Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Chris Beckett is all set to have his first collection, The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish (Smith/Doorstop), published later this year. An early contributor to Brittle Star, Chris is widely published in magazines and winner of a number of competitions including Tabla in 1998 and Poetry London in 2001. I caught up with him one windy evening on London’s South Bank to find out how he had
arrived at this auspicious point in his poetry-writing career.

LH: When did you first start writing poetry and why?

CB: I first started at boarding school when I was about 14 or 15 and did nothing after that for years. Then my dad died in 1990. He used to write poetry, there was a box of all these papers, he had poems in there and I was reading them and I thought yeah, I’m going to write poems again and then I thought am I going to write them to get them published, that’s the big thing isn’t it, so I sent off a few and
rejection, rejection, rejection… I think it was about 1995 before I got anything that wasn’t just dreadful, completely dreadful! And why? I don’t think there’s any reason why, I just like writing, I’ve always liked writing poetry and I’ve always liked reading poetry.

LH: How do you write? Do you have a set routine? Quickly? Slowly?

CB: I tend to get an idea and sometimes write it straight away
but more often it just remains an idea for a while, a month, two
months, and gestates. If I get down too early to writing it then I tend to end up with something I’m nothappy with and it doesn’t go anywhere and just gets frustrating, so I try to wait and then when
I’m putting it down, it changes completely anyway. The good thing
is, if I’ve had enough time to think about it, it comes out easily.

LH: Do you then revise quite a lot?

CB: Yes I do. I work on the word processor, I’m not a pen and paper person at all, that makes it easy, you get rid of what you don’t like and start again. I quite often print out an old draft and then write the thing again on the computer with the draft beside me rather than actually changing what’s on the computer itself, because I find what’s written down has its own sort of… I think, oh my God, if I delete that it’s gone, so I print it out and work from that.

LH: How would you characterise your poetry? Is it funny, short,
descriptive, narrative? What are you trying to do in it, do you think?

CB: I find it very difficult to write abstract or non-concrete poetry. I
tend to start with some sort of incident and then in a way it’s a
fantasy or an extrapolation on that incident. I try to be serious and light at the same time because I don’t like dreary, serious poetry. I hate it.

LH: Ok that leads neatly on to what writers you do like and why?

CB: Oh, I love a lot of Americans, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler,
Galway Kinnell. I like all the women, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon
Olds, there’s too many to mention… Marianne Moore, I just
bought the complete Marianne Moore, they’re absolutely amazing!
Billy Collins as well, I do like Billy Collins. As for contemporary poets over here, we’re very spoilt because there’s so many fantastic people out there, there really are. If I were to pick one or two, I’d say Don Paterson, Matthew Sweeney, Paul Durcan but there are so many more...

LH: It's quite daunting isn’t it? Do you think they influence you and, if so, how?

CB: Yes, definitely. It’s what I was saying, you get that idea or that
incident you want to write and I find it often very difficult to start,
where in the incident do I start? Reading say a poem by Mimi
[Khalvati] or by Marianne Moore, a poem that I know already and I like, will spark something that helps me to get into it, just in terms of the language, the metre or something, so I do read a lot while I’m writing.

LH: The advice to new writers is always to get a number of poems
published in magazines before approaching publishers with a first
collection. Had you already had much published before Smith/Doorstop?

CB: I used to enter loads of competitions because I thought with competitions at least you’ve got a date, so you’ve got something
to aim at in terms of submission, and you’ve got a date when you
know whether you’ve hit the heights or plumbed the depths, so I’ve won quite a lot or been placed or whatever you call it and magazines… I suppose I’ve had about 40 poems published either in
competition anthologies or in magazines.

LH: Whoa, gosh, that makes me feel very small…

CB: When I say published I mean from leaflets up to say Poetry
London. It’s funny, you mostly remember the ones you haven’t
been in, they’re the really niggling ones, like Rialto, they send me back saying every time, we really like this, we really like that, but sorry....

LH: Tell me about Smith/Doorstop and your ‘lucky break’.

CB: Smith/Doorstop run an annual pamphlet competition under the
name of the Poetry Business. What seems to happen is that the editors choose the shortlist and then give it to the judge and the judge chooses five winners for the pamphlet competition and then each of those five is asked to submit a manuscript, if they want to, of a full collection and then if the judge likes one of those manuscripts,
Smith/Doorstop publishes it. I entered two years in a row. Nothing
happened the first year; the second year, when I hadn’t heard anything, I emailed them and they replied saying I didn’t win. Then a couple of days later they emailed saying that although I wasn’t amongst the top five, I was in the top fifteen and they really liked my stuff and would I like them to publish a pamphlet or a book for me. Yes! So it was through not winning a competition...!

LH: What has it been like producing the book?

CB: Hell, absolute hell. I can tell you that writing the poems in the first place is one thing, actually making them into a book… When you see it, Louisa, you’ll think oh, it’s nice or it’s not nice or whatever you think… I’m looking with new respect at what I thought were quite ordinary poetry collections because the amount of work that goes into actually turning that 50 or 60 poems into a book, I had no idea.

About March last year they said they wanted to do a book, probably in the autumn. I said well can I have a sort of editing session and they said oh we’ll let you know, we’ll let you know and it was all quite vague. Anyway nothing happened until I saw the editor at the Aldeburgh Festival and he said yes we really want to do your book Chris, we think it’s very good, but just make sure that you think it’s good, that you think it’s the best you could do. So basically every poem was up for grabs again. All these poems that you think have been published, you like them, you think they’re finished, everything is up for grabs again. You spend whole weekends worrying about one bloody word in one poem and then
of course not only the actual poems themselves, but the order in which they come… I mean that’s like an endless does this one come before this one, does this one go well with this one, what about this one, what about that one, where does this go, shall I make this into a little series and call it something with a title page, you know, epigraphs, what’ll I do about epigraphs, what’ll I do about the contents page, I mean it’s just a really unbelievably difficult job. I basically thought I put this collection together, I spent quite a lot of time on it and then I thought that was it [laughs]. But no, no…

Now, though, I’m really happy that even if the book bombs completely, if nobody likes it, at least I know that I’ve done everything I can and a couple of people were incredibly helpful. The whole thing of where you put each poem, how you group them, you need to have a good editing eye and it’s very difficult to see it yourself, at least for the first time. The first collection really is an
eye-opener, it was for me anyway.

LH: Tell me about the cover… Are you happy with it? I know that’s the thing a lot of authors complain about.

CB: I am actually. My partner’s an artist so he painted a picture for me and I sent the slide off to Smith/Doorstop and the designer put together the cover in the house style and I think it’s going to be wonderful. I’m really happy. And then there’s the blurb. You’ve been around in poetry a while and you get these people you really almost hero-worship, like Moniza [Alvi] for example or Pascale [Petit], and you say would you mind writing something for my book; the things they write are just amazing, you wouldn’t believe it, you think, god is that me? So no, the cover can be a lovely process.

LH: When is the book out and how can people get hold of a copy?

CB: It will be out in September, I think.

LH: And then presumably people can order it from Smith/Doorstop?
 
CB: From Smith/Doorstop, yes…and it’s already on amazon.co.uk
even though it’s not been printed yet!

LH: What are you working on at the moment?

CB: Basically the editing process finished at the beginning of March.
I wrote virtually nothing for the last year so I’m only starting to work on new stuff again.

LH: What do you think has most helped you develop your poetic skills so far or what one piece of advice would you give aspiring poets?

CB: One piece of advice? I think read lots of poetry, go to lots of
readings, classes, workshops; most of all for me is reading, you get so many different influences and things to write about. The more you
do that, the more it sort of opens up, doesn’t it?

LH: Do you think you’ve definitely improved since you first started
writing?

CB: Oh definitely, definitely. I look back at some of the stuff I wrote
earlier, in the early 90s and think god, they’re even worse than my
Dad’s (sorry Dad)! It was well-intentioned poetry without any
awareness of its own mechanics and that’s the thing, you’ve got to
have the mechanics, without it being very noticeable, but you’ve
got to have it there, you can’t just splurge and expect that to be
enough…


The Dog Who Thinks He’s A Fish by Chris Beckett (ISBN 1-902382-59-5) published in September 2004 by Smith/Doorstop, priced £6.95.