I just need it, whenever I get to it. Just for a space where things aren’t synthetic but sympathetic! Or to get to the nearest Post Office! On the road at the top, up there. This narrow strip is all that’s left of the old King’s Wood.

I might find the odd line out here but I don’t tend to write in my head – I like indulging the pre-verbal state of the ‘poem’, the ringing of images, then maybe I’ll sit down and write what follows. But I’ve written a lot of poems about this area. Wherever you are, there’s the material. Almost there!

The alternative Avon Gorge! Here we are. This is the camp. It used to be a two-sided thing but I pulled it down and moved it over here. There’s a seat and there’s a seat and there’s another, and that’s a table, of sorts.

There are little details I’m pleased with. This is holding all these branches in place, just because that branch there secures this perfectly. And so on. If you stand outside and give the whole structure a good shake, it’s solid. I’ve woven it all so tightly it won’t come down. I didn’t break a single piece of living wood to make this. It’s all been collected.

A few months or so just coming up and doing the odd half hour and fussing about with it. Thinking ‘that shouldn’t be there, that should be balanced on that, what’s happened there? Get rid of that.’ I’ve recently added a third ‘wall’ to create a more definitive doorway, and a fourth – the ceiling.

Rearranged in repetitive patterns using repetitive physical movements. But it’s an act of making like any other act of making, complete with its own particular symbolism.

It is almost as if the weaving of the branches of trees corresponded to the process of writing the poem, the branches being lines, or to the drafting process in general, getting rid of non-functional features of the structure – be it a poem or a place like this. Maybe I’m making, in W.S. Graham’s words, a ‘constructed space’. And doing this in order to construct more things inside that space.

And this big rock is my table. You can write on it – with a scrap of slate.

The camp is going to change minutely as the wood rots. That’s interesting in itself. Perhaps decay is another form of labour.

Are you going to be alright coming down this way? What I do is I put my feet sideways and find some grip on the rocks and the roots, where they show through. There’s a rock-hold there.

It’s related, I think, to the medical situation. My daily grind requires a lot of stamina and so I’m used to working with difficulty. When you turn difficulty over you have something powerful or remedial in some way. The health issues are inseparable from the writing. Poetry is putting a lot of pressure on language. If you feel, physically, under a lot of pressure, that has a corresponding consequence. It’s doing what I can with the little space there is, with a feeling of constant constriction. It’s the same with poetry. Whatever your materials are, put whatever pressure is needed on that material.

I really don’t know quite what to call the space. I wouldn’t call it a ‘den’ or a ‘camp’, really. ‘Encampment’ is good. Maybe there’s another name.

Ah, I remember now, your PhD is on poetry in caves! ‘Root house’ it is then. It makes me think of balconies. It’s outside but part of the domestic space so it’s between, or both. The same with the idea of the root house. It’s outside but you’ve made an inside that isn’t quite a house; it’s a space to camouflage myself in, as is language – a provisional space, neither here nor there.

I think the hard work is cleaning those doors of perception, to use Blake’s idea. That’s the hardest bit because the poems are already there. Like two stones rubbing together which end up polishing each other, there’s a lot of pressure involved in the process. It’s the way I’m made. The problem with my condition, Ichthyosis, is that the skin grows twenty times quicker than it should. It then dries and constricts so I’m walking around in a pressure chamber. I ignore it the best I can because I’m used to it so my tolerance of discomfort is pretty advanced. It’s not a choice. I can’t be physically comfortable. It’s a permanent situation. When you apply that kind of pressure to a creative practice, you find meaning in the difficulty.

Or an alchemical pressure, yes. Like ingredients in a crucible, you turn the flame up and see what happens. Either the crucible breaks and you’ve got to start again or you’ve made something beautiful and precious. I first encountered alchemy in a biography of Rimbaud when I was a teenager. I was having a catastrophic time and I remember thinking that if I follow this process, things will fall into place. And that’s my practice. Transmute. Transmute. Transmute. Anything is material. Your own body is material. The universe is in every cell of the body so if you can access it you’ve got the most amazing material.

Coleridge had terrible health problems too! Going on holiday with the Wordsworths didn’t help and they eventually parted company. At Loch Katrine, Coleridge was trying to dry his boots out in an oven and they burnt. Then he had to walk for miles in burnt boots until he reached Fort Augustus where he was able to buy a new pair. And I now remember – having forgotten whilst at work on ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ – that ‘page after page turning / on a rhyme, repeating the word water / over and over again’ was at some point lifted from an earlier poem, ‘Loch Loch’, which was published in Markings in 2009 but wasn’t included in Sidereal. There is a real Loch Lochy near Spean Bridge, one of the places Coleridge walked through at that time.

They are, yes. I read their poems and I’m away. This time of year, November, always brings back a memory of being absorbed in writing a long piece on ‘Christabel’ for the Bristol Festival of Ideas, A New Lyrical Ballads project. It was, in my own life, both a terrible and a vital time, so I engaged with the task pretty thoroughly. I then wrote a second one because I wanted to convey, in a poem, information about his taste in dressing gowns: silk, and covered in hieroglyphs! The poems that are written in the footsteps of Akhmatova come quickly and hardly need much editing. It’s like inhabiting someone’s empty shell. It’s a strange aspect of empathy.

The void of Void Studies isn’t a negative, by the way, nor any form of nullification – quite the opposite. It relates to the notion of the abyss in the Cabala, a place to cross over. I’ll be venturing into similar in-between places in the next collection, this time focussing on the theme of the body in pain. I did think for a time that after Void Studies I couldn’t go any further with what I was doing with language. I had always wanted to write that book – not knowing what it was – and it took many years to be able to – twenty or so – and when it was done I thought ‘now what?’, or rather, ‘why?’ After a pause, the first poem I wrote was ‘Hotel Raphael’, about the feeling of watching a black and white film and then pausing it to have a bath, closing my eyes, opening them, then being radically shocked by colour! Talking of coincidence, after doing some research, the Archangel Raphael is the patron saint of lemon trees. I started writing the book, as a book, when we moved into this new flat and I inherited a lemon tree. When these things happen I just think I’m on the right track, intangibly supported.

I’m trying to step back and allow things to happen without interfering with my own limited ego. I think poetry is a form of empathy. A narcissist stares into the mirror; a poet goes through it. And I take that analogy from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. I’d like to be able to write in a way that gets past the self. I’ve also been thinking I need to be a bit more useful to other people. From what I’ve written so far, it’s not obvious there’s a serious physical problem. I could probably be a little more open about that. I do think there’s an interesting connection between physical pressure and poetry as language with pressure applied to it.

They don’t explicitly reference the process but the way they are structured replicates the pressure. So the process is legible, yes. My favourite form, the sonnet, for instance, is a little pressure chamber, it’s been said. You’ve got these limitations, the fourteen lines, the need for a volta, and the principle that the poem addresses two contradictory ideas without attempting to reconcile them. The sonnet doesn’t answer the problem but the act of writing the sonnet to those constraints does. Some problems can’t be solved on their own level. You need a third transcendental principle for a solution – which is the act of writing to your best ability, allowing an otherness to turn fancy into imagination.

Yes, or possibly eleven lines, and that was a more extreme form than the sonnet. There, I think, the pressure applied to language felt greater. And more exhilarating.

Yes! And asymmetrical. There are twenty-two poems in the first section, twenty-two in the second and then eleven in that last sequence. And those numbers run throughout the first three books. And I’m not going to repeat myself in the next. I’ll try and divert my interest into repetition in a subtler way!

Well it was written in her neck of the woods: Dartmoor, at ‘Eagle Rock’. There is an Oswald influence on it, certainly, and Sappho as well, for obvious reasons – the first line or so could be a Sapphic fragment. I could get quite a few Sapphic fragments out of this poem! But then that’s how the process began with what would become Void Studies back in 2009, as a ‘Book of Fragments’.

Oh that’s wonderful!

And this relates to the idea of ablution. That process and the fact that there is an ambiguity at the end of ‘Ablutions for Midsummer’ where I try to end the poem but the speaker says they’ll be back and will presumably do the same thing again. There’s a line in a poem in Pilgrim’s Flower, ‘Homage’ – ‘homage means going / back to the same place until it knows you’ – and this is what I mean by nature’s sentience.

It’s about the moment you become sufficiently camouflaged, yes! I have to ask what the poem wants to be. It seems to be a matter of your own will and something else – something that isn’t personal but transpersonal – and finding how to cooperate with that. Repetition is something you think might provide a fixedness but it actually leads to indeterminacy in this poem.

It’s 100% rooted in that place. I think I wanted to simplify the language. There are no proper nouns in this poem so just: wood. That’s all that is needed. We named the wood. The wood didn’t name itself. I was dilly-dallying for some time with that but it came right in the end.

After the second draft, the poem settled into its form but it was more a case of where the repetitions happened. I had to take something out but then this would affect the symmetry so then I would need to go back in and change where the repetitions were placed. Eventually, what was miraculous for me was the line in the middle – ‘over and over again. Over and over again’ – which was originally two parts of other lines and came together by accident. And then ‘flying sparks of rain over and over again’ should have led straight into ‘the moon washes her fragments’ but this allows the poem to begin to end because it’s not a strict repeat, leading into that ‘I’m glad this doesn’t last’. The ending is indeterminate because this process is not finished yet and whatever ablutions are required to clear your vision are to be repeated.

Seven, eight… nine, I think.

She was a goddess until about two days before it was finished because I just looked at it and thought there needs to be a way of saying this without saying it. It needs to be there in the poem already. Like everything else, half-said.

I can see you kind of dream-reading your way through Coleridge’s idea of the ‘Primary Imagination’ when you said that. I’m thinking of the phrase, right at the end of chapter thirteen of the Biographia Literaria, ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’! The maxim ‘as above so below’ means the above (the infinite) is replicated in the below (the finite) and that’s a form of Repetition. The act of making is a form of Repetition. And of course, his ‘willing suspension of disbelief’; you read the poem and then had to read it again, suspending your disbelief.

That’s lovely! The literal image here is that I’m standing on the balcony and there’s a stream by the edge of a field and the moon’s reflecting in it and the movement is breaking up the moonlight. And in washing, in the act of the ablution, there is the connotation of preparation. The poem is about being in a place where you have the opportunity to correct or collect yourself. Broadly, it’s a poem about healing.

It’s as I was saying up in the root house, if you keep going back to a place and getting to know it you are engaging in an act of homage, which is essentially an empathetic act, like a reverse or correction to damage, almost an apology. The same for drafts of a poem: paying homage, deepening your connection with the poem by going back to it, over and again.

I remember my astrology teacher saying to me that ‘nothing goes unnoticed in the metaphysical realms’ and I’ve never forgotten that phrase. In terms of small actions, there is a noticing that happens, every action there’s a reaction. A repetition in the finite mind.

That’s Dartmoor for you! W.S. Graham was drugged by the air too. And, yes, I have been spotting Coleridge connections. In ‘The Constructed Space’ Graham uses the phrase ‘fixed and dead’. Turn to the last page of chapter thirteen of the Biographia Literaria and what have we got? Not to mention all those albatrosses. Or Polar regions. There’s surely an admiration going on… Anyhow, that line about being drugged by the air never survived into the final poem but I do want to use it somewhere.

This is related to the healing aspect of the writing which comes out of looking at something long enough that you’ve forgotten you’re looking and you are as much the thing you are looking at; you belong. Poetry is a practice of camouflage so that I am not separate from the language.

Exactly. When I first submitted a proposal for a PhD at St Andrews, I was interested in whether poetry could cure certain nervous tensions. If a certain patterning in rhythms, like prayer, or mantra, might harmonise and change energetic bodies; I wanted to see if poetry could make a physical difference to my situation – or at least make me more comfortable in my discomfort. In the end I wrote a thesis on The Book of Job.

I wrote this poem overlooking the moor and earlier that day having walked through that moor. I walked and I thought ‘I’m missing something’ so let’s do this walk again. I walked that walk three times every day for a week. So I internalised that and constructed this corresponding linguistic place which is the poem.

Yes and I liked the way that each repetition leads to a different place. The first instance of the refrain leads to ‘where yesterday / I walked on’ but in the repeat takes us to ‘where the dark wood / listens into itself’ which is what I’m doing. I’m listening in. That first instance is still ego-based. It’s me. It’s where I was yesterday but by the time we arrive at the repeat, I’ve disappeared. It’s camouflaging the self in the landscape.

And that other self disappears into the landscape until there is no separation between you and the landscape. There is no longer a question of self and other which is why I talk about camouflage, and I suppose why I built the root house. It’s not about annihilation of the self but it’s about trying to realise that the self is not an individual thing. It’s a provisional idea, like all the other ideas we have.

Aye. It’s not annihilation. It’s integration. I’ve recently started going again to a meditation class and during a breathing exercise – counting one to nine and back, one to six and back, one to three and back, and pause and reverse – I noticed I was arriving at a zero; I’d seemed to glimpse this place which is the place I’m trying to reach in my writing too.

And all the energy needed to make a poem come right!