Sheenagh Pugh

This page first came about because my Selected Poems got put on an A-Level syllabus and I started getting questions from students. Some came up often and I thought perhaps I could save us all some time and email. Then, however, the FAQs page became so long that I decided on a reorganisation. This page will be for general questions - eg why did you start writing, why do you write sequences, etc - and the other FAQs page is now for questions on specific poems - eg what is Tulips about. So if individual poems are what you want to know about, go there. I have also added a page specifically for those with exams coming up! It may also be worth looking in the Guestbook.

This accessibility thing....

Every so often, someone doing AS-Level asks me why poems have to be so hard to work out; why can't they be more accessible, and is surprised when I reply that a lot of critics think I'm far too accessible already. The answer (my answer anyway) is twofold: (i) art works best if it's a participant sport, not a spectator sport. In other words, if you leave the reader some space to come at the meaning, instead of spelling it all out for him, it'll make a greater impact.
(ii) having said that, there's a difference between avoiding the obvious and just not communicating clearly enough, and I do think a lot of contemporary work is needlessly "difficult". To those who say you can't write about difficult subjects in any other way, I'd reply that Milton did. (He can be turgid, but he's very rarely hard to understand.) A lot of the time, if some idea isn't clear to the reader it's because it wasn't entirely clear to the writer either.

How do you pronounce your name?

Sheenagh rhymes with Gina; Pugh rhymes with Hugh.

What made you start writing?

I wish I knew. The best guess I can make is that my mother was an infant-school teacher and was always singing songs or reciting poems, and so I wanted to imitate her by making my own. I was trying to write poems from a very early age (about five, and they were awful). But she encouraged me to go on, and if you do that with a child it generally works - my two were keen on music so I bought them instruments and found them classes, and they now play very well. Maybe everyone has lots of potential talents but they don't all get to explore them. Though it must be partly nature too - nothing would have turned me into an athlete, for instance!

Why won't you let your poems appear in women-only anthologies?

Because I think shunting poems into some ghetto like "women's poetry" or "black poetry" implies that they are somehow not relevant to anyone outside that particular ghetto. And because I see myself as a poet who happens to be female, not a "woman poet". And when Johnny Cash's record company defined his music as "rockabilly" he said, "You put me in a box, I'm gonna break out of it".

Why do you write so many poems in other personae, rather than "personal poems"?

Putting them in another voice doesn't necessarily mean they aren't personal; it could just mean I want someone else to hide behind. I have, in fact, written more poems about my family than might appear, but not usually so you can tell! The poem "The Railway Modeller" in Selected Poems is about my husband, and "Sandman", which I think was in Id's Hospit, is more or less autobiographical. If I were going to write a very personal poem I certainly wouldn't put it in my voice; I'd use someone else's to get more distance and stop the poem becoming sentimental or self-pitying. And I don't much like poems that use the first person plural - we did this, we went there - because as a reader I feel excluded by them in a way I don't by the "I" voice. They're like the poet is saying: this is me in my little group of family or friends, and it doesn't include you. But I also love getting inside other people's heads because it's liberating and fun.

Where do you get ideas for poems from?

Things I've heard people say on buses or trains, history (there are better stories in history books than in any novel), newspapers, books, TV, the Net, odd things that happen to me, or would have happened if real life were a better writer.

Why do you use so much sea imagery?

I didn't know I did, until someone mentioned it. It's probably personal; my father, uncle and several great-uncles were seamen.

What are your favourite themes?

Mortality, people in extreme situations, celebration, human contact, men as sex objects, cyberspace, the fluid boundary between truth and fiction.

Who are your favourite poets?

Going roughly backwards in time, Edwin Morgan (who now has an official web site), Mark Doty, Louise Glück, Sorley MacLean, George Mackay Brown (whose dedicated web site is here), Louis MacNeice, George Herbert, Robert Henryson, Sir Thomas Wyatt. But that's only the English-language ones (I know MacLean wrote in Gaelic but he translated his own poems). Add other languages and you'd have Stefan George, Andreas Gryphius, Constantin Cavafy and Anakreon, among others. If I had to choose one, Henryson.

Which is your favourite poem ever?                                                                                                                                            

That changes, though there are some that are always very high up on my list (Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid", Edwin Morgan's "The Unspoken", Paul Henry's "Heredity"). But the one I currently carry about with me is Paul Muldoon's "Meeting the British", because it's so spare and makes words work so hard. And because it's very moving. I haven't much use for poems that don't try to engage my emotions as well as my intellect. Muldoon has a new poem, "The Otter", from Moy Sand and Gravel, which intrigues me a lot, with a rhyme scheme he's borrowed from George Herbert. Catherine Benson has a poem called "Denial" which uses the negative very cleverly and which I wish I'd written. My favourite collection of poems would have to be Louise Glück's The Wild Iris.


Which is your favourite of your own poems?

It varies, often according to what's just earned me some money! For a long time it was "Stalemate", which was on the "other poems" page of this site. I still like that, mainly because of who it's about, but my current favourite is "Times Like Places", which is alos sometimes on the "poems" page. I think what I enjoyed about that was the way it was fictionalised. It's about a man whose life partner has died, and all the places named in it are ones that have been important to me, but the story isn't mine. The places are grafted on to the story of this man, who began as a fictional construct but as I wrote, he started to resemble someone I know slightly. So the poem draws together a lot of different strands of fact to make the fiction. In my new book, Long-Haul Travellers, my favourite poem is a longish one called "Missing Fire".

Do you believe there's such a thing as inspiration?

Yes, but you can't rely on it to produce decent poems. Redrafting does that.


Do you feel particularly "Welsh"?

Only when they're playing England, or somebody English is having a go at Wales. When I'm writing or reading I am not really conscious of nationality. My favourite writers come from all times and cultures and they all speak to me, they can all make me feel "I've been there, done that". I didn't live anywhere for all that long as a child and so I am more a poet of displacement than of place.


You keep saying you don't like this or that poem any more - which of your poems do you still like?

Not much that came before Selected Poems (1990). I still use some of the "new poems" from that at readings now and then but mostly I only read from the collections since then. I am pretty rigorous with collections these days, and don't include anything I am not sure about, even if someone else likes it.

Why do you write so many sequences?

It's a sort of halfway house between poem and novel. With any luck, you can get the narrative breadth and exploration of character which poems don't usually have, but keep the power of brief concentrated moments which is one of the best things about poems. I like being able to dive in and out of the story and highlight particular moments.

How important is new technology to you?

Very. The Net and email changed my life. I have contacts all over the world whom I've never met and that changed a lot of definitions for me - like "knowing" and "real". My Fanfic sequence was directly inspired by the degree of reality a fictional character can acquire and it couldn't have been written without the Net. It gives me a whole new field of imagery and of course it's also an incredibly useful research tool and source of ideas. I'm toying just now with ideas for parallel text poems, because I've got used to having two windows open and moving between them. And there's my own web presence. I've been learning languages all my life, so html was a breeze - you can learn it in a weekend - and it means I get much more feedback from readers than I ever did before. That means a lot to me because like all writers I have a very fragile ego the size of a bus.

What influences you, is it recent news, music or just a picture or view you see and get inspired

That was a recent question in the guestbook (courtesy of Sam Crisp) which I thought I would answer here. Basically, this is the "where do you get your ideas from?" question and there is no one simple answer. It sometimes is recent news, or ancient history, or someone I want to commemorate, or some other part of my life, like the internet or reading fan fiction, or a phrase that pleases me because it's quirky or has an interesting rhythm. It nearly always needs to have something to do with people. If I see a beautiful view, I won't go away and write about it unless I can find a human angle that involves some narrator-figure. Sometimes ideas take ages to shape into anything, and sometimes two ideas come together, though they may have had nothing to do with each other.

If you had the power to go back through time, when would you be most interested in going back to; a time when you feel would be amazing to write about and experience?

Nice question, for a writer who's into history. Of course in one way there's a poem on the site that addresses this - in "Stalemate" I go back to 1900 to have an affair with the chess player Karl Schlechter. But that is for the man, not the time; in itself that's not a period that interests me a lot. There are other human beings I'd go back just to meet - Plato, Confucius, John Aubrey (writer and antiquarian), Henri Bellot (Arctic explorer).
It depends, too, on whether I still have to be me. There are times it would have been great to live in as a man, or a reasonably rich person, but which would be hopeless for a woman or a really poor man. Assuming I can fix all that, and bearing in mind your stipulation that it should be a time I'd want to write about, as opposed to just live and enjoy myself in, I'd settle for something in the exploring line. Being a chronicler on Drake's round-the-world voyage maybe, or going east with Marco Polo, when the world was still new. Or a good leftwing revolution would do - I have a hankering to be one of Spartacus' army, even though they didn't win.
Hope this helps, though it isn't very decisive! But when you've got all of history to choose from, it isn't easy to decide.

I would like to know, how do you know when you have written a good poem? Do you rely on your own self-approval or do you look to others for their advice?

That's a rather more interesting question than I generally get asked. The answer is yes, a lot of the time I do know, though that would not have been true when I was younger. It's something you get a feel for, when you've been doing it for a while. It's easier to know when something isn't right, when the language is just not interesting enough or you've missed the impact you wanted to make. But sometimes I'll write something and know it's better than usual. I do sometimes ask people whose opinion I value - my daughter, or a friend who writes. And they might point out a line or phrase that could be stronger or doesn't read quite right, and I'll listen to that. But mostly, when you get this conviction about a poem, it is hard to shake, even if others don't like it as much as you do! Equally when I don't like something I've written, the fact that others do like it will not make me feel better about it (we are talking "Sometimes" here.....)

And here's a brief email survey someone sent me:


Where were you born?                                                                                                                               

Birmingham UK

What was your childhood like?

Happy, ordinary, very studious. I read a lot.

What affects your writing the most?

Wherever I travelled to last.

What do you enjoy most about writing/life?

Travel, new experiences, playing with words and ideas, provoking people or making them feel something

How do you describe your writing?

I don't. I just do it.

Out of all the awards, prizes, and nominations you have received, which one is the most important to you?

Making the Whitbread prize and the T S Eliot prize shortlists

Any facts about your family you would be willing to share.

I don't write about my family much