Writers who have inspired me

The first poets I was aware of were the Liverpool Poets: Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. This was at a time when we were being encouraged to read things like A Kestrel for a Knave, Joby, A Pair of Jesus Boots: things the teachers who taught us thought working-class kids could identify with. It was exciting to think poetry was actually being written in my hometown, though, and this led me to reading other poets: you follow your nose. Later, when I was an art student at Chelsea, a tutor showed me Lowell, Bishop, Berryman: the Americans. I started giving my paintings titles like 'Myopia: a Night'.

I can't remember how I came across the Irish poets, Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, Mahon, McGuckian, Carson, but they feel like part of the weather now. Similarly, when did I first pick up a book by Tony Harrison? Perhaps I saw him on television reading 'v'? I definitely remember seeing Simon Armitage reading from Xanadu back in the early 1990s, and liking what I was hearing. I was living in London about this time, and got to hear the likes of Michael Donaghy, Jo Shapcott, Eva Salzman, Don Paterson; at the same time, I was forging friendships with other would-be poets like myself. I don't know whether this was a 'scene', but it was an exciting time.

There are, of course, so many extra-literary influences on any writer. I've limited this to poets, even though there are many prose writers whose works I've known and loved. But to be honest, I'm probably more influenced by individual poems than by poets. The roll call above only scratches the surface. I'm drawn to Hart Crane's The Bridge, Cowper's The Task, where he sings the sofa, Hill's Mercian Hymns, loads of Auden and MacNeice, the English Romantics, Clare, the Martians and after, Eliot, especially his Landscapes, W. S. Graham's 'Night City', Marianne Moore's 'Dock Rats', Richard Wilbur's 'The Mind-Reader', Anthony Hecht's 'A Hill', Borges' 'Everness': this list still feels provisional, partial and deficient. Look, I haven't even mentioned Larkin.

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