Short Story Library

Casey: Hello Milner, thanks for agreeing to do an interview with SSL, I appreciate you taking the time. To get started, would you please share a little bit about your background outside of poetry?

Milner: You might well say, Casey, that I’d lived several lives before poetry arrived. I worked in many jobs and in many countries. For 11 years I skippered working sailing vessels, and sailing yachts, mostly Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Eastern Atlantic waters. I worked in the mines in South Africa, as a photographer in the Canary Islands, and as a consultant on tourist projects in South America, where I also supervised the running of a marlin fishing fleet in Ecuador. My jobs in the UK included barman, journalist, farm manager, petrol station attendant, night watchman, hotelier, and horse coper. Some career, you might say. But it has its greatest benefits for me now, providing me with so many varying backdrops for poems, and from the experiences many characters are created, albeit often through a somewhat distorted lens.

Casey: How about your life as a poet, at what age did you discover poetry and who were your early influences?

Milner: I first wrote some poems, in Spanish, in my mid 40’s, mostly whilst living in Mexico. I was trying to write a novel (completed but not good enough), and as a kind of relief from the grind, wrote some short little poems which I found to be a relaxant because I could polish them like jewels. A small volume of these got published in Spain. It was only when I was nearing 60, with little prospect of work, that I took to writing poetry in my native tongue. My early influences would be those current in the school curriculum in England in the 40’s. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, etc, with the most modern being Gerald Manley Hopkins.

I was fortunate in coming to live in Huddersfield (West Yorkshire) in 1987, as there was a very lively poetry scene, and workshops to help me along. A lot of poets were brought in from all over the world, as well as UK writers. The timing was excellent as I’d a lot of catching up to do on current trends and poets, and, reading very widely, my influences were diverse. I was fortunate too, in that within a year I was getting published in magazines, and a little book came out.

Maybe because I came late to poetry, and not having devoted most of my life to it, is why I prefer to consider myself as ‘someone who tries to write poetry’, and never as a ‘poet’. I do not feel comfortable going round calling myself ‘a poet’ – if others want to call me that, then I’ll accept the compliment. Anyways, I’ve ever been a bit of a loner, abhor the concept of joining any club or society, and so the ‘literary scene’ just isn’t my ‘thing’. (All those jostling egos! Perish the thought) Though I’ve done readings at some ‘important’ venues and festivals, I’m more at home reading in a pub, where I sense the audience to be friends, not literary critics.

Incidentally, I suspect that the failure to produce a decent novel may well have been for the reason that I wanted to be a ‘novelist’, rather than just needing to write a novel. It’s the opposite, for me, with poetry; to write it rather than be a ‘poet’.

Casey: If someone asked you to describe what Milner Place poetry is all about how would you answer it?

Milner: Nothing and everything. Might describe it as romantic/realism.

Casey: Who would you say were the top three influences in your poetry?

Milner: Shakespeare, Neruda, William Carlos Williams. Shakespeare, among other things, taught me the advantage a dramatist has, and this has influenced my approach and use of the third person.
Neruda for being Neruda.

W.C.W taught me the virtues of simplicity and brevity (not always successfully in my case) and induced the urge to explore different forms to suit particular subjects. This was a great assist in writing longer works.

Got to make it four, to get Lorca in.

Casey: Can you share a little history about your poetry – magazines you have been published in, chapbooks or collections you have published?

Milner: The magazines are all in the Uk, except some more recent web stuff. Some prestigious, Poetry Review, London Magazine, but I was just as delighted by inclusion in the small presses run by those I especially admired, such as when Geoff Hattersley (one of England’s finest and least recognized by the ‘establishment’ poets) was running the Wide Skirt magazine.

On the web I’m particularly happy with Outlaw Poetry , produced by Klaus Thiemman in Paris, where I find myself in great company, and he also conjures up great images with the poems www.outlawpoetry.com

I’m just on my 10th poetry book now, with ‘naked invitation’, my second from the Belfast publishers Lapwing Publications ( the first from them was ‘Certain Matters’). My best known, because it was from a ‘big’ publishing house, Chatto & Windus (Random House) is ‘In a Rare Time of Rain’, but ‘Caminante’, Wrecking Ball Press, is also quite widely known. ‘The City of Flowers’, a long poem that came from a month in the Spanish city of Cordoba, was produced in A4 format, with wonderful illustrations by David Pitt, by Spout Publications. Another long three part poem, on my home town of Huddersfield, titled ‘Odersfelt’ has been beautiful produced with colour photography by Daniel Lyons, by Flux Gallery Press.

From the beginning of my ‘serious’ writing of poetry, I’ve been very lucky in not having to struggle too hard to get into print. A lot of all life is luck.

I’ve done some radio work, and one poem was taken by the BBC I television for a programme called Bookworm, which ended with me rowing out to sea and disappearing into the sunset!

Casey : So you have a new book coming out, can you tell us about it and where it’s available?

Milner: My new book, as mentioned, is ‘naked invitation’ and can be obtained from Lapwing Publications. It’s around 80 pages of recent poems. The editor tells me the US price, including post and packaging, is $17. It can be ordered direct from lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com or through their web site http://www.lapwingpoetry.com  where currently it can be found by going to their newsletter and scrolling down.

The UK price is £8 (plus p& p)

This below is on the back of the book by the poet Ian Parks.

In the title poem of this fine collection Milner Place invites his readers to join him on a journey of discovery. The concept of journey and adventure is deeply embedded in Milner’s work, as is his extraordinary feel for the exotic, informing it with its distinctive narrative drive and providing vigor for his images. To read these poems is to engage with a richly textured response to experience – and to the experience to be encountered by entering other cultures. His long poem, the odyssey, in particular expresses all that is best in this poet’s work: its innovation, risk-taking and formal variety; its ability to sustain an emotional intensity; the sense of a lifetime’s experience distilled into memorable language. By turns colloquial and eloquent, humorous and moving the naked invitation finds Milner Place writing at the height of his powers, investing with dignity and an earthy realism his ‘rage against the dying of the light’.

Casey: If someone asked you to recommend a few living poets to begin reading, who would you suggest?

Milner: Geoff Hattersley , John Yamrus, Lynn Doiron, Todd Moore would provide some variety.

Casey: When you are not writing, what do you do in your free time?

Milner: Potter and read, walk the dog. All my time now is pretty well free, except when I’m driven to household chores and the garden.

Quite a bit of my time is also taken up by trying to do my job as an editor on Poetry Circle, a forum for contemporary poetry www.poetrycircle.com  and this site has been invaluable for me in fine-tuning my own stuff. It also gets me to new and interesting poetry.

Casey: What’s next for you? Any big plans or other projects in motion?

Milner: Just another book to be put together from stuff lying about, and writing a load more. I’m also planning to see if I can make it to my 80th birthday, which will fall on January 25 2010, on Burn’s night, when, if I’m successful, I’ll do my best to avoid the inebriated Scots and the wail of bagpipes (the latter a wondrous sound as long as they’re played in the next glen).

Casey: Thanks so much for taking the time for the interview and best of luck with your newest release- Just so you all can get a taste of how good his poetry is, here are a few samples. If you like what you read, support the arts and be sure to pick up a copy of Milner’s latest book, Naked Invitation:

***

naked invitation

steal that hour
when all the trappings
of a world
are pit-cast

lie
naked
harboured
in a skin

let loose
the nearest thing
to truth
with swivelling eyes

quiet sit

seeking no lies
amongst stars somnolent
that stretch
across the wind

and of their raging
be assured

***

at the wake for sanchez el viejo

they
sat all night
around his bones

for that was really
all there was of him

pablo ombroso
smelling
of mules
fausto medina
turpentine
henrique monseca
of corazon paz
whilst whatever julio
terramoto may have been at
was drowned
by fumes of mescal

the jug
went round
from mouth to mouth
the tales
from lip to lip
the bones
came dancing
from their box
took turns
about the room

but
when the dawn
came slyly in
sanchez slipped
back
to his home

***

pozo escondido

you must approach
with slink of puma

through whispering grasses
past vigilant crows
guarding thorns
where a tunnel
will open in magnolias
and the sun
is a far fire beyond
imagining

only then
will you hear the voices
of decisive macaws
smell the lichen
of solitude
discover the colours
of all the faces of water
in the deep pool
bathe
with topaz-eyed
horses
where a moon floats
among water-lilies

beware

you must approach
with slink of puma