I don’t really know The Simpsons, how does Krusty use ‘Hey Hey’?

It’s a low key title. I used to know someone who would say ‘hey, hey’ in the way we now use ‘whatever’. I don’t tend to give a poem a title like ‘Church Going’ and then write a poem about going to church. I like the title for meaning nothing. I really like interjections and how versatile they often are, so ‘Hey’ is a call for someone’s attention but ‘Hey, hey’ is kind of pushing someone away. But ultimately it means nothing and the poem doesn’t really mean anything.

I like coffee a lot, I’ve drunk a few cups of coffee a day for most my adult life. It’s one of a range of objects I put in poems – there’s three coffees in there, there’s a fruit bowl and lemons. I’ve got a small vocabulary of things that I put in poems and I like to put them in in different combinations to see how I can make poems out of them. I’m not really interested in subject matter, I’m interested in form and the question of what we call poetry. I’m happy for anything to be considered a poem. None of it is factual or autobiographical – I wasn’t sitting on an empty train looking at an empty road but I use things that are to hand. Michael Craig Martin, who’s a wonderful artist, has a small number of objects he often portrays in outlines as if in a picture book – step ladders, light bulbs, pencil sharpeners – and puts them in different combinations. When I was writing this poem there was an exhibition of his work in Nottingham. I don’t want to have a bigger vocabulary than I already have in my poems, I want to be making things out of a small number of nouns. Coffee is so great – it’s a colour, it’s a taste, it’s a smell, it means a set of things and you can do loads of things to it without it being complicated.

I don’t really know what to say about difficulty. I’m interested in the properties of things. I like the analogy of the composers. They would say to themselves ‘well, I’ll use twelve notes instead of eight’ and that’s obvious, but people were leaving concert halls in droves. All those innovations aren’t very complicated – you can do different things with something very recognisable and still make something new out of it. I’ve done a lot of fairly conventional things, I’ve written metrically, I’ve written with end rhymes and I really care about the sounds of words and what we call imagery. I’ve always been uncomfortable about the word ‘imagery’ because literary imagery is different from visual imagery, and we’re using it metaphorically. I’ve always been more comfortable with the word ‘noun’. In previous interviews I’ve been described as part of the mainstream, and it’s a controversial phrase, but I don’t feel I’m doing anything complicated. If you met someone who is artistically literate – who was interested in painting or theatre – but didn’t know a thing about poetry, and they were interested in wanting to read a collection of poetry, if you sent them what I do, I don’t think they would think it’s any more unusual or difficult than what Michael Symmons Roberts or Alice Oswald does. I’ve got a friend who talks about contemporary poetry as ‘I was doing something and then something happened’ and so many poets write in that idiom. What I’m not trying to do is create my objects and find the metaphor that is hiding – my cups of coffee aren’t telling us about anything, they’re not telling us anything about society, or our relation to one another, they’re just convenient.

I relate to that in my poems – most of the simple things are already there in a work of music, but composers might be making a smaller distance between the rhythm and the metre of a piece. The complexity is in its simplicity; its being resourceful – its saying ‘here’s a nice phrase’. I like that beauty, I like it in poetry – especially in the work of Thomas A. Clark or Lisa Jarnot.

There’s loads of ways of answering this question. This poem isn’t autobiographical, it’s not a poem that’s about my life, but of course I take trains, I drink coffee, I have a fruit bowl. There’s not a message but I do try and say things, though I don’t feel I’m very good at saying them. My mind likes structure. When I first started writing poetry, which was not long after meeting student photographers at university, I thought ‘I want to do that in writing’. I figured I would learn techniques, I took a lot of poetry books out of the library – and I hadn’t studied poetry since I was sixteen. I took other people’s poems apart, I would write lines with the same number of syllables or patterns. I figured once I figured all that out I would have something to say, but I got so interested in the form and thought ‘well, that’s kind of everything’. I think you are saying something through form: it’s an aesthetic thing. I’m interested in what it means to say something – but I think about what John Cage says, ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.’ And it’s the Wittgenstein quote in the Steve Reich song ‘Proverb’ –  ‘how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life’, which, in itself, is a small thought which could fill a whole life, a whole song. I like the idea that simplicity has a lot of potential. I like the mathematics of that, and the permutations, it quickly escalates. If you approach a poem and say ‘every time I write I want to say “cloud” or “coffee”’ then there’s quite a lot you can do.

One poet I met said when he was writing his second book that ‘the trouble is that now I have to find fifty other things I need to say’ and I thought ‘well, I don’t have anything to say’.

In some ways in writing the next book I got stuck. The Waffles poems are in this book and the idea was to write more of those, but around the time I moved to Nottingham I got stuck. After about three years, I thought ‘well I’m just going to have to write something else’ and there’s a long poem in the book – like in The Book of Matthew – when I finished that, I thought it needs more to make it a book. So ‘Hey, hey’ was the first short poem I wrote in years. I wrote it quite quickly and to write a poem but with lines that don’t have a regular metre wasn’t really something I’ve ever done. There is an orthodoxy to the line endings, they’re about ten syllables each. I also kept thinking ‘how do I make this part of a set?’. Because this poem is 202 words, and We needed coffee was 101 words, I was going to do a series of poems with 202, 303 or 404 words each. I also wanted to write coffee in there three times and I really like those Anglo-Saxon onomatopoeic words like ‘sludgy’ and ‘silty’.

Surely be cautious about them, but I hate the idea there should be a consensus. I much prefer the idea of putting words together. I like a range of work and we can all be writing poems at the same time but come up with different poems – and I love that diversity. I also think that one day I’ll write a metrical poem and then one day I’ll write another. It’s good to not be doing the same thing at the same time.

Emily Berry the poet and Emily Berry the editor are both wonderful. The Best British Poetry 2015 was excellent, what she did last year was exciting. But on revelation – Donald Barthelme has two short story collections out on Penguin, one of which is Forty Stories and the other is Sixty Stories, and in the introduction by David Gates he talks about the convention that there should be ‘minor events in the lives of minor characters leading up to minor epiphanies’. I feel that there is a formula, and if it’s a good formula, and if you can do it interestingly then do it. I had a student – she had a career working in charity sectors and with refugees – and she wanted to write about refugees. She also does workshops and she was in one workshop where she was told you should take objects and then find the metaphor. Yes, that is one way, but there isn’t a ‘should’. The whole excitement of poetry is finding something that no one is doing. There are a lot of creative writing text books that say ‘the worst thing you can do is say something directly’, like ‘he was eighty years old’. But why is that the worst thing? Why do you have to infer all the time? Should you write ‘He was dribbling down his bathrobe as he reached for his pills’? Why not write he was eighty years old so then I can get on to the next sentence?

I think so, it’s an interesting register. A lot of the fiction I enjoy, like Shelia Heti, has this directness, too. We disclose so much more now, through the Internet, which was a big turning point. But my parents’ generation didn’t say things about their lives. When ‘happy slapping’ was a thing, if someone got drunk the night before and threw up over themselves, a recording of that would be on the Internet before they had the chance to clean themselves up. So now, the need to be discreet when talking about these things has gone. There’s an openness. Working in a university as a lecturer and personal tutor, I get some students talk to me about troubling things happening in their lives, and I thought ‘are things getting worse’? A counsellor at the university said ‘in some degree they could be, but people are just more open about things now, there’s less shame’. I think about the ‘Hemingway  Iceberg’ theory, that you only show the surface but have all this depth hidden – but you don’t have to, you can just put it on the table. If you want to tell it how it is in your writing, then that’s really interesting, and we need to figure out the poetic possibilities in that. For me, I’m not trying to tell you a secret without telling you a secret. Words have so many properties to them so the ‘It’ usually is a flexible thing, it could be a poem about death, it could be a poem about the seaside.

There’s a necessity to open people up to more ideas of what poetry is in my job, but also I need to respect where they are coming from. They need poetry to be whatever it is they need it to be – could be a private thing, could be a thing they want public; it’s about pluralism. When you’re experienced in writing poetry and being very involved in workshops, you often forget what it was that got you where you are. I’m interested in taking an objective view of cliché, which is often spoken about in a disparaging way. If you’re eighteen, and you’re writing in these grandiose terms to explain what is happening around you, that’s exciting, that’s what youth is all about and you have to respect that. There are poets who have written the same poem their whole lives – that’s fine. There are poets that want to try different things – that’s fine, too.

In both of those phrases, there is a meeting of the low and high register. So, ‘doodles’ is an earthy Anglo-Saxon word and ‘melody’ is a higher register. Of course, ‘melody’ isn’t ‘song’ but, ‘muddles’ is right down in the earth. If I have a formula, that’s what it is. I’m interested that we have objects and that we can think about them – that’s my agenda. But of course a lot of it is based on sounds as well – muddle and doodle – there’s so much fun you can have with words. What could be more fun than to just stand around and say ‘doodles, doodles, doodles’ all day? I want the sound to detain you. Like in ‘if I had a yammer’ in my second book, which is the last poem I wrote with end rhymes.

It was unfamiliar writing a short poem. It’s a short poem, in some ways it’s formulaic – it starts with the short sentences and images, then the long sentence, and it builds on the concrete onomatopoeic nouns and adjectives like ‘rubber’, ‘coffee’, and ‘balloons’. The formula of the poem is that you need those words before you can have ‘condensation’, ‘relent’ or ‘discontinuity’. At the time it felt like a liberation to write this – it was about rearranging things I already had.

I’m interested in the formal side of poetry – metre and rhyme – and what is sometimes described as ‘local grace’ – elements like alliteration – in contemporary poetry. Something like alliteration is rarely used as a structuring device, which I explore in this poem. There was a point that I began writing it and thought of using the phrase ‘think of it’ and I used that, then thought it might be starting to get a bit tedious. In my old way of thinking I would have thought, you have to use the exact phrase every time – but then I thought there would be more mileage in using the phrase ‘It’s’. Whilst there was a formula, I wasn’t thinking about how many times they have to be there. It’s like a rope – if you have one strand in a rope, it’s flimsy, but if you have three strands it becomes more cohesive and stronger.

Just because there’s a convention presently used by publishers, that’s probably only a tradition which is about forty years old. There are all kinds of other things people have been doing outside of that. We were talking about Harold Pinter earlier and, in his Nobel citation, they said ‘he’s returned drama to its essential ingredients – it’s people talking on the stage’. Poems are words and patterns, but I don’t think that what I do is any more alien than what others are doing.

Well, Luke Kennard beat me to it, didn’t he? The red and the black is absolutely beautiful and exciting that Penned in the Margins did that with Cain. But it’s an obvious thing – if you had someone who hadn’t had their eye on the poetry culture and said ‘in 2016, bearing in mind Duchamp is over 100 years ago, someone is going to write a poem with two coloured inks on the page’ they’d say ‘Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t you do that?’. Poems require two colours of ink. I would hope that other people would now do that. It’s along the lines of Cummings using lower-case letters. I used it to proof read the work and it needed it. It’s a quick way of me seeing where the pattern is. I now think that it’s an obvious and nice thing to do, and it would be nice to print the poems in colour. If you care to work it out, you can see where the patterns are – sentences, phrasing, adjective words that have ‘nt’ in them so the six times there’s an apartment in the poem it’s ‘adjacent’ or ‘city centre’ or ‘vacant’. You can enjoy working out the maths of it and I would hope there is a pleasure in doing that. Some people say that taking a poem apart kills it, but I don’t think it does: it opens up these other possibilities. It’s also, for me, fun. I can see why people don’t like it, but I do.