Paola Bilrough: This is a tricky one. As a child I had long periods of solitude and read all kinds of books that a child wouldn't normally have access to. Bits of Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and D.H. Lawrence. The Yates Gardening Guide. Whatever was around. Very early on I realised writing was a means of both escaping from the world but also making sense of it; owning one's own experience and expressing it in a beautiful way. I wrote very short stories till I was about 19 then I realised that poetry was the most economical medium for what I wanted to say. The first successful poems I wrote were prose-poems. I then started paying more attetion to line length and rhythm and the poems I write now all have even stanzas but there's always a narrative slant.
B M-S: Your poetry - alot of it - centers, or at least revolves around, your family. Is this a conscious preoccupation? What are some of your other preoccupations as a poet?
PB: I'd have to disagree with this a little. Yes, my family are an incredibly important theme, but they don't (thematically) dominate. About a quarter of my last book was taken up by family poems and this next book will probably have about the same number. I guess most preoccupations are both conscious and subconscious. I write about identity and dislocation and personal geography and relationships (not just romance but in the broadest sense) because these are issues that occupy a large part of my thoughts. Another huge preoccupation is the role of art, or creative output. In my latest book there are a large number of poems about painters and muscians. I'm interested in the effects creativity has on people's lives, especially on their relationships with other people. You could say of course that this leads back to my family again as my mother is a painter as was my maternal grandfather. Sometimes I think of myself as being a kind of painter because my poems are so visual.
B M-S: If a young person approached you, and asked in all seriouness what he/she should know in order to be a good poet, what would you say?
PB: Obviously there's no particular formula but it helps to read a great deal and to be terribly interested in other people. Basically to have a teeming and inquiring mind i guess. And an eye for oddity in oneself, in other people and in events. A sense of the surreal perhaps. But all kinds of people who don't actually write poetry are poets of a sort. There is
