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The near interview of Richard Z - Page 2

© Billy Marshall Stoneking

our voices, newspapers and relatives. Actually, I spent a lot of time ill as a child, so no school either. I spent weeks and months reading obscure moldering novels, magazines, comics, listening to the radio. I remember sitting with my father listening to a radio broadcast of Under Milk Wood, him laughing and sometimes serious and me not understanding but fascinated. I'm part Irish and the family was large. Many evenings were spent listening to the older people talking, yes listening to the 'craic' as they called it. Listening to the craic and watching them drinking. I started writing when I realised that these novels, comics, verbal stories, were written by men and women. That you could actually do this - create stories, entertain, lie, engage with the minds of others - was extraordinary, I thought.

I started school when I was four. Ran away, back to home again often (about a mile). Then they let me write while others did maths. So yes I've always written, for myself, or letters, stories, but haven't taken it seriously until recently. There was always something else to do, you know, work, life. It's the same today, except now I keep what I write.

B M S: Shelly - or someone - once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. What are your views on this? Does poetry have a social or political function as you conceive it?

RZ: For sure, though I think that the influence of poetry on social change is reactive and supportive rather than pro-active. Novels (The Gulag Archepelago, for example) and drama, I would say have more influence on actually promoting social change. Poetry seems to be more commemorative of upheaval. Poetry accompanies revolution... can reinforce ideology. I think its real power though is historical as a recording device. Folk song acts similarly... the history of the working class, for example, remembered and recorded in song. In the sixties, Adrian Henri wrote about the H-Bomb as did Gregory Corso... I don't know how many ideas on nuclear weapons were changed. The First-World-War poets... Owen and Sassoon... how much effect they've had on the anti-war movements I couldn't say. However, preaching to the converted has its function.

B M S: Who (or what) are your influences?

RZ: Well as I said earlier my upbringing. Being born and living twenty years on Guernsey must also have

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