Author Interview: Colin Dardis
I was excited to speak to Mind poet, Colin Dardis, about his upcoming release with Eyewear Publishing, The X of Y!
Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and arts coordinator from Northern Ireland. His work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and the US. Having had a childhood speech impediment, attending speech therapy classes throughout primary school, Colin’s initial interest in language and words grew out of this formative experience. His personal history of depression and mental illness is also an ongoing influence on his work. A previous ACES recipient from Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Colin was recently shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, and the Over The Edge New Writer of the Year Award, as well as one of Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2016. Colin is also the co-founder of Poetry NI, and is known for his devotion to supporting and developing the Northern Irish poetry scene. His new collection, The X of Y, is out in May 2018 from Eyewear.The book opens with a 'prescription' of how to read your poetry, which I loved - how did this idea come about?Well, that poem is a bit tongue-in-cheek, acting as a kind of introduction to the book, although I feel it also addresses poetry in general, not just my poetry. I’m very interested in the idea of poetry as therapy, and the importance of creative outlets to aid wellbeing. It’s not an original idea of course, but perhaps today in the world we live in, it’s required more than ever. We have the Emergency Poet Deborah Alma prescribing poems to people, the Poetry Pharmacy, anthologies aimed at relieving mental health issues. The correlation is perhaps obvious: read or write a poem, feel a little better. That’s definitely one of my aims for my poetry, and for this collection, so hopefully it helps some readers.The concept of the poem, of laying out a poem like the fact sheet of side-effects, ingredients, dosage, etc. comes from the album notes for Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. It took its inspiration from the packaging of prescription medicines, and was completely unique for its time. I love reading the production notes of albums, seeing where it was recorded, who played what, looking through the list of thank-yous. It’s something we’ve lost really in the digital, online streaming age, and it’s a concept that could be carried through to an entire collection.
Your poem, mountaineering, has a simple title but seemingly, more complex meanings. Can you talk about what inspired this poem?Wow, you’re testing my memory here, I need to go back and look at my original drafts for this poem and see what I remember… interestingly, the first draft was written on the 1st January, 2015, so I must have been thinking of new beginnings, of the year ahead, all that clichéd stuff that comes with every New Year’s Day. But I was also thinking of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeatedly push a giant rock up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Existence feels like a mountain sometimes, living off far too steep a slope for comfort. And we’re caught on the side of that mountain, like Prometheus on the crag, weighed down by our own grief and sadness and heartache. So, how do you get off the mountain? Like any journey, you take small steps; it’s the Japanese idea of kaizen, of continuous improvement by gradual means, rather than giant strides forward. Giant leaps ahead aren’t very common in life: instead, we get to where we are going eventually. The layout of the poem has orphaned words jutting out from their parent lines like steps cut out of the side of a mountain. The visual idea is to follow the steps down back onto the flat land.What would you say thematically links this collection?There’s a lot of intertextuality in the collection, with poems picking up and extending, or revisiting, ideas, images and allusions mentioned elsewhere. The editing process of the manuscript really helped bring this to the fore, which impacts on the sequence of the poems. Though I would like the reader to find these connections for themselves, some of the themes are clear enough. I’m concerned with how we identify ourselves, and the dissonance there might be in how we label ourselves, and the labels that the world already has for us. This stems out of my experience with depression and social anxiety; for a long time, I didn’t really understand the person I am, and how that fitted in with the rest of the world. Depression really isolates you, and poetry is usually a solitary exercise anyway. So when you’re feeling disconnected, poetry is a way to keep on talking, trying to make sense of things.There’s a long poem that concludes the collection, The Escapist, which attempts to encapsulate all of this. This idea of two people in the one mind, the person the person the world sees you as, and how you really see yourself; which can be extended to the idea of how you want the world to see you too. How do other people impact on your own identify and self-worth? How do we escapism our fears and concerns, and how do we come to a point of acceptance and relief? Which writers have influenced you the most?I’m not sure if my work is really reflective of my influences; perhaps others can spy it, but I’m too close to the writing to see it for myself. Samuel Beckett is a huge influence, although more his prose than his poetry. There are hints of his reductive approach scattered throughout the x of y. I enjoy Ted Hughes’s exploration of the more animalistic, bloodied side of nature, how something can be both pastoral and violent. I also really identify with his Crow poems, which inspired a previous pamphlet, Dōji: A Blunder.My wife, Geraldine O’Kane, is also a poet, so she is an obviously influence on me! She converted me to the possibilities of micropoetry; originally, I had the opinion that a micropoem was just an isolated bite out of a bigger apple, and they left me hungry for more. Now I can see that micropoems can be a meal in themselves, or at least, an amuse-bouche.I’m also inspired by my friends and contemporaries. Geraldine and I run a monthly open mic night in Belfast, Purely Poetry, and we are blessed to hear great work regularly. Poets like Ross Thompson, Tory Campbell, Peter Adair, Patricia Delvin-Hill, Anthony Ferguson, David Braziel, Matthew Rice, Dan Eggs, Olive Broderick, Nathan Armstrong, Kathleen McCracken, Rachel McCrum; really, there are so many Northern Irish names to choose from. I believe you have to engage with what’s around you, to be part of that dialogue, and draw input from it. You don’t have to replicate anyone else’s voice, but certainly let yourself be open to it.In some poetry such as 'Orange' you experiment with form - the poem takes on the shape of an orange peel! When you write, what comes first - the imagery or the form?For me, there are two stages to writing a poem: figuring out what you want to say (the easy part), then figuring out howyou want to say it. Usually, the image comes in the first part, and then form arrives afterwards. It isn’t always like that though; sometimes, in the blessed moments, they arrive hand-in-hand, and that first draft is a gift. Sometimes, a first draft doesn’t get beyond a first draft as the idea isn’t worth pursuing. I’m a fan of villanelles, so occasionally I will purposefully sit down and attempt one of those. It’s a tricky form, and I’m far from mastering it; I am tempted to include one in the X of Y, but none felt strong enough. Perhaps the best approach is just be natural, allow the words and ideas to come, then worry about the presentation. You can written a very technically sound Petrarchan sonnet, but if there’s no feeling contained within, nothing to stir the imagination or senses, then I’m not really going to care about your volta, perfect iambic hexameter or clever rhymes.A lot of the poems in the collection do have a specific form, although it might not be obvious right away in some of the poems. I have a poor ear for stressed and unstressed syllables, which perhaps is a result from a childhood speech impediment. But I do enjoy setting restrictions in the number of syllables in a line, and the number of lines in a stanza, etc. There’s that challenge of restricted form, of still being able to say something eloquent and evocative in a poem despite this fierce boundaries you are made to operate within. And ultimately, that’s the truest reflection of life poetry can hold.Thank you to Colin! Look out for my book review of The X of Y soon...LinksTo buy the book: https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/collections/prose/products/the-x-of-yColin's website: http://www.colindardispoet.co.uk
Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and arts coordinator from Northern Ireland. His work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and the US. Having had a childhood speech impediment, attending speech therapy classes throughout primary school, Colin’s initial interest in language and words grew out of this formative experience. His personal history of depression and mental illness is also an ongoing influence on his work. A previous ACES recipient from Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Colin was recently shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, and the Over The Edge New Writer of the Year Award, as well as one of Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2016. Colin is also the co-founder of Poetry NI, and is known for his devotion to supporting and developing the Northern Irish poetry scene. His new collection, The X of Y, is out in May 2018 from Eyewear.The book opens with a 'prescription' of how to read your poetry, which I loved - how did this idea come about?Well, that poem is a bit tongue-in-cheek, acting as a kind of introduction to the book, although I feel it also addresses poetry in general, not just my poetry. I’m very interested in the idea of poetry as therapy, and the importance of creative outlets to aid wellbeing. It’s not an original idea of course, but perhaps today in the world we live in, it’s required more than ever. We have the Emergency Poet Deborah Alma prescribing poems to people, the Poetry Pharmacy, anthologies aimed at relieving mental health issues. The correlation is perhaps obvious: read or write a poem, feel a little better. That’s definitely one of my aims for my poetry, and for this collection, so hopefully it helps some readers.The concept of the poem, of laying out a poem like the fact sheet of side-effects, ingredients, dosage, etc. comes from the album notes for Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. It took its inspiration from the packaging of prescription medicines, and was completely unique for its time. I love reading the production notes of albums, seeing where it was recorded, who played what, looking through the list of thank-yous. It’s something we’ve lost really in the digital, online streaming age, and it’s a concept that could be carried through to an entire collection.Your poem, mountaineering, has a simple title but seemingly, more complex meanings. Can you talk about what inspired this poem?Wow, you’re testing my memory here, I need to go back and look at my original drafts for this poem and see what I remember… interestingly, the first draft was written on the 1st January, 2015, so I must have been thinking of new beginnings, of the year ahead, all that clichéd stuff that comes with every New Year’s Day. But I was also thinking of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeatedly push a giant rock up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Existence feels like a mountain sometimes, living off far too steep a slope for comfort. And we’re caught on the side of that mountain, like Prometheus on the crag, weighed down by our own grief and sadness and heartache. So, how do you get off the mountain? Like any journey, you take small steps; it’s the Japanese idea of kaizen, of continuous improvement by gradual means, rather than giant strides forward. Giant leaps ahead aren’t very common in life: instead, we get to where we are going eventually. The layout of the poem has orphaned words jutting out from their parent lines like steps cut out of the side of a mountain. The visual idea is to follow the steps down back onto the flat land.What would you say thematically links this collection?There’s a lot of intertextuality in the collection, with poems picking up and extending, or revisiting, ideas, images and allusions mentioned elsewhere. The editing process of the manuscript really helped bring this to the fore, which impacts on the sequence of the poems. Though I would like the reader to find these connections for themselves, some of the themes are clear enough. I’m concerned with how we identify ourselves, and the dissonance there might be in how we label ourselves, and the labels that the world already has for us. This stems out of my experience with depression and social anxiety; for a long time, I didn’t really understand the person I am, and how that fitted in with the rest of the world. Depression really isolates you, and poetry is usually a solitary exercise anyway. So when you’re feeling disconnected, poetry is a way to keep on talking, trying to make sense of things.There’s a long poem that concludes the collection, The Escapist, which attempts to encapsulate all of this. This idea of two people in the one mind, the person the person the world sees you as, and how you really see yourself; which can be extended to the idea of how you want the world to see you too. How do other people impact on your own identify and self-worth? How do we escapism our fears and concerns, and how do we come to a point of acceptance and relief? Which writers have influenced you the most?I’m not sure if my work is really reflective of my influences; perhaps others can spy it, but I’m too close to the writing to see it for myself. Samuel Beckett is a huge influence, although more his prose than his poetry. There are hints of his reductive approach scattered throughout the x of y. I enjoy Ted Hughes’s exploration of the more animalistic, bloodied side of nature, how something can be both pastoral and violent. I also really identify with his Crow poems, which inspired a previous pamphlet, Dōji: A Blunder.My wife, Geraldine O’Kane, is also a poet, so she is an obviously influence on me! She converted me to the possibilities of micropoetry; originally, I had the opinion that a micropoem was just an isolated bite out of a bigger apple, and they left me hungry for more. Now I can see that micropoems can be a meal in themselves, or at least, an amuse-bouche.I’m also inspired by my friends and contemporaries. Geraldine and I run a monthly open mic night in Belfast, Purely Poetry, and we are blessed to hear great work regularly. Poets like Ross Thompson, Tory Campbell, Peter Adair, Patricia Delvin-Hill, Anthony Ferguson, David Braziel, Matthew Rice, Dan Eggs, Olive Broderick, Nathan Armstrong, Kathleen McCracken, Rachel McCrum; really, there are so many Northern Irish names to choose from. I believe you have to engage with what’s around you, to be part of that dialogue, and draw input from it. You don’t have to replicate anyone else’s voice, but certainly let yourself be open to it.In some poetry such as 'Orange' you experiment with form - the poem takes on the shape of an orange peel! When you write, what comes first - the imagery or the form?For me, there are two stages to writing a poem: figuring out what you want to say (the easy part), then figuring out howyou want to say it. Usually, the image comes in the first part, and then form arrives afterwards. It isn’t always like that though; sometimes, in the blessed moments, they arrive hand-in-hand, and that first draft is a gift. Sometimes, a first draft doesn’t get beyond a first draft as the idea isn’t worth pursuing. I’m a fan of villanelles, so occasionally I will purposefully sit down and attempt one of those. It’s a tricky form, and I’m far from mastering it; I am tempted to include one in the X of Y, but none felt strong enough. Perhaps the best approach is just be natural, allow the words and ideas to come, then worry about the presentation. You can written a very technically sound Petrarchan sonnet, but if there’s no feeling contained within, nothing to stir the imagination or senses, then I’m not really going to care about your volta, perfect iambic hexameter or clever rhymes.A lot of the poems in the collection do have a specific form, although it might not be obvious right away in some of the poems. I have a poor ear for stressed and unstressed syllables, which perhaps is a result from a childhood speech impediment. But I do enjoy setting restrictions in the number of syllables in a line, and the number of lines in a stanza, etc. There’s that challenge of restricted form, of still being able to say something eloquent and evocative in a poem despite this fierce boundaries you are made to operate within. And ultimately, that’s the truest reflection of life poetry can hold.Thank you to Colin! Look out for my book review of The X of Y soon...LinksTo buy the book: https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/collections/prose/products/the-x-of-yColin's website: http://www.colindardispoet.co.uk
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