Whether penning crash poems, keeping an amphetamine diary or nailing down a bit of psychogeographic prose lloyd robson imbues his work with a wit and vigour that sets him apart from cosier contemporaries. By mixing typographical experimentation with an urban aesthetic he has managed to capture some of the manic flux of city life, revealing it in all its seedy glory. But it's not all chips, draw and the delights of the 24 hour garage - beneath the streetwise attitude is a genuine love of words and language. This interview was completed in October 2004.

By ANTHONY BROCKWAY

Is it possible to make a decent living as a poet in Wales?

lloyd robson: is it bollocks. but you've got a damn sight more chance of making a poor living in wales than any living in england, at least that's what my english poet friends tell me. my understanding is, if you can get the work then you get paid a damn sight more in england than you do in wales, but it's harder to get the work in england. christ help them, cos it's hard enough in wales, especially as the pressure upon schools to narrow the range of education is growing all the time.

you can't make a living from just WRITING poetry in wales OR england (unless your voice is instantly recognisable & you're happy churning out piddling little rhymes for tv adverts) cos no bugger reads the stuff except other poets & other poets are all skint & always on the scrounge for a free copy & we're usually willing to swap books cos we're just pleased someone's shown an interest. but we need to define the question. you CAN make a living as a poet in wales IF you're a good workshop tutor. it doesn't matter whether or not you're a good poet, provided you can provide some kind of educational package which fits in with the national curriculum then you can make a living. if you're a fantastic writer but bloody useless with schoolkids then you're fucked. & to anyone who fancies becoming a fulltime poet i heartily recommend you keep the day job & the regular wage & the sick pay & the workplace sociability & use your employer's time & stationery to do your writing on the sly. & there's certainly no shame in that. take fred voss ­ perfect example of a writer turning the daily grind to his advantage, artistically-speaking.

In what ways (if any) has having a stammer influenced your writing?

lloyd robson: huge influence. i probably wouldn't be a writer if i didn't have a stammer (lots of people who stammer become writers or actors or, you know, things which enable us to communicate but still hide). i probably wouldn't swear so much if i didn't stammer. when you grow up with people laffing at how you speak (& that includes adults) you either shut the fuck up or create diversions & camouflage in your speech, or you turn your speech into a weapon. i'm guilty of all of these, to differing degrees. when i was younger most people didn't realise i stammered because i spoke in someone else's voice, one that avoided words on which i would stammer. over the years the frustration at not communicating honestly & the resentment at having to communicate in a way which was misrepresentative of who i was, well, it boils over. on the page a person who stammers can become fluent. well, i'm not a fluent speaker so i try to stammer on the page as well, although it may not be so obvious to the so-called fluent speakers. i rarely write 'duh- duh- duh- duh-' or its equivalent because stammering is far more complex than just the noises which come out of the mouth. it informs your thought processes. something my understanding of stammering has given me is an insight into the construction of words & the process of speech, i think this has given me some benefit as a writer. also, of course, after years & years of having to deal with other people's impatience while listening to my stammer, when i'm on stage & reading or performing my work i sometimes allow myself to enjoy those moments when i'm stammering & i'm faced with a room full of people all desperately trying to listen politely. having said that, stammering is still no joke to me. i can handle standing on stage in front of a crowd, but make me speak at a post office counter after ten minutes in the queue & i may well have become a gibbering wreck.

You published early works like city & poems (1994) and edge territory (1995) through your own Blackhat Press - how did you go about setting that up?

lloyd robson: i was impatient & keen & still enjoying the riotous freedom i'd found following my involvement in some assertiveness & self-esteem courses provided for unemployed people who stammer, believe it or not. those courses were some of the best things to ever happen to me & to find a genuine resource for people who stammer is an absolute rarity. i went in cynical, i came out believing i could do anything & if i couldn't do everything then at least i had the right to try & fail. & i couldn't be arsed spending the next few years building up a pile of rejection letters. so i thought sod it, publish it meself, get the work out there, get it working, get the reviews & the coverage & see what happens. i had a couple of mates who were printers & were happy to produce the books on the sly & for a couple of months my dole cheques were spent almost exclusively on ink & paper & metal plates. & big thanks go to 'alan walsh reprographic' down east moors in cardiff, who used to let me use their computers with all this lovely design software. why they didn't just tell me to go whistle i'll never know, but without them i could never have produced those books, certainly not attractively.

Typography figures quite strongly in your work - you seem to have an aversion for capital letters and a fondness for ampersands. What is it about the visual presentation of words and language that interests you?

lloyd robson: well, to start with i thought if i'm publishing this meself then why make the books look as boring as everyone else's? also, as they were produced on a very limited budget i had to do something to counter-balance the lower production values. bt mostly, this was the first time in my life i felt i was allowed to be creative & i really enjoyed (& still enjoy) typography. i had no formal art or english education (after o level) so i just winged it. i used to sit up all nite getting stoned, farting around with the text layout on the computer & watching open university. a winning combination.

i gotta clear something up though: i DO use upper case letters, i just don't automatically use them at the start of sentences or for proper nouns. i try to produce a musicality in my writing & upper case letters can often act as red herrings, fucking with the reader's eye & screwing with the music. so i kicked them out. of course, this means i'm reliant upon the reader's understanding of what a fullstop is, but i'm happy to take that risk. what amazes me is people say 'oh but e e cummings did that years ago' as if i'm being incredibly tedious in my choice-making. well, john donne was writing sonnets centuries ago but it doesn't stop people from still churning them out today, does it? it's like, if you do something that was done in the twentieth century you're being unimaginative, but if you're doing something that was done in the seventeenth century then that's 'part of the canon'. well the twentieth century produced some damn fine ideas so i'll be buggered if i'm gonna ignore them.

as for ampersands (&), i do love em & i don't see why they should be reserved for the sole use of firms of solicitors. besides which, i'm left-handed & i got bog-awful handwriting, i could never write a decent-looking '&' in a million years but it just looks so fantastic on the page. i remember a girl in school using them when i was about six & thinking what the hell is that?!

i consider things like my use of lower case & ampersands to be features of my house style. if an advertising agency can make those choices & a newspaper can make those choices, then why can't a poet?

lloyd robson: oh textually more interesting, definitely. i tell you, the use of dialect has caused me a huge amount of frustration & exasperation. not in the writing, but in having to explain it all the time. unfortunately, once you write something in dialect & get a little bit of a name for it, some people presume you must be the absolute epitome of that place (in my case, cardiff) which, of course, is a test you can never pass. i never set out to write THE cardiff voice; i set out to write MY voice. then people start telling you you're writing THE voice & before you know it you're trapped. now as it happens, my voice & accent changes ­ it's something that's happened throughout my life. when you grow up with people telling you to 'speak properly' (because of the stammer) it's very difficult to stick to your own, natural, noise when speaking. i've bored myself stupid with this topic over the years, all i know is how i speak now is the correct way for me to speak now. this is usually with some form of cardiff accent, but there's also bits of cwmbran, monmouth, herefordshire & plymouth in there because i've lived there too. i guess it's harder to spot this difference on the page & to be fair, i created a rod for my own back when i called a book cardiff cut, set it in cardiff & wrote it in dialect.

A lot of the immediacy and energy of your writing comes from it being first person, biographical and often (seemingly) done on the hoof - is it fair to describe your writing as psychogeographic?

lloyd robson: i would be very pleased if you described my work as psychogeographic because, in my understanding of what that term means, i think my cardiff writing is. it's maybe not as obviously so as say the work of iain sinclair, but there's a bit of it in there. 'on the hoof' is a fair description, as most of the textual stuff & ideas are experienced firsthand & scribbled on scraps of paper shoved into the arse pocket of my trousers as i stomp around town. the structure, plot, etc, is created back in the office, as a framework or home for these textual snippets, souvenirs & side-swipes. i should point out there is a difference between me in real life & me in the books, but of course the line between the two moves.

You've contributed to a couple of recent prose anthologies (Cardiff Central, ed. Francesca Rhydderch (2003); Wales Half Welsh, ed. John Williams (2004)). Do you have any sense of being part of an emerging Welsh literary scene?

lloyd robson: 'ho ho' doesn't really do justice to the noise that just came out of my mouth.

i think it's about time those big publishers pulled their thumbs out of their arses & realised there are some fine writers in wales. in the eighties they sold us the irish writers, in the nineties the scottish writers, well perhaps now they should be selling the welsh writers. so i greatly admire what john williams has done in getting bloomsbury to publish a collection of welsh writing as part of what i think is his bigger plan & to try & create something, even if it is mostly out of recently returned expats & the english who have made wales their home - good for him & good for them & good for welsh writing. & good for me too. but the scene isn't so much one of 'let's burn the barricades' as 'let's open the burgundy'. but at least he's trying to do something so thank fuck for that.

by the way, there's also the forthcoming urban welsh anthology from parthian & the book of cardiff from seren.

anyway, there was far more of a scene (in cardiff, anyway) in the early nineties (& even better in the eighties so i'm told), when you had the likes of topher mills & ifor thomas berating & badgering & peter finch pushing it along through his excellent work in the oriel bookshop; with chris torrance, liz bletsoe & gill brightmore gossiping in the westgate & expounding fine ideas. but it was fine effort & much gusto with little outside recognition. these days, i'm not so sure. i think previously we had writers who ran away to london & served only themselves & those back home in wales who worked hard to try & create a free-standing scene, an industry, & the two sides dismissed each other at best. these days we're in an age of universities rather than dole queues churning out creative writers, & welsh writers finding success in london & trying to bring that home for others to feed off.

i dunno, i don't wanna sound like some stupid chip-on-shoulder good-old-days of nothing-going-for-us-&-plenty-to-moan-about arsehole because i always end up sounding like that & it's not a fair reflection of what i think. i just think there was an organic scene in cardiff & it had the heart ripped out of it, because those who kept it going got knackered & dissatisfied & there was no one to give them a break. there was so much hard work put in & it all seems to have faded. i feel a bit of an old man on the block to be honest & i feel guilty that i haven't taken on the mantle from topher & finchy & that lot. i organised the golden cross reading which at the time, i was told, was the first thing for years to get a decent audience, & then the slam thing happened with regular events organised by kerry-lee powell & steve prescott. then me, steve & chris brooke organised the 'sampler:' readings, but since then it's all died a death & i find it incredibly sad. where the hell are the furious twenty-one-year-olds? they're the bastards who create a scene, not dozy thirty- forty- & fifty- somethings who can't handle their beer like they used to. if ever they used to.

You did an interesting long-term project called sense of city road - mixing poetry and photography. Why does that particular road have such a special significance for you?

lloyd robson: at the time city road was in a worse state than it is today & i spent so much time plodding up & down it & taking photos of seemingly valueless little details that i thought i should give myself an excuse for doing it. i got some funding from the arts council & all of a sudden there's this expectation & i'd never experienced it before so i kinda froze. & then HAVING to do it made it a chore. that's why it took so long. weird, how all that works. anyway, i was pissed off with people slagging off city road & saying it was a dump when actually, if they got out of their 4x4s & took a look around, they'd see there was a lot of very interesting little details. also, it's a road of great historical significance & it's a road everyone has a story for. the best part of the whole thing was not getting chased up the street by curry house workers who thought i was from immigration, strangely enough, but from the people coming in to the exhibition & bending my ear about things they remembered from how city road used to be & how the exhibition was bringing it all back to them. now that i enjoyed. didn't enjoy some cunt stealing my camera though.

For me, cardiff cut (2001) is your strongest work so far and one of the high points of recent Welsh literature. Can you tell us about the genesis of that book; and how long did it take to write?

lloyd robson: thank you. i kid you not, that's a very nice thing to hear.

it didn't take very long to write. i guess the first draft took a month or two, but then shaping it up took maybe another six months. then, when it came to preparing the text for publication, parthian let me do the typsetting & that meant i was doing little rewrites right up to the last possible moment. so, i guess eighteen months from start to finish, but a lot of that time was spent doing other things. to be honest, my grip of time is not that great so maybe it only took three months, or maybe it took three years - i'm not trying to be vague i'm just shit at remembering that stuff. no, it was definitely less than three years. lets say fourteen months. i dunno.

i had set myself the task of completing a series of 'crash poems' about odd, scary, bizarre hitches i'd had & car crashes i'd been in & projections & dreams & premonitions i was having showing me a future death in a car near the new severn bridge & it was all getting a bit heavy & bogging my brain down & i started to find the process so sodding miserable that when i settled down to do a night's writing i'd be absolutely dreading it, so i thought 'hang on, why are you doing this to yourself?' so while i was supposed to be writing these crash poems i found myself collating scraps of writing i had scribbled while out & about in cardiff, as an act of creative avoidance. i immediately liked the feel of the jigsaw or montage i was creating out of the scraps so i thought instead of shelving the 'crash poems' idea completely, i'd write one set in cardiff with the crash being druggy or cultural rather than motorised & life-threatening. & this work became longer & longer, with far more prose than i'd intended, & far more enjoyable to write. i'd never written anything that long before but it really caught my enthusiasm & i like to think that's reflected in the work. i think it's fair to say i've never found hard work so absorbing, pleasurable & rewarding & this made it easier.

I like the use you make of cultural difference in stuff like letter from sissi (1997) and those parts of bbboing! & associated weirdness (2003) located in the US and Germany. Is travel writing something you would like to do more of?

lloyd robson: absolutely, i'm an airport lounge lizard, & there's plans for me to write a travelogue/novel in 2005 which'll take me all over the shop.

i've travelled a lot over the last few years with reading tours in the states, japan, australia & shorter trips to various parts of europe & it's been a grand education. not that backpacking malarky, that's not for me, but working & meeting writers & artists from all over the world & hanging out with them & learning. i like to shape my own education & travel gives me chance to do that. one good thing me dad did for me as a kid was ensure i got to travel, but travelling alone as a writer is something else entirely. i owe a big debt of gratitude to my publishers parthian & to wales arts international who have helped me get it together.

sissi was set on crete & was a far greater success, critically, than i could've ever imagined but it didn't sell very well which was a great shame. the travel pieces in bbboing! came in for a bit of a slating from some quarters which surprised me but i'll try & figure that out. the fact is bbboing! was about me clearing my desk so i could start afresh. the germany piece i wanted to get in the book because to go on tour with the pop band 'reach' was a real honour for me & now the band no longer exists i really didn't want them & that trip to go unrecorded. without that trip i probably wouldn't be doing what i'm doing now, travel-wise. as for the american stuff, that was me trying to warm up some writing muscles i hadn't really used before & to take some steps towards developing a different register. i also needed to capture that little period of my life, for my own benefit. the longterm success of those pieces was not in what the readers thought of them, but in creating the opportunity i now have, to do a lot of travelling & writing in 2005, & i cannot wait to get those plans up & running.

You've written a fair bit in passing about drugs - have you ever tried writing whilst under the influence?

lloyd robson: yeh. cardiff cut was written mostly at nite when i'd stay up putting all these scraps together & getting stoned stoned stoned, which probably explains why i have no idea how long it took to write. i think cannabis is a good enabler for me, as it can help me cut through & focus on inner facets of the text, although i'm aware some people find it has the opposite effect. before cardiff cut, the speed diary in edge territory was written on amphetamine & i've tried writing on other substances too. alcohol is good insomuch as i collect a lot of snippets when in the pub, but i can't do the big sit-down-at-home-&-pull-it-all-together if i'm boozing. & i could never get to grips with writing on acid (mainly because my terrible handwriting became completely illegible) although i have written about tripping. & before the books came out i used to co-write with phil coles the drugs harm-reduction magazine the bizz for what was then the south glamorgan health authority. those magazines weren't written whilst on drugs, but i had to have some idea of what i was talking about.

You've built up a strong reputation as a live performer - how much do you enjoy that aspect of the job?

lloyd robson: i do & i don't. it's changing. for a start, readings in britain seem to be a lot harder to come by. when i say britain i mean wales with the occasional gig elsewhere on the island ­ i'm better known in new york than in london because being good in wales counts for nothing in england. basically, i can receive all the praise going in wales but when it comes to getting a gig in england (apart from the south west where i have a good association) then all those good reviews become meaningless. bizarre.

the other thing is, this idea some people have that if you're half-decent on stage then 'obviously' it's all about the performance so they dismiss the writing. that's something else i don't understand. if you sit there mumbling into a book then people take you seriously as a writer, but if you rehearse & try to make it as entertaining & professional as possible then you get dismissed as a performer. for god's sake. also, i do still have problems with my stammer & if i'm having a particularly dysfluent day then reading to an audience can be horrible for me. but usually i enjoy it & usually my stammer doesn't get in the way. i don't get as nervous as i used to & i don't put so much pressure on myself anymore. on a good day, i thoroughly enjoy reading to audience, it can be an almighty buzz.

one thing i feel needs pointing out is the mixed fallout from the slam craze. slam made poetry readings far more fun & far more popular & certainly raised the bar on quality of performance, but with it came a loss of camaraderie & a growth in snidey, backstabbing egotism & competition. i don't feel the need for that & whereas i used to come away from readings feeling the poets were all roughly on the same side whether they liked each other's work or not, quite often these days i find people are looking at everyone else as a threat. that's a real shame, this is poetry afterall, not politics. but life goes on & i do love reading on stage.

Can you give us a few of your literary influences?

lloyd robson: i'll just scan my bookshelves & see who jumps out at me. there's no doubt chris torrance has been a huge influence on me, good old chris. i like peter finch's work, topher & ifor are great performance poets (& that's a compliment), the stammering welsh historian gwyn alf williams for several reasons. outside of wales, my earlier influences were mainly prose writers - hubert selby jnr, william burroughs, henry miller, robert pirsig (for writing about the notion of quality in zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance), richard brautigan (for trout fishing in america), iain sinclair. other writers include linton kwesi johnson, who was the right man at the right time for me; ibsen, for the social commentary, politics, & examination of the individual against society; the new york poets john giorno, donna cartelli & michele madigan somerville; william carlos williams (for dedication for a plot of ground let alone the rest of it - a fantastic poem); kurt schwitters (for his sound texts), the dadaists & bauhaus (especially the typography of johannes itten); & a hell of a lot of stuff in fire magazine which comes out of oxfordshire & regularly publishes great work by writers like the australian poet coral hull. & not forgetting sesame street which introduced to kids of my age sophisticated ideas even many of our parents hadn't got to grips with. finally, i wouldn't call them influences but i enjoy reading hemmingway & james ellroy (the LA stuff, not the kennedy stuff). there's bound to be hundreds of others, some of whom i know personally & who'll moan at me for not mentioning them. sorry.

Finally, your work so far has been a heady mix of the urban and the experimental - what direction do you see your writing going in over the next few years?

lloyd robson: i don't wanna be a moaning minny but i've had a right heavy few years with all kinds of bollocks going down which has really fucked me up & messed with my output, so i haven't been writing very much. i've been surviving & regrouping my energies & now i'm just starting to find my feet again. i really like the short story (chupa ma pena, baby) i wrote for the forthcoming parthian anthology & i'm looking forward to 2005 & the opportunity to write this travelogue/novel. i've got some ideas for it but i really won't know what it's going to be until it's well underway. i think it's going to be drier, but i also think it's going to be funny. i'll just have to wait & see. & i'm really looking forward to getting the poetry flowing again. in the last two years i've only written one or two poems off my own back (there's been commissions, but not much written because i NEEDED to write it for my own sake) so i'm desperately hoping it's going to kick back in. & i'm sure it will. output is down to mood & energy with me. well, my mood's improving & my energy's coming back, so watch out!

Ta lloyd. cardiff cut and bbboing! & associated weirdness are available from Parthian books.

©Anthony Brockway 2004

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