Poet Roger Craik joins me today to chat about his new collection, In Other Days.
Welcome, Roger. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am English by birth and educated at British universities, and live in Ashtabula, Ohio, although I have also worked in Turkey, and have given readings in Yemen, Poland, Holland, Bulgaria and Romania. My poems have been published in England, Australia and America, in translation in Bulgaria, Romania, and Belarus, and I have written five full-length books of poetry, of which the most recent is In Other Days (2022).
I consider myself very fortunate indeed to be a US citizen.
What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
I think the most enjoyable aspect is that, when the writing “fires,” it engrosses in the way that nothing else I have ever experienced can. I also enjoy being surprised at the direction that a particular attempt can take, and the interest it provides, especially when I find itself turning out to be so different from anything I envisaged when I started, or even when the idea first came.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
I’m not that comfortable talking about my own work, somehow: that is for others, if there are indeed others. But there is one in the latest book, called “Lewes, 1965” about a child (plainly the speaker) bouncing a ball against the ground and up against a wall, and then catching it, over and over again, that seems very “pure,” to me, so very close to the experience and my remembering it. Another one, which somehow came out of the experience of writing (rather than of anything stolidly premeditated), is called “33, Charleston House,” the address of my late mother’s flat in Nottingham, England, and it describes the speaker dreading visiting his mother in a nursing home, and then, somehow, finding himself looking at the sky and imagining being in Amsterdam (a favourite city of mine), and savouring Dutch coffee, and seeing the Douwe and Egberts cup that it comes in.
What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
There is no particular form. The shape comes from the way the poem forms itself.
What type of project are you working on next?
I am gathering poems together for another book, which will be called “Alightings,” and shall have a photograph of pigeons on the cover, doing just that, namely descending and ascending both. It’s nice when a particular word means two opposite things, don’t you think? I would like to convince myself that I am gathering poems together, but it’s going very slowly, as I prefer simply to write, and not over-busy myself with publishing. They are two different worlds, aren’t they?
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
When I was a schoolboy in Aberdeen, a city I didn’t like at all, English classes involved “composition,” meaning writing stories, and, occasionally, poems. I enjoyed that, but I never thought of myself as a “writer,” just an enjoyer. I found myself doodling with efforts, that turned out to be poems, only when I moved to America from Turkey. Before that, I concentrated on academic writing, which at the time I thought I enjoyed, I suppose, but about which I never quite felt passionate.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I found “The Poets Market” very useful, but, that said, I don’t know if it is in print this year. Is it? Otherwise, the journal “Poets and Writers.” I try to guess if my stuff might fit in with what individual journals publish, but then again, one never knows, and I think the main thing is to send stuff off, expect rejection (and send out again, when this happens), and be pleased when something gets taken.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I always cover each sheet of paper with soft lead pencil doodlings, always with the left hand (the right hand means that a right-handed person is drawing, and the point is to not consciously draw, in the interests of loosening oneself up).