What made you want to do poetry? (Layla)
This sounds like such a simple question, but actually it is quite difficult to answer. I'm tempted to say that I kind of 'fell into it', but I know that this answer is not nearly detailed or informative enough. I have always loved words and wordplay, and poetry is the best way that I know of, of playing and having fun with words. When I was at primary school I enjoyed writing rhymes and stories, but I didn't truly become interested in devoting much time to poetry until I was about seventeen, in Sixth Form. We studied a poet called Philip Larkin, and I really got the sense that the emotions being conveyed were deeply in tune with my own. (I was quite a depressed, isolated, angry teenager!). My first attempts at poetry were really embarrassing, and I kind of cringe when I think about them, but I always say that if you want to be a good poet, or good at anything really, you have to be comfortable with being bad at it for a long time, before you hopefully start to get good. I carried on writing poetry at university, and a friend of mine told me about a place in Covent Garden called the Poetry Cafe. Every Tuesday evening they had something called an 'open mic', where anyone can pay a small sum of money to get up and read their work to an audience. This experience is what really got me hooked on poetry. It was when I realised that poetry and words live in the body and the voice, as well as on the page, that I started to think that this is where I belong. I left it for a while after university, but I came back to it in my mid-twenties, and here I am today!
A slightly different question, although one that is closely related, is why did I want to become a children's poet? and the answer is: I didn't. There was never a moment when I sat down and thought to myself 'I really want to write for children'. What happened instead was that I wrote the kind of stuff I wanted to write, that I enjoyed writing, and only then did I think that kids might like it too. I thought back to a time when I was in Year 4, when Michael Rosen came to visit my school, and I recalled the time I saw John Hegley playing live, and I thought that maybe I could do something similar. I also realised that the kind of stuff I enjoyed writing, and reading, wasn't really the kind of stuff that you read in most 'adult' poetry books. I found this kind of writing often quite pretentious, and frequently incomprehensible. I didn't want to write the kind of stuff that only very clever people with PhDs would read. So I wrote what I wanted to write, in a way that I wanted to write it, and it turned out that children enjoy it! My sister is a primary school teacher, and she invited me in to her class to share some of my rhymes with them. And I have never looked back.
Being a poet is not the most highly paid job. I am self-employed, which means I don't have a boss, and I get to go somewhere different every day. I really like this aspect of being a poet, and I think it is one of the reasons I wouldn't want to be a teacher: I wouldn't want to go to the same place ever day!
How many books have you got? (Oliver)
I think that Oliver means 'how many books have I written?', and the answer to this is eight. My first two were self-published, which means that I wrote, designed and paid for them to be printed, all by myself. I then got 'snapped up' by a fancy company called Bloomsbury, who published three more of my books. I also have other books published by Troika and Flying Eye. Hopefully I will write more in the future.
Oliver could also mean 'how many books do I own', and the answer is probably around 500. My wife is an English teacher, so she probably has about 500 too. But my books are better.
