Matthew Sweeney was born in Co Donegal in 1952. His poetry collections include Blue Shoes (Secker & Warburg, 1989); Cacti (Secker & Warburg, 1989); The Bridal Suite (London, Jonathan Cape, 1997); and A Smell of Fish (Jonathan Cape, 2000). A selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 12 (London, Penguin, 1997). He is the co-author with John Hartley Williams of Writing Poetry (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1997). He has co-edited, with Jo Shapcott, the anthology Emergency Kit, Poems for Strange Times (London, Faber & Faber, 1996), and with Ken Smith, Beyond Bedlam, Poems Written Out of Mental Distress (London, Anvil Press, 1997). Awards include the Prudence Farmer Prize (1984); Cholmondely Award (1987); and the Henfield Writing Fellowship (1986). In 1999, he received an Arts Council of England Writers Award. In 1994/95 he was Writer in Residence at the South Bank, London. He lives in London

Richard Marshell: You're an Irish writer. It seems there are many fine writers of poetry coming out of Ireland. Heaney, Muldoon, Paulin.

Matthew Sweeney: The Irish thing can be exaggerated. But there are some reasons why it might happen. Where I come from in Ireland, Donegal, the oral story telling tradition was very prevalent. You got used to hearing people fictionalise and also pretending to remember. But if you listened to the stories they told four or five times they would keep changing. And I like that, and still in Donegal if I'm in a bar and everyone's singing they'll say to me æGive us a poem.' So I'll give a poem and people will listen to it and then maybe they'll ask me for another one. So there is still some kind of a place for poetry, and sometimes, on very few occasions, you get to be made aware of the fact that traditionally in parts of Ireland the poet had an important role to play. For example, one of my poems published in the late 80s was called "Where Fishermen Can't Swim". It came about because there was this young teenager who drownedùa lot of the kids there leave school early and go unemployed, or work on the boats. He was working on a lobster boat and he drowned because he couldn't swim and I was left in no doubt by some friends of mine in Donegal that I was expected to respond to this. I remember the poem took a long time and normally if a poem is taking a long time I just throw it awayùf-ck off, I don't want you, I can't be bothered with youùbut because I felt I had to write this one I really stuck at it and put it through draft after draft after draft. In other words, I wasn't going to let it go because there was that thing on it. Another exampleùa cousin of mine died and I was told by her brother that he wanted me to come up with an elegy for the funeral. And again I felt this total duty to do this. And I really like the poem that came out. It's called "Goodbye to the Sky" and is from The Bridal Suite .

RM: So where would you place yourself in terms of poetic tradition? You mentioned the oral, storytelling, vernacular line.

MS: I don't consider myself an oral poet. I believe very strongly that a poem exists in two territoriesùthe visual, read territory and the oral, heard one. And I want my poems to work both ways. My friend Thomas Lynch in America is a poet and an undertaker and he has a jingle that goes, "Before it is a written and read thing, it is a heard and a said thing" and I like that. One important experience that makes me write as I do is having done a German degree in what was then The North London Polytechnic and in the University of Frieburg. I did the German degree because I love Kafka. That was the motivation for doing that. I really like all those writers I studied there. I often read in Germany and the readings go down well. I was reading in one of the German Universitiesùin Berlin one timeùand this old Professor called Schumann took me out with some of his best students to a restaurant and said to me, "Mr Sweeney I have been thinking as I listened to you this evening and as I read your poetry before you arrivedùand please tell me if this is nonsenseùbut I have been thinking that you are maybe continuing a line of German literature which contemporary German poets do not." And I said, "The line you're talking about is Buchner, Kleist, Trakl, Kafka, Grass, Boll." He said, "Exactly. Can this be so?" I said, "I studied and I love each of those writers."

RM: So why are you so drawn to them?

MS: The tradition I come from, the Irish Tradition, is open to what I call Alternative Realismùit's open to going beyond the borders of realism. It's also open to mixing up the humorous and the serious, and in a way that the English tradition is not so open to. And so I saw round the back the same thing with a little bit of darkness added and that appealed to meùEuropean darkness. So I made this big connection and it was wonderful. Exciting.

RM: What about Beckett?

MS: I love Beckett. I adore Beckett. When I was in my final year at school (we were twenty-three miles north of Dublin) my head of English took three of us out to the Abbey Theatre to see what's become a celebrated and quite notorious Waiting For Godot with Peter O'Toole in it. Beckett apparently hated the performance. I thought it was amazing. I'd never come across anything like it. And I came away from that theatre thinking two thingsùthat I hadn't a clue what was going on there, and also that it was amazing. That it was the most amazing thing I had ever come across. And it reverberated in my head for weeks afterwards

RM: So who are the contemporary writers we should be reading?

MS: There's some really good writing going on now. For me the Irish novel I've liked the best in the last ten, fifteen years is The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe. Very dark, a powerful book, and much better than the film. The tone is what carries it throughùit's a lesson in how tone can make or break a book. I'm very interested in the American Yugoslav born poet Charles Simic. I like what he does. The fable-like quality of it. The way it's serious without stating æI'm serious'. It seems to be much lighter than it is. I like that effect. The subterranean pull of a piece of writing. Again, it's tone. The poet who meant most to me when I was starting out was Sylvia Plath. I only had two books of poems in the mid 1970sùCrossing the Water and Ariel. I carried them everywhere with me. A lot of the poems I was writing then were riddled with their influence. And I went up to Ted Hughes at a party in the 80s organised by Faber and he was on his own and I went over and said, "I just want to tell you that Sylvia was the poet who meant most to me when I was starting out and that I had those two books and learned much of what I'll ever learn about writing poetry from them. Possibly more from Crossing the Water although I know now Ariel is the better book. . ." And he said to me, "I used to think that. I no longer think that. I now believe that everything Sylvia wrote was touched by her own particular magic." And then I told him that I had done two of her poems from Crossing the Water in a workshop that week at the South Bank Centre where I was writer in residence and he smiled and said, "I remember Sylvia writing those poems. We were in America and she thought she was writing like Elizabeth Bishop." Which is fascinating because you remember the poems and think æOf course! Yes! Yes!' And we talked about her some more and talked about some of the pieces that would later be in Birthday Letters that I'd started to see around and then I left him alone and was leaving about half an hour later when one of the women from Faber came up to me and said "Ted wants to take you to dinner." So I went to dinner with him and his and Sylvia's son Nicolas and it was wonderful. I went home thinking, æThat's as near to Sylvia as I'm going to get.'

RM: What do you think of Ted Hughes as a poet?

MS: I think Ted Hughes is very uneven but his best poetry is wonderful. Those first two books still read so powerfully now. I can't imagine the effect they must have had in the poetic community when they came out first. And I find Crow very interesting, although some of the obituaries were really scathing about it. I find it very interesting because it tried to connect with that European tradition. At his best he's terrific. He dipped a bit towards the end and the Birthday Letters and the Tales From Ovid are not as brilliant as people are making them out to be, although they are a good bit of a return to form and in the Birthday Letters there are some poems such as "You Hated Spain" which are as good as anything he did. But some of the poems whereùand I'm biased in this because I'm such a fan of Sylviaùhe went over the same ground as Sylvia did are ill judged because in almost every case Sylvia's poem is stronger. Whereas in "You Hated Spain", what makes it such a wonderful poem is that he manages to echo Sylvia and give us a picture of Sylvia yet remain Ted. It's an amazing poem. It shows you how the whole book could have worked.

RM: What do you make of all this Heaney vs. Muldoon argument? Heaney looking back, Muldoon looking forward?

MS: I'm not going to be drawn onto one side or the other on this. There's too much of that kind of thing going on. Both poets like and respect each other and each other's work. Muldoon's work is very ludic, very post-modern in all its tricksiness and getting cleverer and cleverer.

RM: Is it about writers who don't want to write about the writing and would rather approach culture and stuff as a series of soap operas?

MS: I think so. Muldoon's kind of writing is perfect for that kind of post modern stuffùperfect for articles and books and all that kind of thing. Its not necessarily a bad thing (although it might be for some), and its not what all Muldoon's poetry is about. For instance there's the long poem from the Annals Of Chile, the elegy "Incantata", which has loads of emotion, and is an amazing poem. And I like Heaney too. I reviewed the last bookùfavourably, needless to say. It's so good for the Irish poetry football team that we have two classy players like that.

RM: So what about your own poems?

MS: I have a selected poems coming out in March in Canada and England which is nice. Cape is putting it out in Englandùthey did my last two collectionsùand VThicule Press is putting it out in Canada. That was a really good thing for me to do. It was very clarifying. You're going through the stuff and you're throwing this out and this out and you get a feeling that after it will be a clean sheet again which means that you'll be freer to try new things in the next book, maybe things that you wouldn't have had the nerve to try before. An interesting stage in any book is when I get to a point where I see a new book taking shape but with this new stuff I'm doing I haven't seen that yet. I just see all these poems coming that are slightly different and I'm just enjoying the difference and the way they are flying around. And I'm in no hurry anyway. The selected isn't until March so I'll wait until after that before I start thinking æOK, so now we have all these poems, lets move towards a collection.' Every collectio has to have its own character and all of the ones I've done have had completely different characters. Just as much as my two kids have different personalities.

RM: You sound positive about poetry. I was reading an essay by Mandelstam a little while ago where he complains that there are too many people writing poetry and not enough reading the stuff. Is that something you're aware of?

MS: I think that is a danger. I like to make the point when I'm doing workshops in schools or whatever that reading and writing poetry are two sides of the same coin. You can't expect to write poems if you don't read them. And what makes me optimistic is seeing how you can read at a festival to a couple of hundred maybe and they really seem to like it and there's a queue to take books away and you realise that very few of those people would be writers. So somehow poetry supplies something for them in their lives and that's nice and how it should be. And I think one of the reasons for that, and why there might have been a small poetry boom in the last fifteen years is because a lot of poets are learning how to get up there in front of an audience and be decent to their own lines in putting them across. This goes back to reclaiming that oral ground that is also part of the poem. It's nice to come into schools, doing writing with kids and seeing them enjoy what they doùmaybe they're reluctant at the beginning and then despite themselves they get into it. In every class there are always a couple of kids who are more original, more inventive than the rest and I used to wonder if these would be the people who would be published by the big publishers fifteen years later. I don't necessarily think that anymore. Maybe if they enjoy writing poems they might become readers of poems. Poetry needs readers of poems. ò

Richard Marshell is chief editor for 3am magazine.