When did you start writing poetry?

Probably when I was about nine or ten. I really liked the Chronicles of Narnia books, so I’d write little poems about griffins and unicorns. They were awful! I still have them, though. I don’t like getting rid of stuff.

What do you write about now, as opposed to then?

It’s come a long way from the unicorns! The poet Helen Mort said my poems were “ways of seeing”, which I found very flattering, because I love John Berger’s book [of the same name]. I like not being set to a certain path, seeing things from different angles. I worry a lot, “do I have a voice as a poet? Do I have a poetry policy?” But I don’t, you don’t have to. You can just look at things in different ways. I like noticing small things that people say, or do, and generally fictionalising them or expanding on them in a fictional way.

So is that how you start a poem? You don’t sit down and think, “I want to write a poem about this”?

I can’t do the sitting down thing, I’ve tried. I always force it and it never ends well. It’s really weird, but a line will just pop into my head. I don’t think that I think in words; I don’t notice myself thinking in words generally, but I must do a bit, because I look at something and then my brain will just describe it in words in a weird way and I’ll think, “Oh, hang on, that’s a good line”. I keep looking at it and thinking about it, and hopefully more lines will emerge. Then I just run to the nearest bit of paper or computer and try and hold it in my head all the way and then do things with it. Sometimes there’s not enough to spin something out of, but generally there is, which is always surprising.

What’s the best poem you think you’ve ever written?

My favourite poem of mine at the moment is a poem called “The Fire Manifesto”. I wrote the poem when I didn’t get in to Magma [poetry magazine] and I was really upset so I went outside and BURNED A FLOWER. [laughs] I ended up just looking at the looking at that burning flower, and thinking about that and the sea, because I like the sea... it’s fairly abstract and weird. I worked on it with Vahni Capildeo [Poetry Fellow at Murray Edwards]. Last summer term I wasn’t writing and felt very depressed about not writing. I went to her and she said, “Well, you know, you don’t write to be published, you write because you want to write.”

So do you find writing therapeutic?

Rarely, I think. The annoying thing about feeling very down about not writing is that it doesn’t actually help you write. People are right when they say that poetry often comes out of sadness, but I think when you’re just in a state you can’t be creative. And then you try, and it’s really bad, and you feel worse.

What are your main poetic influences?

I really like Emily Berry, who’s writing now. She writes about the experiences of a modern woman, which I can really relate to. But in terms of poetry, I always worry about reading a poem and thinking, “I’m going to write a poem like this”, because it’s sort of plagiarism... I think I’d be very tempted to just steal a line and change the words in a way that isn’t really OK. There are OK ways of taking a poem and writing in a similar form. The Denise Levertov poem “What Were They Like?” is wonderful - the first stanza is questions and the second is answers, and the answers are very abstract and sad and weird... It’s beautiful. I think using a form like that is fine.

I really like going to art galleries... There was a really good exhibition at the Tate Modern about Surrealism, it had loads of Picassos in it and it was wonderful. I went twice, and, without intending to, I started writing really small vignettes - because it was a Surrealist exhibition they didn’t really make any sense, but I really liked them! They don’t have a narrative, so it’s a fairly static kind of series, but I’d like to do something with it.

Why poetry, rather than short stories or...?

I find poetry better suited to the sentiments I want to express and the ways I want to express them. Poems - they’re slightly fragmented. Unless it’s a prose poem, there are generally line breaks, these odd breaks in them. They’re almost like a collection of fragments, even if they make sense. I don’t know whether I think in a more fragmented way... I definitely speak in it [laughs]. So that appeals to me, and there’s more scope to put pretty images in there, and I’m a sucker for pretty images about the sea. If there’s a nice image of the sea, I love it - I’m incapable of thinking critically of it.

And birds...

And birds and fire and stars. Prose... when I was little I had lots of ideas for adventure and fantasy stories, but it’s always filling in the middles, you know, the evenings around the campfire... what are you gonna say about that? I could always imagine the battles, the exciting bits, but you’ve got to fill it in.

Do you see yourself as a professional poet in the future?

It’s not really a job, certainly not any more. I don’t think it ever really has been a job... you need something to do with your time. But I think in the future poetry is the only definite thing I know I want to do... Being an academic is not going to happen, so I’ll just work in a bookshop.