Ian: Your book of poems A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet, 2001) combines a sly, miraculous mixture of zany humour with underlying threads of sadness. Often the two are inseparable, for example, in the line 'Imperfection is the cemetery'. There is also delight in mirth and sheer silliness. Could you tell me a little about the influences on your writing? 

Jeremy: My main literary enthusiasms are the New York Poets, some of the surrealists and DADAists and other poets from the nonsense tradition which I think is a really wide stream not just through English poetry and certainly not just Lear and Carroll. Not sure about the underlying sadness. It’s there in my life in some measure I suppose – I’m not always the life and soul of the party exactly. It’s also there, along with a great frustration, which I can also identify with, always on the point of breaking out in some berserk way, in the nonsense poets – especially Lear. People usually bring up nonsense in the context of John Ashbery’s poetry in order to criticize him but I think he’s one of the great heirs to this tradition. I love his poetry and the way it mixes everything up, veering from one place and voice and tone to another – from tragedy to slapstick. I’ve got the phrase ‘resigned wonder’ in my head from somewhere as a description of the main emotion behind his poetry – probably an interview with him but I think it came from someone else. There’s a sort of bemused air to both him and his poetry, stoically resigned to things and whimsically fleeing them into other worlds almost at the same time and the effect’s charming. He still seems to have the capacity to irritate some people who claim he’s impossible to read or at least a ‘difficult’ poet but I find him in some ways one of the easiest and most inviting poets to read and one of the hardest not to continue reading; he seduces you into reading on.

I think Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett are my favourite New York poets though. I love their good humour and enthusiasm and wish I could carry it off myself.  Their poems seem like invitations or incitements to join in with life and write poems as part of that and not just posthumously with the killing jar and - what’s that chemical you use to finish butterflies off with? Koch was probably the first poet to make me guffaw out loud. It was in the summer of 1991 in a grim hotel in Manchester reading his The Art of Love after a day studying Double Entry Book-keeping. Kenward Elmslie also said something about Koch being the first poet to have hit his bong meter. I think that’s a pretty good test for poetry – right up there with the Dickinson top of the head removal.

I write like many people I suppose at least partly out of a need for compensation – compensation not just for Double Entry Book-keeping but for my inability in a typically English way to express delight and joy (or full blooded misery also perhaps) in my day to day life. There’s a strong link in my mind between expressing delight and making nonsense. My son went through a phase as a toddler playing around endlessly with a phrase from one of his books ‘What do people do all day?’ (you probably have to try it out for a while and out loud to get this). I think I’m sometimes following an equally childish, oral and perhaps autistic pleasure in my writing. Reading Gertrude Stein (in short doses) gives me this sort of pleasure too, for example in Tender Buttons or Lifting Belly.

Non-literary influences or enthusiasms/obsessions are at least as important I think. There’s the theme of collage; collecting and arranging/rearranging bits of the world and (sometimes in a loose sort of OuLiPian way) other people’s poetry- Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Peter Blake. I have fantasies of making environments in my poems like Cornell’s boxes or Schwitters barns from the things I gather together.  Or of making machines like the merry go round the ‘outsider’ artist Pierre Avezard built from scrap in his farmyard. This is compensation again I think – wanting to construct things with words because of a general inability to do that with my hands.

I like the idea of finding things – discovery. There’s Clare’s statement that he found the poems in the field and only wrote them down and I’ve got that in my head alongside an image of Facteur Cheval stopping to pick up rocks on his daily postman’s route to use in building his Palais Ideal. I read recently that he only started this at the age of 43. This cheered me up no end.

Birdwatching and surrealism fits in here somewhere as well – a childhood obsession with Kingfishers and hours waiting in the dark of hides for the discovery or appearance of the marvellous. But I should shut up and let you ask another question.

Ian: It's good to know so much more about your influences. Interesting that you mention Schwitters, too. When I first read your poetry I immediately thought of his poem 'Eve Blossom', which I hadn't read for years, and in particular one line came shooting back to me: 'Blue is the colour of your yellow hair / Red is the whirl of your green wheels'. I'm wondering... How did it all start for you as a writer? You left it quite late, relatively speaking, a bit like Wallace Stevens, before publishing your first book.

Jeremy: Just past my 40^th birthday so yes quite late. It all started in the middle of a rather awkward and introverted adolescence in the middle of a wood in Bedfordshire where one day I found an old ‘78’ on which my father (who died when I was 3) had recorded himself reciting some of his poems. I wasn’t aware that he’d written poetry before this and hearing his voice speaking to me from beyond the grave as it were made a big impression and perhaps created a link for me between poetry and magic. I listened to this recording time and time again as it wasn’t a very good one (it was a DIY job made in one of those booths where you could do this sort of thing in the 40s and 50s I think) and it was hard to make the words out. There are still passages I haven’t been able to understand in fact so the poems remain fragments. I must have subsumed his voice in some way through doing this because I had a rather strange experience at one of the first readings I gave from the book when I suddenly became aware of listening to myself and hearing my father’s voice reading the poem. 

I only actually started taking writing seriously in 1990. Not sure what I was up to in the intervening 20 years – probably trying to escape from the wood and my adolescence. Anyway in the summer of 1993 I stopped taking my writing seriously and started enjoying it more. It was a good summer. I went on an enlightening workshop with Douglas ‘The man with no head’ Harding in an orangery in a park in West London. Harding is a kind of English Zen master cum showman-magician with a suitcase of tricks all designed to demonstrate that we are in fact headless. I also visited an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of work by James Turrell including one of his sky pieces which are basically rooms with the ceiling removed so that spectators can sit and enjoy the view of ‘framed’ sky. Finally I went on an Arvon course tutored by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove who told me that the Totleigh Barton lawn was made of little green bottles all popping their corks as rain approaches. I also fell in love with someone on the course – well on the train home. This all helped enormously in a giddying sort of way and prepared me for my first submission to PN Review of a bunch of silly homophonic mistranslations of Bonnefoy. ‘Imperfection is the Cemetery’ which you mentioned earlier was one of those.

Ian: I was fascinated and moved by the story of you listening to your own father’s voice ‘from beyond the grave’. I have the feeling from many of your poems that they are texts reaching out to other texts, almost superimposed on other texts. How much do you use other people’s work, art or writings, as a starting point for your own work? (Your poems are not exactly about the dog barking next door or you falling out with your wife.)

Jeremy: Other people’s words are the starting point for most of my poems – others poetry or writings about art, natural history or whatever comes my way that I can re-arrange or manipulate in some way. Also spoken words heard on the radio or overheard conversations or signposts, adverts etc (‘Quirks for sale’ was a favourite one for a firm of estate agents) - that find their way into the notebook. I went through what must have been a fairly irritating phase for a while when I read over people’s shoulders on my commute into London and made notes of what I could see there too. I now have to read with glasses and so have stopped commuting. I prefer to start with something rather than nothing basically. Ernst explained his preference for collage by saying he had a virginity complex I think – a fear of the blank canvas which went away when he started with something to work with.

Quite a few of the things I’ve written are completely limited in terms of vocabulary to words that others have used in their writing, e.g. words or lines from Lorca’s or Neruda’s poetry or from writings by Gerhard Richter or Gilbert White. A bit like getting a Lorca or Richter set of fridge magnets I suppose. I think of these a bit like Arcimboldo’s portrait of a gardener where the face is composed of vegetables. And there’s a playing around with voices and masks that I like. I go along with Ron Padgett’s wish (in a poem which makes fun of the idea of writers finding their voice) ‘to remain a phony the rest of my life.’

Other poems are like you say sort of superimpositions – like N+7 shifts of register ( ‘This is just to say/ I have eaten all the plungers …’, mistranslations, erasing words to ‘reveal’ new texts or complete found poems. I think this probably goes back to that autistic pleasure in playing with language.

Perhaps a rather parasitic way of writing and being though. I wouldn’t want to leave behind the world of barking dogs and falling out with wives altogether for some rarefied world of texts rubbing up against each other. And I have written a few ‘straight’ poems – perhaps more recently. But even when using my ‘own’ words I think my main impulse when putting a poem together is to mix things up and rearrange them and stick bits of the ‘world’ in like shopping trolleys in a canal. I don’t really know why. I enjoy a degree of mess when I can let myself go I suppose. But with some kind of formal constraint sometimes hiding behind it all. Perhaps there’s a sort of Schwitters ideal lurking in there of some merz-like fusion of art and life – Whitney Houston , Tunnocks Teacakes and a car full of people chanting ‘ginger headed children’ …

I don’t really like writing that’s allusive and showing off its influences. I was a bit worried about the number of After X’s in the book and wondered whether it might have been more honest to give some footnotes explaining what I was up to.  But in the end it’s probably irrelevant what I’ve been doing to what or to whom and the poem should stand on its own feet even if the toes belong to someone else and have been grafted on.

Ian: My own view is that collage doesn’t in any way detract from a poem, though I don't use it much myself, and it can in fact take us into some incredible places.  I’m amazed at how someone like Rupert Loydell can make poems seem very personal, even though they may originate in other people’s work. Or think of the lyrcism created through cutups by John Ashbery in Tennis Court Oath. I know what you mean about ‘the blank page’ (what writer doesn’t?). In some ways, translation is also a way to create one’s own work, based on the work of another. But that’s another subject.

In an email a few months ago, you picked out  David Grubb, Martin Stannard and C.J. Allen’s poems as the ones you enjoyed most in Shadowtrain. Which British poets writing today (if any), do you admire?