Today, to celebrate publication day, I'm delighted to welcome writer Patrick Chapman to my blog with his new and selected poetry collection A Promiscuity of Spines (Salmon). Patrick lives in Dublin and his poetry collections
are Jazztown (Raven Arts, 1991), The New Pornography (Salmon, 1996), Breaking
Hearts and Traffic Lights (Salmon, 2007), A Shopping Mall on Mars (BlazeVOX, 2008) and The Darwin
Vampires (Salmon, 2010). His
collection of short stories is The Wow Signal (Bluechrome, 2007). Also a scriptwriter, he adapted his own published story for Burning the Bed (2003).
He has written episodes of the BBC/RTÉ children’s animated series Garth & Bev (Kavaleer, 2009); and a Doctor Who audio
play, Fear of the Daleks (Big Finish, UK, 2007).
Welcome to my blog, Patrick and
congratulations on the new book. I always think ‘selecteds’ are for mature
(meaning older) poets and similarly I am always stunned by how young you are,
considering how long you have been in print. Can you tell us about your path
into writing and how old you were when you realised this would be your life?
Thank you, Nuala,
and thanks for hosting me at your blog today. In answer to your question, my
path began quite early on, as seems to be the case with many a writer. This New
& Selected covers 25 years of work but it was much earlier that I
developed the compulsion to write. It came over me rather like a medical
complaint treatable only by more of itself. Back in the 1970s my nerd gene
activated, and I wrote and drew my own comics and stories. Things really got
started when Dermot Bolger took a selection of poems for Raven Introductions
6; that led to Jazztown in 1991. He and Aidan Murphy at Raven Arts
Press were gracious, patient and kind, and I was very lucky to have them shepherd
my first book.
Many of the older poems deal with
love-gone-wrong, while a lot of the newer work takes science as its inspiration
(I’m thinking of poems like ‘The Amnesia-to-Melancholy Ratio’ and ‘4°’). Talk
to us about inspirations and how they mutate and develop.
It really is true
that inspiration comes from anywhere – but it tends to mutate, as you say, over
time. Some writers continue to focus on specific influences, or themes, often
without realising it. Love poems started to come to me seriously in 1994 when I
began the work that would be collected in Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights
thirteen years later. So I lived with those poems, finished, for many
years. I was getting my Berlin Wall Café in early and combined it with
my Blood on the Tracks –sincerely meant love poems written at different
times about different relationships but all in the same book. That was slightly
disconcerting. There are only so many love poems you can write in a row without
losing your mind or repeating yourself. So I turned to other subjects. A Shopping Mall on Mars collected the
other poems I wrote during those years, inspired by memories of growing up in
fear of nuclear annihilation; the Bush wars that were and are going on; the
premature deaths of friends; Alan Turing; a sick horse; and an imaginary
America that replaces the entirety of existence with empty blue spaces. Science
has always been with me as a subject, because everything is science and I
appreciate it more as time goes by. Science performs the role of explaining the
world that art and religion used to attempt. For instance, I find the images
coming to us through Hubble to be heartbreaking for the loss they represent, as
well as beautiful.
The
fragility of life seems to occupy you as a poet – the poem ‘Ouse’ is a reversed
imagining of Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide; ‘Apollo’ delicately contrasts a
baby in an incubator with the first moon landing. Can you talk to us about
that?
As you get older,
the fragility of life reveals itself, sometimes shockingly. I'm increasingly
aware of other people's mortality and my own, of how little time we have and
how much we miss. Friends have died young, some by their own hands, so suicide,
as in ‘Ouse’, has started to turn up in my work.
‘Apollo’ takes
artistic license to imagine my own early days but shifted by a year to tie in
with the first moon landing. I was in an incubator for a few weeks after
arriving, as if my luggage had been diverted to another womb by mistake and I
had to wait. At the time, my cousin asked why I was in a spaceship. So for this
poem, an image came to me of that tiny capsule in which those Apollo astronauts
flew; of how precarious their situation was; how like a child coming into a new
world. It’s a preoccupation, this fragility. How improbable it is that any of
us should exist at all. The chain of cause-and-effect that had to happen to get
each of us here, starts at the beginning of time. By turning up, we collapse
the wave and become inevitable, but for the first fifteen billion years or so,
it really is touch and go.
Poems like ‘Skydiving Narcissus’, a funny-yet-serious
poem about a man who is sure he will make ‘a gorgeous corpse’, and ‘Covetous
Foetus’, which ends with the line ‘I want an abortion’, offer stark contrast in
terms of tone. How important is humour in poetry? Is it something you feel
poets should employ only occasionally?
I never try to
make something funny, as that wouldn’t work, but I welcome the humour when it
happens. I'm all for humour in poetry and in life, as long as in both cases it
suits the mood and works with the material. I do like it when a serious poem is
leavened with a certain wryness, and my favourite flavour is 'dry'.
You have a rich vocabulary. Can you talk
a little about language and its importance to you?
There are
almost-rhymes and wordplay in my work, but often they simply occur as I write
and I then see how far they can go without breaking. Much of this happens
unconsciously. There's a poem in the book, 'Volcano Day', which contains several
'ea' sounds – heartbeat, tear, breast – which came out as the lines formed, and
which I noticed afterwards. I enjoy music in a poem, even if it's not music you
can dance to.
You
write both poetry and fiction. Which poets and fiction writers make you think,
‘Yes!’?
There are lots of
them but I’ll name a few. Poets that make me go ‘yes’: Robert Lowell and
Elizabeth Bishop. Early on they were an influence, especially Lowell. He gave
me the permission to be personal while being fictional. A writer of prose: F.
Scott Fitzgerald, for Gatsby, and his
stories, and Tender is the Night.
What
are your best three bits of advice for aspiring writers?
1. First drafts
are allowed to be bad, so think of writing as sculpture. Drafts are the stone
you chip away so the statue can appear.
2. If something's
not working, walk away and come back to it later. You may find that the story
or poem just needed you to leave the room while it changed.
3. The only one
whose permission you need is your own. Time and resources, on the other hand,
sometimes have to be stolen.
