July 2nd 2005
The Poetry Café ' Covent Garden

The cellar beneath the Poetry Café on Betterton Street is crammed and humid. The crowd - here to celebrate the launch of Aoife Mannix's new poetry collection The Elephant in the Corner - had lingered till the last possible moment in the comparative coolness of the bar upstairs before descending into this cauldron. Clinging to them are the worst elements of London summertime - stickiness, closeness, moistness - and these accumulate above the ever-growing audience: a strange subterranean weather system which forecasts an unsettled audience.

Aoife had been worried there'd be a poor turnout, but it soon becomes clear, as chairs are carried precariously aloft and latecomers perch awkwardly on armrests, that her fears are unfounded. Baden Prince Jnr, our host for this evening has a wry bash at the now mandatory health and safety announcement ("If there's a fire down here tonight, we're all fucked!"). The café is officially rammed.

There are some great acts on this evening - performance poet Ronnie McGrath and the inspiring Canadian spoken word / music hybrid The Fugitives both give engaging turns - but with a hundred minor irritations competing for the attention of a sweltering, fidgeting audience, many of the artists are having a hard time. Aoife's first reading is at the very end of the first half, a tricky slot at the best of times, but tonight - cool air and a cold beer moments away - it's going to be difficult to connect to this audience.

She steps up to the microphone: wily; almost cocky, but with a voice and a flashing energy that locks the audience in place. She's on good form.

... cos I'm air cushioned
I got ox blood in my veins
I bounce comfortable into a Friday night.

She may be wearing kitten heels, but her performance tonight stomps.

I managed to catch up with Aoife before the show. She's been rather hard to pin down lately as she was in Thailand for a year working with Medecins Sans Frontieres on a non-fiction book on their work with refugees and HIV Aids. She was the Spoiled Ink's Writers Choice winner for July, and I'd been reading some of her work online. I'd also managed to get hold of a copy of The Elephant in the Corner: New and Selected Poems, and found it full of cleanly written, balanced poetry both insightful and emotionally engaging, leaving me curious to find out more...

Sean Merrigan: I've read your biography on Spoiled Ink. Fill in the gaps...

Aoife Mannix: Basically, I started writing poems when I was about eleven. I didn't even really think it was poetry. I was scribbling stuff, and my mother asked me, "What are you writing?" And she looked and said, "Oh, that's poems." (Pronounced 'pomes'.) I was living in Dublin, then, and when I was eleven my family moved to New York. I lived there for four years. I think in a way it was the incredible culture shock of moving to New York that got me writing in the first place.

SM: So how did you get into writing poetry?

AM: Well I moved back to Dublin when I was fifteen; then to London just after I finished college. I'd been writing for ages but I'd never thought about doing anything with it. But then I saw this competition run by Doc Martens, where you had to write a poem about Doc Martens boots. I'd actually already written a poem about them -it's in the book in fact- which I thought was a funny coincidence, and I just sent it in. The thing was that I didn't read the small print, which said that if you were a finalist you had to come and perform the poem.

SM: Had you ever considered performing before?

AM: I'd never thought about performing ever, and I nearly didn't go when they called to say I was a finalist. But in the end I went along, and I won. One of the judges was the editor for Gargoyle (Legendary Washington D.C.-based poetry magazine started in 1976), Maja Prausnitz. She told me to send her some stuff, and they published my first poems. Then she asked me to come to the launch of the magazine, and I read at that. Maja went on to become the programmer for Apples and Snakes - a poetry reading organisation - and she later asked me to read there too. I slowly got into the whole poetry performance scene in London, which is fantastic.

SM: Did you find performing your work particularly nerve-wracking?

AM: Terrifying. At the beginning I used to feel physically sick before going on. I never really saw myself as the kind of person who got up on a stage. That was around five years ago, but now, though I still get nervous, I can actually enjoy myself whilst doing it. Before I think it was just the massive relief afterwards - the adrenaline rush.

SM: But poetry is arguably all about performance. I'm looking at the poem "firefly" in your new collection:

"In the garden in the heat of summer
the night as warm as a glove,
we chase fireflies among the trees
shouting and calling as we run.

I open my hands a crack
to see his electric orange tail.
then throw him high as a shooting star.

These lines demand to be physically heard. Do you have that element of performance in your mind when you compose?

AM: I never start out thinking about performance, and I don't think about performing when I'm writing. But I think that poetry should be like music, so the meaning of the words and the sound of the words are as important as they are in a song. I often - it's hard to explain - but when I write, I hear the words in my head: the meaning and the sound combined.

SM: What do you think about the current state of poetry? There certainly seems to be a lot being performed at evenings like this these days, at least in London.

AM: Performance poetry seems incredibly vibrant at the moment and there's lots of different types. So if you want soul searching- type stuff you can go and find that, but if you fancy comedy, there are nights that do that. Personally I'm interested in the connection between poetry and music, so I like nights that mix it up a bit. For me this is where poetry is actually alive and relevant. I always think that if you go to poetry gigs you have to accept that it's not all going to be brilliant, or all your cup of tea, but there's usually a really nice atmosphere, and it's usually very relaxed. I think, for instance, it's one of the few things you can do in London where you might start talking to someone you've never met before.

SM: So, for you it's about breaking down barriers, about making poetry in some way more approachable to an audience who might otherwise think that poetry is not for them?

AM: I don't like the idea of poetry being this elitist, tortured, angst-ridden thing, and I think a lot of people can be like that: they can be really talented, but they just sit in their room and they don't necessarily go out and listen to other peoples stuff, which I think is very important. I personally find that going to gigs is inspiring - not that you're going to copy someone else, but that it just gets you thinking about what you can do with language, and how you can approach words and styles and different ways of doing things. Since I've started doing that I've found poetry to be really alive. Oh my God!

(Aoife's face lights up as a small group approaches the table. It transpires that these are members of her family . When I bumped into Aoife outside the venue earlier she was very excited that her 85 year old grandmother was flying over from Dublin specially to attend the launch. Unbeknownst to Aoife, her brother Steven has also unexpectedly flown over to surprise his sister. She's clearly delighted, and I feel a bit bad continuing the interview, but she splendidly introduces me to everyone and we carry on.)

SM: There are a few recurring themes in your poetry, which I'd like to ask you about. In particular there's this sense of a desire to return to childhood - an unattainable desire of course. I've also noticed this in some of your short fiction posted on the site, particularly The Visit. Your poem, The Unwanted Gift, concerns someone seeing their lover as a child in a home movie, and wanting to "ride bareback across the years I didn't know you."

AM: I have this idea about trying to make language fresh. There's something about being a child, when you're just discovering the world. When I was a kid, my family moved around a lot, and therefore maybe I just started the nostalgia thing very young. When you're a kid and you move to a new place, or a lot of new places, it makes you question and look at the world and try to understand places - "well, what was that place compared to this new place?"

SM: There's also a preoccupation with death, particularly funerals. Not necessarily the moments themselves, but more how they inflect memories - In Snow in Spring memories of loss threaten to turn back the course of the seasons: "As fast as I turn to escape it / push it back, bury it in other Christmases / it becomes again your funeral." Often there's also a deep sense of peaceful resignedness, as in In the Hospice:

At night there is a quiet
only the dying can know.
Something beyond vanity
a quality of light,
a glass shattered,
the wildness of paint,
silence engraved in swirls of red,
a name remembered
the smallness of eternity ...

Poetry is often considered a source of consolation, would you agree that this could be said of your work?

AM: I think for me quite a lot of the poems touch on these elements of loss and grief. My mother died a few years ago, and, though I've always written a lot, this in particular made me think about what it means to try and articulate what you feel about the people you love. About what loss means. I also think that death is part of life, but there's a tendency to not want to talk about it, and I really want to be honest about it and show that things don't last forever. That doesn't mean that the poems become about something morbid, rather that they celebrate something special and important.

SM: World Press Photographs is one of my favourite poems in the collection. It chides our blunt reception of mass media ('of course it's humiliating / beyond shocking') whilst at the same time making an emotional appeal to see the small details which break through the saturated horror and bring us closer to the humanity of those that suffer: 'But still there are small details, / a man with a boy in his arms. / what became of them / in that moment when fear was defeated." How do poetry and politics relate to each other in your work?

AM: I really like political poetry, though I do think it's very hard to write. Poetry should be about raising questions. It shouldn't be about telling people what to think. We have politicians to do that. What I like about good political poetry is that it surprises me and makes me think about the world in a new way. I think sometimes when someone gets up and starts ranting, and there's a group of people all going "Yeah. Yeah." I think "Yeah, you're just telling me something that I already know, you're not actually making me question what I think." World Press Photographs is a very political poem, but it's a reaction to things that emotionally touched me. I'm not trying to tell people how the world should be.

SM: The reason I picked up on this was to do with the line "History is an open grave/ but we are more than paper." For me this suggests that you're seeing a limit to poetry in a way. There seems to be a recognition that words can only do so much, a point beyond which you just can't say anything.

AM: I think that's very true. That's why I wanted to keep it true, and emotional - not necessarily that I just want to write about things I experience - but I do want to write about things that have really touched me. I know there are a lot of things that would be fantastic to write about, but I don't think you can force it, and I think you have to be very careful with political poetry. In the broad sense - and that couplet sums it up- is that the human spirit and the individual are incredibly important in the face of mass media and control. We really need to look into ourselves and poetry can make you liberate yourself and your thoughts: it raises the questions, but poetry is not going to solve the worlds problems.

Aoife Mannix can be seen performing at the forthcoming Brighton Poetry Festival and at the Manchester Poetry festival in October in conjunction with Citizen 32 magazine. Her first novel "The Burner" (Xpress) is due out later this year, and she has just completed her second, provisionally titled "The Vertigo Trap."

The Elephant in the corner is published by thetall-lighthouse. www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk

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