Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Since 1981 he has lived in France, where he is Maitre de Conferences in the English department of Tours University. Stephen has published three previous collections of poetry with Oxford University Press and is the editor of the Faber anthology Twentieth-Century French Poems. He regularly writes on French literature and modem poetry for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. His latest collection is Yellow Studio.

Mark Thwaite: Is there a unifying theme to your poetry collection Yellow Studio Stephen?

Stephen Romer: The lineaments of a unifying theme, in any of my collections, is usually discerned a posteriori , rather than conceived at the outset, poetry being discontinuous in its nature and realization. This is clearly less true of the fifth and final part of Yellow Studio, the poems of elegy to my father. What held the book up, in fact, was any satisfactory sense of a "unifying theme", or rather, of an emotional centre. For whatever reason, there is undoubtedly some desire in me for thematic cohesion. When I came into possession of my father's diaries, it was not long before I felt I was in possession of the emotional centre, though to write about my father so intensely and intently came as a surprise to me, and was directly caused by these diaries he kept as a young man. They held me in a kind of enthralled magnetic orbit for several weeks. Later on, when I came to ordering the book, I did realize there were intimations of a private space, connected with childhood, and leading directly to memories of concentrated moments of composition; very concretely, in fact, they are the places where I have lived and live in now. The Yellow Studio of my title, is not just Vuillard's, but my grandmother's, my mother's, my sister' s, my former wife's and her father's -- they were/are all painters! The "humane/heaven of drapes and turpentine", celebrated in the title poem, is no fantasy, it is always redolent for me of creativity, ever since I stole into these studios on my own and looked at the objects, the paint-spattered books of Old Masters, the vinyl records. When I was about 17, my portrait was painted simultaneously by my mother and my sister, in a yellow studio, with Eliot reading Four Quartets as accompaniment -- "The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight" is for me that studio, and that time. And the yellow room in section 5, where I wrote and dreamed, is related to these "studios". They represent, along with the room I describe in "Dismantling the Library" and "Dismantlings 2", a place of safety, privacy and mental concentration. There are, clearly, other themes running through the collection -- but the title I chose indicates where I think the heart of the matter might be.

Mark Thwaite: How long has it taken to bring this collection together? Is this a usual timeframe for you?

Stephen Romer: My previous book, Tribute, came out in 1998, and the two previous to that, Idols and Plato's Ladder were 1986 and 1992. So a timeframe of around six years was extended into ten on this occasion. This is partly an accident of the publishing process -- there is, naturally enough, a bit of a log-jam; also, I withdrew the book once since I was aware, as I have said, that a crucial part was missing. I was also doing other work during that time span, including my French anthology for Faber. The completed book took me, for all practical purposes, eight years to complete.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your collection? How did you overcome it?

Stephen Romer: There were many difficulties, of different degrees of fiendishness! Getting started again, after publishing a collection has "cleaned you out" is always, in my experience, a slow process. The slim file of work written since Yellow Studio came out, I have titled Poems 2009 -- !, the exclamation mark being a rueful indicator of my almost disbelief there will be any more... Thom Gunn, apparently, would not let a book go for publication until he had a follow-up completely, or very nearly, finished, such was his fear of post-partum depression... The love poems in Part 1 I did have to hand, or some of them, and they made a natural sequence to those that make up the bulk of Tribute. But part of the difficulty with these was the sense of an "afterthought", although the poems in Part 1 do not, I hope, in fact feel that way to the reader. Ordering this collection was very hard, for some reason. There were to have been six sections, with a further "family" section, but these would have overburdened the book with poems of that kind; so I dropped about twenty poems or so. This radical cull, though painful at the time, in fact enabled me to overcome the chief difficulty which lay in its ordering.

Mark Thwaite: Was there any particular poem within the book that caused you more problems than any of the others? Why was this?

Stephen Romer: The long poem, "Jardin Anglais: a Malentendu for Two Voices" described by most critics as "obscure" -- despite my best efforts to clarify the thing! -- was undoubtedly the hardest to write. And even now, I concede, there is some obscure material in it, or under it, but it is crucial to the poem. It is partly about not being able to drag certain matter "into the sunlight". The poem began as a dialogue between a man and a woman, and the matter of unreciprocated desire. But the male voice too much enveloped the female voice -- it reserved for itself the ironies, in a way that in fact distorted and disabled the balance of the thing. It was also originally written in several blocks, alternating roman and italics, to distinguish the two voices. And the visit to the "jardin anglais" was only the prelude to the further difficulties of an overnight stay I had nearly abandoned the whole thing, until in a final effort at salvage, I banished the male character altogether, and replaced him with the voice of a rather tiresome, wheedling and lecherous French tour guide thereby shifting the emphasis entirely to the woman's voice. The much shortened, final version of the poem emerges from an obsession with Gerard de Nerval, and his habit of idealizing women, combined with places in the Loire valley, which is where I live, combined with reading about Catherine de Medicis at Chenonceaux and Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Pretty much straight off the bat or with lots and lots of editing?

Stephen Romer: There is no rule to this. Poems have been "gifted" to me straight, and required little or no editing. On the other hand, sometimes I have had to wait months, or even years, to make the necessary adjustment (once a poem hinged on changing the modal "must" to the modal "can", and it took me about two years to realize it.) Usually, I work intensely and single-mindedly at a poem when it first "arrives", re-writing until I have something approaching what I want. I then leave it to mature, and will return to it when it comes to the question of its publication.

Mark Thwaite: Is poetry inspiration or perspiration for you?

Stephen Romer: Mark Twain's old adage remains true for me. I do believe in inspiration, however, and without it, without the strange stirrings of language, of something being galvanized with extreme rapidity usually, into an arrangement, but beyond my conscious control -- I will not set anything down as poetry. I do, however, write notes fairly continuously -- things seen, things read, things heard. Sometimes things heard on the radio, or read in the media, that drive me mad with rage and frustration! Usually with a bearing on the excesses of political correctness, or Health and Safety. I also believe, perhaps eccentrically, that the poetic vein, once struck, is quite soon exhausted, and though one works it for all it is worth, a poet usually knows (or ought to) when it has run dry. Then he or she should stop.

Mark Thwaite: There is a lengthy homage to Gerard de Nerval in your collection -- why is Nerval so important to you?

Stephen Romer: For two reasons, one accidental, or local, the other psychological and deep-rooted.For many years I lived in the ancient medieval town of Senlis, near Chantilly, to the North of Paris. Nerval's strange childhood -- abandoned by his mother who followed his father on the Napoleonic campaign to Russia, and died during the retreat -- was spent in the region. His finest single text, Sylvie, takes place in the forests around Senlis -- Ermenonville, Halatte, Chantilly -- and around the beautiful Abbaye de Chaalis and Mortefontaine. I read Les filles du feu and wandered around those forests. On the deeper level, Nerval for me is the absolute Romantic, more so even than Goethe, or Rousseau (also a denizen of Ermenonville) or Baudelaire. He is Byronic in his love of women, but you have to imagine a hopeless Byron, one who never gets the girl. Perhaps he is closest to that other tragic, god-haunted figure, Holderlin. Nerval lives essentially among occult books and fantasms -- his famous "mad" text "Aurelia" confesses to how dreams can "leak" into conscious waking life. Something in particular that fascinates me, for whatever reason, is how he continually superimposes the image of one woman upon another (which is why he loses them all), and below them all there is, presumably, the ultimate "model" of the eternal feminine, and in all likelihood, the lost mother. He is like Laforgue's Lord Pierrot, who "dies among his books". Nerval is devoid of any trace of worldliness, and as such, he is naturally fascinating to poets. I suppose he is, in that sense, the ultimate "poet's poet".

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

Stephen Romer: I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time "not writing", and absurdly, getting anguished about that fact I earn my crust teaching Eng Lit and Lang at Tours University in France, and have taught (French Lit) in the US. I have spent an inordinate amount of time, recently, trying to create something resembling an English lawn on recalcitrant and rebellious French soil. If I could, and perhaps one day I shall, I would like to travel widely and at great length, as once I had leisure to do. Recently I organized an exhibition of my sister's paintings in the studio/study I have here -- very satisfying to achieve an ambition I have always had, of having a place to exhibit painting. Lit crit, reviewing, judging poetry prizes; concerts, plays, exhibitions. None of these activities consist of writing, though they do conceivably "feed" it. A great deal of my time is spent on an activity that is correlative to writing: the art of translation. This undoubtedly affects, in some way or another, my own practise as a writer.

Mark Thwaite: You live in France: how does this affect your writing? Have the rhythms of the French language affected your prosody?

Stephen Romer: A question I am often asked, and one it is hard to answer. There is no dobt in my mind that I remain an English writer; I have only on very rare occasions tried writing poems directly into French, and the result was dismaying. I disliked myself as a French poet intensely. I was taken over by other voices in a way I can perhaps now struggle against more manfully in my native tongue. The experience of aiding and abetting the translation into French of my own poems only confirmed my stubborn linguistic identity. "L'eternel sachet Lipton" has a beauty and an elegance that "the eternal Lipton's tea-bag" does not share -- but then beauty and elegance was not what I was after. In terms of subject however, or in the way I think of so many things, being in France goes to the heart of my preoccupations: about art, love, politics. The image of the writer is more strongly defined, and somehow full of savour, than comes across in the English tradition: words like spleen, ideal, fatigue, chambre, ennui, usure... there is a whole vocabulary of Gallic angoisse that is second nature to me now, just as in French there is (or the soldiers at Verdun had) three colours for their depression -- but, again, the word cafard is so much stronger -- le gris, le noir, and worst of all le cafard vert... This undeceived but still romantic France, the France of the outcast, impossibly sensitive poet, but also of the terroir and the vigneron is the place that inspires me, not the dogmatic, statist, forensic, technocratic France, that is the other side of the coin. The willingness and capacity to theorize (but I use the word strictly in the most humane sense, not deconstruction etc.) emotion, and in particular eros (think of Proust or Barthes) -- and their respect for the notebook, and for the journal intime as a genre in its own right, have also influenced my writing. On another level,the sheer physical quality and beauty of their books, especially poetry books issuing from small presses, never fails to delight. I don't think the rhythms of French prosody have affected my language; on the contrary, my prolonged experience of translating out of French has taught me to respect the light, unaccented, anapestic rhythms of French poetry, and to appreciate all the more the no less admirable, accented, consonantal weight of English. Only Samuel Beckett seems to have been able to handle these two different geniuses with equal dexterity, wit and panache.

Mark Thwaite: Do you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

Stephen Romer: There is no clearly defined "ideal" reader in my mind. Inevitably I write for my contemporaries, and one undeniable desire (or hope) is to be read (even enjoyed) by those whose work I myself enjoy and admire. So I suppose they are somewhere in the picture, but never present in any censorious or applauding way at the time of writing.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now?

Stephen Romer: A major translation project -- a collection of "French Decadent Tales" from the fin-de-siecle threatens to keep me very busy for the next months. I am strugglng with a long-ish poem on another French poet who fascinates me, as he has fascinated others before me, Jules Laforgue. And there is an undefinable, and probably unrealizable "prose work" on Eros, that has been a very long time coming ! I suspect I am in fact writing a French book, but in English. And then there is that as yet very thin file of new poems, which I hope and trust will be added to incrementally.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite poet and your favourite prose writer? What is/are your favourite books?

Stephen Romer: I can only answer this impossibly exclusive question by speaking of my current enthusiasms. I am re-reading Ezra Pound, with ever renewed delight, at his edge, his verve, his astonishing technical variety, his ravishing visual gifts and his perfect ear. No prose writer has affected me more in recent years than W.G. Sebald. Sylvie by Nerval; Lustra by Pound; Austerlitz by Sebald; Fragments d'un discours amoureux by Barthes; Quidams Diary by Kierkegaard.

Mark Thwaite: Have you any tips for the aspiring writer?

Stephen Romer: There is the classic one, but it remains classically true: read as much as you can, and not just work by your contemporaries, in your chosen medium. Also, show your work to others, or undergo baptism of fire in a workshop (and not the kind where no one dares to say what they really think). Young writers have to learn to see their work from the outside, and as it were, "in the round". One of the hardest disciplines is to rid onself of "blind spots", ie what may be blindingly obvious to you may be no more than obscure gibberish to someone else. (Unless obscure gibberish is what you're after.) Remember also Pound's motto, Dichten = Condensare: keep it concentrated.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

Stephen Romer: I think I have probably said enough... Thank you!