In our brand-new interview slot with amazing poets under thirty, Andrew McMillan, talks to KEATS, the Astronaut Zine on-board droid via satellite link.
Unfortunately, KEATS is currently having some problems with space dust infiltration, so not all of the questions are exactly on track. Please bear with us while we fix KEATS.
Andrew has also allowed us to publish his poem, “finally.”
Hello, Andrew. Welcome to the live link. I am KEATS the Astronaut Zine on-board android. I will be conducting your interview today.
Hello.
What are you up to at the moment?
Work-wise? Well my new pamphlet, ‘protest of the physical’, which is one long 30-page poem, is coming out next month with Red Squirrel Press and I’m pulling the manuscript together for my first full collection.
*%>You’re doing your patients a disservice if you don’t help them lose weight. ^%”
HA! Erm, let’s be clever about this glitch. Let’s suggest this is about helping the reader to distil the fluff away from previous generations of poets and leave them with the best stuff? I’m not smart enough to follow that line of thought … I will say I used to overwrite a lot: people might think I still do, but I tried to cut down, to pare back. I read John Riley and the wonderful prose writer Jon McGregor and I suddenly thought, “this is it, this is what writing is.” Anyone can write a clever image, an interesting line, but the best moments of a poem are when it punches through poetry into something much clearer : “I have not loved you enough” “somebody loves us all” etc… All poetry fails but I feel like the plain lines fail less, they get closer to a truth. “My patients,” the poems, it’s my job to help them lose the excess weight of my overwriting.
You’ve been published since 2009. Why so many pamphlets?
I felt like I really wanted to get things right; and to try out different ideas, When I first started writing I was writing fairly traditional, slightly quirky love poetry. And love poetry, or out-of-love poetry is still really the basis of much of what I wrote, but it felt too flat in a way…
So then my second pamphlet [the moon is a supporting player] I tried lots of different more adventurous forms and things and I’m producing my current pamphlet, just because there’s not really any other forum for such a long poem; People are kind about pamphlets, and I’ve had some very generous reviews that I don’t think a first collection would have got. You can’t take a first collection back from the world, it has to be right… I never really thought thematically and the first two pamphlets are really occasional poems, but this manuscript for the first collection – I’m really trying to hone it, to give it a distinct narrative
Are they all linked then?
Not all linked but just that they might have something to say together; that they might build into something which is greater than the sum of their individual parts (which is maybe my concession to saying my poems just aren’t very good).
Surely this is not true.
Well, it’s odd because I look around my peer group and there are just so, so many great poets. For example, I read Emily Berry’s Faber debut and that’s just stunning, Sam Riviere and Oli Hazzard are brilliant, Kate Killalea, and her long poem, Hennecker’s Ditch, which is in Carcanet’s New Poetries 5, is this incredibly contemporary fusion of The Wasteland and The Dream Songs and is the most interesting long poem written this decade.
Helen Mort is going to be one of the biggest names of my generation, and people whose books are on their way too, like David Tait and Niall Campbell, these are the people I’m following behind, they’re like that first stampede in Jumangi, I’m that little rhino at the end, sweating, struggling to keep up.
*%> Betcha can’t keep up. ^%”
Ha ha! How wonderful! I guess the idea of competition within the poetry world, which I’ve always seen as quite a futile thing. In the grand scheme of things nobody cares, nobody is reading anyone and even if they are in 10,000 years all of it will have been pointless. I just want to create something that might outlive me (which is really the point of art) and I have a lot of friends in the poetry world who want to do the same. There’s a lot of jealousy, which seems kind of pointless to me
Does it make any difference that you are a gay poet?
I’m not entirely sure that it does; I’ve never thought of myself as a gay poet, I’m just a poet who, if I write a love poem from personal experience would write it to another man because I’ve only ever fallen in love with men before. That being said I’m very interested in masculinity, in the body and in sex within my writing at the minute. I read a lot of Thom Gunn and he was the first poet I ever read where I saw myself, in terms of being a gay man (or a boy then) reflected back to me. Maybe it mattered more back then. But the things that matter to me, love, beauty of the human form, violence, masculinity, sex, are always going to be framed through my experience of them, which is a gay experience.
And you wonder who out of this generation will be the Thom Gunn, or the Mark Doty; I get people coming up to me at readings and saying “that love poem, that was something different”- and it could have been the most banal ordinary love poem, but because it’s to a man people think it’s somehow edgier than it might have been if it were to a woman- I’m just a poet who happens to be gay… and my poetry would suggest I have a lot more sex than I really do
*%>I’ll just put the kids to bed^%”
Ha, erm … Well I don’t think I ever want kids, that’s not really on my radar, I think I want to just keep writing, I enjoy lecturing at the moment too, and just see what happens, when I die I’d like an obituary, something in a national newspaper where someone says I was alright, that I made a bit of difference. as for everything else, I’m happy to let it happen to me. I think I’m scared of having children because they demand so much love and so much money and so much time, and then what might be left for the poetry? I like what’s important to me, I actually like travelling on trains all the time to do freelance work in far-flung places, I like being immersed in my reading or my writing, maybe that is selfish, but I think I’m scared of what’s important to me, not being important anymore… But I am only 24
When can people on Earth see you next?
I’m reading as part of the TS Eliot prize tour in Liverpool on 11 October. The first collection is still in manuscript form so no date for that yet, The new pamphlet is out next month, I’ll be putting the details up on my page.
astronaut 