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Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she has worked for almost twenty years in the family metal finishing business. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008). New poems can be read at her website: www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk. Her collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), After Beethoven (2000) and Bricks and Ballads (2004). Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award.

You have an obvious facility with poetic form; this is apparent not only from your two latest collections being built on the ballad, but also in your earlier collections. Even your free verse poems seem to have an underlying sense of form and metre. Can you say what place form takes in your writing process?

Yes, this is pretty straightforward. I decide before I write the poem if it will be in free verse or a fixed form. If it’s the second, it’s usually a form which is a favourite, or obsession at the time, or, perhaps equally deplorably, something I have just stolen from another writer or re-discovered, and am keen to try out.

The problem with free verse is that if it doesn’t work, I find it very hard to revise, and if someone interrupts me, or I compose it in my head and forget some of it, I can never pick up the thread again. Sometimes I have simply started the poem again, and it has worked, but in a different way. With a fixed form, I sometimes find it doesn’t suit me (or the poem) and have to alter it. Sometimes I find I’ve deviated from it without meaning to, which is also quite hard to undo without destroying the poem, so usually I have to leave these swerves. I think I can sometimes detect them in other poets’ work (no examples forthcoming!).

I am interested in these unintentional ‘swerves’ in form; do you experience the same effect in reverse? Does working within the restriction of form requirements take poems in unexpected directions for you?

The reverse effect is more like a sieve than a swerve! If I try, for example, a rather intricate new stanza, I find that I am writing more slowly, and looking hard at every word. Sometimes this feels a little like a crossword. (I am not particularly good at crosswords.) But often it means that the words, being hard-won, are more carefully chosen. At my luckiest, the poem begins to deepen rather than skittering along the shallows.

The real danger with formal poems is that the sieve will turn into a bottleneck. I don’t normally like to work out too closely where a poem is going. If I have a final line in my head, the rest of the poem usually refuses stubbornly to join up with it. So the poem goes through its sieve; but then we run out of space, and the meaning is either caught or it isn’t. I am particularly wary of forms with very short final lines, as I think the meaning will almost certainly run off into the sand. I should say that I like short lines immensely, when other poets have taken all the risks and caught sense in the briefest sound.

What would you tell beginning poets about received form – are there any benefits to practising it for those who write free verse?

I am almost evangelical about the virtues of practicing various aspects of formal verse, even if a writer thinks they will always prefer free verse. Clearly, of course, poems in “free verse” are not totally free. Each poem has its own individual web of devices and binding rhythms, and can display a maddening mixture of intractability and fragility when you try to revise it.

The writers I would call upon to support my claims for formal writing would include Eliot and Plath. Thanks to The Waste Land, Eliot is almost notorious for allusive and collaged “free verse”, but both his early and later work show a mastery of many forms. Plath’s early work (which I admit I haven’t re-read lately) included tightly patterned work. I have just come across a quotation from her letters when she was a student at Cambridge: “I keep telling myself that I have a vivid, vital, good life, and that it is simply that I haven’t learnt to be tough and disciplined enough with the form I give it in words which limits me..”

The words “disciplined”, “form” and “limits” struck me very strongly in this extract. I think a lack of acquaintance with a range of possible forms does generally leave a poet trapped within firm, if unrecognised, limits. I would suggest that an apprenticeship in English poetry (which most of us serve for a lifetime) includes practice in the main metres of English, including the iambic pentameter; in the varying shades of rhyme, and in a variety of stanzas and types of poems, from the couplet to… well, possibly the sestina, but I admit to shunning the most rigorously repetitive forms. I don’t think I have the raw material of strong free-standing lines. Perhaps one of the benefits of testing various forms is to find out individual limits, as well as possibilities.

I would say briefly that I think a profound change took place in the techniques of English poetry during the twentieth century. The cause was very simple. For the first time in several centuries, most poets had not passed through private schools whose pupils learnt, and practised, classical metres. There is a smoothness and metrical authority in the lines of, for example, Auden, which I could never replicate, except as brief echoes. So I think we may have to find rather different models. It may be no accident that, as stylish commentators keep remarking with surprise, the passion and brutal precision of British folksong is now – almost – fashionable. I think the stressed rhythms, the echoing rhyme and the quick narratives of ballad lyrics have a great deal that a poet can make off with.

Is poetry theft? Of course. It is also a confidence trick. The confidence you have to win is the readers’ or listeners’. In my experience, both expect high levels of skill from poets – and respect those, such as Dylan Thomas, whose skill shines through the work. I think they are quite right to do so.

You have been consistently writing and publishing for over twenty five years: has anything changed in your approach to writing in that time?

I would like to say that I now spent more time on writing; that I now read enough; that I worked hard enough on technique, and that I was not endlessly distracted by horses, roses aspiring to jungle status, or sending emails on behalf of Oxfam or the Gloucestershire Badger Group. Unfortunately none of these is true.

Since I turned fifty, I have become extremely keen to find my poems a wider audience (and have forfeited my almost perfect health in the process; don’t sit up all night computing, as it wrecks your circulation). For the first time in those twenty-five years, I would like to stay at home and write. I have a pile of poems to finish, and only have the right time and energy to work on them (too briefly) at the start of Saturday and Sunday. In about four years, the family metal finishing business where I work will be wound up (if it survives that long). If finance is short, I might for the first time in my life see if I can find some funding to be – even briefly – a full-time writer. Until then, it is scramble as usual. I am more consistently involved with fixed form than I was when younger, and I keep poems for longer (for years in some cases). I think I’ll choose to see this as some kind of progress!

Your collections have appeared every four years or so. To a reader, you appear to produce good poetry consistently: do you have dry spells? If you do, how do you cope with them?

I wrote very few poems when I was pregnant, and none were good. After my daughter was born, I realized that I had to start again technically. (I think this is quite common.)

If poems stopped coming of their own accord, then, (as well as doing more gardening), I think I would try some technical exercises for a time, to see if the dry sticks of form might at some point catch fire.

Where does a poem start for you? Is it an idea, an image, a metaphor?

Ideally, a poem starts when I have read a great deal, and when I have form securely in my head, with the swing of lines in my ear. A poem comes best when it is waited for. It is like listening for a bird.

But, in life, these rarely fall together. Poems can come from public events, like the attack on the Twin Towers, from sudden changes in my own life, such as those caused by a death, or from the smallest things (which may mean most to a reader). It’s my anxiety that technique will not be practised enough to carry the weight of the first two, or that I will simply miss the small, most vital subjects through inattention.

I will add that what I think are my best poems come with a kind of flash, inside the mind’s dark.

I understand you do some tutoring for The Poetry School and I know you have judged some major competitions: what do you look for in a poem? Is it different as a reader and as a judge?

When I read purely for myself, I let poems move me, and then tear them to pieces looking for anything I can take! Recognising merit in a poem is almost a physical instinct, I find; if I am listening to poetry, a good poem slips in through the soles of the feet.

I don’t think tutoring or judging are very different, except that I try scrupulously to recognize the worth of the variety of subjects and forms presented to me. I do have very broad tastes. I have J. H. Prynne and Pam Ayres on my bookshelves. Of course they are vastly different, but I believe we need them both.

Can you say what you dislike in poems – what, for instance, would make you discard a poem immediately in a competition?

Poems fail, I think, through lack of finished form or any spark of life. You can have poems which are a kind of polished shell – and quite empty.

Have you always had broad tastes? Can you identify poets who have been important influences for you?

I think I’ve simply read my way through what was available, and have always liked very different things. I like songs very much – the best pop song lyrics, folk songs and music hall songs, and songs from musicals with dashing and outrageous rhymes.

The poets I encountered first, at primary school, and in books we were given by a great-uncle, were the richer Victorian and romantic poets: Tennyson and Keats. I still have them flowing round my head, and I still admire them very much. I read Wordsworth via school in my teens, and I think he is my “favourite poet”, because of the perfect attentiveness and simplicity of his best work. (Shakespeare tends to get left out of these surveys, doesn’t he? Perhaps it’s because he’s everywhere, like the air, having escaped from poetry into the language. There’s an aim.)

My favourite lines are from Eliot “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender” from The Waste Land. I am always startled by “the blood shaking my heart” in an earlier line. I like poetry which erupts.

Edward Thomas is very important to me; I’ve known his work now for almost fifty years. I have come to think recently that English poetry, like so much else, was wrenched awry by the First World War. People still blame Eliot for making English poetry too allusive and academic, but the War left Eliot like a boulder on a flood plain. Edward Thomas should have been there, redeeming the English ballad with Welsh music (Thomas loved folk songs, by the way, including the dark tough ones. His daughter, recently dead, remembered what he sang.) So should Owen, who I think would have been as great a love poet as Shakespeare, and as powerful in rhyme. I think it has taken almost a century to reconnect with the traditional strengths of English writing, with the line looping through Auden and Larkin (who has left me with an abiding love of strong endings).

There is much I admire in new writing, from the vivid voices in Daljit Nagra to the dancing lines of Sophie Hannah. It is almost impossible to summarise, which is a sign of English poetry’s stubborn and diverse health. I frequently read new work which I admire very much, and which sends me back to my own tattered pile of A4 determined to be better, fresher, and more finished.