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No 15 - 2005
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Wendy Cope Sam Gardiner
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| Interview with Wendy Cope |
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Sam Gardiner: Your Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was a
tremendous debut (in 1986), and you became famous overnight. How did this change your life? How did Wendy cope?
Wendy: I had already given up my full-time teaching job and was
working part-time. When the book came out I was suddenly in demand to do all sorts of things, so I gave up teaching altogether. Ever since then I have been able to earn a living without having a job. For this I am eternally grateful. However, the overnight fame, modest though it was compared with what happened to, say, J.K.Rowling, was difficult to deal with. The telephone never stopped ringing, I couldn’t keep up with the post, and every day brought new demands and decisions. I had to toughen up very quickly and learn to say no. I wished there was someone I could talk with about what was happening to me but in those days I didn’t know anyone who’d had a similar experience.
Sam: Has your poetry changed over the past 20 years? If so, what do you think are the main differences?
Wendy: Since Making Cocoa … I’ve done fewer parodies and literary jokes. In my early work I only used rhyme and metre in
humorous poems. Now I use it in some (though not all) of my unfunny poems as well. My second book, Serious Concerns is a
very unhappy book because I was unhappy when I wrote it. My
most recent book, If I Don’t Know is calmer and more contented.
Sam: Your poetry is often meaningful in that it deals lightly with
serious subjects. Do you consider yourself a serious humorist?
Wendy: I’m a poet with a sense of humour. Actually I’ve hardly ever
met a poet who didn’t have a sense of humour but many of them keep it out of their poems. I do believe that humour and powerful emotion can exist in the same poem. And that a funny poem can be saying something important.
Sam: Laughter is one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity, especially that we can laugh at ourselves. Do you see
yourself as a custodian of one of humankind’s precious endowments?
Wendy: No
Sam: One objection to humour is that life is not a comedy, but do you agree that life is a comedy, or at least a tragicomedy, once you
get the joke?
Wendy: I think that humour often arises out of misery and despair.
Sometimes life seems so terrible that all you can do is laugh. To see life as anything other than a joke, and to care about making the world a better place, you have to be reasonably happy and optimistic.
Sam: It has been said that a sense of humour is a sense of proportion. Do you agree?
Wendy: Yes, I think there’s some truth in that.
Sam: Do you think that people, and poets are people, often take
themselves too seriously?
Wendy: My first response was yes. But on reflection I’m not sure.
When I was young my self-esteem was so low that I didn't take myself seriously enough. Beginning to write was about feeling entitled to take myself seriously. But I hope I’m not self-important. Most of the poets I know have enough sense not to behave as if they take themselves too seriously.
Sam: How do you self-edit, and do you agree that the wastepaper
basket is a poet’s best friend?
Wendy: Most of my poems go through lots of drafts. I write in a
notebook and I never throw a draft away because I might want
to go back to it. I never throw a finished poem away either, although I don’t try to publish all of them. I have a file labelled “Failures”. Now and again I look through it and find something that doesn’t seem to be a failure after all. So, no, don’t use the wastepaper basket.
Sam: Do you try to write during regular hours?
Wendy: Only when I’m working on something long, such as “The
River Girl” or “The Teacher's Tale.”
Sam: When can we expect to see your next collection?
Wendy: Probably not before 2010, and maybe not then.
Sam: Wendy, thank you very much for your time. |
page(s) 39-41
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