EJ: Your most recent collection,Where We Might Have Been, is linked through many of the poems to A Dropped Glove in Regent Street. Some of your recollections in the latter become poems in the former. Do many of your poems develop this way, from prose?

DC: I’m sure I’ve done this a few times, don’t know how often. I’m not anxious to overdo the tactic, it can, I think, limit the freedom of movement of the coming poem, predetermine or inhibit its form, narrow or shape it in ways which the poem won’t benefit from. And I’m not just talking about format here, but about the effect of an existing piece of writing to which one is returning for, one hopes, a good reason (.e.g. because one feels that that prose piece’s theme or central image hasn’t been exploited as it ought, the investigation has halted before it should have done), on the writer’s imagination. It’s as if, in using that prose source, you don’t have the totally unblemished white page in front of you, the page bears traces or stains of an origin or map which is other than your best-case uncharted movement into a poem. But I’m straying from your question: the shortest and bluntest answer to ‘do many of your poems develop this way, from prose?’ would be, ‘not many, and I think I’ve never deliberately headed back towards my own published prose on a generalized hunt for a poem; when it’s happened, it’s emerged out of an unpremeditated browse’. It’s clear that the prose most likely to play this sort of role, i.e., prose that can seem profligate in this regard, littered with unwritten poems, will of course vary with whoever’s reading it. To mention one such writer, one who has mattered in this regard to me and also, a sure bet, to hundreds of others, poets and more, there’s the collected correspondence of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century’s finest poets but a man who also wrote thousands of letters, hundreds of which have been published in countless translations; and these are letters wherein you can not only find the stirrings of what would later become poems of Rilke’s own but other stirrings too, incipient thoughts which he lost interest in or simply failed to return to and here they now are, signalling to you of what’s kept so still so long. Writers who can function in this way for you or for me are unlikely to be of the same name for both of us, but with luck and the requisite thousands of hours of reading, there are trouvailles of this nature for us all.

EJ: Can I ask some about your process with a poem? You are known for reworking published poems. How do you see a poem after publication?

DC: I think there’s not a single poem of mine which, if its publisher advised me that they wanted a re-issue and offered me a chance to edit it, would ‘scape whipping. Even if it were only a line-ending or the replacing of a comma with a semi-colon, let alone the more inviting chance to go for one line in place of a stanza, or the even happier prospect of entirely omitting one or more poems from the collection...done deal. I know that not everyone thinks this a good or even a tolerable way to behave: reviewers have now and then regretted that Ur-versions of poems of mine didn’t really exist, Christopher Levenson, for instance, in a generally friendly review, contrasted a newly-arrived version of a poem with an earlier one he’d liked better. But I tend to have one copy of each of my books which has got pencilled improvements on every third or so page, and these altered versions maintain their position over the years. These pages of mine become even more cluttered as time passes but I think they never return to that first version. So, I’m not sentimental here, I don’t “see a poem after publication” as having achieved any status that puts it out of reach of whatever growth or change I may have undergone.

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