Photo : Derek Adams
1.Biographical Details
2.Maura Dooley and Michael Laskey in Conversation
Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor with many years experience of promoting contemporary poetry. He founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. As chairman he continues to be involved in the development of the Festival. He also founded the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman in 1991 and since Roy's death in 2002 has been editing it with Joanna Cutts.
As a poet he has published three collections and two pamphlets - Cloves of Garlic (1988), which won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and In the Fruit Cage (1997).
His first two collections were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness (Peterloo, 1991) and The Tightrope Wedding (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. His most recent book is Permission to Breathe (Smith/Doorstop, 2004).
In the spring of 2005 he was awarded an Arts Council International Writing Fellowship at the Banff Centre in Canada.
In addition to ongoing issues of Smiths Knoll, his work as an editor includes:
The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Anthology 1989-1998
(Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 1999)
and five pamphlets:
Football on Waste Ground by Richard Kemp
(Smiths Knoll, 2006)
The Watermen by Roy Blackman
(Smiths Knoll, 2003)
A Small Sun by Mourid Barghouti
(Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 2003)
Irresistible to Women by Dean Parkin
(Garlic Press, 2003)
The Difference by Anthony Wilson
(Aldeburgh Poetry Trust, 1999).
Active as a workshop leader, he teaches an undergraduate creative writing module at the University of East Anglia and works regularly for the Arvon Foundation, the Open College of the Arts, Community Education, and in primary, middle and secondary schools.
Born in 1944, educated at Gresham's School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read English, he subsequently worked as a teacher in secondary and further education in Spain and England for ten years. Since 1978 he has lived in Suffolk with his wife who is a GP. They have three grown up sons.
Maura Dooley and Michael Laskey In Conversation
Maura Dooley was born in Cornwall and come to live in London via Bristol, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire and Wales.
She is a poet (Turbulence, Explaining Magnetism, Kissing a Bone, and most recently A New and Selected Sound Barrier)
and anthologist (Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems ). She worked
for five years as a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank and for six years creating and directing the
Literature Programme at London's South Bank Centre. She has two daughters.
Michael Laskey was born in 1944. Now a freelance writing tutor, he initially worked as a teacher in Spain and England,
before moving to Suffolk where he has lived for the last twenty-five years. He founded the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival
in 1989 and the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll in 1991. He has three sons and is married to a GP.
MD: Are you somebody who writes regularly? Do you put aside time or do you just have an idea,
then write a poem?
ML: I think I write better if I'm writing regularly, yes. I don't usually
write anything useful till I've sat there for three hours and fiddled
around. So actually what that means in effect is if I don't get up at six
in the morning I don't write anything, because I only write in the mornings
really - if I'm in, afternoons are for shopping and cooking, meetings,
letters, admin - I'm not very good in the afternoons - and evenings are for
family. So I have to get up early. It's difficult, isn't it, getting up
early. You have to have something to get up early for, you have to be
slightly excited. Otherwise you turn over and next thing you know it's
seven and then everyone's up and it's breakfast. I need to start before
that, because then, when they leave for work and school, my mind's already
going. But I have writing groups too, which are a great help to me. I have
the East Suffolk Poetry Workshop which meets twice a month these days. And
then I have a mixed group, which is prose and poetry, that I run in my
house, monthly, we agree a theme and write on it. They've both been going
for thirteen years now. So they're what keep me writing really. If I didn't
have them, I'd probably go for months at a time without getting round to
it. The trouble is, of course, that if you're writing for deadlines like
that, quite often you start too late, so you end up with something that
doesn't quite get down deep enough. But another thing I do is all the
Aldeburgh work - driving poets around for their residencies and for regular
sessions with teachers - so I probably go to more writing workshops than
anyone in the world. So that's good - lots of exposure to other people's
stimuli. Sometimes that sparks off things that you wouldn't think of doing
yourself normally. But really the times when I've written poems I've been
really pleased and excited by have been extended periods when I haven't
done anything else but write, like weeks at Arvon or in an isolated house
somewhere. I did 'Driving Home' like that.
Longer poems seem to need that space. Because of the way I write. A line at
a time. I'm not one of those people who whizzes through a rough draft. I
feel I have to get it more or less right.
MD: And then you don't change very much?
ML: Well, then I take it to the workshop and change it in the light of
that. But yes, not very much on the whole. If you don't know where you're going
which I never do - because otherwise there wouldn't be any point in it - and if it
goes wrong on the way, it just stops. You have to go back and find where you missed
the path and start again from there. It's funny how slow one is to see what's wrong
with poems though.
MD: Yes, or sometimes when somebody says 'in line 3, don't you think...',
you actually know really, but somehow you've been suppressing it, so you
feel grateful but cross too, because now you've got to do something about
it. That happens sometimes, to me anyway. It must be a kind of laziness I
think.
ML: No, we're all like that , all wilfully blind about more or less
everything, aren't we?
MD: When you say you don't know where you're going, does that always apply?
I mean I was thinking that with both 'Driving Home' and 'Home Movies', you
must have had a pretty clear idea about where those poems were going?
ML: I didn't actually know where 'Home Movies' was going. I just wanted to
do that backwards thing. I certainly didn't know the end at all when I
started.
MD: So when did that come in? Just during the course of writing it?
ML: Yes, as I went along, as I got the detail right en route. But 'Driving
Home', yes, that was different. It was a something I'd been wanting to
write for a long time, a poem about self-deception, about how we can
justify anything to ourselves, and I was waiting to discover a way of doing
it. So once the story came to me, though I did know the shape, I didn't
know any of the detail, and the interest in writing it was in finding the
different stages. And how to make the transitions too, because they're a
real pleasure too, aren't they? What about you? How do you do it?
MD: Well, it's changed, I think, because I have much less time. I've never
been someone who's cleared enough time, I've never been methodical about
it, so I was always, in the past, someone who relied upon having an idea
and scribbling something down. Not like you. I work quite quickly and I
draft. I can only think of two poems I've ever written that have come out
all of a piece. They've always been bits of this and bits of that that may
achieve a first draft and then go through lots and lots of drafts before
they become what they do. Or it may even be just a couple of lines or an
idea noted down and then much later on it might turn into something more
than that. And quite often I've got an idea in my head for a long time - or
a couple of lines, or a feeling maybe about something rather than an idea -
which is only half of what I need, and it takes time for the other part to
bump up against it, and then I'll write something. But it needs those two
ingredients, whatever they are, one to be the catalyst for the other. These
days, partly because of having young children, I'm not writing much. I
haven't found the early years particularly productive for me as a writer -
I've got too much invested, I'm too interested and too tired. I know that
for a lot of people it is a really creative time, they write about that,
but I don't much, yet. I think there are difficulties about that whole
subject area for the writer. As soon as that becomes part of your territory
there are dangers of being put in a box. I'm interested in how one might
write about it and yet not be put in the box - not in metaphor exactly, but
in the idea of where our experience ends up in the writing and how it's not
always linear for any of us. But generally I seem to have lost a lot of
confidence too as a poet.
ML: Why is that? How?
MD: Well I suppose because you have your first book and there's a
tremendous excitement about it, because actually it represents your life's
work, and then people say 'come on, where's the second book?', and you
think hang on, a lot of those poems took me twenty-five years. But you do
get to your second book and I sort of feel I managed that, but also it came
out a couple of months before my youngest daughter was born, so for me it
was swallowed into another part of my life. Certainly in my experience
having a baby is an enormous crisis of confidence about who you are and
what you are as a person, to the extent that I could barely get out of the
door for weeks after I had my first daughter. I didn't have post-natal
depression, I was just terrified. It wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it, I
was - but I was still terrified and I think I've never quite lost that. I
don't think what I'm describing is in any sense unusual - I'd say a lot of
women experience it, which is why giving up work or going back to it can be
such a hugely difficult undertaking, because you have fundamentally
changed, I suppose, though you're exactly the same person. I know for some
people it can be like the release of a valve, but for me it wasn't like
that. It's made me more anxious about the poetry somehow, though I'm
beginning to come out of that now a little.
ML: What about giving readings? Do you enjoy that?
MD: Yes, I do, though I find myself more worried about them in advance than
I used to be. But once I start I'm fine. And I particularly like the way
you get to go somewhere you'd never normally be for any other reason
probably and there are maybe twenty people or two hundred - it doesn't much
matter - who've turned out perhaps on some filthy evening because they're
curious about hearing some more of who you are - they've maybe read
something or they've been told it might be interesting or whatever - and
you get to speak to them afterwards. I like all that. I find it all very
interesting and part of what the whole thing is about. So, terribly important.
Do you enjoy them?
ML: Yes, I do. Actually I quite like those ones when ten people come and
you can talk more, when it's less of a performance. Certainly I like to see
the audience and get reactions. I mean, who do you write a poem for? You
write them for yourself obviously, but it's sometimes an encouragement to
deliver a few to strangers and see that they're doing the kind of things
you hoped they might.
MD: Yes, maybe that kind of contact is another reason why I write, because
during the times that I've been so busy - just with family and work and so
on - the poems that have come through are nearly always poems written for
someone else, either because someone's specifically asked me to write one
for some occasion or some book, or because I've wanted to write somebody a
poem as a gift or whatever, or because someone has said something that has
sparked one off. So almost always it's been about that kind of contact,
which is part of why I enjoy readings as well I think. It's a continuation
of that in some kind of way.
ML: And other people's readings?
MD: I've probably been to more of those than most! But if I was completely
free in the evenings, I'd probably go to almost as many as I ever did
professionally. I enjoy it very much. And even if someone reads 'not
particularly well', you never come away without having learnt something,
either an insight they've given you by something they've said about a poem
or the way they write or whatever it is, or simply by the cadence of a
line, the way in which they read a line. So I like that. I like the
culture, odd though it may be. It's my culture now really, I've done it for
so long. I go to fewer readings, but still if somebody has a new book out
or if there's someone I haven't heard read before whose work I like, I'll
really try hard to get to it.
ML: And what about working in literature and the effect that has on one's
own writing?
MD: I don't know. I think it's both helpful and in some ways difficult. You
have to get over the fact that you're surrounded by people working at it,
many extremely talented wonderful writers. It can be too much sometimes,
like it is for a lot of people who've written as teenagers but give up when
they go to university, particularly if they're reading English, because
they feel overwhelmed by it all. But actually with me, when I was working
at Arvon and then at the South Bank, it was quite the reverse. It was a
tremendously stimulating time.
MD: I've always written. I stopped at university, but later while I was at Lumb Bank, the Lancaster Literature Festival was in a fantastically lively phase and Ursula Fanthorpe, who was then writer-in-residence at St Martin's, ran a whole day workshop as part of the Festival and I went to it. And you know how sometimes at a workshop
like that something can suddenly click - by the end of the day I found I'd
written about seven poems and afterwards I was on a run for the next couple
of years. I'll always be so grateful to her for that.
ML: So she was key really?
MD: Yes, she was, absolutely. And lots of other people as well have been
hugely encouraging over the years. Early on David Constantine particularly,
and then Gillian Clarke. Are there people who've been important for you,
poets who've made you sit up and think?
ML: There have been lots, yes. Friends first, people I met on Arvon
courses as a student, people I'd never quite expected to find who shared my
passion for poems, like Carole Satyamurti, Dorothy Nimmo, Frances Wilson
and Roy, of course, Roy Blackman, who I edit Smiths Knoll with. We met on
our first course at Lumb Bank with you - Alan Brownjohn and Fleur Adcock
were the tutors. I've always loved Alan Brownjohn's poems - so varied and
surprising, funny too, and exploratory. And Edwin Morgan, he's wonderful
too, always doing new things, restless. Norman MacCaig is someone I'm
always rereading - I'm sorry I never got him to read at Aldeburgh at the
festival, he turned me down both times I asked him, said it was too far and
he was too old. I like those older women poets too, the ones who've
outgrown guff and can say just what they mean, who have a kind of relish
for human weakness, like Connie Bensley, Elma Mitchell, Elizabeth
Bartlett. But I think the ones who've really excited me since I began doing
the festival have been the Americans - especially Billy Collins, Stephen
Dobyns, Sharon Olds and C K Williams - those bold, discriminating
narratives, I love them.
MD: Yes, with C K Williams particularly there's a sort of unflinching -
well, flinch-provoking actually - honesty in every line he writes, about
any sort of feeling, any kind of emotion. I've just read 'Disgrace', the
Coetzee book that won the Booker last year and it reminded me of no-one
more than C K Williams, because he does the same thing, he goes so directly
at his character's behaviour, his way of thinking and feeling, every action
is interrogated with that kind of intelligence and extraordinary honesty. I
remember the first time that I came across 'Flesh and Blood', the shock of
it, marvellous.
ML: What about dead poets?
MD: Thomas Wyatt, Henry Vaughan, Donne and Marvell, and then Anon.
ML: Ah yes, good old Anon.
MD: Yes, I've been editing this anthology of love poetry for Bloodaxe, sort
of forever, and that was a great pleasure to do, but it did bring home to
me the riches of Anon (who's a woman, of course!). Then I love Yeats,
Blake, John Clare. I don't know, I'll have to think who. It's awful - then
you realise all those you've forgotten - Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens.
ML: He doesn't feel very dead, Wallace Stevens.
MD: Yes, that's what I mean, the twentieth-century doesn't feel dead,
although Yeats and Hardy do, don't they? It's also partly to do with those
you read at school who you knew were already dead, they felt dead, while
there were others who may well have been dead but because you discovered
them for yourself when you were older, they were clearly more alive to you.
What about you?
ML: I'm more for Wordsworth, and Hardy, and Edward Thomas. They're my
touchstones. And Pound, I have a great affection for Pound, though it
started off as an affectation, because my English teacher favoured Eliot,
it must have been. I bought that grey Faber paperback, it's quite nasty
heavy print, but there are all those beautiful Chinese poems in it- 'The
River Merchant's Wife'..
MD: Yes, those are wonderful. I've got that poem in the anthology.
ML: So what about editing?
MD: Well, I've edited a book of essays called 'How Novelists Work' that
Seren should be bringing out soon, and there's the new anthology for
Bloodaxe and the earlier one, 'Making for Planet Alice'. That was
interesting to do. I don't particularly like partisan anthologies, so it
seemed odd to end up editing one, but there was an extraordinary burst of
publishing from a lot of women during those seven or eight years in the
nineties, and it seemed a good way of presenting some of it that was
slipping through the net a little or hadn't had the attention it deserved.
When I did it, I was looking forward to a time when we wouldn't need
anthologies like that one, though I have to say that increasingly I feel
that time's not going to arrive. Women's work's still largely reviewed in
the same way - either not at all or rounded up with a group of other
'girls' - so it's not going to be given the attention it deserves within
the canon, it's not going to be taught in the same way, but only in a more
partisan way as a part of Women's Studies Courses or whatever. It's one of
the awful things about getting older. You see all the same things happening
that you thought were happening just because that was the way older people
behaved and when you were in their position things would change..! Anyway
it's not a bad introductory anthology for people who don't read a lot of
contemporary poetry. It introduces you to a few people you might then want
to follow up. But what about you? How do you balance all those things -
editing, programming, running writing groups, working in schools and doing
your own writing? Isn't there a moment when you feel 'Too much poetry'
ML: No, not really. I think poems generate their own energy. At the
festival for instance, the more I hear, the better I listen. Or on an Arvon
course, say. You're working with all kinds of different people who are
writing and you're catching the drift of what they're saying and getting a
real sense of who they are. After five days of it, you come away exhausted,
but elated, because it's so interesting. There's nothing like
poetry for that, is there? If someone reads you a poem they've written that
matters to them, it cuts right through all the usual guff of social interactions,
and it's as if you've known them for years. Of course my life's never balanced.
Is anyone's? I'm always behind myself and doing too much of something and not
enough of something else, but I'm lucky because at least it's all to do with poetry.
There are things that weigh heavily, that I don't fancy and am forever putting off - like reports
and accounts and funding applications which involve all that kind of boasting you have to
do, that presentation of yourself as something you're not quite. And the phone too, I
have a great inertia about making those necessary phonecalls. But if I'm writing, it's all
right. It's like having sixthform work if you're a teacher in a secondary school - it makes
the rest bearable, because you're being fed by it and refreshed, talking about
Shakespeare or Hardy. So long as you're writing poems, you're healthy, you're in touch with that
bit of yourself, so you have energy for the other things.
MD: Yes, that's right. And it makes you feel alive, doesn't it?
ML: Yes, even just putting things down in my notebook from time to time,
noticing things, having a thought, even hearing a word can be enough. I
mean I learnt the other day that young hedgehogs are called 'urchins'. I
didn't know that. It was on the radio, on a ghastly nature quiz programme I
was really ashamed to be listening to that I'd turned on, on my way to the
station to pick up a son. But it really cheered me up. It's language that's
the business, isn't it? That's where the real vitality comes from when
you're writing, the excitement of the words interacting, cannoning off one
another, combining wonderfully. I remember reading that Paul Muldoon
advised his students not to bother so much about expressing themselves, but
to concentrate more on exploring language, finding out what the language
might want to say. Certainly when I'm writing is when I feel most alive,
when the language comes alive.
MD: Yes, that's lovely, when the words seem to be wriggling around under
your pen. They escape, they have a life of their own. Then suddenly, after
all the drafting, it's as if the poem decides it is finished.it gives you
up.. And that's a great feeling too, isn't it, that just finished feeling?