I think of that poem as a kind of lullaby. How the poem came about – a close friend of mine, her mother had recently died. I was staying over in her mother’s flat, where my friend was living. This was at a time when I was thinking a lot about my own mother’s death and trying to write about it – all the stuff that became the book. The flat is close to a very wild bit of Hampstead Heath, a part of the Heath where there are loads of trees. I couldn’t sleep that night. It was very windy and you could hear the trees swaying back and forth, swaying all night long. It felt like they were all around me. It was partly quite sinister and partly soothing. Like being inside something, but protected from it at the same time. On my way home the next day – which is this bus ride I like that goes along one edge of the Heath where it feels very rural and if you sit on the top deck you’re sort of up in the trees (and can peep over the fences of these crazy dilapidated mansions that are mostly owned by foreign investors) – the poem started to emerge.

As I’ve got older I’ve had a few friends lose their mothers and there can be a kind of solidarity about it. I wanted to write something that spoke to that – that’s why it’s ‘we’. Seeing other people lose parents got me more in touch with my own loss, because I was so young when it happened – my mum died by suicide when I was seven, as you know – I’d sort of blanked it out. It seems like whatever age you are, losing your mother can make you feel very small again, completely defenceless. I guess I was trying to take something menacing and turn it into something that might be comforting. You know that nursery rhyme, Rock-a-bye baby? Rock-a-baby on the treetop, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall… It’s a completely terrifying lullaby! This only occurred to me later, but I think ‘Canopy’ is meant to be the anti-Rock-a-bye baby.

I don’t know, really. I just read an interview with Maggie Nelson in which she said ‘there is no catharsis, the stories we tell ourselves don’t heal us’, but that writing about trauma can be a necessary process. I am a person who is on pretty intimate terms with anxiety and panic, as you know, and much of the writing in Stranger, Baby emerged out of difficult emotional states. But it wasn’t in the sense of, ‘Oh, I’ll do this and I’ll feel better.’ It was more a way of weighting what I was feeling internally. With this book, and with other poems that have come from difficult places, once they’re concrete and they’re existing, they become scary in a new way. I was really scared of this book for quite a while. When it was a manuscript I didn’t want to go back to it. I kept it under a pile of papers on my desk.

I didn’t always want to write these poems and at times it felt a bit like… being sick. But that comparison feels disgusting and shameful because a poem is meant to be a beautiful thing. There’s this disharmony between what a poem is meant to be – beautiful, transcendent – and the actual wretchedness of its source. The other day I saw Nuar Alsadir talking with Josh Cohen about her amazing book Fourth Person Singular, and shame was one of the topics, the shame of writing in the lyric ‘I’. In the talk, and in the book, she talked about the lyric being like ‘saliva in a glass’, based on something Slavoj Zizek said about us being okay with swallowing our own saliva repeatedly, but if we were asked to spit into a glass and then drink it we’d be horrified. When you write a poem you take something internal and make it external, so in that way you seem to be showing your insides to the world (and to yourself).

That didn’t really come into the discussion; I guess it was more about her approach to the lyric, which is sort of elusive and shapeshifting.

That’s a beautiful idea. Is there something about fear being harnessed by a kind of discipline? I don’t know what place I write from, though. I go to talks and readings and I often get the sense that many writers, or indeed artists of any discipline, have these really clearly thought-out ideas about their process and how they write and what they want to write about – and I don’t have any of that. I don’t really think about my writing process. If I try to think about it, my mind just sort of bolts itself shut. When I write it’s just because it… arises. Almost like a physical process. Trying to answer that feels like thinking about ‘what’s the approach I would take to eating?’, or something.

I mean, obviously, there’s structure. Sometimes I sit down to write when I haven’t got the urge just like sometimes I eat when I’m not hungry, just because it’s been pre-arranged, or whatever. In terms of what I like to read… I want a poem to make me feel like I’ve been stabbed in the heart! Not literally obviously. I want a very powerful non-physical physical feeling…

I ask myself that question a lot, especially lately because I haven’t written anything new for quite a long time, and I am wondering what it might mean not to write, as well as what it means to write. During the process of writing Stranger, Baby – writing a book about a grief that is over 25 years old – some people said to me, oh that must be an important and necessary thing to do, and some were like, are you sure it’s a good idea, raking up the past like that? I still don’t know. Right now, I feel fine about not writing, I’m enjoying the silence.

Yeah, but I think my experience with that has changed since my last book. With Dear Boy, when I had a period of not really writing afterwards, I did think ‘What’s going on? I need to produce new things.’ And I was frustrated. I felt like I’d had this skill that I somehow couldn’t access anymore, whereas now it doesn’t feel like that at all. The spirit analogy feels accurate. The spirit has gone on holiday, thankfully.

Loss was sort of haunting my first book in some ways. I had one poem in Dear Boy called ‘Her Inheritance’, which was about not speaking about my mum’s death – that was my approach for the first, maybe 20 years after she died. I thought that was maybe going to be my permanent approach. The fact that that changed was a huge personal crisis and sort of continues to be. There’s a way in which writing a poem is another way of not speaking. The process of writing Stranger, Baby was very different than writing Dear Boy, in that it all came very quickly and in various absorbed emotional states of being compelled to write stuff down. The first book felt more architectural. Like, done in many stages over a long time, plans first, then slowly being built in parts; whereas Stranger, Baby felt more, I don’t know… sculptural? Like working with clay or something. Not that I have skill in either of those fields!

Exactly. That’s the weird thing about it. I haven’t talked about it all that much actually, because I don’t know how to. I already talked about it in the only form I was able to talk about it in… Some people are really brilliant at talking about their work. Ocean Vuong was in London a few weeks ago for the launch of the UK edition of Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I saw him speak about it and he was so incredibly eloquent and said all these insightful things – at one point he even broke into song! For me, when I talk about my work, it feels like a hard task, but sometimes I learn something.