The Mersey Sound

"I chose this book because it’s the largest-selling anthology – a million copies since 1967. It’s now in the modern classics, so it’s probably worth its place. There are some poems in my section I still read. You can see why the book broke the mould. There was a wonderful series of Penguin modern poets which I used to buy and discovered the American poets in there. And then suddenly I was in it. It was quite groundbreaking and interesting for people who want a sense of the journey of poetry. No, we didn’t want to be. We were accused of it. It did get a big reaction – people said it was breakthrough and all that. Other people said it’s not really poetry, it’s just pandering to public taste. They sensed it was working-class and it brought out the worst in some people. We wanted to change things in a sense, because everything at the time seemed London and cosmopolitan. This was giving voice to our own city, Liverpool, I suppose. We were part of a generation with access to university for the first time. The post-war, working-class people who went to university and art colleges. That was the voice we were speaking for – a generation really. I still do! Nothing much happens. I keep waiting for something to happen. No, I still haven’t got my driving licence. So there we are. I go on buses and tubes. Not very much, really, in a funny way. I know in some ways I spend longer on the poems than I did when I was younger. I think it was the first flush of being so delighted that you were writing a poem. When you get older you insist on the process and you want to get them perfectly right. You get more critical. You almost don’t like letting them go in case another one doesn’t come along. I rewrite more than I used to. What I write about doesn’t seem to change. The voice isn’t that different. You like to think it’s matured. There’s always a sense of humour – that remains – and being able to couple the humour with the seriousness and the inevitable sadness that comes with age and death. I’ve always been writing head-on about things. He was a sub-warden of my hall of residence. I was only 17 and I wasn’t writing poems then. He seemed rather austere. I always described him as a ‘toppling steeple of tweed’. But I did send him poems in my final year and he was very nice. He was very encouraging. He used my poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse . None really, you know. But the best was from Charles Causley and Miroslav Holub and Larkin. They all said, don’t take any notice of what people say. People are going to say things which will worry you and offend you. Don’t take any notice. It was a surprise to me to write. I never set out to be a poet. I just found myself writing poetry . I have a study now and I tend to write every day. I write longhand, as it always looks too printed and published if I use a computer. At the end point I do. I feel unless I’m writing poetry I’m not doing what I should be doing. When I start to write I can’t think what to write about – from one panic to another. But the more you write, the more you write. Sometimes it comes with a word doodle. Sometimes it can be an idea. Reading other work. The excitement is not knowing what’s going to happen. The poem very rarely comes fully formed. The excitement keeps you going. Yes – it does really. Someone cleverer than me, and I’m the conduit. There’s two parts of the brain: the male and female. The female part is a bit flighty and a bit silly and creative, the mad bit. The male part is the one that gets the rhymes right, the sensible one. But if you have a drink or two he falls asleep and she bombards you with silly ideas and makes the poem what it is. You need both. I think being creative comes with being human. It’s a survival method, really, in anything. There’s a sense of what’s going to happen. Poetry and art are aware of that and try to meet it."