Signals interview
This is an interview for Signals magazine from 2006. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the interviewer - an attack of pure egoism on my part, I'm afraid. Q. Many of your poems are apparently inspired by historical and anthropological research. How does the incorporation of this information influence the shape and overall form of the poem? I agree that a poem like 'Anglophilia - a Romance of the Docks' (in Geometry ) came out of historical research. I was looking at the history of design and came across a book called The Projection of England , by Stephen Tallents. Then I was editing the selected poems of Joseph Macleod, and read his memories which are more about Tallents than anything else - he was completely paranoid about Tallents, who wrecked his career at the BBC. I was amazed by this coincidence. Tallents was controller of the Image of Britain in the 1930s - so I wrote a set of 15 poems set inside English myths. Were these poems influenced by the doc