CW: In his forthcoming review of *Dragons*, from which I quoted in
introducing your poems, Joe Duemer laments the failure (as he sees it) of
the "American neo-formalist movement" to produce a poet as "inventive" as
you, and he deems you "a mainstream experimental poet." What do you make of
this implied positioning of your work?

MF: I quite like the tag "mainstream experimental" because it does seem to
express an oxymoronic quality in my writing. Certainly, I sometimes think of
my collections as a mixture of those two categories. When *Blizzard* came
out, there were reviewers who liked the title poem, which I thought of as
"experimental," and others who liked "Occupied City," which I thought of as
"mainstream." It bothered me that no one was giving me credit for trying to
be both.
     But, for me, form has never been the issue that separates the two. In
fact, it's often when I'm most concerned with the formal properties of a
poem that I'm most aware of taking risks and trying something new. There is
a certain kind of loose, readable free verse that I feel under constant
pressure to write--it's what editors in this country seem to be most
comfortable with. And blank verse is equally popular--possibly because some
readers and editors don't realize it's in form. Formal challenges, such as
slant-rhymed syllabics, which I've used a lot, or the more gimmicky ones,
such as ending every line of "Dragons" with the same word or beginning every
word of a poem with the same letter, seem to help me to move outside the
predictable territory of autobiographical realism to somewhere more
imaginative.
     Some of my early influences were the ancestors of the New Formalists,
American academic poets like Lowell and Berryman, who were far more
inventive and interesting than their offspring, though some of their work
has dated a bit. They meant much more to me than the standard British
influences of Auden and Larkin. If I sound more like the latter, it's
probably because I'm a middle-class Englishman and, *pace* recent exchanges
on the subject here, I do think a certain quality of one's speaking voice
gets into one's poetry. I'm not a person who shouts a lot, so I don't write
at the top of my voice either.
     Another big influence on me *as a reader* has been the rich, metrically
complex free verse of Pound, Eliot, and, a more recent discovery, Bunting--
very different from the kind of insipid free verse I was referring to
earlier. I'd love to write that way, but I have no idea how to. There may be
a touch of Bunting in the compressed effect I get in some of my more recent
poems when working with very short syllabic lines--I'd certainly like to
think so.

CW: The *Guardian*'s reviewer of *Blizzard*, elaborating on how "unsettling"
your work is, called it "disingenuously plain in address, delicately
sophisticated in form, and yet time and again pulling the solid ground away
to introduce notes of intangible terror, loss, or love." This is a good
description of the effect your poems have on me--the way their quietness and
apparent modesty lulls the reader into a false sense not of security exactly
(because there's tension in them from the outset), but more of a false sense
of *familiarity*, which you then proceed to make strange. Sometimes you do
it with an unexpectedly funny question, such as "When did they blow in?"
("Blizzard"); sometimes it's an oddly skewed detail that signals the poem's
turn into the curve of its own (other) reality, as in "Blizzard" again,
after the couple (presumably) find themselves "cut off" from the lights on
the other side of town and isolated where "there were no / stars, and the
road was overcast." Can you talk about your process in terms of these
moments? Do they relate to, say, the recurrent dream(er) motif and figure in
your poems?

MF: Yes, that's what I'm always hoping to do with my poetry. I don't on the
whole want to challenge readers from the outset. I try to draw them in, make
them comfortable, and then disorientate them when they're not expecting it.
I'm interested in the dark side of everyday life and, yes, absolutely
fascinated by sleep and dreams. It almost embarrasses me how much I've
written about them, but I can't seem to tear myself away from the subject.
The fact that for a third of our lives the normal rules of reality don't
apply seems to me wonderfully liberating, and I suppose I'm trying to extend
that liberation into the daylight world.
     Another fascination, as you say, is the double-edgedness of language,
the way an ordinary remark can take on an extra dimension of meaning, as in
your "When did they blow in?" example, or the way you can say something
quite bizarre in words so simple that people don't at first notice, like the
"you being me" of "Outside My Window" or--the first line of this kind I ever
remember writing, in a poem called "The Inferno of Ascupart Street," which
is otherwise fairly forgettable--"Tuesday is closed for the winter."

CW: To follow up with some other recurrent elements of your poetry, it
strikes me as highly telluric, very attached to the ground, whether country
path or city street, not to mention all those woods your poems traverse. I'm
wondering about the effect on a poetry so *scaped* of your move from England
to Wales--how radical a move was it for you as a poet? Or have you perhaps
continued to write from and on the basis of a landscape that's internalized
by now? Also, given all those landgauge poems of yours, I'm wondering how it
came to pass that when the Poetry Society commissioned a poem, you went to
the beach and produced "Ocean"! A major work, with its own URL
(http://www.poetrysoc.com/places/francis.htm)--and readers can find the
stunning accompanying photographs here, too--"Ocean" also partakes of the
"long poem" subgenre (is it your longest, by the way?).

MF: Actually, "Blizzard" is my longest poem, at 420 lines. "Ocean" is only
280, but it has a lot more spacing in it. My poems are becoming more spaced
out all the time.
     Certain landscapes and locations have been very important to me as a
person: the New Forest, where I went for a walk almost every week for years,
the streets of Winchester--which form the background not only to the
Winchester poems of *Dragons* but also to "Blizzard"--Winchester Cathedral,
the cliffs and beaches of west Cornwall, where I've spent many holidays. It
seems to take a long time for these to become so familiar that I'm able to
write about them: Winchester was mostly anonymous in my earlier poems and
wasn't named and described in detail until I was just about to leave. And I
was for years unable to write about Cornwall, though it remains perhaps my
favorite place in the world. Finally, it got into the first two sections of
"Ocean," though still unnamed. The Welsh landscape is staggeringly
beautiful, so much so that it makes most of the countryside of southern
England look like a theme park, but so far it's only got into one poem
("Dragons"). I hope I'll write more about Wales when I've got to know it
better.
     But your point about the landscape being internalized is very shrewd.
The landscapes only play a major part in my poems because they have symbolic
resonance for me, and in a sense they're not real places at all. The point
of the forest, for example, is that you can get lost in it. This has
happened to me often enough in real life--forests are very confusing places,
since one tree looks much like another--but it does mean that the forest
becomes a kind of topographical equivalent of my dreamworld, a place where
no one can be sure of anything anymore. The designers ["Interior Designers
in the Forest"] and museum visitors ["Museum of the Forest"], who think of
it as something that can be understood in purely human terms, get their
comeuppance in the end. And the ocean is really another kind of forest, a
place where the non-human rules and which, because of its darkness, is
another sort of dreamworld. Take the sperm whale *in situ*, for example:

This was a sperm whale that swam with outriding dolphins,
that hung from the swell to sleep, disturbed the ocean
as it plunged into the darkness to hunt squid.
It is deeper than ever now, opened

and stinking, the squid's parroty beaks
spilled out on the floor. The red shrimp
and rat-tail fish tear the white

from its last rags of blue.
It will be gone soon,

a weight lifted.

("Ocean")

They do, by the way, "hang from the swell to sleep" (i.e., sleep vertically
just under the surface) and "swim with outriding dolphins." The dolphins
seem to enjoy the racing water created by the whale's swimming.

CW: If the ocean is, as you say, "another kind of forest," what happens, for
your poetry, when a manmade structure like your trademark cathedral comes
into play?

MF: There's a good dose of old-fashioned Romantic nature-writing in my
treatment of landscape. My excuse is that I feel the relationship between
the human and the natural is something we're still desperately in need of
working out. I know I mythologize it (in my slightly ironic way), but that's
a better option than ruling it out altogether. It's nonsense to suppose a
human being could walk on the bottom of the ocean and encounter all those
sea creatures, but that's the only way I can make their world imaginatively
real, and it's essential to do that if we're to understand our own position.
     The cathedral has a slightly different function. There's another theme
in my poetry, no doubt equally romanticized--that of community. What I love
about cathedrals is that they're the apotheosis of the house: "a house so
tall / flying things are at home there" I call it in one poem. A house, that
is, that can contain the human and the animal (bats and so on), the living
and the dead. In fact, it's so big that there are other houses inside it,
the chantries and chapels, little roofed structures within the greater one.
Much of my writing, and perhaps "Blizzard" most of all, is touched by the
dream of an ideal community--it's a theme I encountered when studying the
work of W. S. Graham, and which I came to realize is as important to me as
it was to him. (In fact, it seems to me a major theme in post-1900 British
poetry, and I've sometimes toyed with the idea of writing a book about it.)
Of course, it's mythical, just as the dream of a perfect rapport with nature
is mythical, but such fantasies are a way of understanding the problems that
beset real communities. The community of "Blizzard" is almost undefined;
there are no distinct characters in it, and one pronoun tends to slide into
another, but that indeterminacy is in constant tension with the poem's
emphasis on the importance of living together. For a supposedly pastoral
poet, I write quite a lot about cities, and there's always this doubleness
in the way I write about them--an unstable compound of alienation and
intimacy.

CW: Speaking of fantasy, I know from an earlier discussion on Poetryetc that
you're a reader of horror fiction--a genre with which "Museum in the
Forest," for one, is certainly resonant--and there's more than a hint of the
supernatural in your work generally--thinking not only of "A Ghost," but
also of the "time out of mind" experience (jamais or deja vu) you capture in
"Occupied City" and "Sleepers," for example. How do you see these effects in
your poetry--what brings them to bear and how do they operate relative to
the dream- and natural worlds of the poems?

MF: My love of the supernatural is probably related to my love of dreams.
Reality seems to be something I'm always trying to escape from. And I've
complained on the list before of the problems I have with fantasy fiction: I
love to read it when it's believable, and for me it hardly ever is; I'd love
to write it, but so far I haven't come close except in some of my poems in
which it's easily rationalized away as metaphor. I don't believe in ghosts
or UFOs or farfetched conspiracy theories, but they fascinate me
nevertheless. Part of me is hardheaded and matter-of-fact and part of me is
crazy about fantasy. I see the first two poems in *Dragons*, the title poem
and "Ocean," as summing up that dichotomy: the first tells of the monsters
of the imagination, while the second tells of the monsters of the real
world. It's significant, of course, that the hunt for dragons turns out to
be a failure--and also that, as I said before, it's necessary to include an
element of fantasy in the portrayal of the real world. (One inexperienced
reader of poetry was completely thrown by the way I allowed my walker to
breathe underwater; in fact, the conceit comes from the scientific essay on
which "Ocean" was based.)
     The power of poetry, and the reason I return to it again and again when
I'm also very drawn to fiction and would like to write another novel, is
that it's so much less tied to realism than the novel, which has to evoke
the detailed everyday texture even of its fantasy worlds. You can get away
with so much more in a poem.