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