CityLife

Questions for Ross Sutherland

Ross Sutherland is a performance poet and one of the founding members of live poetry collective Aisle16. Ross, who now lives in Liverpool, also runs poetry workshops in schoos, prisons and community centres across the north west.

Birth date: 27/10/1979.

Home town: Edinburgh.

How would you describe your work? Someone recently described my poetry as ‘half Britpop, half Maths’, which I really like, despite not being much of a Britpop fan. I’m obsessed with structure, and more often than not, any piece of work will start with a formal challenge given to myself. “Write a story as a mobius strip, so you can start reading it on any page”, or “write a poem that only uses one vowel.” The content arrives almost subconsciously. I try to be funny a lot of the time. When I don’t pull it off I just pretend that I was being deep.

Who are your influences? In January this year I got a copy of Dave Berman’s first collection, Actual Air. I haven’t stopped ripping him off since. Also I like a lot of the New York poets of the 1950s: Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara.

Apparently ,John Ashberry writes his poetry with one eye permanently fixed on the TV in the corner of the room. I’ve enjoyed reading him a lot more since I learned that.

What's the first book you remember reading? Probably George’s Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dhal. I wrote my own version of that, called (dur!) Ross’ Marvelous Medicine. Basically, the same story with different ingredients. So much of my subsequent writing has been based on that exact principle.

Who is your favourite literary character? I love the deaf mute uncle in Salinger’s Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters. My life would be immeasurably better if it contained that genial little man.
 
If you weren't an author, what would you be doing? I don’t know. I’d probably be Prime Minister or a talking flying car - something super-sweet like that.

Which of your work are you most proud of? I’ve only just finished my first poetry collection (Things To Do Before You Leave Town, published by Penned In The Margins), which comes out in January. I was shocked at the level of coherence that the book has, despite the fact that the poems were written over a six-year period. It’s ended up helping me understand my own life a lot more.

The nature of my work is incredibly transient; I’m often in three, four cities a week, giving readings of my work. Sometimes I get this feeling of dread when I’m equidistant between two homes and I don’t know if I’m leaving or arriving. I hadn’t considered how much of the rest of my life was tied into that same feeling, but suddenly, my own book was spelling it out to me. It made me realise I had to take some time off.  

What’s a typical writing day? If I’m in London, I’ll head to my rented office, which is a converted tube carriage on top of a warehouse on Great Eastern Street. I’ve only had it for a few months but it’s been a great help to my writing. All I can see from my window is the building site for the new Shoreditch train station. It’s just diggers and cranes at the moment. The whole thing feels abit like living in a post-apocalyptic dead-zone.

I try to write all afternoon. Once rush hour has past I’ll put my walkman on and go for a walk across the city. Then I’ll head back to the office for a few more hours.
 
If I finish something, I’ve got about 10 people dotted over the UK that I’ll send it out to. Each of those 10 people will usually contribute a substitute line or idea, which means by the time the piece is finished, I’ve barely got authorship anymore. I’m more of a writing collective than an author.

Can you give us three top tips for aspiring writers?

1. Find writers you love and rip them off. It’s impossible not to put a bit of yourself into the process of plagiarism. We can’t help but be ourselves, and the party can’t start without us.

2. Force people to listen to you as much as you can. That’s why poetry is such an amazing genre. You can write a poem when you get up in the morning, learn it by lunchtime, rehearse it at dinner, then that night you can stand up in front of a room full of people and get a round of applause for it. That’s a room full of people being entertained by an idea you had at breakfast! It makes you feel sorry for novelists. But if you’ve gone as far as agreeing to do a reading, you might as well couch your work in the best possible terms for its reception. I don’t mean tell knock-knock jokes and do jazz-hands. But learn your work. Practice reading it aloud. Work out a set and time it.

3. Think of some interesting things to say around the poems. Many poets think that they’re somehow excused from performance, as if helping out the audience was somehow watering down their craft. I'm not saying every poet needs to be Patrick Stewart  on stage, but I reckon every poet can do a good William Frakes.