T S Eliot prizewinner Jen Hadfield on RSA Arts & Ecology

I've posted an interview with the poet Jen Hadfield up on the main site. I'll admit I hadn't even heard of her until she won the T S Eliot Award a few weeks ago, but Nigh-No-Place turns out to be really great for its vivid, unruly, close-up-view poems about life in the back-0f beyond.

I've posted an interview with the poet Jen Hadfield up on the main site. I'll admit I hadn't even heard of her until she won the T S Eliot Award a few weeks ago, but Nigh-No-Place turns out to be really great for its vivid, unruly, close-up-view poems about life in the back-0f beyond.

Two things I found intersting: Hadfield is, self-admittedly, a poor reader. Despite a love of language, she finds getting through novels hard. Which is one of the reasons why she graviates towards poetry.

Also, by her own admission again,  she doesn't have a single political bone in her body.

I'm almost alarmingly apolitical, which is something I have anxiety about in the same way as I do about the reading thing. I think that I'm not political is possibly partially about the generation I come from but also to do with me as a person.

But it's inevitable that anyone with Hadfield's subject matter becomes political, in the sense that - as Siân Ede was saying - nature is no longer just out there as the ineffable, unstoppable force. "It is tainted. It is sad. It is ending." It's something broken, and if you write about it now you are inevitably writing about catastrophe. Hadfield sees herself as writing from within the ecopoetic tradition, but with that modern knowledge:

It's not just about people going out into the landscape and looking at it. "Oh how lovely and interesting and possibly sublime!" There's an anxiety in there as well about how it's changing and about how we make ourselves at home out there, how we impact on it.

Read the full interview here.