Interview with the smashing Rob A. Mackenzie (Poet)

Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow. He studied law and then abandoned the possibility of significant personal wealth by switching to theology. He spent a year in Seoul, eight years in Lanarkshire, five years in Turin, and now lives in Edinburgh where he organises the Poetry at the Great Grog reading series. His pamphlet collection, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005 and he blogs at Surroundings (http://robmack.blogspot.com).

In THE OPPOSITE OF CABBAGE, his latest collection, Messiahs parachute themselves to disused northern fairgrounds, a woman diets until practically invisible, trained apes teach a colony of drunks how to dance, a bingo night fuels familial despair and love, and an airborne cabbage blasts a cyclist into orbit. The poems are funny and tragic, often both at the same time. For more details:(http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715138.htm)

1/ When did you start writing poetry and why?

I wrote my first poem as a school assignment, aged 13. I still have a notebook filled with about fifteen poems written over the following school years. They are abysmal and most sound as if they have been written at the end of the nineteenth century – unsurprising, as my favourite poets were Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Wordsworth. I must have thought I had some talent although, looking at these poems now, I wonder why.

For about fifteen years after leaving school, I wrote only songs, both music and lyrics. I played guitar (and later alto saxophone too) in two bands, Pure Television (jangly alternative pop) and Plastic Chicken (strange art-rock), and dreamed of being a cult act, the kind of band that’s famous only among a few discerning people for a decade before everyone discovers their genius. However, our finest achievement was being played on Radio Scotland’s ‘Beat Patrol’ show, no doubt to an audience of seven people and a dog, and that didn’t lead to any multi-million dollar contracts.

I started writing poetry again when I picked up a Seamus Heaney collection, ‘The Haw Lantern’, and what I read seemed unearthly and astonishing, which brings me to your next question…

2/ What writers have inspired you the most?

I enjoy good lyricists like Joni Mitchell, Morrissey, Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker. They show me the powerful effect words could create, albeit backed up with music, but it was only in the mid-nineties when I really began to get into poetry. I read through almost everything Seamus Heaney had written. Although some of it lost me, I was amazed by the sheer quality of sound and rhythm Wallace Stevens managed to create in his poems. Charles Simic’s weirdness appealed to me. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’  blew my mind, and then everything else he wrote did the same. I heard Edwin Morgan read his poems and was taken aback that so much could be said in what sounded like (but wasn’t really) ‘ordinary’ language. These five, above all, taught me to write. ‘Teach Yourself Writing Poetry’ by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams was also a great help, one of the few ‘how to’ books I’d recommend to anyone wanting to learn.

Since then, every now and again, I read someone whose writing has a huge effect on me and I feel I have to read everything by them. I have a diverse taste – W.S. Graham, Zbigniew Herbert, Tomas Transtromer, Dens Johnson, John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Michael Hofmann have all made their mark on me. Michael Hamburger’s monumental book, ‘The Truth of Poetry’ was also a huge inspiration, and Robert Hass’s ‘Twentieth Century Pleasures’.

3/Do other arts genres influence your poetry?

I’m a big movie fan. I never miss a Woody Allen movie if I can help it. I enjoy humour and absurdity in poems as much as on the television and cinema screen, but the comedy is never more than a breath away from tragedy. I tend to go for the arthouse film rather than the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but becoming a father has curtailed by cinema-going activity quite a bit. I still watch movies on TV and my wife was kind enough to buy me a complete box set of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ episodes for my Christmas in 2007. Rather worryingly, I find myself able to relate to Larry David more often than not, even if I wouldn’t always deal with things the way he does.

My daughter is 7, so I’ve seen plenty of Disney movies and must have watched ‘High School Musical’ on video at least twenty-nine times. Her all time favourite is ‘Chicken Little’. I may have seen that over a hundred times! I don’t know whether this affects my poetry but I do find myself switching, often within the same poem, from quite a high register to some reference from reality TV or the pop charts, whatever comes into my head: I am quite an intuitive writer in that I might start a poem with a vague plan, but I rarely stick with it for long.

4/You lived in Seoul for one year and Turin for five. Tell us more.

From 1989-90, I spent a year or so in Seoul. I was studying theology. At the time, the ‘Minjung’ church in South Korea had sprung up. It offered a kind of liberation theology and the congregations often met in homes or small rooms in factories etc. I was really interested in it. I’d also been involved in writing letters for Amnesty International on behalf of those imprisoned and tortured under the military Government in Seoul and not set free with the advent of democracy in 1988. I was young. I wanted not just to write letters but to go there, experience a different culture, and gain an understanding of what it had meant for people to live under a series of repressive regimes (the seventies and eighties had been particularly bad, in that respect, for South Korea).

I did learn a lot, but what I gained most was friendship and acceptance. People were as curious about me as I was of them. I studied, I grew to love Korean food (no chilli has induced fear in me since), I got a smattering of the language, I did a little work in a church, I taught English, and engaged in hundreds of conversations on unification (the Korean word for ‘unification’ had been banned until the year before I arrived). Everyone wanted to talk. It was a great time. I had periods of loneliness and confusion but, for someone in his mid-twenties, it was a privilege to have such a great opportunity.

I am a minister of the Church of Scotland by trade, which often surprises people who only know me through my poetry. I had spent seven years as minister in a housing estate to the east of Glasgow and, around 1999-2000, it felt like time to move on. I found an advert looking for someone to work in Turin. The job had three parts: 1. to be a minister in a multi-national church, with English as the common language, 2. to be a minister in the Italian Waldensian (Reformed Protestant) church, and 3. to work for a project giving advice and support to immigrants and asylum seekers in Italy.

I got the job and moved to Turin with my wife. My daughter was born there. We stayed in a flat that looked out onto Primo Levi Square – inspirational in itself. Turin is a beautiful, bustling city. The people are generally quite shy at first and it was hard to make friends easily, but we did eventually manage, especially as our Italian improved. I could go on for some time about the food, the wine, the pavement cafés, the elegant streets. There are many advantages to living in Italy. The downsides were the crazy bureaucracy and the stifling, humid summers – OK if you have a beach handy, but not if you have to work…

I still translate Italian poetry now and again, partly to keep what remains of my language skills alive. It is also a window into a different approach to writing poetry than what prevails in the UK. But my spoken Italian is now atrocious. I do pine for the Zelli Bar in Corso Vittorio Emanuele II where we used to spend our Friday evenings with a bottle of wine and unlimited antipasti. These evenings never felt like hard work.