NPR N.6: Alan Moore is IN!

Portrait art by Tom Harding

Northampton Poetry Review ISSUE 6: Rejuvenation includes a great interview with Moore (pp. 85-93) mostly focused on his poetry interests, writing and... more!!!

You can find all the info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue is available HERE for downloading.

Northampton Poetry Review returns with the theme of Rejuvenation. We’re rekindling old energies, awakening deep roots, and sustaining ourselves through strange and wearing times—with hope for renewal.

We offer poetry from voices both near and far. And we are honoured to present a deep and wide-ranging conversation with Northampton’s own Alan Moore—a giant, a guru, and a guiding light in these dark and mysterious times.

Below, some selected excerpts from the interview! Highly recommended!

Q&A with Alan Moore
The following is an interview with Alan Moore— Northampton notary, master, magician, guru and guide; a leading luminary and multimedia Renaissance man of our times. Alan generously gave us this interview back in 2022. Due to the buffeting winds of independent publishing, it finds its way to you only now.
He shares his thoughts on a wide array of cultural, political, and creative concerns—and we are truly honoured he took the time.

Alan Moore is a legendary comic book writer, novelist, filmmaker, and boundary-defying artist. Known for seminal works such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his work has shaped the landscape of modern storytelling and continues to be an uncompromising artistic force across a variety of mediums.

Alan Moore: [...] I'm continually drawn back to Blake, Clare, and, with his very recent death, to Brian Catling’s magnificent The Stumbling Block. Also, if I ever again locate my copy, I want very much to re-immerse myself in Mervyn Peake’s The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, which I remember as having Stanley Holloway rhythms and a marvellous idiosyncratic grandeur. Oh, and Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door always rewards a reopening. [...] 

[...] if it’s an idea, it will most probably emerge at some point as part of a story, whereas if it’s a tenuous soap-bubble impression, and if I can get a few words down before it pops from memory, it will more likely end up as a poem. [...] 

[...] Trying to define one’s own thought processes is always slippery, but it might be as if each project is a separate Memory Theatre in some by-now sprawling and overgrown multiplex.
Many of those theatres I need never visit again, although they still remain standing, obsolete warehouses rusting in some bleak, industrial-estate outpost of my awareness. There are a few abandoned palaces amongst them – works that for various reasons remain uncompleted or will never see daylight, like my John Dee opera or the detailed five season outline for The Show television series – that I find slightly haunting and will more often return to in idle moments. You shouldn’t, however, be misled by this talk of Memory Theatres into thinking my mental processes are anything like neat or orderly. In practice, it feels like some sort of cloud-chamber, and I have no real idea how it works. [...] 

[...] A key difference between prose and poetry lies in the ways that they engagé with time. [...] Poetry can dispense with time altogether, and allow us to see what is left when time is gone. As for the importance of time in my own work, I feel that along with space and consciousness, time is one of the three fundamental elements that a writer has to work with, so I like to get as much fun and meaning out of it as possible. [...] 

[...] I’m sure I’ve been a multiplicity of people in my time, but from my own perspective it feels very much like an unbroken continuity of self. The biggest shift of personality came, probably, with my decision to engagé with magic, back in 1993, but this seemed more like an expanded comprehension and intensification of ideas and processes that were already there than it did a huge psychological change. When I think back to previous incarnations of myself, I find that they’re all still me, only stupider, better looking, and with more intimidating physical energy. [...] 

[...] tend to enjoy works that are a few paces beyond my personal boundaries, that will entail a little bit of personal effort, which will therefore expand those boundaries. I believe that the most affecting kind of art is one where the audience does part of the work, making the experience almost a collaboration between reader and writer. To that end, I try to make my work as understandable as I can, while also subscribing to the idea of literary difficulty, whereby you are prepared to potentially alienate part of your readership in the knowledge that those who remain will have been made to engage with the work on a deeper and hopefully more rewarding level. I always try to pitch my work at a level that won’t be beyond the reach of an averagely intelligent person. [...] 

More info HERE. Pdf of the whole issue available HERE.

3 novels and The Great When

Transcript of a video posted yesterday on YouTube. You can watch it HERE. 

Moore visited his local Waterstones in Northampton to reveal more about The Great When, and three novels that played into his writing of it.  

The Great When has just been released in paperback format. 

Alan Moore: [...] The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very  baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When. 

 

I mean one of them is Pariah/Genius by my very good friend Ian Sinclair; for my money one of the best writers in the English language. And in Pariah/Genius he's  following the story of John Deakin, who was the photographer that Francis Bacon actually got all  of those images from. And not a very likable man, but a very, very interesting man. And Ian has done this wonderful story about John Deakin. He's already dead when the book opens and the rest of the book is the thought going through the mind of this extraordinary dying man. 

 

Other books that have played into The Great When would include Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, probably  one of my favourite novels ever. The main thing about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is it's very, very strange and quite frightening in places but it's very, very funny. And that was something that I was trying to keep in mind while writing my book that there's no reason why  everything has to be straight-faced. There's no problem with having a laugh once in a while. 

 

And the third book that certainly was a huge inspiration was Brian Catling's The Vorrh. This is the first book of a trilogy. But having read this, I realised that Brian had really raised the bar  for fantasy writing because fantasy, as I see it, really shouldn't be about things that you already  know about. I mean, I've got a lot of room for magicians and dragons and all the rest of the fantasy paraphernalia, but I would prefer a fantasy that gives you things that you've never even imagined before. And certainly in the Vorrh trilogy, Brian does that in spades. 

 

So while I  was writing my books, I was thinking of all of these authors and trying to make sure that my book  was at least in the same ballpark as these greats. 

Watch the video HERE.   

The Great Mystery of Brian Catling

In July, Swan River Press published a collection of Brian Catling's stories entitled A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences, co-edited by Victor Rees and Iain Sinclair. 

More information about the book can be found HERE. 

 

The book includes three new texts written by Moore in response to 3 photographs of Catling as a young man, all of which are included within the book. 

Check below for one of them! Thanks to Victor Rees for this amazing preview.

 

Moore expressed his admiration for Catling's work in several occasions, they were close friends and kindred spirits. Moore also wrote the introduction of Catling's The Vorrh and defined it "The current century's first landmark work of fantasy". 

 

So... get a copy of A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences HERE!  

Highly recommended!

Cyclopic Moore by Brian Catling

Art by Brian Catling.

Above, a recent portrait of Alan Moore as a cyclops by poet, sculptor, writer, performance artist, and educator Brian Catling. 

"[...] a revealing portrayal of a well-known warlock from Northampton, celebrating the singularity of his genius."

Source: Vorrh Excavation Project

Alan Moore intro for The Vorrh novel

Excerpt from Alan Moore introduction for The Vorrh, a novel by English artist Brian Catling.

The complete introduction can be read here. You can also listen it directly from Moore's voice, here.

Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre, with The Vorrh we are presented with a sprawling immaterial organism which leaves the reader filthy with its seeds and spores, encouraging new growth and threatening a great reforesting of the imagination.

Comedies of manners set in mews and crescents that have lost their meaning, auto-heroising romps through sloppy pseudo-medieval fens, our writings are increasingly outgunned by our experience and are too narrow to describe, contain, or even name our current circumstance. In the original-growth arbours of The Vorrh, new routes are posited and new agendas are implicit in the sinister viridian dapple. As the greyed-out urban street-grid of our ideologies and ways of thinking falls inevitably into disrepair and disappearance, Catling’s stupefying work provides both viable alternatives and meaningful escape into its tropic possibilities.

It offers us a welcome to the wilderness.

[Alan Moore]

The complete introduction: here. 

Directly from Moore's voice: here.