Readers Place

Author Q&A

This is a total departure from the style of your first two collections of verse, ‘A Glass Half Full’ and ‘Lone Wolf’. Why is that?

A man cannot live by villanelles, sestinas and sonnets alone. Like everybody else, I want to kick loose occasionally. To write purely to amuse readers – or to enrage them and to do it in short order. Nursery rhymes are perfect for such a purpose.

In what way?

Their forms (and often their tunes) are universally known. This means that the rewritten lyric leaps both to the eye and the mind without consideration of length, metre or context. A first line like ‘Old Osama Had a Farm…’, or ‘Baa Baa AIDS Sheep’ plunges the reader directly into a a spider’s web of contradictions, no matter on which side of a divide the reader stands- or even if they are neutral on a particular subject, as I am on fox hunting, for example. As a bonus, this inherent contradiction leads to an immediate smile or frown; humour, after all, is built on unexpected contradiction.

What else attracted you to the Nursery Rhyme form?

Firstly, there is no throat-clearing or mucking about with a nursery rhyme. Either you begin joining in the chorus because you are enjoying it, as I have seen people do in pubs, at dinner parties or on a long car journey, or you make a mental raspberry. More ‘serious’ forms of verse require thought and consideration to appreciate. It is perfectly possible not to like a sonnet on first reading and come to love it later. That’s not the case with a nursery rhyme.

And secondly?

It puts me in good company. Nursery rhymes and street ballads have a long history. Many of them attacked the evils of their day. They were coded complaints and attacks against the powers that be and the evils, niggles and foibles of society at the time.

And what are the ‘powers that be’ or the ‘evils’ attacked in ‘When Jack Sued Jill’?

Political correctness in all its many coats; the insidious embrace of bureaucracy and spying by modern government; the rise of victim and tabloid culture; the assumption that we have the right or duty to invade or castigate any country which we deem not to be ‘democratic’; the rise of political lying by ‘spin’; the absurd posturing forced upon institutions like the police and health services… the list is endless.

Isn’t that a pretty serious agenda for a book of light verse?

Light verse, as you call it, has often played a very significant role in mass political awareness. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then a gentleman?’ just about sums up in a dozen words the force and passion of the greatest political pamphleteer and revolutionary of all time.

Who was…?

Thomas Paine. One of my all time heroes. A man curiously forgotten and ignored by the country whose very founding owes so much to his genius and courage. Search for major statues and monuments for Tom Paine in the USA. It will be a very long search. Jefferson, yes. Lincoln, yes. Washington, all over the bloody place. But Tom Paine? Not today, thank you!

Did you write most of the nursery rhymes in ‘When Jack Sued Jill’ in a concerted burst or over a longer period of time?

The latter. They came about because of the many poetry reading tours I’ve done in Britain and the US. I usually read to several hundred people at a time in theatre-like environments. Each reading amounts to close to two hours on stage, broken by a half-hour interval. That’s a long time and requires me to build up tension to keep the audience entertained. But tension needs to be pin-pricked every now and again and a couple of nursery rhymes tossed in unexpectedly serves that purpose very well.

You have a reputation for being pretty serious about your verse, if about little else. But surely these nursery rhymes aren’t meant to be taken seriously?

No, they’re not. Not in and of themselves. They are doggerel, after all. But the intention behind them is deadly serious.

A Glass Half Full has sold extraordinarily well in the UK and US. Do you write with a mass audience in mind?

Aaah, here is the: ‘Have you stopped beating your wife’ question. I knew we should get to it. My answer is that you must ask my wife, not me!

Seriously, now. Not many novice poets have their work performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, get a puff from Tom Wolfe and sell as many copies with a first collection as a A Glass Half Full. So why you?

Not because I am a very good poet, yet, that’s for sure. I have only been at this craft for six years. Certainly I promote my work through poetry tours relentlessly. That would be a fair criticism, if criticism it is. Such tours require money and most poets don’t have money, novices or otherwise. Even so, I would like to think that the success of ‘Lone Wolf’ and ‘A Glass Half Full’ is in some measure due to my deliberate repudiation of free verse, or, at least, verse without form, structure or formal metre.

But what has that to do with popularity?

Everything and nothing. The purpose of poetry, as I understand it, is to move the reader or listener emotionally and intellectually. How can you move anyone’s emotions or intellect if they fail to comprehend what you are on about? I challenge anyone to read much poetry written today, with its torrent of critically acclaimed self-referencing and deliberately oblique style, and tell me concisely what any particular poem is about. My poetry strives to move my audience, but I do not permit it to do so by blinding them with opacity and clever-dick tomfoolery. Besides, the craft is missing in much modern poetry, and readers have always admired a veneer of craft.

Some would say to the detriment of poetry itself…

Yes, there’s truth in that. Craft can obscure as easily as literary pretension. But at least the culprit is in the open. And anyway, as there is precious little literary pretension or literary craft in ‘When Jack Sued Jill’, I stand innocent of either crime at present!

What about the CD that comes with every copy of When Jack Sued Jill?

That is very much down to the talent of George Taylor, my producer, who has done such a fantastic job with the children’s choir who sing the rhymes with me on the CD. George and Harvey Brough must take all the credit for that CD, which has been responsible for so much of the radio publicity – and for the fantastic sales – which the book is achieving.

Any last thought on When Jack Sued Jill?

Yes. If the CD is wonderful, the illustrations by Sebastian Krüger and Bill Sanderson are a crucial part of what I was trying to achieve. I hope they both win awards for their illustrations which many people (myself included) believe are worth the price of the book alone. I’m hugely grateful to both them.