Q1: When did you start writing and whom influenced you the most now and currently?
Clive: I write mainly poetry but also short stories. I went through a very creative period in my early twenties when I was heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Freud, Richard Brautigan, ee cummings, and Leonard Cohen and Charles Bukowski. I worked as a journalist for 30 years but took redundancy at 50 and went to university where I studied the Marxist/Anarchist poet Sean Bonney.
Q2: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Clive: I’m 64 now and have been re enthused by modernist poets such as Sean, Tom Raworth, Doug Jones and Adrianne Clarke. I owe a great learning debt to the London group of experimental poets Writer’s Forum.
Q3: Who has helped you most with writing and career?
Clive: Too many people really but two in particular. An English teacher at my secondary modern school, Ian Bell, who introduced me to offbeat writers such as Brautigan and my university tutors, particularly my Master’s Supervisor Keith Jebb, himself a London poet.
Q4: Where did you grow up and how did that influence you? Have any travels away from home influence your work?
Clive: I grew up in Ruislip and was always terrible at football and other manly pursuits but even as a youngster I read and wrote poetry, but sort of stopped in my journalist years only to rediscover it at uni.
Q5: What do you consider your most meaningful work creatively to you?
Clive: It is yet to be published in full but is a 16,000-word prose poem called ‘Shadow Reel’ which has had sections published in Otoliths and Blackbox Manifold. I attach part of it if you want to use some.
Q6: Favorite activities to relax?
Clive: Listening to rock music, writing and reading. I am a great Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa fan – I think they are both genuine geniuses.
Q7: What is a favorite line/ stanza/lyric from your writing?
Clive: An irony of unemployed/walk into the bar
Q8: What kind of music inspires you the most? What is a song or songs that come back to you as an inspiration?
Clive: Dylan has just been an almost lifelong inspiration to me. Then again I also appreciate Rod Stewart. Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands comes to mind. There’s the constant debate over whether or not Dylan is a poet – I think songs like that settle the argument. Also Visions of Johanna.
Q9: Do you have any recent or upcoming books, music, events, projects that you’d like to promote?
Clive: My most recent books are three chapbooks with erbacce press ‘Strings’ ‘Atoms’ and ‘Spaces’ all of which have had good reviews in Tears in The Fence and Litter.
Bonus Question: : Any funny memory or strange occurrence you’d like to share during your creative journey?
Clive: When I was about 19 I wrote a short story about talking and violent furniture and sent it to Ambit but it was rejected which put me off sending stuff out for ages. A few months ago I wrote it up again and it was used by Cafelit and put in their ‘best of’ book.
Touch Wood by R.G. EvansThe poem/lyrics below were inspired by an interview about songwriting with Leonard Cohen. The first line and refrain or both quotes from that interview
Raise an altar of unhewn stone
One gate of horn one gate of bone
Touch wood
Come on touch wood
Black ball white ball juggle them both
Look to the one that you drop most
Touch wood
Come on touch wood
Say a prayer cast a spell
One goes to heaven one goes to hell
No way of telling what’s bad from good
Only thing a soul can do and that’s touch wood
Come on touch wood
Black cat howling on a gravestone stump
Watch where you step and how high you jump
Touch wood
Come on touch wood
Midnight crossroads meet your man
John the conqueroo and glory’s hand
Touch wood
Come on touch wood
One thief on your left and one to your right
Only thing to do is hold on tight
And touch wood
Come on touch wood
Bio: R. G. Evans is a poet, fiction writer, and songwriter from Southern New Jersey. He teaches creative writing at Rowan University. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com
Lookout by Clive Gresswelldedicated to Leonard Cohen
the holy war metaphors are in
wages of the pentecostal sin
harbingers of every thin reprieve
soldierless fortunes armies on their knees
recalling from fixtures the broken cry of hymns
the rattle of the mounting mourning violins
& stretchers from across the chimes of winds
the solitary burgeoning of terrestrial times
the tinkling emergence of solitary rhymes
beside the lakes & the burial of mimes
we seek the hope & glory of appeal
the work towards the journey of it all
& where the men stood motionless on the hill
gathering up the writing on the wall.
Bio: Clive Gresswell is a 64-year-old innovative writer and poet who has appeared in many mags from BlazeVOX to Poetry Wars and Tears in the Fence. He is the author of five poetry books the last two being ‘Strings’ and ‘Atoms’ from erbacce-press (see their website for more details).
Clive Gresswell is a 64-year-old innovative writer and poet who has appeared in many mags from BlazeVOX to Poetry Wars and Tears in the Fence. He is the author of five poetry books the last two being ‘Strings’ and ‘Atoms’ from erbacce-press (see their website for more details).
DNA etc
1/
from the opening
the red bud/this stinking corruption
classless/injured/democracy
drawn into the life before
drawn into the death before
the mouth moves silently as
he questions how those sub-atomic
particles can grasp what was said
in the beginning and scheduled
thru the chromosomes as if wired
to capture the plasticity/this combination
this horror show that freezes the breath
naked to the accordion blasts & the inclination
to grow and grow and claw its fetid muscle
cramped in an unworkable spasm ripped
forward from the tongue and its hue and cry
deep into the animal instinct captured
and regenerated through the queer
curiosity of time & space
its talons grown cold in gripping
the perfect neurons which fell like
snow into distillations of a worldwide DNA
fluttering like the intrinsic eye howling
by the borderline where time and tide betray.
2/
new horizons stick in throats of silver platitudes
to roaming gypsy hoards and their impolite tongue
snaked and roughed with the background accordion
the flair from witness witches into soft harbingers
dressed in almighty rags and sentenced with long-jowls
martyred in their fading opinions rested at the junction
to which a symphony plays regretful tunes of tiger-moths
and hotel rooms or hostels for the first-born
whose mothers’ wailing is now torn on the agony
and ecstasy the deliberate throbbing of the vowels
leapt forth in antique matrimony slithered from vows
the hissing and green ink scrawled across this black
and white graffiti blessed in memory of frivolous clouds
and the ancient merchants of their entire misery cast
3/
the fruitful birds which rest
complete in the region where
cutting circular gesticulations
morbid on the mind and cast
along the centrifugal force
shattered by society’s flattering
insipid dreamlike vestiges
cut-free from wandering chance
& loosened to the tongue a final
baying by the wolves of fate
beyond castigations of forever verbs
& into their annals ripped by ropes of despair
Fevers of the Mind 