Aidan Mathews: ‘Read classics and trash in equal ratio. Copycat your mentors until they become tormentors’

Tell me about your new collection. The title, Pure Filth, is an oxymoron – how does it reflect the themes?

I’ve come to prefer a both/and approach to the either/or of my earlier life. To use – or perhaps abuse – an old Christian binary, you can’t be incarnational without being carnal too. So we must cherish imperfection or go mad.

Can you give us insight into the creative process of writing this collection during a pandemic?

Creativity’s a huge word, which I leave to the theologians. I’d rather be an artisan, working on words, the same as any tradesman practising their craft. Besides, I’m too anticlerical for the elitist whiff around the arts with a capital A. But I did have a two-year lockdown in my younger years when I was sectioned by my favourite brother, and the pandemic returned me to that quarantined time in a way that almost redeemed it.

Your work often touches on intensely personal themes such as faith, sexuality and mental illness. How do you balance the deeply personal with the universal in your poems?

The deeply personal is the universal. What’s left of us when we delete our beliefs, our bodies, and our search for sanity?

Your Catholic faith is foundational to your work. What is the role of spirituality and faith in your poems?

I’m a roaming Catholic who’s taken Communion in every tradition, bar the Salvation Army where they don’t have Eucharist because it’s far too divisive. In the main, I’ve found the synoptic gospels more life-giving than John’s, so I may not quite be an orthodox Trinitarian, but I do cherish the holy spirit of the god of Jesus.

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Your background includes radio drama production, and you’ve written prose and plays. How do you decide which medium best suits a particular idea or theme, and how does your versatility affect your poetry?

Depends on the commission, the time available, and my own mood swings. Prose comes more readily on Windows 95, but because I’m a bit OCD, I suppose, I’m energised by the ruminative lengths of a short lyric. I can’t do novels because I don’t believe in their 19th-century narrative premises. Short stories are closer to the algorithms of rupture and intermittency.

What is the importance of poetry in today’s world?

Minimal. The Anglophone genius of Heaney may be closer to the death of a star than the birth of a galaxy. Even the forms have their funeral games.

Dermot Bolger called you the ‘Cristiano Ronaldo of linguistic stepovers’. Could you explain how you approach language and wordplay?

I’m not familiar with football, so I don’t know exactly what he meant. But the man is kindness itself, so it must be a compliment.

Do you have a favourite poem from the collection and why?

My favourite poem is the one I haven’t written yet.

What advice would you give to aspiring poets who are looking to find their unique voice and style in their writing?

Read classics and trash in equal ratio. Read, and read more. Copycat your mentors until they become tormentors.

Which projects are you working on?

A missal of humanist liturgies for hatch, match and dispatch. The secular services I’ve attended are so meagre and congratulatory.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Every time I browse my bookshelves.

What is the best writing advice you have heard?

What I said a moment ago about mentors and tormentors. It is too good to be me.

Who do you admire the most?

The book I’m in bed with as I part its pages.

You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?

Love of neighbour as oneself. It would be the end of the world as we know it.

Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?

Pure Filth from Lilliput. “Hilarious and exhilarating” – Author’s wife.

Which public event affected you most?

The second World War (my four brothers and I were born after it, but into it) and the Second Vatican Council.

The most remarkable place you have visited?

Mount Athos. But I fled after three days.

Your most treasured possession?

My wife’s transplanted kidney.

What is the most beautiful book that you own?

Yeats’s first collection. I gave it away 40 years ago to free myself finally from coveting books, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?

I think it would have to be Turgenev, though he wasn’t as fluent in English as in French and Russian, so I would be tongue-tied.

The best and worst things about where you live?

Since I’ve lived in the same few streets all my life, it’s the proximity of the dead and the approximation of the living.

What is your favourite quotation?

“Those who love will be crucified. Those who don’t are already dead.” A Dominican at Blackfriars whose name won’t come to me.

Who is your favourite fictional character?

Winnie the Pooh (or Winnie Ille Pu in the lovely Latin edition).

A book to make me laugh?

I don’t dare say.

A book that might move me to tears?

The poetry of Derek Mahon, RIP.