Brian Docherty — WHY I WRITE

Brian Docherty. author of 'The View from the Villa Delirium'

The question of why I write could mean various things and could be answered in different ways. The simplest answer is ‘because I can’ and ‘because I believe I have something to say that other people might be interested in.’ I am not a musician or visual artist, and do not write prose, apart from academic work back in the day, and occasional reviewing nowadays. My family background is skilled working class - what Americans would understand as blue collar. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and identify as Glasgow-Irish. I left school at 16, and did various jobs before enrolling on my first degree aged 28. (When I was a teenager, there were still plenty of skilled jobs in the UK, and most people I knew left school at 15; back then university education was for the privileged few.) I moved to London when I was 21.   
 
I started writing poetry in the summer of 1976, and realised immediately that it was awful rubbish;I burnt wodges of that stuff. So I went to Hornsey Library in north London, and started reading English poetry. Philip Larkin was seen as an important poet then, but I read Larkin and thought ‘If that’s a poet, I don’t want to be one.’ I turned my back on English poetry and picked up William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder among others, and started reading in earnest in the Arts Council Poetry Library, then based in Covent Garden, London. By July 1978, I was writing better work, but realised I needed to join a workshop group; that was Camden Voices, run by Dinah Livingstone as an Inner London Education Authority evening class. (ILEA was abolished by Margaret Thatcher, and the old evening class system is long gone). For six years, I was one of many people mentored by Dinah, and I also joined various other groups over the years, notably Vertical Images, Islington Poetry Workshop, and Word for Word, all in north London where I lived for 40 years.
 
So, if there is such a thing as a typical grassroots poet, that’s me; I publish in magazines, and now eight books, go to readings, attend workshop groups, buy books, and until recently, subscribed to magazines. I carry on because I am still prolific, and I am part of a growing community of writers, artists and musicians in the Hastings area where I have lived for just over six years, as of March 2022. For those of you who haven’t visited the UK, Hastings is 70 miles south of London, on the Sussex coast. Here, I am a member of several writers groups, including Hastings Stanza Group, Shorelink Writers, Words for Wellbeing, and The Literary Shed, and I take part in regular local events in Hastings, Eastbourne, and Brighton. I don’t get up to London very often, two hours on the train on a good day, and I am too old to be getting home at one am. As a grizzled veteran, I can just show up and read my work; I am not involved in organising writing groups or events, as I was in London, but I can still make a contribution.
 
What I haven’t mentioned is that my wife, Rosemary, and I moved to St. Leonards-on-Sea, next door to Hastings, in October 2015, for what I imagined would be a life of elegant retirement in a quiet seaside town. We were there 11 weeks when Rosemary was taken ill one Saturday morning, and passed away peacefully on the Sunday evening. Be careful what you wish for? As George Harrison put it, ‘life flows on, within you and without you.’ So yes, I carry on writing, and my work over the last 6 years is locally specific and very different to my London writing. Some of it is still the blend of politics, social comment and black humour I was known for in London, but it is only recently that I have started writing more openly ‘personal’ work, including a sequence of memorial poems for Rosemary, Blue to the Edge. In 2017 I published two books, In My Dreams, Again, (Penniless Press), London poems from 2008-13, and Only In St. Leonards: A Year On The Marina (Special Sorts Press). Only in St. Leonards is made up of poems written in 2016 (and early 2017) and is a signed, numbered, limited edition, as a fundraiser for St. Michael’s Hospice in St. Leonards, where I did bereavement counselling in 2017. The View From the Villa Delirium was published  by Dempsey & Windle in 2021.  
 
I am blessed to have made new friends in Hastings, and been accepted into the local creative community, and there is one person in particular who was an absolute beacon in the darkness early on who I will not embarrass by naming; more recently Kuan Yin smiled on me  and allowed me to meet someone very special. No idea what my future might hold, I get through one day at a time, I write, go to poetry events, art exhibitions, gigs, watch soccer on TV, travel some, anything else is a bonus. Poetry will continue to be at the centre of my life until the day I have to give myself away. I look forward to meeting my friends in Austin, Texas, again for the Austin International Poetry Festival and then meeting more friends in San Francisco after that, and as always, I am grateful for the opportunity to share my work.
         BRIAN DOCHERTY, St. Leonards-on-Sea, January 15, 2018, updated February 2022.