Keep an eye on… Swithun Cooper

13 Jul 2009

Every issue we find an exciting new writer whom you should keep an eye on and ask them a few questions.

This issue we present Swithun Cooper, a young poet whose works have appeared in New Poetries III (Carcanet) and the magazines Time Out, The London Magazine and Acumen. He won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors this year.

The Literateur is very excited about this assured and brilliantly inventive new voice in poetry. We predict he will be snapped up for a debut collection soon...

Your poems are often quite traditional in form. What is the appeal of form to you?

In terms of traditional forms, I would say less than a third of my poems really embrace them, and I find I can’t force a poem into one; however I do notice that once I’ve got into the flow of writing, I often slip into some kind of poetic meter – I suppose it just helps me get a handle on the language, and the rhythm of the line does seem to be my driving force. The thing that I concentrate on consciously is the tension between the poem’s narrative and its imagery, so perhaps form helps me to keep the poem’s momentum or its gradual unwinding.

Do you think that there is a return to form in the current poetry scene?

I don’t feel like I have any authority to speak on that matter, but to me it never went away – Apollinaire’s concrete poetry, the layout of much of August Kleinzahler’s poetry, and Frank O’Hara’s structured line-breaks all provide forms of their own kinds; a lot of contemporary poetry may not rhyme but its stanzas are often regimented. My favourite formal poems are ones that take a while to reveal their structure to you – Leontia Flynn’s ‘Casablanca, Backwards’, for example.

Your poems are often peppered with words which one might find in the poetry of the Metaphysicals; ‘circuit’ in ‘The Quietening’ for example, or ‘cylinders’ and ‘molecules’ in ‘The Perversion Index’. What impact, if any, have the Metaphysicals had on your work?

I‘d never considered them an influence until now, but when I was first discovering poetry as a teenager, I did read a lot of John Donne, so I suppose he has been resting at the back of my mind all this time. What I particularly loved about him was the rhetoric: the poem as instruction.

Have you written or are you interested in writing prose and/or drama as well as poetry?

A few years ago, I thought I’d never write poems again – I’d written them heavily as a teenager, but by the age of 20 I felt that they were all failures, that my ability had hit a glass ceiling, and I felt more confident and satisfied writing fiction. By 2007, I was feeling that way about fiction, and sneakily writing poems in my notebook whilst at work. Perhaps I’ll go in these cycles every few years; but I hope that eventually I manage to do the two alongside one another

Please tells us of two poets you admire and why, one from the past and from the present.

I am a big fan of Homer, although I can’t read him in the original – at 16 I opened ‘The Iliad’ to see the word “undergloom” and was sold from there. What I really love is his ability to keep character, message and narrative in check without sacrificing the originality of the language. Although he is dead, I feel like Thom Gunn is a poet from the present – his final two collections especially. It’s very hard to write about everyday emotions of love, lust and loss without coming across as clichéd, and I enjoy the complexity of his longer poems. He also once took 15 years to write a poem; you’ve got to respect that.

Any ambitions?

I would like to reduce caffeine in my diet and successfully go vegan. In literary terms, the usual one – get better at writing.