It does apply with me and it comes in different ways for different poems. As it often seems to be with me, there wasn’t a single route into the poem; there were several that came together at the same point. This particular summer I was up on the Northumberland coast. I was aware of the shape of Mancunia being Manchester shading into mythic versions of Manchester, Manchester being a city which mythologises itself greatly and is mythologised. That myth shades through into a form of utopia or dystopia because, as soon as cities become mythic, they do get into that territory. I had done one or two broadcast things to do with the big anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. More’s Utopia – which is such a strange and disturbing and now timely, pertinent book – was going around in my head. So as these poems in Mancunia started to shade into utopia and then a fallen utopia – given that utopias always do destroy themselves, usually from within – I thought I needed a poem which in some sense… I had a number of poems which were circling around that collapse, just before it occurs, and I needed a sense of writing something close to it, asking: what would this moment be like when you no longer owned the city, the state, the world, the place? I was trying to think how that might work and I remember that first line – ‘There is a victory parade moving through the city’ – coming and feeling like it was a repeatable line and that there was a point to it being a repeatable line. That first line which is a sort of intentionally on-the-nose statement of something happening.

Yes, absolutely. I think it very interesting the way you draw those two together, though they are doing slightly different things. The repeated line in ‘Terra Nullius’ was intended to convey a sense of incredulity. It partly mimics the continual movement of the parade through the city, but also it seems to say ‘this is happening’. It’s the way you repeat something traumatic, some huge change – you repeat it to yourself in the hope that somehow it will become more real, that you’ll be able to process it.

Yes, absolutely. The line ‘three thousand refugee children’ was slightly different. That was written at a time when there was huge political debate around whether we would let in three thousand refugee children and I just thought this is such an odd block of a phrase. It’s self-defensive for both sides of the debate because it’s a way of talking about it without acknowledging that you’re talking about individuals with histories and families. The idea that these three thousand refugee children as a block were being bandied about and argued over seemed dehumanising in itself. That aspect is what made me think there might be a poem in that phrase. Whenever you turned on the radio or the television you were getting that phrase.

I wanted that ambiguity but I wanted it to be more sinister than comforting. I wanted this voice behind the poem to be a resigned voice, a defeated voice. The title of the poem comes from a concept in Roman law meaning ‘nobody’s land’ but there’s also a strand to the meaning of that term which means a ‘relinquished land’. You’ve given up sovereignty. I wanted that idea of being defeated and your own city being overrun by people who are pulling all the tricks of smart politicians: keeping eye-contact, dressing down to appear more part of ‘the people’.

I suppose for me it felt like that sort of cod psychology which crept into business and self-improvement and is now in politics – for example, politicians learning how to stand with their legs further apart to look more authoritative. They repeat certain phrases over and over and over again so that people… you get the feeling of being played.

Absolutely. I wanted that sense of these people in the ‘victory parade’ being a savvy, almost business-trained political generation. Though there is an ambiguity in the line about the ‘velvet revolution’, I wanted a sense that this was a menacing thing and that despite appearances and all the ‘eye-contact’ and the ‘we’re not driving our flashy cars because we don’t want to put you off’, there was a brutality to this underneath the surface.

That’s right. Around the time this was written, Brexit had just happened and certainly taken people like me by surprise. We were still trying to make sense of things such as what had happened in Crimea and Ukraine. I think my generation – I’m in my early 50s – grew up with fear and then complacency. We were the generation that watched threats on the television and were terrified by the idea of nuclear apocalypse. You would hear a plane at night and wondered if that might be it.

Yes [laughs]. So there was a fear but after a while – particularly after the Berlin Wall came down and so on – you no longer believed that would happen. Then we entered this odd era of complacency where you could seriously have a book by a major American academic [Francis Fukuyama] called The End of History and people would take that seriously. Maybe we are just looking at the calm fields and gardens of the future now. And of course it was ridiculous. And now what it’s been replaced by is this perpetual uncertainty, the multiplicity of sources of authority, none of which seem to be trusted by everybody. The idea that if and when we’re overrun it could be undramatic and in a way that we least expect.

I think they’re part of the weather. The late non-fiction writer and essayist Gordon Burn had a phrase, ‘the news is the weather’. It’s what we exist in. I’ve always been interested in and wrestled with ways of incorporating theological, philosophical and political ideas and themes into poems. I suppose I’m drawn to poems which seem to reach beyond the purely solipsistic.

I think there are a number of moments throughout Mancunia that would. The hope was that as you read through the book you would become acquainted with the real Manchester and you would see it rooted in that. It’s never called ‘Manchester’ in the book, it’s called ‘Mancunia’, ‘Mancunia’ being something people seem to understand (they call themselves ‘Mancunians’), but it becomes a place where Manchester can become mythic if you call it Mancunia. It has echoes of utopia and dystopia as well.

And there are. There’s interesting work being done by a number of people, including one of my colleagues at MMU [Manchester Metropolitan University], on how some cities become mythic and others don’t. For example, look at Southampton. It’s a city which has a history and a size of population and industry comparable to Liverpool or Manchester, but there aren’t really myths or stories about Southampton, at least not ones that are public currency. Whereas if you look at Manchester… Manchester is the cradle of capitalism and communism (both of which are semi-true); it’s the birthplace of the computer, has an extraordinary place in musical history, both classical and pop. It’s constantly myth-making and it even makes its own myths. Twenty years ago the Arndale [Centre] was blown up by an IRA bomb and the city had its guts ripped out. The story that Manchester told about that, eventually, was that it was the making of us because it enabled the city to be reborn, that it was the catalyst for what’s now this very vibrant city. But of course that was happening anyway; it’s another myth. It’s the kind of city that generates stories around itself. I was interested in how a city like that becomes a utopia and then falls. This fall has seeds throughout the book, even in the earlier poems which are much more about a living and vibrant Mancunia.

I can’t remember which one of them came first, but whichever it was came as part of the research I was doing into Utopia. I was looking at medieval maps and the way in which the world was divided up; looking not only at the maps of an imagined utopia but of the perceived real world. I liked the idea that somewhere could be designated ‘terra pericolosa’ [‘dangerous land’] or ‘terra nullius’ [‘nobody’s land’]. Sometimes I work from a title down. Usually I get a line or a rhythm first but just occasionally, especially with two of those poems (having got the original one), the title came first. From looking at these medieval maps, I thought: what would ‘terra pericolosa’ be about? So you work down from that.

Yes, absolutely. That sense of growing menace, as you put it, is intended. I’m usually an obsessive fiddler about with the order of poems in a book, but this time it happened even more so than usual. I really wanted that sense of the volume shading through into a utopia that tips into a dystopia and is lost. Then right at the end you get a cluster of poems in which effectively the narrative voice of the poems flies out, leaves. There’s that sense of departure at the end.

Yes it was. It had to do with that voice of resignation or defeat. It’s related to one of the things I like about Elizabeth Bishop; you could call it a passionate coldness. The ability for a poem to contain huge passion but be described really coldly and clearly. I wanted something of that in the assumed voice behind this poem. This voice is someone who has seen this city, this culture, collapse from within – someone who is being overrun. But there’s resignation, there’s a defeated sense to it. Your small victory is not making ‘eye-contact’ as the victory parade passes.

Absolutely. There’s almost no language, apart from perhaps very specific forms of technical language, which isn’t metaphorically loaded even when it purports not to be. Into this poem – which appears to be driven by a passionate coldness, which seems driven by a desire to set things down as clearly as possible – there are these devices which open in multiple directions.

There are a number of ways in which the poems talk to each other. I’ve tried to do that in past collections as well, as I did in the last one, Drysalter. There’s the three ‘Terra’ poems you talk about and in the middle of the collection there’s a cluster of poems which are to do with the idea of politics as a form of theatre. There are two or three poems that are explicitly about theatre.

That’s right. And ‘Demetrius to the Audience’ and ‘Dumbshow’. There are moments when that becomes explicitly dealt with – that sense of artifice, of something being acted out.

Once you develop artifice, how do you break it and get someone to be sincere? So, yes, there are a number of places where the poems talk across to each other and images are handed on from one to the other. There’s lots of dogs here, for example. And the fly at the end of ‘Barfly’ is connected to the fly at the end of ‘My Father’s Death’, which becomes a wispy embodiment of death.

It certainly played a part. Writing and thinking about the deaths of these poets… The point of that book was to interrogate the odd, skewed image of poets in our culture: the expectations of poets which have now been transferred onto musicians, rock stars and so on. The idea that the great work comes from the crashed life, the risked life –

That’s right. That blazingly spectacular American generation, which was the one my generation of poets looked across to. Lowell and Sexton and Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Plath all seemed to either consciously, as Berryman did, or unconsciously fly very close to the flame. The work seemed to respond to that. And of course it goes back to the Romantics and the pre-Romantics such as Chatterton, who is probably the foundation of it all. But inevitably by writing and examining and looking very closely at the poems and letters and the accounts of the lives, the ends of these poets’ lives… Yeah [laughs], you’re thinking about and confronting death a lot.

I am interested in that. We’re a culture which tries to make death invisible, yet is somehow more death-haunted even than the Victorians were. They were better at it because they confronted it. There’s something about the old spiritual exercise, found in both eastern and western religious traditions, in which you imagine the decomposition of your own body. The idea is that this heightens your sense of being fully alive.

The ‘Rhyme of the Merchant Mariner’ was a commission from the Bristol Festival of Ideas. That festival commissioned a number of poets to respond to something in Lyrical Ballads, and I just had always been fascinated by Coleridge’s poem and so decided to do a kind of ‘Ancient Mariner’ meets Glengarry Glen Ross. That’s a deliberately playful response to the original poem.

They were never intended to be parodic. These are poets who have been hugely important to me in different ways, so it was very much a sense of honouring them.

You could describe it as a process of connection-making as well. Sometimes while writing these poems for Mancunia. I found myself thinking ‘Actually, there’s a mood or a tone here that reminds me of something in Stevens or reminds me of something in Bishop.’ I quite like the idea that you might reach across and hold hands with one of their poems at some point and make that explicit in a title or in a reference.

I suppose like any poet your influences are multiple and shifting. They come into and out of the foreground, but there’s a multiplicity of poets and poems that you’re reading and re-reading. Bishop has always been there, sometimes more of a foreground influence and sometimes I won’t read her for years when I’m not teaching her work. And you take different things from different poets as well. I always found that I’ve returned to John Donne because Donne seems to me one of the pre-eminent poets in being able to take a philosophical idea for a walk in a poem and see where it takes him.

Exactly. Because it’s exploratory. Whereas with Bishop, what I’ve returned to and what I’m fascinated by is this passionate coldness. You talk about a poet like Keith Douglas famously having a ‘cold eye’, a clinical eye –

Yes, that’s right. I love Keith Douglas but in Bishop this coldness seems to be able to contain real tenderness and passion as well. There’s a sort of alchemy to a Bishop poem which allows her to be both cold and passionate.

No, of course, but in the miasma of things that are in your head you do tune into someone’s wavelength every now and again. I like the idea – and this knits together what we were just saying about Donne and Bishop – I like the idea of thinking in a poem, not knowing where a poem is going to end when you start it. That phrase ‘or rather, scuttled’ reminded me of lines from another poem in Mancunia that uses the same technique, called ‘Master of Lighting Small Details’: ‘Raise a glass you lonely souls, / to the master of lighting small details, // or mistress, more likely’. Rather than going back and correcting the line by putting ‘mistress’, you include the revision and it becomes part of the fabric of the poem.

Yes, and I wanted this sense of being resigned and defeated and turning away, of not meeting the victors’ ‘eye-contact’. Therefore there’s a sense that even though you’ve been overrun you’re not being taken in. I liked the idea of taking the eye of the reader in that direction as well, constantly looking away.

If you work in another form of making for enough years, something of that rubs off on the poetry as well. There are poets who are accomplished musicians and you start to see it in the way they put poems together. Well, I made films for many years. One of the key building blocks when you’re putting a film together is to make sure that you cut between wide-shots and close-ups. That’s how a) you build up a narrative and b) draw the viewer in. So there’s something of that in these poems as well. I’m never quite happy with a poem that’s all in mid-shot or all in wide-shot. This is a poem about a city being overrun but at some point it comes into the surface of a glass.

I think the impulse behind it was to try, as accurately as I could, to describe a certain kind of opulence. The poem mentions that these victors’ smart ‘tunics’ and ‘limos’ are ‘stabled away’ until later. They don’t want to enter in a kind of glorious triumphalism because that’s not the game they play; they’re too smart for that. I was trying to get at the fact that very, very expensive, very, very smart cars have a different kind of black, the quality of its lustre, of its depth of colour, is just different. It reeks of money and power. You see those limos occasionally in processions. I wanted to get at that quality. Probably in the back of my mind I had Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which is an aesthetic celebration of beauty from his perspective. And Tanizaki describes at one point the absolute beauty felt when looking into a miso bowl. It has to be a fairly dimly lit room and you look into the miso bowl and see its depth and lustre. That’s what you see when you look at these cars; it’s more than just a black car. It’s that absolute depth and richness of it.

Yes; loads. I’m a major re-drafter, even at proofs stage, sometimes to the frustration of my editor, who’s trying to lock down those proofs.

[Laughs] My editor is very long-suffering and has allowed me to go back on these proofs several times. I draft and redraft and redraft. Some poems come more quickly than others but I do work and rework which sometimes involves long periods spent putting a poem away and then coming back to it, realising what’s not working and stripping it back.

I show them to those people close to me, friends and family. My wife usually sees them, my sons will sometimes look at them. Like a lot of poets, I suppose, I have three or four poets I know well, to whom I’ve got into the pattern of showing work. I wouldn’t show anyone earlyish drafts, but when I think something is about as finished as I can make it, it’s then often interesting to show it to people and see what they have to say about it. Trusted readers, I guess. People who you would trust not just to say ‘that’s fine’. ‘Trusted readers’ doesn’t mean they’re going to be kind, it means the opposite, actually. Readers you can trust to tell you, ‘this is not what you think it is’.

I do think teaching affects your work. For me, the single biggest effect, probably, is teaching the literature courses. It affects the normal way in which you pick up poems from the past, which is: one thing leads to another and you think of something, or someone reminds you of a poem and you go back and look at it again, or you decide it’s years since I’ve read, I don’t know, Marianne Moore, so you think I’m going to get deeply engaged with Marianne Moore again. That process is interrupted by teaching because there’s a week where you have to read Auden and MacNeice because you’re teaching them. I quite like the intrusion of poems that you weren’t reading anyway; of being made to engage with them. I find that very fruitful, those coincidental re-encounters with people you might not have read for months.

It’s one useful way. I think it can be too reductive to say it’s all about form. Next year, I think, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Arvon Foundation and the explosion of creative writing teaching which that brought about in Britain. But there’s still a sense in which questions are asked about the teaching of creative writing that aren’t asked of composing being taught in conservatoires or painters being taught at art school. I think that’s because, since language is common currency, there’s less of a recognition that it does involve craft. And that’s not to say craft as in villanelles; free verse is a hard form. Poetry is a negotiation with the materials, just as a sculptor is in negotiation with the materials when they take a new piece of wood or a new piece of stone. There are things you can teach and learn about the negotiation with materials, just as much as you can when the materials are musical or structural.

Yes, exactly. That can disguise the craft element of poetry, or mislead people into thinking it doesn’t exist. David Jones puts it explicitly. He says: ‘a poet is a maker’. The expression comes through the making. It’s an exploratory form and you are a maker, which carries all kinds of implications about craft and separation from self. Of course, it contains you because you’re the maker of it but it’s still separate from you. There are things you can say about something being made that it’s harder to say about something being expressed.

That sounds spot on.