[Laughs] Yeah. There was something somebody said in a review once, where they were saying that the work really resists — not resists interpretation, but resists being reviewed. I think actually it was more like ‘resists bad reviews’ — it tries to second guess problems people might have and incorporate that within the work, which is a sort of defence mechanism, and they meant that as a criticism in itself, which I thought was quite a fair one.

Enough of this, enough of the literary in-jokes… Mmm. I wanted to pull in both directions with this book. I think that because I knew it was going to be centring on the anagrams – which are by far the most experimental, with a capital E, kind of thing that I’ve done, the closest to Language Poetry as a movement – I wanted to blend that with my most confessional work as well. So that includes faith, it includes autobiography, it includes talking about your life as it really… is, perhaps? But then I also wanted that to be a difficult and contested space. I get a little frustrated when people talk about the idea of the lyric ‘I’ being something that is slippery, that is hard to define, and that is prone to lying. Often a poet will say, quite defensively, ‘You should never assume that the “I” in the poem is me, or is even The Poet.’ But quite often… it just is, isn’t it? The work is actually uncomplicatedly autobiographical. It doesn’t mess around with the boundaries between your idea of yourself and your self-presentation and the way other people see you — it doesn’t even play with that, you know, that basic social truth. It’s very well-managed; it really is this very careful presentation of the self.

Not my work, no. [Laughs] I’m being mean about other people’s work. But it troubles me when I feel like a writer is trying to present themselves in the best possible light – it becomes a kind of propaganda of the self. So my feeling was like, right, OK, so if the lyric ‘I’, if this inverted-commas lyric ‘I’ is unreliable and slippery and hard to pin down, then let’s actually do something with that, let’s make a lyric ‘I’ which is a persona. So for instance, in Cain, I think there are four poems that are kind of autobiographical sketches about school, and those are — I use the term reservedly, but, absolutely true. Those are completely drawn from memory and, in a way, they’re trying to do something similar to Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill in Stations and Mercian Hymns, which are two collections that I’ve written on, and I admire them greatly, but I also felt a bit dismayed that there was a sort of lack of embarrassment. It becomes a deliberate and playful type of self-mythologisation, but one that leaves out the more painful elements of childhood. There’s one exception in Heaney’s Stations, where there’s a poem about how he gets given a kaleidoscope, and he goes to a deep muddy puddle in the back yard and he ruins the kaleidoscope, he sinks it into this mud, and it’s never the same again — and I love that poem, it’s one of my favourite Heaney poems actually, because it involves a sort of inexplicable act of self-sabotage that to me feels closer to truth somehow.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that came from a story on the podcast Reply All about ultra-surveillance. That’s not the word – there’s probably a proper term for it – but I mean the extension of CCTV to the point where you can actually film a whole city in real time. I think they were specifically talking about using this technology in a warzone, so you’ve almost got this — you end up with this incredible kind of life-size simulacrum of everything unfolding. You see an explosion, and then you can trace back to see exactly who was responsible for it.

Yeah, a camera that can actually reverse time. I suppose that’s it, because the poem is about things that are irreversible, and in some ways it almost gives us this comforting idea that everything is reversible, or at least explainable.

Yeah, the technology does. The technology affects our perceptions, and our philosophies to a certain extent, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our actions. I think sometimes there’s a kind of slippage between our ideas of morality, our decisions, and the technology that we use to talk about and discuss and to write about them. So, like, obviously no one believes that rewinding a video undoes the act itself… but I suppose specifically, as a sort of surveillance and anti-terror device, we do believe in it as a form of protection after the event, or as something that will help to capture those responsible, to punish them, to explain, and to find out what wasn’t explained yet. And often what actually stays with you from stories about heinous acts, is that it’s not really explainable, it doesn’t help to catch the perpetrator, and it doesn’t give us this satisfying sort of closure.

And of course these are huge debates at the moment, between our civil liberties and the necessity to — supposedly the necessity to protect us by increasingly recording everything. But you’re right that in the poem the camera is immediately mocked as an image – it’s pre-mocked, I suppose, by being juxtaposed with the more surreal image of the beard. And that kind of comes from – not comes from, but I often think of the second Monkey Island game, which I was obsessed with as a child, and the Ghost Pirate LeChuck’s beard, which is the only part of his body which is alive. He’s a sort of zombie pirate, but his beard is still living and it’s horrible.

From the very beginning of me writing this collection, I think my Cain was the bearded sort of Cain. So there are two extremes in art history, one of Cain being beardless like Judas – not having a beard being seen as a mark of distrust or of evil in some way, in Biblical times – and then the other extreme — an equally prevalent visual representation of Cain — was that he was extremely hairy. I have to use a lot of ‘h’s in each of the anagrams, so at one point Cain is referred to as ‘the hairy household mythologist & his adherent undertow’. The interpretation of Cain as immortal has him as being this big hairy man. It’s more than just the Mormon Church, although that’s where the theory currently rests. It goes back to the early Church Fathers, this idea that he was made immortal to witness the whole, the full scale of the horror of human history from start to finish, and that’s one of his curses, that’s part of his mark, in a way – to be immortal.

Yeah. And that ties into the actual bit just before Cain slays Abel – it’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s OK, let’s try again.’ But then he kills him. So this idea of irredeemability that you mentioned, I want to follow that up because it’s what the poem is about, and I think I wanted to look at that as a universal, rather than something that — I’m not really interested in the notion of perdition, the idea of there being people who are beyond redemption by virtue of their own actions. That doesn’t really interest me at all. It’s the idea that this is actually something common to any mistake, anything that can’t be undone. Nothing that we do can actually be undone, or taken back — it can’t — but I think that my feeling about that is that we don’t want it to, either, actually, when we really examine ourselves. We can fake a feeling of repentance, we can fake a kind of sadness for it, but actually we just stay angry – maybe that we were caught, or that we’ve been taken to task – and you see this in anybody who’s accused of anything really, especially when it’s a correct accusation: we’re even more angry than if it was a false accusation, more defensive. So it’s this idea that the whole poem, with all the reversals, the ‘me’ in the poem — I’m expecting it to draw back to the point where the first murder is committed, and Cain can not kill his brother.

Yeah, and the solve is for everybody. The solve is that finally this first most heinous thing has finally been reversed, but – but actually he is trying to do something which I think is more in line with how we feel when we’ve done something wrong, which is that we want to reverse everything else but the thing that we did.

Nobody knows why God preferred Abel’s offering – nobody can explain that, from the rabbis thousands of years ago to the early Church Fathers. Again, as with the mark, there are many, many different interpretations of it, all of them different, many of them conflicting. Nobody actually can say why that is, and the first time I think I even had an inkling of it was reading Lord Byron’s play Cain, where he makes quite a lot out of that scene, with a lot of dialogue between Cain and Abel. I think seeing the scene spread out for about five or six pages, and explained and expanded on a lot more, where actually Cain’s offering feels like — a bit paltry. And Abel presents his offering in all humility and says, ‘I am a lowly shepherd, this is all I can give you but at least it is the best lamb that I have.’ And Cain offers the fruits and some seeds and some ears of wheat – he even offers them in a slightly sneery way – but still Cain’s offering feels below par, inferior, which I’d never got from Genesis, from even contemplating or thinking about that story before.

I think it’s more that even when he impossibly engineers it so that he has the opportunity to take back what he did, he’s living through exactly the same moment again, feels just as embittered, and kills Abel again, even though he’s managed to make it so that his offering is the one that produces the burst of light and is accepted. Even though he’s able to engineer that, he still kills Abel. So ultimately it makes no difference, I suppose that’s kind of what I was aiming towards. And the examples that lead up to it, and again I should probably go back into the sort of autobiographical and fake autobiographical bits of the collection, where – the bit that is completely fabricated, and that I’m actually not terribly comfortable with, even still, is the bit about me having estranged myself from my family, either abandoned my family or done something… I think what’s implied is that I’ve done something kind of unforgiveable, I’ve had an affair or something. From time to time I think we all feel close to losing something that we’ve built, walking away from something that defined us, or sabotaging it. Again, I think that’s something that we all have, that you maybe see more extremely in cases of addiction, which is often linked to trauma. But I think there’s something very human about self-sabotage, and about not rebuilding something once you’ve smashed it, not trying to… heal that. There’s a kind of finality.

And also exploring how fragile a lot of things are, a lot of the things that we rely on, whether that’s our sense of self or our relationships to other people. You wouldn’t have to be that careless to destroy what you have. In a way, that was my feeling – that sometimes you can start down a certain trajectory which… I’ve been listening to a lot of music, popular music and jazz, things that make reference, any reference whatsoever to Cain and/or Abel, and the early ones are all sort of embarrassingly… instructive, just like, ‘Ooh, don’t be like Cain – don’t murder people! Don’t go around killing people, ‘cause you’re angry.’ Which of course totally misses the point.

… and actually I suppose my feeling is that we all are: there are no sons of Abel, as it were. I’m going to have to look up the name of this philosopher [It’s Gillian Rose], the woman who wrote On Innocence, which is a book that I really struggled with because I’m not a proper student of philosophy, so it left me standing most of the time, but – she kind of tackles this pernicious myth of… our essential goodness, our essential innocence, which I think needs doing in the way that we think about the world. We too easily think as if we have a leg to stand on, morally, whenever we venture an opinion about anyone else, whether personally or geopolitically.

And sometimes it’s just thrown in, I suppose, but, yeah, it’s always been there.

Yeah. So there’s only ever been one person who’s ever asked me about it before, and this was a Canadian poet called Natalya Anderson, who just emailed me out of the blue about five years ago, specifically to talk about faith as it relates to my poetry, and in a way I was surprised it had never come up before, because I suppose to me it’s quite essential. I was received by the Greek Orthodox Church a year before getting married, and the church that we regularly attend is a monastery near Woking, with five monks in it. In Orthodoxy, the sayings of the Desert Fathers are still really central, in fact almost as central as the Bible. There is acknowledgement of the Old Testament, but I would say, in Orthodoxy, in terms of textual precedence, church history and the early theologians are more important than the Old Testament. Actually, that may be a horribly controversial statement – I can’t remember; I’ll probably be excommunicated for saying that.

I guess faith is not something that I… it’s not something I’m that comfortable with talking about explicitly – which is probably true for quite a lot of people who have a religion of one kind or another. I mean, neither do I like the kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, that ‘whatever works for you’ kind of thing, but I also hate – I have an absolute allergy to anything that smacks of evangelism in any way whatsoever. I think it’s a deeply personal thing, and again that probably comes from my background, which maybe was slightly more evangelical, in a way that as a child I found really uncomfortable, too, let alone as a teenager, which is when I stopped going to church altogether – only to come back to a very, very different sort of church in later life. But it’s funny, isn’t it, because it’s not like there are no poets who are religious, is it? It’s not like that’s the case. But I think there’s a problem in that… it’s so easily linked to homophobia and misogyny and many other things which are horrific to any kind of decent-thinking person, so that if you start a conversation about faith, it’s hard not to… just end up talking about it in those terms. I don’t feel defensive, I should add. I don’t feel defensive of it at all, and almost everybody that I know is an atheist, I think, or they’re very quiet about the faith that they do have. And I think even if I was being directly attacked for it, I wouldn’t feel defensive. I’d probably feel like the person had a very good point.

No, I’m not worried about that at all. I think, in terms of starting that conversation with myself, and in my work, then yeah, that’s good – but more often than not, the thing that gets focused on in my work is that it’s quite funny, or that it’s deliberately unfunny and that in being unfunny it’s sort of funny. Which is great, and I’ll never stop writing in that way, I don’t think. But I suppose I thought, ‘This is actually something central to my inner life.’ Though even using a phrase like ‘inner life’, for me… it’s about whether thoughts matter or not, it’s about whether your inner life is of any significance whatsoever. And I think something that gets neglected in any discussion about faith is that huge ontological difference between… if you are a complete sort of logical positivist or rationalist, you kind of have to believe that your inner monologue, your inner life, is of no significance whatsoever, that it’s completely senseless, that it’s a process like saliva or the excretory system is a process.

Yeah… but I think the difference is, when you look at the other extreme, if you look at somebody who does have a faith, then you live in your head a lot more, and you believe in this weird amalgamation of Jung’s collective unconscious, where we’re all kind of linked in this really weird way, in this way that goes beyond the symbolic if you believe in it completely. We’re all linked in this strange, sort of metaphysical space – you have to believe that if you’re going to believe that there’s a point in prayer, if you’re going to believe that there’s any such thing as prayer or meditation and it’s not just a word for – for a strong desire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – and I think maybe it has something to do with the presence of the imagination, of the dream within poetry. There are a lot of things in common between psychoanalysis and poetry, in a way, because for me it’s not surreal – with the ‘s-u-r’ in italics – to include thought, and the imagination, within an autobiographical poem. To me that’s more realistic, more honest, than leaving it out.

Yeah, they’re sort of metonyms. I always find with metonymy it’s only ever accidental in the work, it’s only ever something I notice in retrospect, it’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s good, I can claim that – but I think I did, and then chose to carry on with the almost mantelpiece-like set-up.

Yeah, I think it is inevitable. That kind of… enfolding, I’m really interested in. That enfolding of experience, and that way of thinking about experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hope not in a way that just mocks it, because we are the media. There are arguments about who gets to say what’s included and about who gets to make the shows and to be the commentators, but still, it’s us.

Yeah. That’s already in the realm of a TV critic, really, isn’t it, ‘frankly / melodramatic slow motion’.

It’s a retreat on my part. It’s a retreat on my part into commentary. It suggests a comfort in that, yeah, as a retreat would be – not wanting to face up to things, so commenting instead on the technical aspects and the ways in which those technical aspects are a bit sentimental.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s not something that’s lost on anyone, is it, so why did I feel the need to point it out? I think it kind of returns to the camera in the first three lines, and the fakiness, the impossibility and staged quality of the whole thing. Maybe what I was riffing on with the beard growing and somehow latching onto things and reversing time was, um, Superman, in, like, the worst Superman movie, where Lois Lane is in some kind of a building that falls down, and there’s an earthquake or something, and she sort of suffocates in earth. It was, like, a U-rated film, but it was quite graphic. The dark earth falling in around Lois Lane, and her stopping breathing – you know, this really upset me as a child, and Superman has to fly really fast around the planet in order to reverse time so that she comes back to life again. As probably a six-year-old seeing this, I was so upset and it immediately took that sadness away from me, Superman flying around the world. It was that kind of comic-book level of an inane attempt to escape reality, of the idea that you can reverse any traumatic event.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s it. So the special effects in the final lines put that back, front and centre, don’t they? And with the jug, I guess that’s a slightly heavy-handed Keats reference, to the whole idea of time in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, of a moment that you don’t value enough at the time.

The whole word ‘jug’ – yeah. I think maybe in an early draft, I had ‘urn’, and I was like, that’s too much.

[Laughs] No! I’m really kind of obsessed with kitsch, in my work. I think there are poets who’ve used popular culture a lot better than I have, and a lot more powerfully. I mean, I think you can go back to the early New York School, whose work is full of cartoon characters. There’s the famous John Ashbery sestina about Popeye, which is great. Thing is, Popeye as a comic strip was already kind of high art in a way. The original Popeye comic strips are astoundingly good, so it was worth – it was already quite poetic I think. There was a really good Amazon review of The Harbour Beyond the Movie – or was it of Migraine Hotel? ‘This work for me is on the knife-edge of naff’: I think that was the title of his review, and I’ve always been really grateful for that one Amazon reviewer, because even the word ‘naff’ is kind of a stupid word that nobody likes to use. It’s a naff word, ‘naff’ – but he was totally right in saying that my work is always flirting with that kind of disaster.

Yeah, and this is making me think of iconography, which is one of the things that I struggled with when I was converting to the Orthodox Church. Within the Orthodox Church there is still an idea – an actual idea – of the sacraments, and of a space being sacred, and of a thing being sacred, which Protestantism has almost completely done away with, so that the sacred becomes purely symbolic. Like, the church I grew up in sub-let the assembly hall of a local primary school; the idea of a “consecrated space” is anathema to you if you’re low-church. I was trying to work my head into a place where I could accept some kind of literal reality to that, and of icons actually being holy, because initially it seemed to be almost a kind of idolatry. Icons go beyond being holy works of art; they’re supposedly a sort of window into the true nature of that which they depict. And it’s interesting to try to have some belief in that without it becoming superstitious, kind of, ‘Have some lucky dirt, this will solve your problems, I’ll sprinkle it on you and it will –’ The complete opposite to the kitsch object is the sacred object, the object that’s invested with this… power. When I started seriously writing poetry, I’d already started going to these long, incantatory Orthodox services, so it was already on my mind. I think, early on, I was using the poetry to interrogate, to satirise my own real discomfort with trying to take anything like this more seriously.

Yes, totally. I really think that that’s there. To me it’s a necessity. The only way of really trying to interpret or come to terms with anything is in this tension between the serious and the frivolous, the sincere and the frivolous.

Yeah, okay – and I think sometimes that doesn’t work. I think sometimes it’s either too obscure, or it’s not obscure enough, right, if that makes sense? It can feel like moralising, like… trying to win someone over. I dunno.

Or for curdling, or just… things that don’t really belong in the same poem or in the same collection. It’s like, ‘Actually, just do one or the other.’ But the literature that I like is itself quite playful and complicated and has elements of personal disclosure alongside elements of deliberate distancing. The freedom to use both extremes is something that’s quite key to contemporary poetry for me. I read a lot of younger poets, and I really enjoy the relationship in their work between truth, self-expression, and self-awareness. I like the self-awareness; I find that the opposite of self-indulgence.

There has to be something you’re offering the reader. If you’re just mocking the very idea of anything making sense, if you’re just saying there are no answers, that’s actually sort of stupidly easy to do, isn’t it? Admitting that you know nothing is the ultimate wisdom but it’s also the ultimate ignorance.

Yeah, that’s a fairly obvious way of saying ‘we were all kids once’, right? The mother of one of the Columbine killers has recently published a book. She’s been giving interviews on the radio, talking about how her son used to be a sort of happy, joyful child. That’s the disturbing and upsetting thing, isn’t it? It’s that you can go down, as can anyone. I don’t want to be Puritanical here, but you’ve got to guard that which about yourself is decent, that which about yourself is… human, and I think sometimes we forget how fragile that is. Our shock at atrocities, or our inability to even basically deal with fundamental things like our own mortality, it comes from neglecting how fragile we are, spiritually as well as physically. A poem in The Migraine Hotel has a line, ‘Each day contains a hundred subtle chasms.’

Yeah, and I kind of mean that, you know.

Yeah, that’s it – and I suppose that those can be more than just the charms on a charm bracelet, more than just the luminous little moments of insight.

There was. As an almost formal exercise, I mentioned trying to get them in some order to have a playlist for the launch party, so I was listening to stuff that mentioned Cain, such as a really good Frank Black and the Catholics song, ‘The Steak and Station’. I was listening to quite a bit of his stuff – I like how he can use some between-song conversations like he did with the Pixies to make the lyrics of a song. The new Joanna Newsom I was spinning quite a lot, I think, when I was writing this.

I’ve probably read quite a lot surrounding Orthodoxy. There’s a really good Penguin edition of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and the Philokalia as well, which is a sort of four-volume thing that Faber did, written by monks, and particularly extreme monks who just lived in such deprivation. And there’s some really weird stuff in all that, there are the hermits who would have one little hole in the cave, partly so people could pass food through but partly so people could ask them questions.

Yeah, exactly. I mean I did a lot of specific reading for research. There’s a brilliant scholar, Ruth Mellinkoff, whose book The Mark of Cain was a really big early influence. It’s quite a short book as well, one you can read in an evening. And I was reading books about Byron’s verse play, so I was doing a lot of that quite targeted research. After that I came to José Saramago. He’s got a book, his last novel I think, called Cain, written in his usual kind of breathless, punctuationless prose. I really liked Blindness, but Cain wasn’t that interesting as a discussion of faith, because it felt like a bit of an adolescent, ‘Religion is bullshit, let’s just retell it from a different perspective.’ I recently reread Berryman’s The Dream Songs, not for the way that he writes – because I think that that’s so much him; I don’t think you can recreate that – but for the freedom. For the freedom to be more than one person in your poems, and to be sort of the interlocutor and the… interlocuted [chuckles].

That was conscious. Oh God, another really big influence is Anne Carson! In a way, this whole collection came out of teaching a module on the Creative Writing MA at Birmingham called ‘The Poem As Story’, where we start looking at Ted Hughes’s Crow, and then the next week we look at Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I love the way that Carson uses metafictional constraints – she has essays within her poetry collections, commentaries on the poetry within the poetry, and then the poems themselves are just so witty and invitingly written. There’s some quite arcane, difficult stuff around them, but once you get into the main poems of Autobiography of Red, it’s – it’s just beautiful, and I’ve had people who’ve never really read that much poetry before finding that book funny and moving and deeply thought-provoking. Teaching on that module for five years got me thinking that the next book I do, I want it to be this sort of thing, almost like a novel in verse, something that has a consistent thing, a really consistent thing, a deeply consistent thing. And I think that’s also to do with the fact that I feel kind of through with doing collections of poems that just happen to be by me; I feel like I’ve done that. I’m not saying that I feel like that’s over and done with as a form of poetic publication, because I don’t think it is – it’s just that there are people who do that really well and I think increasingly that I’m not one of those people, that actually I work better on a larger canvas.

People seem to like the wolf prose poems, as they’re almost like fragmented stories really, so I thought, ‘Shall I just do a big wolf book?’ And should it be something that gathers the last six wolf poems, some of the unpublished wolf poems, and then also ten new wolf poems or something like that – or should it be like a novel-length thing, that is, like, fifty wolf poems? But then I just gradually felt like… I don’t actually want to. I’m attracted to it as an idea, and I’m attracted to it as this imaginary object, a big book with a wolf on it, but actually… I don’t want to do that. So I conscientiously didn’t have a single wolf in this book.

Cain is the trickster figure in this, yeah. And that probably came from talking about Hughes’s Crow as a trickster figure, or Henry as a trickster in Berryman, and I think I’m just fascinated by that as an archetype – whenever I have a kind of imaginary guide figure in a poem, I want it to be of that type. Cain’s almost like a carer who shows up, who steps in to try to make sure I’m OK. In some ways he’s a ridiculous figure, and in other ways he’s… he knows more than the narrator does in the collection, than I do.

Sometimes the story itself can be almost embarrassingly simple, but the way it’s told is interesting and that gives it its energy. In this collection I had to find ways to be more honest and direct, but in such a way that 1) it wouldn’t be off-putting, and 2) it wouldn’t sound like I was saying, ‘Ahh… this is what I really think.’ And yet I hope it’s more complicated than what I’ve done in the past – I hope it’s more difficult! [Laughs.]