Poet Linda Chase grew up on Long Island in commuting distance of New York City. She is a woman of many talents with a broad experience of many things life has to offer. She has been a stage costume designer, a Tai Chi teacher and, most recently, a tutor of poetry and creative writing.

Linda is a part-time lecturer on the MA course in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University in the north-west of England. She is the Programme Co-ordinator and a tutor for The Poetry School in Manchester. In 2004 she started a performance series, Poets & Players, which showcases new writers and musicians in a number of venues around the city. The series receives British Arts Council funding.

Linda’s first collection of poems, These Goodbyes, was published by Fatchance Press in 1995. Her two Carcanet Press titles are The Wedding Spy (2001) and Extended Family (2006).

Linda, please tell us something about your life. What life experiences stand out for you as worthy of mention, for whatever reasons—perhaps because they inform your poetry in clearly identifiable ways?

I think that two major facts of my life which have shaped my worldview. One is that I am an American living in the UK and the other is that my brother died when he was 48 and I was 46. He is the subject of many of my poems and sometimes is the inspiration behind other characters I write about. Loss and longing are themes in these poems. Many other poems deal with my American roots and use a clearly American voice. I think that both these factors contribute to my feeling of being an outsider—not a bad thing for a poet to be! To a lesser extent, being a left-handed dyslexic (an extremely poor reader) also adds to this outsider feeling.

Would you say poets are born, or made? And either way, what’s your number one piece of advice to any poet seeking to improve their work?

I feel that we all have poems inside us which have real value. Whether they stand up to literary judgement is another story. I think it is important to remember that standards of excellence in poetry (and all art forms) are products of convention. A top performance poem is not the same as a top page poem. Every time we get close to our true feelings or deep realisations, we are on the verge of poetry. My advice to new writers? Read contemporary poetry.

Tell us about the work you do to promote poetry. What is it like to be a teacher of aspiring poets? Do you get equal measures of despair and delight when appraising the work of others? And what are the common mistakes people make either in their approach or their poetry?

There are so many questions here! I think I will narrow it to my feelings about teaching. I love it and always have loved teaching. For over 20 years I taught Tai Chi and really, there is no difference between that and teaching poetry. The teacher is in a privileged position always. The students are on the verge of development and self-realisation. The teacher is there to help facilitate that change. I feel that encouragement and praise are the best teaching tools. Let the students experience their own talent and begin to trust it. I used to think I could never be a very good teacher because I would never know enough. Now I feel that being a good teacher does not depend [so much] on knowledge as much as it depends on belief in the students.

Following on from that, what for you makes a poem good? Or if good isn’t the word you’d use, choose another!

When and how does a poem complete itself? Well, this is a huge question. There is something about the internal integrity of a piece of writing. It needs to be true to itself, consistent and somehow unlock more power than its words alone might account for.

Poems which excite me are ones in which something happens—perhaps through tension of language or form which makes the poem lift off—transcend the narrative of the words, send shivers done my spine. Other kinds of poems may be good in that they have all the poetry tricks-of-the-trade, but they might not come to life for me. Of course, they may be brimming over with life to another reader. This is important to remember. We bring only our own sensitivities to each reading of a poem. We just may not have the ones the poem requires in order to soar.

And which poets do you count as influential upon your own, shall we say, bardic development?

I started writing poetry when I was a child and the poets I later came across in high school were the ones who touched me the most. Robert Frost, EE Cummings and William Carlos Williams were the top three. I was also very fond of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, and the playwrights Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. They all seemed to have in common this great American gift of going to a deep point very easily and without too much fuss. I love that kind of writing. More recently I have come to admire Cummings even more. He is a master of form as well as idiosyncratic syntax and phrasing. He still manages to be witty and sharp and very touching. What a poet!

Please tell us the journey you took from wanting to write poetry to seeing it published. What does anyone seeking to embark on the same journey need to take with them for the ride in order to succeed?

I didn’t try to publish till after I was 50. It was my brother’s death that inspired me. I realised that I was still alive and if I thought of myself as a poet, then I best get on with it and be one! I became quite single-minded and started sending off my new work to literary magazines. I also went to residential Arvon writing courses and eventually did an MA in creative writing. My first degree had also been in creative writing, 40 years earlier. Having work rejected was difficult in the beginning. Later it seemed to be just part of what happens. Then one day an editor says yes. It all takes time.

Is there one specific poet whose work you return to time and time again to uplift or console you, re-energise you or remind you of something important? Why does that poet have the influence s/he has upon you?

I must say that there are three women poets who truly enchant and uplift me. Selima Hill for her bravery and startling images, Sharon Olds for her stunning truth and tender telling of it, and Nina Cassian for creating a unique world of magic. As well as these (and other poets) my favourite sources of energy and inspiration are singer-songwriters. Of these, Bob Dylan is my main man. I prefer songs to poems, most definitely. I went through a period of writing songs—80 of them—both lyrics and melodies. I was just not talented enough, alas.

What is it about poetry, exactly, that makes you want not only to write but to enable others to write?

Maybe because it is compact and to the point. There is a challenge of crafting the best way of saying something which holds the challenge of problem-solving. I like that a lot. When I work with students, the thrill for me is to see them find new modes of expression.

Now, your first collection for Carcanet was The Wedding Spy. Your second, recently published, is Extended Family. What changed for you as a person and as a poet between the two volumes, and how did those changes impact upon your poems?

The first book came out while I was still a student and many of the poems were written before I started my MA. The new book came out five years later after I had been doing a lot of teaching. In this period between the two books I became more critical of my own work because I was more aware of my own weaknesses. This can be very depressing as well as useful for attempting to raise one’s standard of writing. The main outcome is that I throw away a lot of work. Much more than I keep.

Please tell us all about Extended Family.

Extended Family is a book about people and their relationships to one another. It contains the usual sorts of relationships and some less usual. For instance, siblings, house-mates, former partners, teachers and students. Some poems are light hearted, and others broken-hearted. The final section of the book is a long sequence of love poems called Younger Men Have Birthdays Too. It doesn’t have a happy ending as you may have suspected.

Your home country of America is the focus of the warm and witty poem, Independence. Do you maintain much awareness of the US poetry scene, for want of a better phrase, and if so, what do you think of the way poetry is developing there? Given everyone’s predilection for labels, would you say if forced into a corner that you’re an American poet or, if not British by acclimatisation, something else? And as a person with experience of both countries, how do you find the UK differs from the US when it comes to poetry, if at all?

I feel that my poetry is very American—it is plain and attempts to sound natural. The issues are ordinary and straightforward. I like it when a poem takes a comical turn and makes me laugh. I feel this is true of a lot of American writers. I have lived here in the UK since 1968 so I am a bit out-of-touch with the American scene and would like to know more about what is going on in the US. Perhaps I will re-subscribe to an excellent journal called The American Poetry Review.

You manage to inject humour, at times gentle and other times harder-hitting, into many of the poems in Extended Family. Do you think poets can rightfully be accused of being too serious sometimes, or is that a myth people put forward as the reason why they don’t go near poetry?

Excellent question. I definitely prefer poetry which has humour and irony and the odd laugh in it. I feel the same with people. I prefer those who laugh and who can make me laugh. It is a matter of taste, I guess. Very serious poetry which does not venture off into the absurd, the surreal or the bizarre usually bores me—even if I can see that it is good. Perhaps this is just a matter of taste. Roger McGough’s poems are good examples of how wit can lift a poem and let the listener really ‘get it.’ That, after all, is the aim—to let the reader in on the message of the poem. Humour is a good vehicle for this. Nothing is worse than going to a deadly serious, self-important kind of poetry reading.

And what can be done to get more people reading, listening to and buying poetry (besides this interview!)?

I feel that the best way to share poetry is to read it aloud. I love to go to readings and I love to give readings. Everything is alive and volatile and uncertain. There is risk involved. The audience has a real opportunity of being allowed into the poems. There is a kind of invitation given.

You perform your poetry a lot, and encourage others to do so through Poets & Players. Please tell us about your attitude towards performance, what Poets & Players is, and why it is important to you.

I have been attempting to raise the standard of readings both within the university where I teach and through Poets & Players, the reading series I run in Manchester. I work with the poets on their performances and also feature excellent musicians in each event. Since our audiences continue to grow, it must be working! An American poet I really admire, Muriel Rukeyser, says that the reading is the final goal of the poem—it is the moment when the poem becomes fully-realised because it is being given to another person. Before that, the poem has not really done its job. I love this idea and it makes every reading a potential opportunity for true generosity.

Last but not least, please give us just one word that sums you up, one word that sums up Extended Family and one word that is simply a favourite of yours (in that order!).

Me = enthusiastic. Extended Family = juicy. Favourite word = fortuitous.

Linda Chase, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you!

Linda has her own website where you can listen to her reading some of her poems. Her collections can be purchased online from the likes of Amazon, or directly from Carcanet. More information on Poets & Players can be found here. Further details on the MA Creative Writing course at Manchester Metropolitan University can be found here.