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I had been writing for a number of years and had written two books of poems: one was in the process of being published at the time Wally was diagnosed. So poetry, as a way of examining my experience, as a way of considering its depths and giving shape to my concerns, was already an established habit for me. When he was diagnosed, I think what it did was sort of push the entire enterprise which you can say, in a way, was always there. We are always confronting mortality, we are always faced with the loss of the ones we love, and the whole of experience is by nature effervescent. But those things were never so underlined for me as they were by the possibility of his loss in the foreseeable future.

There was a strange time there when we knew he was HIV positive, but he was not sick. So I had this knowledge, to the extent that it was knowledge; in some terms it was quite vague as to what course that illness might take. There was nothing much to do about it other than to seek what was, at that time, fairly rudimentary medical care. That meant that, for me, there was a kind of weird leisure of contemplation to look at what was, or might be, happening to us; to use my work as a vehicle for meditating about this condition. Wally didn’t really get sick until 91/92, at which point I was working on the poems that became Atlantis. That was a very different writing process. Because as he was actually becoming ill, I didn’t have much time to work. It was a matter of scribbling down a line or two here and there for the sake of my own sanity. Those bits and pieces were brought to more of state of polish after his death and became Atlantis.

The prose memoir Heaven’s Coast was written in its entirety after his death. So we’re talking about seven year’s worth of work which has appeared in the UK a relatively short time. I think this might be somewhat distorting in the way readers see that work, because these three books really cover a great deal of experience and consideration. I think that the same concerns which always occupied me are also present in those books because, as well arising from particular occasions, they are also self portraits, as any work of poetry is. So they feel like the concerns that were always with me, but put under an enormous pressurising weight which intensified them and required a more urgent sort of negotiation.

In Heaven’s Coast you describe dying as being like light which reveals more of what things are. This thought also a p pears in ‘Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down’ (Atlantis, see extract below) when you say the “ferocity of dying” Is “the luminosity of what’s living hardest”. The usual idea is that dying is a diminishing, isn’t it?

Well, one of the extraordinary things that happens to us when we are brought face to face with the edges of life, with being with someone who is leaving the world, is I think we are also brought strangely close to the heart of life as well. One sees, in any kind of experience of extremity, into life which is not on the edge; in other words our ordinariness, what it means to be human in a daily way I think is brought into focus by living with those who are disappearing. While this has been the worst thing that has ever happened to me, whilst the impact of this epidemic has ravaged my life as it has so many people, particularly gay men of my generation, it’s also been something which has been, I guess, like any kind of difficulty, an opportunity to learn more about what it means to be alive. So, strangely enough, I suppose like in any crisis, there are gifts in it too.

They are a nocturne
in argent and gold, and they burn

with the ferocity
of dying (which is to say, the luminosity

of what’s living hardest). Is it a human soul
the painter’s poured

into them - thin, beleaguered old word,
but what else to call it?

Evening is overtaking them.
In this last light they are voracious.

Is it, do you think, only the person observing who sees it like that or do you think the dying person does too? Did you detect that?

Yes. I would imagine it is more true because my participation was someone in love, someone in a long relationship, and, as in any long relationship, the boundaries between us blurred a bit. So, at first when Wally was diagnosed, I felt that it was my illness too. Of course, that’s not true. It’s true that I was with him, that it was an extraordinary intimate experience, but there were aspects of his experience that I can never know. I can only guess by all the evidence available to me what that must have been like for him. In a way, I think, that’s part of what Heaven’s Coast is: an attempt to understand or to imagine what had just happened. Death, the death of someone you love, feels literally not just like having the rug pulled out from underneath you, but having the whole house disappear around you. I felt spun around, I felt at a loss for words, I felt as if I had fallen off the edge of the world. It was a time when I could not write poems. For one thing, I felt as if a poem would be unable to contain those feelings. I also felt as if I had gotten as close to my experience of the last part of Wally’s life as I could in poetry and my experience at the moment of his death changed. It was as if the terms of my life had changed; I needed to talk about it, but the only way I seemed to be able to talk about it was in another form.

So, about six weeks after his death, I found myself beginning to write an essay. In fact, it was an essay written on commission for an anthology. It was an invitation I had I’d had for a while and I was interested in it, but things were just too difficult; I could not begin to do it then. But about six weeks after he died, I found myself thinking: you know, if I could write that essay, this is where I’d begin it. I then thought of a sentence, then I thought of another one and I thought: if you are thinking this way, why don’t you try it? I found that one sentence followed another, which was such a relief because this was a time when I couldn’t even read yet, I couldn’t concentrate. I was having that kind of mental experience we have in extreme states where the mind seems to jump tracks, you know, where you can’t focus clearly on any one thing. But writing became a way to focus my thinking, became a kind of life-line really. So one essay followed another. And when I had written three short pieces then I began to feel: Oh, I seem to be doing something continuous here and I decided I would keep going, which I did for a year.

And that became Heaven’s Coast?

That’s right. Then half way through the year I began to write poetry again, but it was because the prose work seemed to free me to do so.

So would you say those poems were, as Wordsworth put it, “recollected in tranquillity”?

In a sense, yes. It was as if the storm of feeling, the more unbounded, oceanic state had to find its expression in the prose. And, you know, I have written a lot of long narrative poems and I began to realise that perhaps I was writing them out of a frustrated impulse towards writing prose because most of my poems written since Heaven’s Coast have been shorter: there’s more compression. I hope there’s a kind of lyric intensity which may be a little different from some of the larger architectures of poems in My Alexandria.

I wonder what you think about the work of the late Raymond Carver, whose situation of being diagnosed as terminally ill and then going through the process of dying was a sort of correlative to yours, you being in the position of an intimate witness to that?

In the poems of his in the last book, A New Path to the Waterfall, you can see that kind of spare intensity which I think has to do with the falling away of the inessential. At times of such gravity you know this isn’t any time to fool around. That which is merely decorative, and perhaps less consequential, tends to step into the background and our priorities shift towards that which is most us, that which is most central to our identities. I think that that’s borne out in Carver’s poems. His widow Tess Gallagher wrote an extraordinary book of poems called Moon Crossing Bridge (1). They are quite different from the documents of grief which I have written, but I believe are also charged with that sense of grasping at what is most difficult to say. To my mind, it is the unsayable that is the fuel of poetry. What is poetry but an attempt to get at what is unsayable? And we are most pressed towards what cannot be said when we confront those kinds of experiences.

So do you feel your style has developed in response to the intensity of the subject matter?

I think that one of the temptations, when we confront difficult experiences, when we confront material that is most charged for us, is to move towards a very plain speech, as if it might somehow be inappropriate to talk in a more ornamented, heightened way. I found that sometimes was true for me, but other times it was more important to look for a range of stylistic possibilities which might approach different registers of feeling, different aspects of these core experiences. So that in Atlantis, for instance, there are poems that I think of as being arias really. They are rather more heightened, they are rather fluid and elevated songs about the experience of loss. A poem called ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’ is an example of that. There are poems which approach the core experiences of the book, the core concerns of the book, in a highly metaphoric way, such ‘A Green Crab Shell’ or ‘A Display of Mackerel’. These poems take some emblem in the world, particularly in the natural world, and use that as an occasion for meditation on issues that the poem doesn’t necessarily broach in a narrative fashion. The poem isn’t talking ostensibly about my life; it’s using that vehicle as a way of approaching the subject. And there are poems, like some of the parts of the title poem, which are indeed very plain spoken and very direct. It seemed to me that, if I had chosen any single one of those vocal registers, I would not have able to circle round the experience in such a way as to suggest its complexities. Actually, I hate the idea of finding your voice as a poet. It seems to me that we’re better off trying to lose our voice.

John Hartley Williams reviewing My Alexandria in Poetry Review said, by way of criticism, that you will happily compare anything with anything else.

I’ll certainly try to compare anything with anything else and see what happens! I suppose I’m interested in what you might call a kind of impurity in poetry. You know, I can imagine trying to describe a single scene, a single feeling, with a set of metaphoric terms selected for their consistency and their unity. But my life doesn’t feel like that very much of the time. It’s in juxtaposition, in the surprising movement from one frame of reference to another, in the layering of kinds of experience, kinds of vocalisations of experience, that I hope to get at meaning. I frankly don’t like poems very much that are neatly controlled and tied up with a lovely ribbon at the end so that all the elements have been marshalled into place. It seems to me that often the surprising turn, the unexpected connection, we get at the thing that feels more like the complexity of reality.

A particular metaphorical image from your work, “the children smell unopened like unlit candles” in ‘No’ from My Alexandria, has sparked off a lively debate in this country. How do you respond to some of the points that have been about the nature of metaphor in that debate?

Well, one the things that I look for in a poem or a body of work by single poet is a sense of the character of individual perception. What interests me mostly in poetry really is that stamp of individuality in which we are allowed to observe the way in which a sensibility makes meaning in experience. I think that people, by and large, actually think very differently and move along patterns of association, of inquiry, of meditation which maybe almost as individual as fingerprints are. The poets I love most, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, seem to me people who are unmistakably themselves. This is partly a function of sound, of rhythm and the kind of sonic texture of line, but it’s also about the quality of perception. It’s the way that Elizabeth Bishop thinks, what she chooses to notice and what she makes of what she notices that serves as a kind of watermark on her poems so that they are undeniably hers.

Well, I’m trying to render my own processes of association, of comparison and of metaphor making. I think I am, by nature, a metaphoric thinker as opposed to an analytic one. I reach for comparison in order to understand what I think, what I feel. Now, if those comparisons are odd or, shall we say, unconventional, then that actually gives me more room for investigation to understand, well, why did I think that children might remind me of a candle that hasn’t been lit yet? What are the connections there? And to me they are very interesting ones about potentiality, about the untouched, about the going to be consumed. Those associations may tell you more about how this perceiver functions than they do about external reality. But isn’t poetry in the dialogue between the external and the internal? Isn’t it in that set of shuttlings? Now, I hope to be accurate to the world and I hope also to be accurate to perception, to honour both because I think that it’s there that the life of poetry is. Also, when I think about poetic practice in America now, my way of moving through language and image is, I wouldn’t say conservative but, at least centrist. Many of my colleagues and contemporaries make much wilder sorts of leaps than I do! So it’s interesting to me that that single image should have sparked so much debate.

What can we look forward to from you?

I am close to the end of a new collection of poems which is called Sweet Machine. It is more playful, more exuberant than some readers might expect. It is a very urban book, it is concerned with how we move forward, about the ways in which we desire, about how the body as a sweet machine keeps us participating in the world even when we are not sure that we want to. Sweet Machine, the title, comes from a piece of graffiti I saw in New York: it was written across the belly of one of those Calvin Klein underwear models. I found myself responding to that term as a metaphor for the body itself. It’s persistence, what’s good about that persistence, also the way we are trapped by it. I think of Art too as a kind of sweet machine where we make a kind of replica of ourselves. Both desire and the need to make have been things which have sustained me, things which kept me alive and they have been central themes In this book. I think it’s a book about new beginnings, about pleasure, about immersion in the city which gives us a sense of both autonomy and powerlessness.

I’m still getting to know the poems myself. I think that they are all written now; then there’s polishing to do. It seems that now I need to let a group of poems sit and breathe for a while, let myself stand back from them so that I can see what still needs to be done. I find that reading them out loud is also extremely helpful. So I am beginning to read poems from this collection in progress and learning where the bad lines are and to tighten then up a bit. Sweet Machine will be out in the US in the Spring of 1998 and published in the Britain sometime after that.