Maria Taylor is a poet based in Loughborough in the UK. Her forthcoming collection, Melanchrini will be published in July 2012. I thought I would take a break from fiction here on Necessary Fiction to ask her about her book.

Melanchrini draws upon personal experience, history, mythology and often beautifully honed observation, and is a rich feast of a book. As a non-poet, it strikes me that there is something of a storyteller’s sensibility underlying many of the poems in the collection—whether it is the small tale of liberating a stubborn bee from the room, a nightmarish encounter with Larkin (doing things that you would really rather he wasn’t doing), a journey to the banks of the river Lethe, or the unfolding of half-remembered family histories—and so much of the interview that follows is about the relationship between poetry, storytelling and prose.

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Q1. Firstly, as the collection is not yet published, could you say a little bit about its origins, about the title Melanchrini, and about yourself as a poet?

The collection is the product of two to three years of work. I didn’t consciously set out to write a collection. When I began writing I’d had some years off poetry, felt quite out of touch with the contemporary scene. I just had an urge to write poetry and would run away to the garden shed when I could and just scribble. Eventually these scribbles became poems. I sent many of them off, some were rejected and some were accepted. I just felt, ‘well what do I really have to lose?’ It wasn’t only just writing, but sharing my poetry with audiences that interested me. I also wanted to hear other people sharing their poetry, because I knew that listening was as important as reading. I began by attending readings and taking part in Open Mic events in my local area. It was by doing this that Nine Arches Press approached me about publishing a pamphlet, which eventually turned into a collection, Melanchrini. The title is a Greek word, meaning ‘dark-featured.’ I’m from a Greek Cypriot background, and I am fluent in Greek. I often include Greek words in my poetry for the reason that the words are authentic and true to my experience. It’s when there’s some truth or honesty in writing that it rings true. Otherwise it falls flat and comes across as false. That does not mean to say that all the poems are autobiographical, it would be terrifying if some of them were! But they come from somewhere real. It still feels a bit foreign to think of myself as a ‘poet,’ I still feel like a newcomer.

Q2. I’m interested by the poets – living and dead – who you feel an affinity with. The influence of Larkin feels strong (and not just in the poem alluded to above), but are there others? The poetry world seems always seems to me, as an outsider, to be a strangely factional one. Do you see yourself as a part of a broader poetry “movement”, or do you see yourself as doing, more or less, your own thing?

I can’t claim to belong to any ‘movement.’ There’s an accepted wisdom that you should read, enjoy and learn and I try to do this. I’m lucky in that I have friends who are poets in my area but this is hardly a faction, more a jolly group of people who like poetry. Perhaps it’s for someone else, with a critical eye to judge where I fit in.

As for poets I like, I find that question impossible to skim down. I wrote the ‘Larkin’ poem as a poke about teaching the work of the same poet day in day out ad infinitum till exam day. As for Larkin himself, I think he’s a fine poet, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with him. I like how Selima Hill answered this question; on being asked who she was influenced by she said ‘everyone.’ However, I’ll try and outline a few favourite poets. Of the living: Mimi Khalvati, Geoff Hattersley, Kathryn Simmons, Roy Marshall, John McCullough, Matt Merritt, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Simon Armitage, Maria Jastrzebska, Eavan Boland, Jamie McKendrick, I could go on. I expect to add other writers to that list as I become more familiar with their work. Of the dead: C.P. Cavafy, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara. I’ll stop now. Larkin too maybe, I read his poem ‘The Explosion’ the other day and was struck by its clarity and ability to be so moving.

Q3. One of the things that strikes me about your book is how satisfyingly put-together it is. Poetry is often something that is encountered in small chunks: whether in literary magazines, at readings, on buses or elsewhere. So it was a pleasure to read a collection that had such a strong sense of overall structure to it, a book that felt as if it demanded to be read in a single sitting. What were the problems and difficulties involved in putting together a collection (rather than just crafting individual poems)?

Thanks very much! Ordering the poems didn’t take that long, I was really surprised by this, because I thought it would take weeks and be of the utmost importance. Which, to be fair, I think it is. There has to be some energy between different poems and ordering them badly can really disrupt the flow of a book. In the first instance I put all the titles of my poems on a screen and kept moving them around till I had a ‘mock’ contents page. Then I printed off the poems and put them in that order. I read them out and physically moved the poems around into different groups and orders, relying on instincts. My editors also had some influence, but generally they seemed fairly pleased with the way I ordered the poems. I would avoid the ‘throw-them-in-air-and-order-them-how-they-land’ approach, unless I was at my wits’ end or if I wanted to have a little fun experimenting. What I have learnt about the ordering process is the importance of reading poetry collections in a linear way and not just diving into them. Someone has probably spent a lot of time contemplating the order of their poems.

Q4. You seem to me to be both a natural poet (if there is such a thing) and also a natural storyteller. Do you see yourself as telling stories through your poetry? And – this relates to my previous question as well – is there a broader story that you are telling in Melanchrini?

If there is a broader story to Melanchrini, I am yet to figure out what it is! I think all writing is to some extent storytelling, it has to come from a particular experience, but it doesn’t have to mean it’s autobiographical. It feels as if it’s more of a scrapbook, although I did work very carefully at ordering the poems in such a way so it would still feel cohesive. I started off with poems which were telling different stories about things which interested me or events which had actually happened to me. As the collection progressed, I found that I was including many more poems which were distant from me, more engaged in detached subject matter. Then I returned to personal themes again at the end. These included poems about being a teenager, losing contact with old friends and a poem which was about getting married and choosing to drop my maiden name. I think you have to let the poems speak for you.

Q5. Sometimes I look enviously at poets because, a writer of prose stories, I can’t help thinking that poets have some advantages over prose writers. Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist makes an interesting point about the distinction between poetry and prose. Poetry, Baker says, is simply poetry. But prose is weirdly corralled into two different parts of the bookshop: one for fiction (supposedly made up stuff), and one for non-fiction (supposedly not made up stuff). When I read that, I found myself feeling very jealous of all you poets, as it seems to me that there is a serious limitation in splitting prose into these two broad categories of “fiction”, on the one hand, and “non-fiction” on the other. Reading Melanchrini, I was struck by how it seems to take full advantage of the poet’s ability to move between the invented and the recollected, between myth and history between what would, in prose, be called “fiction” and what would be called “non-fiction”. Do you think that writing poetry gives you a kind of freedom that you wouldn’t have in prose? And how do you see yourself moving between these different domains of the invented and the recollected, the historical and the mythical, and so on.

I think there’s a great deal of freedom in poetry to do whatever you feel like doing. A lot of my poems are ‘snapshots’ of events; based on particular aspects of memory and experience, but even within those snapshots there’s often a thread or narrative holding them together. I like the surreal, and many people have commented on this. I don’t consciously decide to write surreal poems, they just happen. What I sometimes think of normal is seen as unusual by others, which is surprising and perhaps just a little disconcerting. The question of ‘truth’ in poetry is such a broad one and I think what you say as moving ‘between the invented and the recollected, between myth and history’ is absolutely right. I do this, as many poets do, largely unconsciously.

I heard from many different poets and critics the idea that a poet’s debut collection tends to be the most autobiographical of their work, but I’m not always convinced that’s true. Christopher Reid’s collection, A Scattering, deals with the highly emotive issue of his wife’s death. I think the need to write about such events truthfully must sometimes outweigh the need to write in a detached or surrealistic way.

Q6. Finally, Melanchrini is coming out later this year. Are there any other projects – in poetry or prose – that you are working on at the moment?

I don’t have any projects as such, I tend to write individual poems and then reflect on them, looking for connections in terms of themes, images or ideas. I did have one idea for a project, but it refused to ‘play’ and now I’ve gone back to writing individual poems again. I would dearly love to write a novel some day, but I’m not in any rush. For the last few years I’ve had an inexplicable urge to write poetry. I can’t say where this urge came from, it’s almost as if I wasn’t always aware that I was writing poems at first. I would write them and then think, ‘my word, I’ve just written a poem! Where did that come from?’ Being a writer is more than simply wanting to be a writer or worrying about getting published, it’s something you can’t stop yourself from doing. You wake up in the morning and have an idea you simply have to commit to paper; you do this without thinking or analysing the process, then you put it away and go downstairs for breakfast. You have, to some extent, surprised yourself by the writing process. That, to me, is what writing is about.

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Maria Taylor’s Melanchrini will be available from Nine Arches Press in July 2012.