Tell us more Mr Fagan! This is your first time recording spoken poetry to disc….how did it come about?
I started going over my old and new poems trying to work out what would be best to read for the John Cooper Clarke gigs earlier this year and I realised the way I read them to myself might not be the way other people read them off the written page, and thought my read is probably more to my liking than someone else’s, so also thought I might as well document my read, so there’s no future ambiguity about how I thought they should be read in perpetuity….
Where recorded?
On a little ship hundreds of miles from land.
Challenges, disadvantages, benefits of writing and recording at sea?
Disadvantages: The ship rolls incessantly, so the physicality of recording can become a challenge. It’s a ship without sails so engine noise, air conditioning noise and associated vibrations can also be a challenge.
Benfits:The benefits of physical and social isolation from mainstream society (when off watch) brings out the creative essence of everyone.
You dive in and out of Poetry….why keep going back for more?
I’m not sure….. you’d have to hypnotise me and ask my sub-conscious self that question….
In Wellington (where you grew up) were you writing poems before lyrics for songs?
Only teenage love poems that have hopefully been lost with the passage of time.
Poems vs song lyrics process….some words end up poems, others as song lyrics?
For me song lyrics are usually constrained by the parameters of melody and phrase which comes first and naturally in the song writing experience. Fitting words into those parameters that demand emotional appropriateness constitutes lyrics.
Poems exist without melodic constraint which for me is a major point of difference. Poems are about distilling the emotional essence of a thought, chasing words out of self-conscious corners, drilling the words down into the most concise parcel of communication that hopefully someone else can understand and relate to.
You seem to have been under-going a recent major creative burst…why?
At sea I’m without the terrestrial distractions that bind us all to the usual emotional, social, and must cynically say, mundane preoccupations…..If you’re that way inclined you find the time to apply yourself to what sub-consciously really matters to you, and I guess this stuff matters to me….
Who do you think will appreciate this more – literary types or the person on the street?
I write primarily for myself. Anyone else who gets it is a bonus. Generalising, I’ve found that academics and ‘literary types’ that I know seem to be surprisingly emotional retarded individuals blunted by their ‘braininess’ to some degree and seem to find security in insular perspectives. Certainly not people whose opinions I would court or whose company I could endure for longer than a glass of wine at some over-rated book launch….
Which poets do you most admire?
A.R.D. Fairburn and Dylan Thomas. Old school poets. They shaped their poems to the strict edits of meter and had pathos. I recommend ‘The Estuary’ by Fairburn and Dylan Thomas came before Bob Dylan….enough said.
Dylan Thomas was into Syllabic Count style poems which at my best I also aspire to. It’s a compelling discipline to work within, although the way I read my poems, it’s hard to identify that medium at work…. .
Are there differences/si­milarities reading poems live compared to rock gigs?
People look at you and listen, that’s a similarity. You don’t have the sonic security blanket of the band so that’s a major difference….
Tell us about these recurring themes and scenarios in your poems.
The subliminal turmoil of human emotional interactions contrasted with the eternal indifference of the planet we live on.
This new release ‘It Was Always Going To Be Like This’ combines spoken poetry with what you have described as ‘noises’, what was your approach to creating the soundtrack?
I read my poems then revisited them looking to put an appropriate sound texture behind them to hopefully amplify the emotional impact of the thoughts and words. The whole process was trance like. Every sound that presented itself seemed to force itself sub-consciously on me. It was fun and felt entirely other worldly, even though my immediate real world was rolling on the ocean swells at the time.