Poetry Space

Featured Poet - Andrew Robert Hodgson

Andrew has had several poems featured on Poetry Space since we started. Here he reflects upon the writing process...

Sometimes, writing can feel like trituration. A hegemony of ink on paper and a definitive stall in any or all fecundity. The cadence stammers, or story fails, and the rhythm which bade pen to hand amounts to nothing but exacerbation, a dash of symbols on pulped wood. However, often in the oddest places, it fits together like the inequities of our lives, strung together in perfect conspiracy. Of course, unfortunately, when do you ever have a pen to hand when hiding under a table; or waiting at a bus-stop? I have always viewed writing as whatever bones memory can absolve from these episodes, forced together in the surreptitious manner of Dr. Frankenstein. Not a very eloquent way to write as a matter of fact.

Inspiration, like original sin, was granted me by Douglas Coupland, whose Generation X afforded me a break from parables and Seamus Heaney. That literature did not have to be sentimental, over-boiled lessons on morality, or realities far distant from mine, and representing everything I resented. From this I read further, looking in to the 'beat' writers, and dismissing them quickly in their turn before reaching literature of actual import, Shelley, Byron, Rimbaud, Brooke. And once again fording through historicism, Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, B.S. Johnson and Philip Larkin.

These writers have forged such bowers, characters, tribulations - that to my mind; it would amount to larceny to create any seemingly of my own. Never the less, I have always been a thief so I accept the denigration warmly.

As regards where I am from, where I live, where I am going; there are few facts in this life, and fewer truths. Some might say there are no truths, some might say there are getting on for infinite facts. But that gets all a bit Wittgenstein. My name is Andrew Robert Hodgson. I was born in Kingston-upon-Hull in 1988, a place known well for the almost motherly way Larkin loved the people there. I currently live in Paris, working on a novel concerning what will probably surmount in death, but I began writing it optimistically, so we shall see.

© 'Hugo Jozwicki / la nuit je mens'