Mimi Khalvati on teaching, voice and political poetry

Valeria Melchioretto interviews Mimi Khalvati, a poet who worked in theatre before turning to poetry and who runs workshops and courses in London as co-ordinator of the Poetry School. The introduction lists her collections White Ink, Mirrorwork, Selected Poems and The Chine.

Khalvati explains that she came to poetry by accident on a residential writing course in 1986, published a first book about three years later and soon gave up theatre work to concentrate on verse. She notes that a poet's day is mostly taken up by activities around poetry, not by writing at home. Asked about talent and effort, she says the two cannot be pulled apart, because hard work is how one finds out what one's gift is. She describes the plan for her next book as unusually clear: a title taken from Wordsworth, short and formal poems, and a leaning towards song.

Several answers deal with the public side of poetry. On performance she would sooner hear good poems read badly than weak ones delivered with flair, though she values real contact with an audience. She compares poetry and theatre as arts of relationship, and she says the Poetry School, which she founded in 1997, serves people at many levels, from versification to translation. Some things, she says, such as a love of language, cannot be taught. She also questions the idea of finding a voice, preferring to think about the voice of the poem itself.

The final questions are more pointed. Khalvati sees continuing sexism and ageism in positions of power in poetry, discusses whether poets are obliged to address political events, using the anti-war anthology 100 Poets Against War as a prompt, and answers lightly about the author photographs on book jackets. The page ends with the interviewer's credit.

I'd rather hear good poems performed badly, than bad poems delivered with a great deal of panache.

Mimi Khalvati, The Wolf, issue 3

You cannot teach people to love the language.

Mimi Khalvati, The Wolf, issue 3