Meet the Editors: Christopher
Jack interviews Christopher
Part of the mission of the Seaford Review is to shine more of a spotlight on the people making, submitting, and working with poetry in 2024. Lyric doesn’t come out of nowhere, and too often the way we publish these days — particularly in smaller or ‘indie’ presses — cuts poetry off from the context which nourished and gave rise to it. We’d like to shift some of the focus back onto our poets, and the language-worlds in which they are working.
One of the ways we’ll do this is by offering our published poets the opportunity to do a Q&A, which will follow in the wake of the issue that features that poet’s work. As a way to kickstart this process, we thought we’d run an initial Q&A with our editors, this time with Chris. The idea is to help our readers get acquainted with the editorial team before submissions open in September, as well as with the rough format that the Q&A will take.
Christopher Lloyd (he/him) was born in South Wales in 1987. He is the author of the poetry pamphlet Pick Up Your Feelings (Fourteen publishing, 2024), as well as stories, essays, and poems such as ‘contact high’, recently published in annie journal.
Jack Westmore: Hey Chris! (I’m calling you Chris rather than Christopher, obvs).
Chris Lloyd: Hi Jack. I’m the last up in this series so pressure is on to be interesting!
JW: Good luck with that.
Jack laughs.
JW: Let’s start simple. I think I know this, but do you have a particular writing practice? Where and when, how, are there snacks, music?
CL: In short, no. I have no consistent practice for writing, whether poetry or otherwise. I sometimes write in notebooks (I have many) but that tends to just be lines or images or words I find interesting. It’s more of a way to remember certain sounds or ideas. I can only really write on the computer: something about typing poems out on the screen really helps me to see it and inhabit it. I find that near-impossible writing by hand. (We are very different, I know!)
I can’t listen to music while I write, but it’s there in the writing scene, if you like.
JW: We’ll come onto that later.
CL: Ha, okay. There is always tea or coffee, usually a sweet snack of some kind. But I write when I’m inspired, or when I’m really feeling the urge to try something out on the page/screen. I wish I was more disciplined.
JW: What draws you to writing poetry? I know you write in other forms too.
CL: I started writing fiction and poetry before getting into academia—as a kid really—but then writing for scholarly publication kinda takes over. Once I was into the PhD, it was hard, for me at least, to find brain-space for more creative forms of writing.
For me, poetry has always been a way of trying things out (finding things out?). Where my prose is driven by narrative and character first and foremost, poetry is driven by language, by speculation. My poems sometimes begin with a kernel of emotion (maybe a sensation I’ve had or witnessed, or maybe an affective state I’m in) but then I use that to springboard elsewhere. I don’t want to linger in the feeling too much; I worry that I’ll just be writing a diary entry.
Ideally poems, in my mind, are about language and sound, about the potentialities inherent in poetic form. When you arrange words into lines—rather than sentences—you are thinking in a different kind of linguistic unit. You are no longer dedicated to the sense-making architecture of a sentence, but rather to the ambiguities of the line, the stanza. You can end a line mid-way through a thought or phrase; enjambment is the real engine of poetic movement, and that’s exciting to me. The things you can get away with, the plural meanings a line can generate from being broken like that.
In other words, poems do things on the page (and off the page, of course) that other forms of writing can’t. I think by attending to language’s flexibility, poems are uniquely placed to help us understand how language itself shapes everything.
JW: So, we know what you think poetry does, but which poem do you wish you’d written?
CL: There are so many poems that I wish I’d written. Like, too many. And I wish I could pick something queer here, but the poem that most feels like something I might write (had I the ability!) is Billy Collins’ “The Breather.” I know we’ve talked about it before, but I think it’s such a brilliant example of a poem doing many things at once. It feels and sounds like ordinary speech (“well, sometimes”) but it also reaches towards beauty (“our tender overlapping”). It is a remarkably taut poem even as it feels loose and easy. I have no idea how he did this. It’s also about that horror movie trope of the call coming from “inside the house,” which is fun at first, and then by the second stanza you realise it’s actually about a non-existent relationship—is it a fantasy, a past lover, a dead one? The poem moves so slowly and effortlessly through this very precise image—“it’s just been me dialling myself/then following the ringing to another room”—in a way that is both beautiful and devastating. I would love to have written this, or one day approximate something so shattering.
JW: So, as hinted at, I know that music is everywhere in your poems. Your pamphlet is even titled after thee Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings.” Indeed, we’re having this chat after having seen her live recently in Manchester. We probably shouldn’t get derailed but…
[they talk at length about how good the gig was]
JW: But what songs would help us to get to know you better?
CL: As you say, songs saturate my world: I am always listening to something. Music, like poetry, taps into multiple emotional realms at once: it’s auditory, it’s linguistic, it’s affective and bodily. I have poems written after songs and lyrics, like Jazmine’s (cry emoji).
If you want to get to know me (and my work I guess), I’d say these two songs. Yes, they are of course heartbreak songs. The first is Jazmine’s “Lost One,” and this live version is one of the best things I’ve ever seen/heard. After a breakup, the singer is mournfully asking, “don’t have too much fun without me,” “try not to love no one.” Like, come on. You should also watch her version of “Home” from The Wiz, sung as an eleven-year-old, better than most adults on the planet.
The second is Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the most upsetting song out there, I think. The title tells you everything. It’s so direct, so vulnerable, so deeply honest. I cry every time. This version from the 1992 Grammys is worth a watch, but so is the original track. (There are good covers of it, too, from George Michael to Bon Iver, but I really love this one from Samoht, which is turned almost into a kind of ministry).
JW: Okay, now you’ve brought us all down, here’s the last question. What’s on your bedside table?
CL: Ha, sorry. Okay, this is intimate! The things I can tell you about, in no particular order: antihistamines; some jewellery; a brush for the cat; my therapy and dream notebook—
JW: Very Gillian Anderson in The Fall!
CL: Oh yes, except I don’t have a fancy fountain pen for it. Also… my Nintendo Switch; and then a stack of books. Currently: Robyn Crawford’s memoir about Whitney (borrowed from you), Jordy Rosenberg’s novel Confessions of the Fox, Jamieson Webster’s book on psychoanalysis, Disorganization and Sex, and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental.
JW: Do you recommend any of these?
CL: Totally, they’re all super interesting. I love the memoir as I’ve been trying to write this essay on Whitney for a while. And Webster’s book of short essays is insightful and weird and always helps inspire some new thoughts on the psyche.
JW: Given we are the Seaford Review, what’s your favourite text about the sea?
CL: Well, most people that know me know that I am obsessed with the sea. Put me near the ocean—or, in a pinch, any other body of water—and I’m instantly calmer. The sound and sight of water really puts me at ease and slows me down.
For a while, I loved John Banville’s The Sea, but I haven’t read it in a long time, and I know he’s super problematic so maybe we won’t say that one. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was also big for me when I was in my early twenties. I might say Tove Jansson’s work actually. She’s the creator of the Moomins—
JW: We love.
CL: We do. But her adult fiction, especially all her short stories, are filled with Scandinavian watery landscapes. They’re always set on small islands, and in boats. Always at the water’s edge. She writes so luminously about being near water, I highly recommend all of her books (read The Winter Book as soon as it gets chilly outside).
JW: On that lovely recommendation, I want to thank you for sitting down with me and chatting.
CL: My pleasure, king.
Submissions for the first edition of the Seaford Review will open in September. Stay up-to-date by following us on Instagram and X/Twitter.