Interview with Daniel Sluman

WG: Daniel, recently in the Huffington Post, Robert Peak mentioned you as one of "Five British Poets to Watch In 2015." That's quite compliment. What are you going to be doing in 2015 that readers should watch for?

DS: Yes, it was very much a pleasant surprise, thank you. The majority of 2015 will be about preparing and finishing off the manuscript of my second collection, the terrible. Sometime in the summer my editor and I will sit down and sort out the final order of the book, and it'll be published this winter. Until then, I'll be sending poems out to journals, so people should be able to get an idea of what the book is going to be like, "citalopram" is one, and that was published in the last issue of Wordgathering.

This year I'll also be continuing work on my PhD in disability poetics at Birmingham City University, which I started in October of last year. The creative aspect of this research will hopefully turn into my third collection; a book-length poem written from the perspective of the disabled body, so I'm starting to get to grips with a very different type of writing for that project.

My only editorial duty this year is continuing my co-editorship of an anthology of British disabled poetry. We're too early to know when this will be completed, but it will be published by Nine Arches Press; the same press who published my debut, and will be publishing the terrible. I'm working alongside the wonderful Markie Burnhope, and Sandra Alland, for the anthology, and we'll be calling out for submissions shortly. We're not aware of anything too similar to this project in the UK, so we're incredibly excited.

WG: Can you talk a little more about the terrible? How does it differ from Absence Has a Weight of Its Own?

DS: I think debuts are often an introduction to the type of content and themes the writer is interested in, and the second collection hopefully builds on that. We're constantly changing as people and that means we're changing as writers too, and the last three years for me has involved a break-up, a new relationship (and engagement), and a massive decline in my mobility and quality of life. I'm a through-hip amputee from bone cancer as a child and my chronic back condition has rapidly worsened and limited what I can and can't do. I wasn't particularly comfortable writing about disability a few years ago, but now I find it difficult not to, with my pain and medication affecting every aspect of life, and so the struggle with my own body, and how that defines me within society is something you can find a lot more in this collection.

I've been looking a lot more inwardly with this book; it's very psychological and talks a lot about concerns which are universal, within all of us to some extent. This includes the desire to be loved and love, how disability interacts within a relationship, and depression. The main thing that relates to the title is anxiety around the what if, the dark underbelly of even the most beautiful, happy things that happen to us, and the belief that everything good in our lives can and will be taken away.

Finally, my interests have changed stylistically as well, so the entire book is written without punctuation, utilising space to indicate breath. None of this is new, but I feel a lot more comfortable now I'm putting a bit of distance away from the form of traditional British lyrical poetry, which I read less and less of. Most of my recent influences have been writers from across the Atlantic, like Brenda Shaughnessy, James Dickey, C.D. Wright, and Rosemarie Waldrop, and I hope this shows in the new poems.

WG: Can you talk us through what the process of writing a poem is like for you? Is it more a matter of "inspiration" or is there a lot of trial, error and revision involved?

DS: I'm certainly in the trial-and-error camp when it comes to the poems themselves. I'm working on a few of them every day, gradually getting all the poems up to a stage where the lines seem fixed to the page and I can't see any further.

I think that inspiration is still a part of it, and to me it can be a very subtle thing, not a sudden bolt of realisation and a complete poem written in a single sitting, but rather any stimulus that generates attention; half a sentence misheard from the radio, something glanced outside the back door, these are the micromoments I collect at first. If there is something I want to investigate further in them, then they usually turn into notes on my phone and then they go through a process which feels very clumsy and time-intensive at times. I transfer the ideas to the computer when the various parts have gestated and seem coherent, and an awful lot of poems then don't make it to the next stage, where they are printed and I can see what they might look like on a page, before deciding what to do with them next. I don't know why transferring the poem into print seems to help so much, but it makes the poem more real for me, which is why I'll now change the font and margins on my drafts to mirror the ones my publisher uses, so it seems as close to how it would look in a book as possible.

My breakthrough in writing the terrible came last year, when I was finally happy with the way everything had come together in a few new poems – the use of a new form, the different approach to narrative, and the influence of the more difficult poetry I was reading. It now feels like I've found a new voice or a different way of exploring the things that interest me as a writer, and a lot of this had to do with becoming more self-conscious of my process, and being more patient in letting the poems find their own direction without me micromanaging them as much. When I was younger, I would try to force parts of the process that I now know are damaging, it's a fine line in pushing a poem enough to gain momentum, but not too much that you lose all objectivity.

WG: I'd like to pick up on that last thought and tie it in with something you mentioned earlier, your influence by poets like Brenda Shaughnessy, James Dickey, C.D. Wright, and Rosemarie Waldrop. As you said, we are constantly changing. Are there poems in the terrible that you think you simply couldn't have written in Absence Has a Weight of Its Own? If so, can you give an example of one and explain why.

DS: Definitely. Many of the poems in the terrible have been a result of the last three years of change, and a certain amount of self-reflection on which direction I wanted to go in after my first book. As an example, the poem "the hug" was published in a great journal called B O D Y, and I couldn't have written it the way it is for my debut.

I was in the last year of my BA when I got a book deal for Absence…, and my overall knowledge of poetry and theory at that point was a lot more limited in scope than it is now. So the poems in that book are reflective of a lot of the traditional lyric poetry I was influenced by at the time, from the way the poems were laid out in terms of form, the very typical use of punctuation, and a certain template for how lyric poetry works regarding pacing and inner logic.

"the hug" is 33 lines of varying length in a single stanzaic block, which is something I'm utilising more rather than tercets or quatrains, due to my interest in narrative poetry from writers like Dickey, and how they set their work out. There are no commas, full stops, or semi-colons. Reading other poetry without punctuation has helped normalise it for me from a point a few years ago where I really wasn't sure of it, but now the whole book will appear as this does, the spaces giving me more control in indicating length of pause.

I would say that the way I use content is the main difference between this collection and the last. I am still using specific moments in time as context, but the poems from Absence… very much move in a linear fashion, pushing a narrative from beginning to resolution. Now I've been influenced by the ways someone like C.D.Wright makes a poem leap in terms of direction and time, whilst still maintaining emotional impact, Dickey's use of magic realism has also interested me, and it's not something I see too much of in UK journals.

In "the hug", the embrace between two people who seemingly love each other is the immediate context. This is certainly something I could well have written when working on Absence…, but at that time, the metaphor and associations within that poem would have been quite tightly knitted with little deviation, leading the poem from a situation or context, to a resolution that hopefully resonates universally. The difference between my debut and this book is that instead of doing that, I've been a lot freer about where the poem goes in terms of those associations with the initial content, and also through the use of time, this approach being something I see a lot in the works of Sahughnessy and Waldrop. Time moves in a non-linear fashion, as we see the female character's childhood and adolescence re-enacted with concrete or sensory details. Years occur during this one hug, and by the end we find out what's happened, which will hopefully come as a surprise.

In writing the new poems, I've given myself permission to do things like this, to move time or the narrative on at different speeds or in different order, to hopefully build tension in different ways and create more interest by delaying certain expectations the reader may have of lyric poetry like the work that appears in my debut Absence…. It's been a lot of trial and error and risk-taking in writing this book, attempting to leave bigger semantic gaps in the poem so the reader can put more of themselves inside it. This is something I find the most satisfying of all, when I sit in front of somebody else's poem; that it exists as an open communication between the writer and myself. These types of strategies were not on my radar at all three years ago, as it wasn't something I was seeing in the poetry I loved at the time. I've found this different approach I now use to be very difficult and risky at times, as leaving too big a sematic gap will lose the reader, and not using punctuation can also throw some off, but it seems to be a natural part of my development, and three years in between books is a long time not to change as a writer.

WG: I'd like to switch directions a bit not and ask about the anthology that you will be doing for Nine Arches Press. You mention that it is unlike anything that you are aware of in the UK. Tell us a little about the nature of the anthology, what prompted you to want to work on it, and what is it that you hope to achieve.

DS: I can't talk about why we think this book needs to come out in the UK without mentioning Beauty is a Verb, which I know you were heavily involved with. Markie introduced me to the book, and reading about the variety of disabilities in the critical pieces, and how they affected issues around identifying as writer, was a revelation for me. It got me into disability studies in a big way, and inspired to me to do a PhD in Disability Poetics, which I'm about to start. I had never read self-defined poetry from or about disability like that. After Markie and I were finished with the FTW Poets Against Atos online anthology project, I approached my editor at Nine Arches Press, and soon later, we got the news that she would be interested in publishing a new anthology. Markie and I were delighted when Sandra Alland jointed the editorial board, as we hope we now have a skillset between us that can give the best possible chance of making this a success.

The context here in the UK is similar to how it is in America, or certainly how it was before Disability Studies started being seen as a viable area for research. We have had major anthologies out in the UK that cover race, sexuality, and gender, but very little that is specifically based on disability. Politically, disability is a real issue in terms of how people see it and how the government and media demonise it some degree, connecting it with benefit scroungers. The Paralympics came here a few years ago and that created this spectrum of disability where you are either an inspirational figure who strives against their disability to perform an able-bodied identity, or you're faking your condition and illegally claiming money from the welfare system. There isn't much left in between.

It's hard to put concrete goals for this anthology, but we just hope that it will make some difference in perceptions of disability on one level, whilst also helping would-be disabled writers, academics who may be interested in disability as a research area, and also writers who may well have a disability but may be apprehensive in writing about it or think they'll be judged if they do. We're still nailing down the exact format, and I'm sure it may well change depending on the type of submissions we get, but we're looking at combining poetry with self-reflective/critical pieces that help give a deeper understanding of how disability affects the contributors writing and vice-versa. If anybody is interested in keeping up to date with this anthology, the website is https://britishdisabledpoetry.wordpress.com/.

WG: Are there any UK poets whose work you would be interested including in the anthology or whose work, even without the anthology you would recommend to readers interested in disability-related poetry?

DS: I'm biased I know, but external to the anthology, Markie Burnhope's Species has fantastic disability-based writing in it, and my second collection will be centred around my own disabilities much more than my first. With regards to the anthology, this is something we're hoping to come across in the process of making and editing it. When we were involved with Fit To Work: Poet's Against Atos, Sophie Mayer, Markie Burnhope and myself were delighted with the the quality of submissions from writers who explored their relationship to a variety of disabilities, and these writers were often ones we hadn't been acquainted with before. Whether this is due to the lack of discussion around disability and writing, and therefore an implied lack of demand for it, I don't know, but for me this act of discovery is the most exciting part of making this anthology.

WG: I want to thank you for taking the time to discuss your work with us. Before we close is there anything else that you would like to bring up about your own poetry, the upcoming anthology or disability and poetry generally, that we may not have touched upon?

DS:Seeing as it is Wordgathering, I wouldn't mind talking a bit about my relationship to disability and my own writing. When I was eleven I was diagnosed with bonecancer in my left femur, and unlike the majority of cases, my chemotherapy didn't work, so I had to have a through-hip amputation, and have spent the last 17 years on crutches.

When I first started writing, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of working on poems about my disability. I felt that people would make an assumption about the type of poetry I would write whenever I stepped up to read at an open mic. I felt like I would get pigeonholed, and that readers and audiences would be turned off by what I saw myself as whining about my condition and my experiences.

Something changed in the latter stage of writing my debut, and I found it incredibly hard to not write poems about the cancer and how my disability affected my ideology towards life. Even though there are probably five or six poems in that book about disability, they mean a great deal to me, and the reception of the book has helped normalise the idea that poems about disability might actually be enjoyed and engaged with by able-bodied readers.

Since 2012, my back condition has meant that my life has slowed down rapidly, to the point of me spending my life at home, heavily medicated on morphine. Everything I do takes more time, even this interview has probably taken ten times longer than if I wasn't on the painkillers I am. Because I am so much more disabled than I used to be, the poems that will become the terrible are a lot more focused on this, whether it is main content, or it acts in the background.

I feel like I've only now understood what my disability means through the writing I'm doing. Not all of the poems in this book are purely about my condition itself, but more about how it relates to able-bodied society and how I become disabled through that interaction, especially with regards to relationships. I don't think I would have such a firm understanding of my disability and what it means in societal terms without the aid of writing, and hopefully that will show in this next book.

WG: I think these last remarks about the way in which your specific experience with disability informs your poetry and the way that your own thinking about it has changed in this area as you've grown as a writer is valuable for other emeging writers with disabilities to hear. Good luck with your work and thank you again for taking part in the interview.