Is Bernie Madoff 'Free at Last'?

In a recent New York magazine article, writer Steve Fishman sheds light on Bernie Madoff's life behind bars. The lengthy profile reveals a string of insider details, some far more telling than accounts of Madoff's prison rumble back in October.

For starters, the disgraced financier viewed by most as a thief and criminal for swindling an estimated $65 billion in history's worst Ponzi scheme, is regarded as somewhat of a celebrity at the federal correctional complex in Butner, N.C. He has an entourage of "groupies," according to the article, and though he shuns all autograph requests, he has managed to cultivate these relationships over time. Some even go as far as dubbing him "a hero" and turn to him for advice on anything from investing to entrepreneurship.

Then there's Madoff's talent for delegating duties on to others, hiring an inmate to do his laundry for $8 a month -- negotiating a discounted rate nonetheless. On the flip side, Madoff has energetically thrown himself into the prison-work world, even though he's exempted from chores because of his age. Fishman writes:

"He proposed that he serve as the clerk in charge of budget. He had qualifications—he'd been chairman of NASDAQ. 'Hell, no,' said the supervisor to Evans, laughing. 'I do my own budget. I know what he did on the outside.'"

Instead, Madoff was assigned to maintenance and cafeteria floor-sweeping duty.

Perhaps the most startling inclusion in the article is that Madoff reportedly feels little remorse for what he has done. Instead, Fishman suggests he might even be relieved that he is no longer living a lie. The article explains:

"'It was a nightmare for me,' he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. 'I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,' he said in a little-noticed interview with them."

As for his victims...

"'F--k my victims,' he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. 'I carried them for twenty years, and now I'm doing 150 years.'"

For an in-depth view on Madoff's life in prison, read Steve Fishman's full article in New York magazine.

--

Message Edited by ReneeDeFranco on 06-09-2010 10:08 AM

Regrouping After the MFA: How to Find Community Postprogram

After a brief but torrential thunderstorm in mid-June, eight writers of poetry and prose, myself included, huddled around a picnic table crowded with three-buck beer and leaves of printed-out poems, stories, and essays in the concrete garden of a Brooklyn bar. It had been almost a year since I'd taken a seat at a table with other writers to talk about the stuff, the meat of our writing—inspirations, obsessions, discoveries—and the project at hand every time each of us settles in to confront the blank page. All of us had spent an intense two years together at the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts school nestled in woody Bronxville, north of New York City. Many of us had migrated to the city after graduation, and while we saw one another often enough, touching base at parties and readings, our writing lives had become privatized, with only the most dramatic aspects—I haven't been excited by a word in three months! My thesis is moldering!—shared among us. So, about thirteen months after graduating, a group of friends and I, guided by our assiduous organizer, Hossannah Asuncion, decided to create a new program in order to reestablish the connection that the MFA experience had provided. We would get together once a month to check in with one another, warm ourselves up with a few brief free-writes, and discuss a predetermined topic on which we had all read a few essays before meeting. We could also bring works-in-progress to share, though workshop-style critiquing would not be on the agenda—our gatherings would celebrate our writing as art, and our work as artists.

Perhaps the shocking burst of rain was an apt metaphor for the two brief years we'd been ensconced in, and saturated by, a lively stream of words. The way whole days of digging in to work felt like a deluge after which the world often shone. The way words became new again in the voice of a classmate, and how the dross would be purged by the workshop process, revealing the tender bones and pulse of a piece. A creative writing program had offered to many of us an ideal experience—and then it was over. Of course, a workshop-heavy curriculum can have debilitating effects as well: Participants can tire of their work's being scrutinized in its infancy; differences in critical approaches can stifle discussion; and the compounded anxieties of the final semester can weigh on relationships, especially as solitary time to write becomes precious and staunchly defended. I'm sure the capacity for inducing this exhaustion informs our universities' having limited the MFA track to two or three years. After a while we're inundated and need to move out on our own. But writing programs don't tend to teach the skill set required to work fruitfully—and joyfully—beyond their gilt walls.

The MFA experience does not necessarily prepare us to be writers in the world. Our time as students is set apart as a sacrosanct period during which we perform the very important work of honing and polishing our craft, but little guidance is given as to how we might preserve that sacred lifestyle (as well as the more profane, yet necessary, moments of criticism and editing) once outside the bubble. On the other hand, no one could have told us then that our devotions would flag and that distractions—such as earning a living and making our way in the world—would threaten to prevent us from writing altogether.

This is not to say that constant connection to a writing community is necessary, or even entirely healthy. Once I'd successfully cast off those workshops and conferences, a momentary sense of liberation washed over me. When my thesis crossed over into the hands of my advisers, I was immediately walloped by a profound exhaustion, and there was freedom in that fatigue. I needed a break from the intensity of the MFA experience—from workshops, and even from writing. The project I had immersed myself in for two years (at times a desperate, sinking immersion) had worn me out, and I required some time to let the omnipresent criticism, however sparkling or seductively constructive, settle within me. It was like recovery after a marathon, when my legs were ripped and clunky and I needed to cross-train for a while, to teach myself how to move again. But the respite from writing and talking about writing soon devolved into a drab routine. Instead of slowly starting over, I had let myself stiffen, and the loss of my teammates—and our shared field—made the process of resuming the race profoundly difficult.

Excuses abounded. At first, no amount of time seemed long enough to sit and work, and when I'd attempt to write in short spurts, the words danced only on the surface of ideas and questions. Sometimes language simply felt inert. I often had the sense that I was playing with plastic blocks rather than textured, living things. Some pleasure had seeped out of the project of making art with words—a joy that I have discovered came from sharing both my poetry and the process of writing it. While I can't say this perception was common to all my peers, it seems that each of us has experienced an occasion—however extended—of craving community.

In Asuncion's experience, it has been a struggle to continue the writer's life after leaving an MFA program. In a society that often diminishes the value of the written word, students of fine writing can find their ventures trivialized as flighty or idealistic. "More often than not, I feel like the world is telling me that doing an MFA program was a bad decision," she says. "And more often than not, I'm like, ‘Yeah, time to start studying for the LSATs.'"

"I often feel stuck in my writing life," fellow salon member Rena Priest recently told me. "I have long patches of time where nothing I write is satisfying to me, and I have periods where nothing I read is resonating. When I am with other writers talking about writing and all the triumphs and struggles it involves, the ennui recedes." For Hila Ratzabi, another member of our group, connecting with other writers forces her to think about writing and to return it to the forefront of her mind where it belongs—but from which it can quietly slip as the static of the world interferes with our creative frequencies. "Thinking and talking about writing are not the same as writing, but having a community where it's safe to say, ‘I haven't written in months, and it sucks, but here's who I read when I can't write' is a blessing," Ratzabi says.

Without the meeting of friends and colleagues to help reframe myself in my project—and in the living portrait of us all doing this work together—writing began to feel like a secret game of limited consequence. I felt as if my contributions to anything larger than myself were nil. In fact, at our second salon, the question was posed, "To whom do you write?" For several months, I noticed, I had been writing primarily to words themselves, fiddling with language with nothing much at stake. My work on the page was reflective of my practice: scrawling on the train or for a few minutes at lunchtime, or making mental notes while running. I didn't feel I had an audience, and, curiously, my writing had even receded from conversation with my imaginary listeners, Dickinson and Stein among them. During my time at graduate school, the writing process itself had induced an exceptional sense of accomplishment, a purposefulness that comes from knowing that one is doing the work that one is supposed to be doing.

At times, the validation that we achieve through being and acting—in this case, writing—genuinely wavers, and we are compelled to look to one another not for appraisal but for support. Asuncion, who had rounded us up with the aid of a Google group she and others had created for Sarah Lawrence MFA alums, was inspired to start the salon by a similar series of gatherings she'd been attending that had been organized by Kundiman, the Asian American poets organization, whose members began running informal salons in January. She experienced the salon format as more of a generative field than an editing session for pieces in assorted stages of existence. Asuncion herself has written several pieces this year as a result of short salon exercises. For our group, exercises have ranged from creating a portrait based on a character we frequently noticed at our meeting spot—the mustachioed fellow leaning over his Belgian ale doesn't know how many weird narratives were spun about him—to drafting radical rewrites of work we'd each brought to the table. But most central to the salon, and for me its most vital aspect, is topical discussion.

I have always thrived in arenas that celebrate and engage ideas in all their intricacy and malleability, particularly ideas relating to perceptions of language. While not all classrooms are equally conducive to such vigorous exploration, the MFA roundtable at which I participated provided such a space and, ultimately, fed my writing. The salon reinvigorated that part of me that had been too easily neglected after leaving school, quelled by the seeming urgency of daily routines and pursuits unrelated to writing. In several of our conversations we've discussed how we can each create a space, physical and mental, where writing matters and can thrive after the intensity of the MFA experience. I've found that before establishing that room of one's own, separate from the mesh of the world, one needs to acknowledge that each of us is not alone in our endeavor; we are part of both a tradition and a living multitude of others.

As the very act of coming together on equal terms for a salon has reminded us that we are not isolated as writers, the material of our discourse has illuminated the fact that, despite having distinct styles and drives, we share a mutual human project. For discussion during our second meeting, Asuncion chose two essays on spirituality: Federico García Lorca's 1933 lecture "Theory and Play of the Duende" and Fanny Howe's "A Leaf on the Half-Shadow," published in the journal English Language Notes in 2006. These works stimulated a conversation that took off from group members' personal accounts of having sensed attunement to the spiritual while engaged in the process of writing—feeling the pull of flow, not knowing from where words were arriving; being moored in a mind state so lush and tangible, but beyond the realm of the known; approaching meditative clarity while working. My most gratifying writing hasn't been fed by my head, but by a universal, oceanic "something" exterior to ego. Without clear language to discuss phenomena such as this, experiences can feel ephemeral, or even inconsequential. But gathering with a group that understands and empathizes with the challenges posed by the shifting creative mind, and the elations that arise from meeting those challenges, I see that the importance of my work becomes more resonant.

In her essay "Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico García Lorca and Duende," Tracy K. Smith writes, "There are two worlds that exist together, and there is one that pushes against the other, that claims the other doesn't, or need not, exist." She refers to the capacity of duende, or the dark spirit (which some in our salon group perceived as death itself, the palpable movement of our own mortality within us), to both pull us toward and repel us from what some might call a higher state, a vaster consciousness, a discovery. In some ways, our lives outside of writing facilitate that centrifugal pushing away, and as I and many of my compatriots have found, a community that validates the opposite—a fearless movement toward the dark other—encourages the writing to approach those uncomfortable places. Talking about the act of writing has helped each of us to realize how much that wilder world does need to exist, and to negotiate its importance in our lives.

According to that Psych 101 standard, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, when certain basic human requirements are met, our minds are free to explore more philosophical realms. Granted, as graduate students none of us was living a plush life, but we were able to focus less on the minutiae of survival and ego-driven pursuits (notwithstanding the occasional lovesick breakdown or ravenous scavenge for leftovers after a school event) and more on larger pursuits. There was art to be served, and it was our one and only job to serve it. In some respect, many of us joined an MFA program believing that if we wanted our writing to evolve from the fruit of our labor into art, it had to enter the public realm. It had to take a place at the table and enter into discourse with all of the other works that have been and continue to be written. While submitting pieces for publication and seeking opportunities to read remain excellent means of propelling the work into the world, nothing beats offering the tiny body of a poem or story to the live hands of a reader, or feeling that your quietest, most shuttered of lives is in conversation with another. Our postprogram salon has offered us not only a lively arena for sharing our writing with others, but, more important, it's given us a renewed opportunity to share our writing selves with a community of kindred minds each encountering distinct but similar challenges, as emerging artists in the wider world.

--

Send us a glimpse of your post-MFA story: your toughest—or brightest—transitioning moment, the virtues and vices of your program in retrospect, or a way you found to keep your community solid. Include "Post-MFA Story" in the subject line of an e-mail to editor@pw.org.

Jean Hartig is the editorial assistant of Poets & Writers Magazine. Her chapbook, Ave, Materia, won the Poetry Society of America's New York City Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming in 2009.

Literary Journals Associated With MFA Programs

As an MFA student, helping to put out a literary magazine—whether you’re an editor, a reader, or a publicity volunteer—offers a valuable glimpse into the realm of professional publishing and another means of learning about your community of writers. If, as part of your graduate experience, you’re interested in contributing your time or writing to a school-sponsored journal, check out this listing of institutions whose MFA programs produce literary magazines.

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Black Warrior Review

University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Permafrost 


American University, Washington, D.C.
Folio

University of Arizona, Tucson
Sonora Review 


Arizona State University, Tempe
Hayden’s Ferry Review 


Ashland University, Ohio
River Teeth

University of Baltimore
Passager Journal

Boise State University, Idaho
cold-drill
The Idaho Review

Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Mid-American Review

Brooklyn College, CUNY
The Brooklyn Review

Butler University, Indianapolis
Booth

University of California, Irvine
Faultline

University of California, Riverside,
Palm Desert Graduate Center
The Coachella Review

California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Eleven Eleven

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia
Black Clock
Sprawl

California State University, Fresno
The Normal School

California State University, Long Beach
RipRap

California State University, San Bernardino
Pacific Review

University of Central Florida, Orlando
The Cypress Dome
The Florida Review

Chapman University, Orange, California
Elephant Tree

Chatham University, Pittsburgh
The Fourth River

City College of New York, CUNY
Fiction
Global City Review
Promethean

Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Colorado Review
The Freestone

Columbia College, Chicago
F Magazine
Hair Trigger

Columbia University, New York City
Columbia

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
EPOCH

Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond
Aurora
Jelly Bucket

Eastern Washington University, Spokane
Willow Springs

Emerson College, Boston
Ploughshares
Redivider

Fairfield University, Connecticut
Dogwood

Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, New Jersey
The Literary Review

University of Florida, Gainesville
Subtropics

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Coastlines

Florida International University, Miami
Gulf Stream Magazine

Florida State University, Tallahassee
The Kudzu Review
The Southeast Review

George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Phoebe

So to Speak

Georgia College & State University,
Milledgeville
Arts & Letters
Flannery O’Connor Review

Georgia State University, Atlanta
Five Points
New South

Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont,
and Port Townsend, Washington
Pitkin Review

Hamline University
Water-Stone Review

Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia
The Hollins Critic

University of Houston, Texas
Gulf Coast

Hunter College, CUNY
The Olivetree Review

University of Idaho, Moscow
Fugue

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ninth Letter

Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana Review

University of Iowa, Iowa City
The Iowa Review

Iowa State University, Ames
Flyway

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
and Washington, D.C.
The Hopkins Review

University of Kansas, Lawrence
Cottonwood

Lindenwood University, St. Charles, Missouri
Untamed Ink

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Exquisite Corpse

New Delta Review
The Southern Review

Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York
Inkwell

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
CRATE

jubilat
The Massachusetts Review

University of Massachusetts, Boston
Breakwater Review

University of Memphis
The Pinch

Mills College, Oakland
580 Split

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Dislocate

Minnesota State University, Mankato
Blue Earth Review

Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Red Weather

University of Mississippi, Oxford
The Yalobusha Review

University of Missouri, Columbia
Center
The Missouri Review

University of Missouri, Kansas City
New Letters

University of Missouri, Saint Louis
Natural Bridge

University of Montana, Missoula
CutBank

Murray State University, Kentucky
New Madrid

Naropa University, Jack Kerouac School
of Disembodied Poetics, Boulder, Colorado
Bombay Gin
not enough night

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (PhD)
Prairie Schooner

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Interim

University of New Hampshire, Durham
Barnstorm

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Blue Mesa Review

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Puerto del Sol

University of New Orleans
Bayou

The New School University, New York City
LIT

New York University, New York City
Washington Square Review

University of North Carolina, Greensboro
The Greensboro Review
storySouth

University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Ecotone

North Carolina State University, Raleigh
Free Verse

Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium (NEOMFA)
Luna Negra
Penguin Review
Rubbertop Review
Whiskey Island Magazine

Northern Michigan University, Marquette
Passages North

University of North Texas, Denton
American Literary Review
North Texas Review

University of Notre Dame, Indiana
The Bend
Notre Dame Review
Re:Visions

Ohio State University, Columbus
The Journal

University of Oregon, Eugene
Northwest Review

Oregon State University, Corvallis
Prism

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
OR

Pacific Lutheran University’s
Rainier Writing Workshop, Tacoma
A River & Sound Review

Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon
Silk Road

University of Pittsburgh
Collision

Hot Metal Bridge
No 


Portland State University, Oregon
Oregon Literary Review
Pathos Lit Mag
The Portland Review

Purdue University, West Lafayette, Louisiana
Sycamore Review

Queens College, CUNY
Ozone Park

Roosevelt University, Chicago
Oyez Review

Rosemont College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Parlor 


Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey
StoryQuarterly

Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga
Mary

San Diego State University
Fiction International
Poetry International

University of San Francisco
Switchback

San Francisco State University
Fourteen Hills
Transfer

San Jose State University, California
Reed Magazine

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York
Lumina

Seattle Pacific University

Image

University of South Carolina
Yemassee

Southern Connecticut State University,
New Haven
Connecticut Review
Noctua Review

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Crab Orchard Review

University of Southern Maine, Portland
Words and Images

Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
Amoskeag

University of South Florida, Tampa
Saw Palm

Spalding University, Louisville
The Louisville Review

Stony Brook Southampton, SUNY
The Southampton Review

Syracuse University, New York
Salt Hill

University of Texas, El Paso
Rio Grande Review

University of Texas, James A. Michener
Center for Writers, Austin
Bat City Review

University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg
gallery

Texas State University, San Marcos
Front Porch

University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Quarterly West
Western Humanities Review

Vanderbilt University, Nashville
The Vanderbilt Review

Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier
Hunger Mountain

University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Meridian

Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Blackbird

Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University, Blacksburg
The New River

Western Connecticut State University, Danbury
Black & White
Connecticut Review
Sentence

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Third Coast

University of Washington, Seattle
The Seattle Review

West Virginia University, Morgantown
The Loop

Whidbey Writers Workshop, Freeland, Washington
Soundings Review

Wichita State University, Kansas
Mikrokosmos

University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Madison Review

2010 Creative Writing MFA Rankings: The Top Fifty

If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).

Rank	School	Votes (of 508)	Poetry Rank	Fiction Rank	Nonfiction Rank	Total Funding Rank	Annual Funding Rank
1	University of Iowa in Iowa City	253	1	1	1	21	22
2	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	169	3	2	*	16	4
3	University of Virginia, Charlottesville	144	2	4	*	21	21
4	University of Massachusetts, Amherst	132	4	5	*	40	41
4	University of Texas, Austin	132	5	6	*	1	1
6	University of Wisconsin, Madison	129	6	11	*	21	22
7	Brown University in Providence	127	8	3	*	19	20
8	New York University in New York City	125	7	7	*	+	+
9	Cornell University in Ithaca, New York	110	9	7	*	10	2
10	University of Oregon, Eugene	104	15	12	*	27	29
11	Syracuse University in New York	97	20	10	*	5	7
12	Indiana University, Bloomington	93	13	14	*	6	8
13	University of California, Irvine	91	26	9	*	26	28
14	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis	85	17	14	8	29	27
15	Brooklyn College, CUNY	81	39	13	*	*	*
16	University of Montana, Missoula	78	17	17	17	47	46
17	Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore	77	11	16	*	30	30
18	Vanderbilt University in Nashville	76	13	18	23	25	26
19	University of North Carolina, Greensboro	75	10	19	*	33	31
20	Washington University, St. Louis	70	15	24	*	12	3
21	University of Florida, Gainesville	67	22	21	*	13	16
22	Columbia University in New York City	66	38	19	10	*	*
23	University of Notre Dame in Indiana	62	34	22	12	+	+
24	Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia	56	32	26	4	+	+
24	University of North Carolina, Wilmington	56	22	25	5	41	42
26	Arizona State University, Tempe	55	19	28	35	15	18
26	Hunter College, CUNY	55	45	22	6	*	*
26	University of Houston in Texas	55	11	34	18	34	34
29	Colorado State University, Fort Collins	53	20	34	*	42	43
29	The New School in New York City	53	47	27	3	*	*
31	Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York	52	27	33	8	*	*
31	University of Washington, Seattle	52	27	28	*	*	*
33	University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa	51	25	31	29	2	18
34	University of Arizona, Tucson	49	32	28	2	+	+
35	Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana	45	22	40	*	9	10
36	University of Arkansas, Fayetteville	41	31	45	*	17	24
37	George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia	40	39	34	12	+	+
38	Boston University in Massachusetts	39	39	38	*	+	+
39	University of Nevada, Las Vegas	38	48	31	*	35	35
40	Ohio State University, Columbus	35	27	+	35	7	9
41	University of Maryland, College Park	34	37	44	*	*	*
42	Florida State University, Tallahassee	33	39	+	*	38	38
42	Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge	33	*	46	*	3	5
42	Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey	33	*	37	12	*	*
42	University of New Hampshire, Durham	33	39	40	7	*	*
46	Pennsylvania State University, University Park	32	45	46	11	28	14
47	Southern Illinois University, Carbondale	31	27	48	*	14	17
47	Texas State University, San Marcos	31	*	40	*	+	+
49	University of Mississippi, Oxford	31	+	40	*	18	25
50	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	30	34	+	*	4	6
50	Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond	30	+	38	*	31	32
50	Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg	30	34	+	*	8	10

Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.

Keep an eye on...Kathryn Simmonds

This issue we are happy to present Kathryn Simmonds, a poet and short story writer whose debut collection of poetry Sunday at the Skin Launderette was published to great critical acclaim and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Her idiosyncratic poetry is accessible and lucid without compromising on complexity and beauty. We thoroughly recommend you get hold of the book and keep an eye on what she does next. The Literateur expects great things from this new voice…

You have recently received a great deal of critical recognition. How has this affected your career as a writer?

I think when you spend a long time working on a book, the idea of it having a life in the world is fairly unimaginable, so it was a nice surprise when the poems found an audience. The fact that people seemed to like the collection is obviously a confidence boost, but there is still the problem of the next white page and the page after that, so in that respect it’s business as usual.

Much has been made about how unusually optimistic your poetry is. Jackie Kay has mentioned the ‘joy’ in your poetry, Stephen Knight has written of ‘the ebullience and optimism’. Yet I felt when reading your poems that they perhaps overstate the case. Do you feel there is an over-riding sense of happiness in your work?

It’s interesting that some reviewers picked up the optimism in the book because many of the poems were written during a particularly bleak period, so perhaps my efforts to transform the dross of despair have worked. I think anyone who writes poetry enjoys a good wallow, I mean, if you were feeling insanely chipper all the time, why waste time writing about it? There’s a poem in the book called ‘Against Melancholy’ which is about the ongoing struggle to resist melancholia,and this became a theme; in the end I want to engage with the world, find the bits and pieces that are sustaining, and I’m on the side of Wallace Stevens who said (in his delightfully sexist way) “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

Many of the poems in Sunday at the Skin Launderette are formally structured. Do you set out to write, say, a poem in tercets on a given theme when you write or is structure something that you shape later?

I’ve found there’s something necessarily organic about the process of writing poetry when content and form develop together, so I try to listen to what the poem wants to be rather than forcing it into a particular shape. Sometimes this takes a great deal of patience because the process is as much about waiting and listening as it is about writing. The title poem is a case in point, it remained lines in a notebook for a long time and although I’d jiggle the lines around from time to time, I couldn’t work out how to write the poem. Then one day I realised something about the repetitive quality of the lines suggested a sestina and (after much gnashing of teeth) the poem came together.

You have published a number of short stories in magazines and have written a radio play for Radio 4. Do you consider yourself a poet first and foremost?

I’d hesitate to call myself a poet, that’s a title that has to be earned over many years, but in some loose fashion I’m a writer and I write whatever appeals. Writing poems alone might very well send me a bit bonkers, so I work best when there are various pieces of writing to turn to. I enjoy narrative and character, and I think there’s an interesting connection between short stories and poems, something about the limited space and the fact that stories, like poems, don’t always seek to explain themselves. I probably enjoy reading poetry over anything else and in that sense it’s my abiding passion.

Could you tell us of two poets you admire, one from the past and one from the present?

I love George Herbert. His only subject was his relationship with God, but he is never pious or sentimental, instead he presents all the sorrows and joys of his faith with a complete lack of self regard and in poems such as ‘The Pulley’ or ‘The Flower’ you can experience that struggle. He was also a superb versifier. Sometimes I think Herbert’s great subject is missing from contemporary writing, perhaps because poets don’t know how to approach it in an increasingly secular age, and I think that’s a pity because it is such a rich subject and one that seems uniquely suited to poetry.

There are so many excellent contemporary poets, it’s difficult to settle on one. But in contrast to Herbert I might pick Selima Hill, I admire her inventiveness and sense of fun.

What works can we expect from you in the near future?

That’s tricky, I wish I could tell you but I don’t know myself. I’ve been working on more ideas for stories so perhaps one or two may bear fruit.

Any burning ambitions?

I’d love to stand on stage in a West End theatre and belt out a tune from one of the big musicals, but unfortunately I can’t sing so I guess that won’t be happening. Other than that I’d like to try and write a decent stage play one day.

--

The Literateur, 28 April 2009