Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald
Alice Oswaldis a British poet from Reading, Berkshire who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
best education effort express human natural paying poet poetic question understanding
To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.
commitment needed next night poetry until
At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.
novels people poem straight totally
People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.
earth hands quite start
It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop.
assumed either great mean order poetry questions role roots works
I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
feeling hate head locked managing reached speak
I hate not managing to speak clearly. I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia - like I'm locked in my own head - if what I've said hasn't reached someone.
trying
It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it.
ideal job meant poet
I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
greek taught teacher
When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.
cool
I like Patti Smith's lyrics, and sometimes think I could be influenced by them. But she has a kind of cool that's beyond me.
might poem remade totally
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.
information manner ought system verb warmth
Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn't really anything. It's a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind of information system of the air.