The World’s Wife

"I love this book. I wrote a book called Waxworks based on mythological, biblical and historical characters. But what Carol Ann did was use their wives – wives like Mrs Faust, who refers to her husband as ‘an absolute berk’. She really doesn’t pull punches and she writes with a certain strength and mastery. She is a witty, intelligent, shocking yet compassionate writer with a rich source of imagery – I like to think this description applies to all the poets I have chosen. It’s funny and wicked and a great read. Mrs Aesop says her husband ‘could bore for purgatory’; Mrs Midas is cursed when her husband wishes for the golden touch and gets it. She moves him out – she cannot allow him to touch her. She visits from time to time as he starves, fish and hares turning to gold before he can eat them. Then she moves away. But thinks of him sometimes – she misses his touch. They’re irresistible poems. When I was a teenager, I occasionally asked my father for advice, but then I stopped at 17. At my 25-year school reunion at Bedales, I saw my old English teacher, John Batstone, and we were talking about the A-level English exam where you could hand in some of your own work in order to possibly increase your grade. He had a grim expression on his face and said: ‘There were 96 of them and all filled with teenage angst’ – referring to my poems! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I was mostly too self-conscious to show my poems to my father . But the advice he did give me was: ‘Don’t worry about writing for anyone else’. However, just before I published my first book of poems, I simply gave him a huge pile of them and asked him to put them into good, bad and indifferent piles, without actually advising me on individual poems. I felt that if he told me anything about them then the re-writing wouldn’t be mine and I was adamant that the work be unadulterated. Although taking advice shouldn’t make a person feel the way that I did, in this case it was imperative. I cannot take credit for something I don’t feel I deserve credit for. So for me it has to be my own work, and that was my way of doing it. So Dad did as I asked and just put them in good, bad and indifferent piles. No, I thought his choices were spot on. I would advise people to read aloud. Especially emails – read them aloud and what you thought was humorous and witty will sound humourless and witless. For poetry, reading aloud is the single most important thing of all. Absolutely. Over and over again, and it’s the only way that works. Then sometimes you have to put it down, walk away and leave it for a couple of days until it sounds like it’s not yours so that you can be more objective. Often the driving force behind a poem is to hear something, see something or feel something that I really want to convey to other people or another person, where saying it in an ordinary way would not get the message through, and I want to make it somehow startling enough to catch their attention. No, but between the ages of 24 and 34 I didn’t write at all because I thought I’d get compared to my parents. I then got chronic fatigue when I was 34 and so I was only awake for 20 minute stretches for a total of about four hours a day, but I started writing poems because a) they were short, and b) I realised that I had refrained from writing poetry in order to avoid other people’s criticism and their comparison of me to my parents. But if I were on my deathbed, would I then think that was the right thing to do? I don’t think so. We can’t live to please others. Lots of people who aren’t going to read my poetry aren’t going to care. If people do compare me to my parents, then that’s taking the easy way out. As my father said: ‘You can only write for yourself’. If you live for what other people think of you, then you’re not living."