Interview: David Harsent
Huge congratulations - how are you feeling today?
Richer! And pleased. It was a very strong shortlist, as a number of people have observed, so I was delighted to be able to take the prize against that kind of opposition.
You've won a number of prizes during your career, does the Forward mean something different to you?
It's always terrific to earn the praise of ones peers. I've had lots of emails and texts and phone calls from other poets and friends. My favourite text, though, I picked up as I was walking to the tube station yesterday evening. It was from my 15-year-old daughter and said "bring chocolate"! She did also say "well done, daddy".
You also write a series of detective novels under the pen name David Lawrence. Are you better known for the novels than your poetry? Does the prize mean you won't have to write a detective novel this year?
I'm not really a detective novelist, like that. My detective fiction sells pretty well, and my publishers are quite happy but I'm not a bestseller, I haven't got a profile like PD James or Dan Brown so it's not true to say I'm better know for crime fiction. I'm doing pretty well but I'm not a household name.
All poets have to have day jobs. I used to be a bookseller and then a publisher, a lot of people teach and we all have to try and make a living as nobody can make a living just from poetry. For example, Robin Robertson is a publisher, the poetry editor of Cape, and Don Patterson is the poetry editor of Picador. I didn't want to teach or go on being a publisher because it was too demanding of my time. So I decided to try to make my living by my pen and I quite like thrillers.
There's also a tradition of literary novelists and poets writing crime fiction - Julian Barnes under a pseudonym, Gore Vidal, former poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis was Nicholas Blake and he wrote whodunits. There is even a rumour that TS Eliot wrote a piece of crime fiction and Joyce Carol Oates wrote them under the name of Rosamund Smith.
There are two things to say about writing crime fiction: one, I enjoy doing it - it's fun. And two, it beats the hell out of going to the office!
So I'll write one anyway as I can't write poems all the time and, in any case, I've already written it this year. So the deed is done.
Which of the other four collections would you have chosen to win?
I can't really answer as I have to confess that I have not closely read all of them. So it would be unfair to pick one. I've got them all but I haven't had time to give them the attention a volume of poetry deserves. I come from a school of close reading, I don't like to make snap judgements.
Do you think we're living in a 'golden age' of poetry, as the Forward judges have suggested?
It depends what they mean. I think that a lot of very good poetry is being written, I don't suppose they meant that poetry is selling in wheelbarrow-loads. As John Mullan points out, you can go to Waterstone's and find all the Booker and Guardian First Book award shortlisted fiction but there is no great display of the Forward or TS Eliot shortlist. Poetry's a minority art, and I don't mind that in the slightest. There are lots of minority interests and poetry is one of them. It just so happens to be an extremely important minority interest.
Why?
It's deep and crucial, or it can be. I think all the arts are important to a society's health. Eliot said that without vision the people perish and I think that's true. It would be interesting to know what a society bereft of arts would be like. Extremely unpleasant, I would think. Poetry is important for the same reason that the arts in general are important. They tell us how we live.
Which poets would you cite as your influences?
I can never really answer that. All I can really talk about is the sort of poem that makes me want to write poetry myself. I've fallen under all the influences that all poets fall under. Once upon a time I thought Dylan Thomas was a superb poet.
But reading the Border ballads in my early teens was very important. I feel in love with it and felt involved in the world of those rhythms and narratives gave me.
Also, I met someone when I was 16/17 when I was working in the bookshop. I met this man who seemed older than god, though he was probably only just around retirement age. He was really into poetry and I didn't know anyone who read and liked poetry - I came from a working class background - I just knew that I did. He was fond of poetry and half-French and introduced me to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Verlaine and this was a revelation to me as I could see that poetry could be dark and dirty and that was very interesting to me at the age of 16!
War poetry is a very recognised genre. What caused you to return to it for this collection?
A bit of a long story but... Jo Shapcott commissioned me to write a poem for an anthology she was editing for the Royal Institute, where she was writer in residence, and the subject of each poem had to be the same as the subject of the lectures given at the Royal Institute while she was there. I mistakenly thought you had to use the title of the lecture as title of the poem and there was one lecture that had been given and the title was "From metals with a memory to brilliant light-emitting solids".
So I chose this out of a sense of bravado - surely it would be impossible to write a poem about? It was just at the time that we were bombing Afghanistan and there were TV images and press photos of it were everywhere and I sat down to work on the poem without having much notion of what I was going to write about and then very quickly the metals with a memory became smart bombs and the brilliant light-emitting solids became the people they hit...
I'm not a "public poet" so I was completely taken by surprise but there was the poem and it wasn't a bad poem, I thought.
After the invasion of Iraq I found myself writing short, intense poems which traded off these images of war which I was seeing quite a lot of and, in addition to that, I had done some English versions of poems written during the siege of Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb poet, Goran Simic, who was under siege with his wife, a Muslim, and their two kids. I think the images I used in those versions may have informed what I was doing to some degree.
There is also some anecdotal material in there - one poem, The Piss Pail, uses an incident that happened to my father during the second world war, but largely the sequences are from my imagination. And some are informed by those images and those stories, some of which were told to me by Goran Simic when the siege had ended and he and I met again.
Others are just pure imaginative constructs but of course the Legion sequence is just one section of the book, it's not all that is in there. The third part is a series of poems of alienation and middle section consist of shape poems which trade off standing stones and have fake autobiography shaped into them in a helix-type way.
And there's a poem called The Player which comes from an anthology of poetry I edited for the Palace Theatre, Watford - my wife is an actress and starred in Terence Rattigan's Deep Blue Sea there. The Palace had to close for refurbishment and they wanted me to put an anthology together to celebrate its reopening and I wrote this poem, called The Player to go in there. It's one I feel very close to, being married to an actress. I think she felt a little uncertain because it's a poem about a character that I dreamed up, something I often do. It's not really a poem about theatre, it's about this one character.
What's next?
I'm working on a libretto, again with Harrison Birtwistle for a full-length opera for the Royal Opera House. I've finished it and Harry has started to compose so we are talking to each other all the time. I now have to accommodate him, usually a matter of writing more text. It's called Minotaur and is scheduled for early 2008.
I've got a long poem on the go which at the moment has no title. And I hope there will be another Stella Moony novel.
How will you celebrate your win?
Nothing special tonight as my wife is away on tour. I might take my daughter out for a curry. Or some chocolate!