D A Prince

Congratulations on winning the EMBA 2015. What was your reaction when the results were announced?
I didn’t expect to win. Poetry is a minority interest, after all. I went to the awards event in Bromley House Library confident that I’d only have to sit back and cheer the winner, but I’m delighted that Blake Morrison chose Common Ground and that poetry is on the map again.

Do you have a favourite poem from Common Ground?
It’s difficult to choose a single poem because the book is an entity, shaped as a whole, with inner connections that bind it together. A key poem is Everything I know about which opens the collection; it grew out of an idea in my first collection Nearly The Happy Hour about how we learn those odd skills that aren’t on any school syllabus.

Does living in the East Midlands influence your writing?
I left Leicestershire to go to Reading University in 1965 intending never to return, but moving back in 1991 made me look at my own past in unexpected ways. Now, Leicester shapes the way I see society. It’s there in the deeper layers of my writing. There’s a lot of lively poetry activity locally. I’m involved with Soundswrite, a women’s poetry group in Leicester, and the Poetry Society Stanzas in Nottingham and Market Harborough.

How has your working life affected your 'parallel life' as a poet and how do you make time to write?
I kept my writing life entirely separate from my work in education and as a librarian. That’s why I used my initials rather than my name, to protect my privacy. In the early eighties I started with the weekly light verse/political satire competitions in the New Statesman and Spectator. This gave me courage to work on my own poems, and some magazine editors were very supportive. I use odd corners of the day for writing: for me, poems build up slowly, layer by layer. Anyone who has the need to write will find that time.

What inspires you to write and are there any central themes in your poetry?
A chance phrase, something rhythmic, that latches on to something that I’m thinking about, or reading, or hear on the radio. I know when one of those phrases arrives – it’s like electricity, and I have to write it down. Every poem is kick-started by one of those phrases. In terms of themes: the sharing of human experience, the writer and reader finding something they have in common.

What is the best writing advice anyone has given you?
The opening of a poem I first encountered in 1970 by John Heath-Stubbs, Ars Poetica, “One thing imprimis I would have you remember:/ Your poetry is no good/ Unless it move the heart.”

Which writers do you most enjoy reading and what are you reading at the moment?
I always have several books on the go, with heaps of unread books everywhere. Among living poets I like to have Don Paterson, Lorraine Mariner, and John Burnside within reach, and Wislawa Szymborska. Also, inevitably, poetry greats such as Yeats, Larkin, TS Eliot and WH Auden. As for prose, I enjoy A L Kennedy, Ali Smith, and Jenny Erpenbeck for their originality and inventiveness.

What are your future plans?
I have poems forthcoming in magazines The Rialto, Prole, The Frogmore Papers and, if I’m lucky, fun pieces in the New Statesman and Spectator weekly competitions. A collection of poetry comes together slowly and can’t be forced: there was six years between Nearly the Happy Hour and Common Ground, so I’m in no hurry.

Common Ground is available to buy now.

D A Prince website
 

illustration: Ian Carrington

Everything I know about

hanging wallpaper came from a West End play,
early 70s, title and playwright lost,
even the plot. But two actors he-ing and she-ing  -
unrolling, measuring, cutting, pasting, folding,
unpleating each length every night of the run  -
they taught me.

My sister sent knitting instructions, second class,
dense blue biro on a postcard I kept for years.
Fountains Abbey in autumn light:
the neatest way to join shoulder seams.

Laying bricks from a novel by Solzhenitsyn
(though I’ve never put that into practice)
unlike sex, from so many novels
the library shelves are exhausted.

There was the man in the laundrette
who could fold a perfect fitted sheet;
and everything I know about the Ramones
I learned from a poem.
 

It couldn’t happen

but suppose the door-bell rang  -
you, greasy jeans, and thinking Trick or treat?,
another pizza flyer  -  and there’s
a uniform, the whole street blocked,
the gold-glass glitter of a coach
and four matched bays, shrinking Ted’s van
and Gupta’s 4x4, curtains
already twitching Who d’she think she is?
waving gloved hands  (oh, pigeon-breast,
those gloves!):  
                    Madam, the Prince awaits
                     your presence at the Ball.
                     Your fairy godmother has sent her coach.
the first impatience of a car
snarling its horn, the 88
(already late) giving the upstairs deck
a paparazzi view, a row of phones
fast-track to YouTube,

what would you do?

Common Ground
D A Prince
£12.00 (HappenStance Press)
A trip back home on the bus, a swallow’s nest in the street outside, the one inevitable family member who is spoken of with an arched eyebrow since they went away under a cloud. Common Ground is aptly named, and Prince excels at locating and communicating moments and characters that ring true. Witness the acerbic old woman in Was, tutting about modern times and claiming that “only the old bread made proper crumbs”. Or the family whiling away time on a car trip in Are We Nearly There Yet, where the parents “hand barley-sugar distractions, point a church or cow or traffic sign”. Particularly good when writing about the autumn years of life, and the slow, unsteady winding down of ourselves as we ease towards the grave, Prince picks out the little things that make up so much of who we are. Quiet moments of familiar, emotional truth are scattered throughout this handsomely bound volume that will pop back up in your mind long after it has been put down. Robin Lewis