“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

you write a poem and then read it out does it sound alien to you, when spoken?
JB: no, I wouldn't necessarily say that, it isn't just that I have a sense of how it sounds
when i'm writing it, the actual writing of it comes out of the sound of it. You know,
someone comes up to me and says, 'how do you start a poem?', a word, a theme, whatever,
and I say no I write a rhythm. It's true. Something rhythmic starts happening first. And
certainly the first few years I started writing poetry, I wasn't even aware of the fact that the
rhythm was happening, and I think a poem starts when I'm getting the first metaphor
even word. But really, this poem starts before then. The sensation is actually wordless, if
you like. It's just pure rhythm. It anticipates the music of the poem. And then, obviously
the idea comes. When a guy looks at a block of marble and says, I can see David. Or Jesus,
or whatever, in that block of marble. It's true. The rhythm embodies the idea certainly. So
then, there's a process of transferring that sound in one's head to words, onto a page, and I
used to think there were rules for how you wrote something on the page. The first poetry I
learned was Latin poetry, because I did Latin in school. From the age of about eleven. And
of course that was metrical poetry, and of course it was in, you know, so there were rules
for that. Six feet on this line, four. Maybe that's the only thing that is free really. So you
write it on the page and I hope that when somebody opens the page, in the book, will read
the poem, say the poem aloud to themselves. And they'd hear it from the page. And that's
why I think the communication happens. I don't want to sound curmudgeonly, because
I'm not as curmudgeonly as I usually sound, But I do think solitary activity is really
important for our psychology. There's a huge difference between going out and buying a
book of poems, sitting down on your balcony with the sun blasting down on you, and
opening it out and letting that poem furl out and flow into your mind, and hearing it, or
sitting down and reading it out I say it aloud. Because that's how it should be done. And
there's a big difference between that experience and the experience of going into a room,
some people who think it's really hip and cool to be there, some people who are really
genuinely fans of whoever slopes across the stage, leans on the mic and mumbles the
poem into the mic, which is what I was doing two days ago. Or comes on in a wonderful
costume and performs that work, choreography and everything. That group experience is
20