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Fiona Sampson has published fifteen books encompassing poetry, philosophy of language and on the writing process. Her awards include the Newdigate Prize and the 2003 Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia) and being shortlisted for the 2006 Forward prize. She has eight books in translation and is editor of Poetry Review. The Distance Between Us (Seren, 2005) was received with great acclaim whilst her latest book Common Prayer (Carcanet 2007) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. 

Ruth O’Callaghan (ROC): Discipline has obviously been fundamental in achieving your impressive academic record, including a doctorate in the philosophy of language, your international status on the music scene and your respected reputation in the field of health care. How have these different strands influenced your own writing?

Fiona Sampson (FS): I think they make the mixture I am! I listen for the music in poetry – I sometimes think I listen ‘past’ the literal meaning to the semiotic, the meaningful character, of everything I hear and read. I found the training in philosophy rigorous and demanding. It stops me being as eccentric and playful as I would otherwise have been. It also means I want any line of thought, including that in a poem, to have ‘good bones’.  You’d be astonished how often that means I sub. someone’s review and pick up a basic grammatical error which could distort the whole piece. Working in health and social care, from hospice to long-stay psychiatric unit, was simply an education in life. But it also equipped me with both a sense of vocation and seriousness. It feels as though I’ve tested what works in poetry in the most demanding of circumstances. I know that my view of this practice, whatever else it may be, is absolutely not the product of the ivory tower.

Discipline? Well, you have to work hard to make a difference, it seems to me. And – unless you’ve a mentor, which I never have had – I think women have to be twice as accomplished as the guys under the bizarrely old-fashioned gender rules of British poetry. So – we need to get working!

ROC: Being appointed to such a major editorial chair as Poetry Review is a significant breakthrough in a field which is traditionally male dominated. In general, is gender still a defining boundary?

FS: Yes. I find it jaw-dropping.  Incidentally, if Poetry Review hadn’t been an equal opportunities appointment there’s no way I’d have got it. I didn’t know anybody – I just knew how to edit, review and publish. And I was passionate about the poetry being written in the UK, of course.

There are lots of women poets but few women reviewers; and none of the other big poetry editorial chairs is occupied by a woman.  It seems to me that women poets in Britain are expected to be thoroughly ‘feminised’, both on and off the page.  We’re supposed to write about a) body parts and sex, b) emotional difficulties, or c) the linen closet. Ideally, perhaps, each in turn. Talk about  ‘ ’Tis woman’s whole existence ’. When I look round for role-models, women with serious literary working lives – as distinct from women poets who write wonderfully, and indeed are lovely people: we have lots of those, thank goodness! – I have to look to the upper age-group, to people like Ruth Fainlight and Elaine Feinstein, Fleur Adcock and Anne Stevenson.  These are poets who have been literary protagonists; who have anthologised and translated and biographised and edited – as well as writing their own wonderfully lucid poetry.  But, somehow, we’ve lost their range and strengths.

ROC: Obviously the criterion for being published in Poetry Review is that it has to be a ‘good’ poem, but such a judgement is necessarily somewhat subjective. Which criteria do you employ to make an objective judgement in selecting poems?

FS:  I make disinterested judgements.  That’s to say I might get it wrong, but I do make myself listen to the poem itself and not to any possible reputation the poet may have. Nor, indeed, any occasion on which they’ve been outrageously rude to me...! I do look out for range and balance between schools, generations, gender etc. And I keep in mind my own tastes and style – as something which I should actively avoid favouring.

I look for poems which are alive, rather than simply mechanical or obedient; I avoid cliché, look for presence, since a poem should stand on its own ‘feet’.  It goes without saying, too, that poems should be finished – they should have solved all their own technical and semantic problems. And of course I edit towards a goal – I have an Ideal Reader, whom I imagine as a subscriber living quite far from London, and relying on PR to know what’s going on in British poetry.  I want them to be reliably informed – but also enthused and inspired.  You have to believe poetry can change lives, sometimes: or else the whole thing’s pointless.

I’m also enormously interested in conceptual space. ‘Abstract’ thought doesn’t seem to me to be dry – or, indeed, abstract. It makes form and pattern as well as sense (meaning).  I think we all experience abstract space opening up when we read, for example, a poet like Tomas Tranströmer. 

ROC:  A practical question – top tips, please, for developing as a poet?

FS:   Development seems to me to have everything to do with temperament – so perhaps I can only answer according to my own.  I think you have to remain open and curious: and that’s difficult to do both when you’ve had some encouragement and when you haven’t. You do have to ‘keep your head’, willy-nilly, and that feels like something to do with continually returning to the poem(s) you’re writing as a reader: as if these are simply texts among the others that you read, explore, consider. Rather than ‘being a writer’, where all sorts of self-consciousnesses intervene. So, 1) I think it’s essential to read wonderful poetry every day, rather than relying on what one knows of one’s peers.  You develop, both technically and in aspiration, by osmosis as well as consciously. 2) I think Redgrove’s idea that the real poem is a crossroads of emotion and the sensory, intellect and intuition, is a useful model which can be applied consciously. And, 3), ‘Il faut travailler’ as my Prof at the Paris Conservatoire used to say. Providing you know which are five-finger exercises and which are real emergent poems, it does no harm to push through the pain barrier, I think. Or is that my temperament?

Ruth O’Callaghan

Ruth O’Callaghan holds the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship, is a winner in International Poetry competitions, a competition adjudicator, interviewer, reviewer and editor. She frequently reads in the UK and abroad, most recently at the O2 Festival, Hyde Park, and Ealing and Essex Poetry Festivals. She also hosts two poetry venues in London. Her work has featured in numerous anthologies and magazines and has been translated into German, Italian and Romanian. Both Take Five ’06 (Shoestring 2006) and Where Acid Has Etched (bluechrome 2007) completely sold out. The latter is in the process of being re­printed whilst A Lope Of Time (bluechrome 2008) has taken many advance orders.

Her work has “a rare ability to sustain the highest emotional and spiritual stakes.” (Fiona Sampson, Chair, Poetry Review)