Simon Barraclough’s debut collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Prize, has just been released in paperback. We caught up with Simon to find out how things have been since his Forward nomination.
1. When did you get the bug for writing poetry — and at what point did you decide that you were going to pursue having a collection published?
The urge to write goes back further than my interest in poetry. When I was six, I scandalised a primary school teacher by asking for a new exercise book so that I could write her a ‘Dr. Who’ novel. I scrawled many pages and crayoned in a few Dalek space ships but, despite an international bidding war for the rights, I just couldn’t finish it to my satisfaction. The poetry bug hit me when I was about 13 after being ambushed by Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Mix in a little bit of Robert Smith from The Cure and the conditions were right to trigger that whole teenage poetry thing.
It was around my 30th birthday that I decided to knuckle down and take writing poetry more seriously. A few years later, with a couple of dozen poems I felt might be good enough, I started thinking about the possibility of a collection.
2. Are there other writers in your family — were you encouraged to be creative as a child?
No writers, but my dad was a talented musician, my sister is a talented artist and my mum is constantly creative with quilts and fabrics and clothes. We didn’t have a vast library at home but we had some key building blocks: Ulysses, some Shakespeare, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and Arnold Silcock’s wonderful anthology Verse & Worse. My sister was always drawing and painting, my dad was often composing and I think that this environment, along with some excellent schoolteachers, encouraged a certain amount of creativity in my childhood.
3. Is there something you can say about your love for films and your writing? Do they feed off each other in some way?
The two art forms that impressed me the most as a child were music and cinema. I found both to be overwhelming and shot through with fear and beauty. Somehow my imagination took on a pictorial or cinematic bent and I’m keen to treat cinema, even at its most populist, as one of the highest art forms. It seems to me that some of the greatest poetry from before the time of cinema predicted it or strove, in a funny way, to create it. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ is incredibly visual and suspenseful and whole swathes of ‘Paradise Lost’ anticipate (maybe create) epic cinema, right down to the elaborate ’special effects’ that we’re only managing to perfect today but which have always been part and parcel of the literary imagination.
4. How did it feel when you found out that you’d been shortlisted for the Forward Prize?
I heard from a friend and I was delighted, of course, but I also felt a little nervous and exposed. You crave coverage and appreciation for your work but at the same time part of you flinches from it. It was an excellent shortlist and I remain very proud to have been part of it.
5. What’s the past year been like for you as a published author?
Since the book came out I’ve been much busier with readings and I’ve also branched out into school and radio work. In 2008, I appeared regularly on Radio 4’s The Film Programme and they set me all kinds of poetic challenges in the manner of Lars von Trier! I got to condense 10 new releases into 60 seconds of poetry, sum up the films of the year in one poem and write a villanelle for Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’. I’ve also been lucky enough to appear on Radio 3’s The Verb a couple of times and they even let me record a prose memoir with music, which was a lovely new challenge. In January The Verb asked me to write a poem in memory of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the amazing man who survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
6. What are your greatest influences?
It’s tricky to define influences because they’re as much about the future as the past. I don’t know yet what will influence me tomorrow or next year. Using very broad strokes I’d say that Ted Hughes, Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Amy Clampitt, Alexander Pope, Mark Doty, Alfred Hitchcock have all influenced me in one way or another. And then there are the inescapable giants like Shakespeare and Milton who are just ‘always already there’. But I’d also need to factor in the vibrant contemporary poetry scene and stir in places and disciplines like London, New York, Rome, Venice, cinema, astronomy. I fell in love with Italian cinema, which made me fall in love with the Italian language, which now feeds back into my poetry…it’s always in flux.
7. Are you still writing — what are your plans, writerly or otherwise?
Well, I’m very excited to have a pamphlet of commissioned poems coming out from Penned in the Margins in May this year. It’s called Bonjour Tetris and contains all my radio poems to date, along with some other interesting commissions. I’m also working on the next full book and I’m ‘curating’ two poetry events to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I’ve sliced the film into 12 segments and allotted them to 12 poets, each of whom is writing a 2-minute poem about their segment. Between us we’re creating a strange new poetic version of the film. The piece will be performed at the British Film Institute on Saturday April 10th and at The Whitechapel Gallery on Thursday May 13th.
Los Alamos Mon Amour is available now at the Salt online store at 20% discount: click here
