An Interview with Michael Laskey
Conducted by Janna Layton, AKA `bananaprincess. This interview appeared in Mimesis issue 1.




What is Mimesis?

Mimesis is a recently established international poetry journal that is published quarterly. Small and big names rub shoulders in the magazine's glossy 6x9 production, and each issue features an interview with an established poet alongside around 50 pages of poetry and assorted illustrations.

Mimesis website is here

Find out yet more from our dA journal: [link]






For our debut issue of mimesis, I got the chance to interview English poet and editor Michael Laskey. His poetry magazine Smiths Knoll, which he co-founded with Roy Blackman, has been running since 1991. A strong promoter of poetry, Mr. Laskey also founded the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and teaches poetry in universities. He has published three books of poetry: Thinking of Happiness, The Tightrope Wedding, and Permission to Breathe.


Janna Layton: How did you get started in poetry?

Michael Laskey: I wrote my first poem when I was 14 or 15, really out of boredom I think, one afternoon in the long summer holidays. I suspect most adolescents try writing – it’s a way of coping with acne and parents and hormones, isn’t it? – but generally they give it up as they leave home and get jobs and so on. But some don’t, they get addicted to it. I was one of those. It must have been what I was reading at school that had excited me: Chaucer and Shakespeare, the strangeness and aliveness of the language; then the heady richness of Keats and Yeats and Owen; and the naturalness of Wordsworth, Hardy, Frost and Edward Thomas – we studied an anthology called Seven Modern Poets that started with Hardy I think. So it must have been my two English teachers, I suppose, who fired my interest, though I always felt it was my discovery…"of the good leader, they say 'we did this ourselves'"! I went to a school in north Norfolk, Gresham’s, where a few decades earlier Auden and Spender, Benjamin Britten too, had been pupils, so that was lucky, it didn’t feel mad or impossible to hope to be a poet.


JL: You've helped to promote and support poetry through the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, poetry magazine Smiths Knoll, and workshops. Is it difficult to find time for your own writing with all the work you do?

ML: Yes, always, any excuse not to! Absurd perversity not to put it first when it’s what I most love doing. But of course it’s crucial to get out too and meet people, and see what other poets are up to.


JL: Do you feel that the amount of editing and workshop leading you have done has affected how you write?

ML: I was struck by a remark of Don Paterson’s, some advice of his to poets, that I read the other day: he said we should remember that the reader isn’t interested in us or our poem, he’s interested in himself. Which I take to mean that our poems need to engage the reader, and be rewarding enough to keep him from all those other important things he has to do. Maybe the editing I do has made me marginally more aware of that potential reader. And less prone to overwriting too - my poems these days try to be simpler, less clotted than they used to be.


JL: What is your method of writing poetry? Do you have a daily schedule for writing?

ML: I write very slowly, a word, a phrase at a time, I like to get it more or less right as I go along. I don’t do fast very approximate drafts and then dozens of rewrites. If I’ve managed to free myself up time to write, I get up early, get started before breakfast, in the dark’s best, and then keep going till lunchtime.



JL: How long do you tend to work on a poem before you feel it's ready for publication?

ML: Hours, days, years. It all depends. Gael Turnbull, the Scottish poet, said that there are four types of poems – poems that emerge from a plan, from a mistake, from the compost of earlier poems, and poems which fall from the ceiling. The last kind’s the rarest and usually the ones that feel most precious. You’re lucky to get any of those, and unlikely to at all as you get older if you don’t sit at your desk working at the other kinds.


JL: Smiths Knoll has been around since 1991. Any words of wisdom for those hoping to start a literature magazine?

ML: Energy and optimism – the daily thud of submissions on the doormat can be demoralising otherwise. And you do need to be really interested in other people’s writing if you’re going to keep going. And support too, one friend at least to do it with you, to discuss the submissions with and make the funding applications and post out the issues etc. On those days when you’re feeling low and your judgement's gone missing, having a co-editor’s a real help and generally it just makes it much more fun.


JL: Are there trends you've seen in the poems submitted to Smiths Knoll and in workshops recently? What is the state of poetry today?

ML: There’s always a lot of bad poetry of course, written by people who don’t read contemporary poetry at all, but I think there’s more good stuff about than ever probably. And more variety. Something to do perhaps with the increase in the provision of creative writing courses? But, mind you, I’ve always felt there are more good poets out there than you’d think if you just read the national papers and listened to the radio. From the outset in 1989 we had a non-inviting-back rule at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and though that’s sometimes breached now we’ve presented some three hundred and fifty different poets over the years. And we go on finding new ones. And in Smiths Knoll on average I’d say a third of the poets we publish in each issue are new to the magazine.


JL: What does the future look like for poetry, especially with new forms of publication and discussion such as the internet? Will poetry continue to have a place in society?

ML: The internet’s fine, isn’t it. It makes a huge range of poetry from all over the world readily available. Though there’s so much that one might need help to navigate it, some sites one can trust, to avoid wasting a lot of time?

I don’t know what place it has in society now – poetry that matters tends to be written by outsiders rather than belongers, doesn’t it? It’s anti hype, anti the mass media, the party line, unexamined assumptions. It’s often uncomfortable, provocative, offensive even, so to stay healthy it probably needs to be at the margins. The trick is not to end up marginalised! Perhaps it’s readers that matter most, finding ways of developing a wider readership?


JL: Any advice for beginning poets?

ML: Read. Love the language. Write. Praise something, praise anything.


JL: What are you currently working on?

ML: I’ve got a New and Selected due out this autumn, so I’m trying to sort out what will go in it, revising some of the new ones which aren’t quite there yet but which feel as if they might be worth a place.