'Andrew Motion would probably slit my throat.'
Poetry Book Society Member and keen poetry reader Marie Robertson talks
to us about poetry and her experiences on the Next Generation judging panel.
Were you nervous about the Next Generation judging?
I was, but I thought the panel was really excellent. They were all known names
- poets, novelists, musicians - and I wasn't, so I'll admit I was rather scared
of meeting them all. But they soon put me at ease, one person even said they were
nervous about meeting me because I'd read so much poetry! I think the diversity
of the panel really worked; it made it a very fair way to judge the poets. We
all had our own unique ways of looking at imagination, sound and craft, the poets
were better on craft than I was, obviously.
What did you most enjoy
about the Next Generation Judging?
I think it was just the sheer variety
of poetry. A lot of it I'd come across one way or another, but there's always
something new there. So to suddenly come across a poet - Leontia Flynn, I hadn't
come across her before, for instance - or a poem by a poet that I didn't know
or hadn't really read in depth, was wonderful. Poetry never ceases to surprise.
If you could slip one more poet onto the Next Generation list who
would it be?
Oh no, I am not going to answer that one. Andrew Motion
would probably slit my throat. You didn't think I'd answer that one did you?
What do you look for in a poem?
I think a kind of connection, but
that could be misconstrued, it doesn't need to be a personal connection but something
that by the time I get to the end I actually want to go back to the beginning
again. It can be imagination, it can be rhythm, it can be musicality, it can be
many things but there is something that draws me back. I've just bought two new
collections, one by Ruth Padel, and I'll spend a lot of time over them, I'll probably
read them once, very quickly, and then they'll stay by my bed, so I can go back
and reread them at my leisure.
When do you think you caught the poetry
bug?
Well, school didn't do a lot for me. We learned poetry by rote,
Tennyson, Wordworth, yuck, yuck yuck. My English teacher wore a twin-set and pearls!
I did not take to it at all. And yet I've always been interested in words, my
husband always had poetry books, and I've always had books around me, dictionaries
are an endless source of fascination to me, so something must have rubbed off
along the way.
Should Sue Lawley ever call, what single volume of
poetry would you take to that desert island?
Probably Staying Alive.
That's a brilliant anthology. I think I'd take an anthology rather than a single
collection, although I might want to take a single volume as well, if allowed.
I'd want to take something by Matthew Sweeney. He's so concise and compressed,
which is another thing I like about poetry - it's so succinct. When I think about
it, it's probably why I like contemporary poetry, and Mathew Sweeney, in particular;
it's so precise, and there's a real art to conveying something in such a compressed
way.
For anyone feeling daunted by contemporary poetry, what advice
would you give?
I think people have an expectation with contemporary
poetry that they feel they should be able to understand it, and they feel sometimes
its inaccessible. And I don't know why they do, but again the old masters, to
my mind, can at times be very inaccessible. If you can drop an easy contemporary
poet, I don't know, something with a bit of humour into a reading, then with a
bit of luck you'll hook people.
I also think it's terribly important to
read poetry out loud and we shouldn't be embarrassed about it, whether we are
in the bath, on the bus or tube or wherever. Put somebody sitting next to me who
is talking to darling on their mobile phone, saying they'll be 20 minutes late
or whatever, and I'll sit there and read my book out loud. I know somebody who
travels a lot and he takes a small volume of poetry with him because he can read
little snippets, eat or doze, while it's not always easy, while you are travelling,
to read a novel. Poetry, he says and I completely agree, is the perfect travelling
companion. |
