Interview with John Looker

Hello Poetry Lovers

Welcome back to the talk show studio. (Rapturous applause)

Today we have the honour of welcoming talented poet John Looker (Audience cheer)

(Our esteemed guest glides down the lighted stairs to great applause)

A pleasure to be here, Heather. I managed to give Dobby the slip (for now).

I suppose I should start with a confession Heather, although I’m afraid you can’t claim it as a scoop: ‘John Looker’ is a pen name. It’s the name of my mother’s father who was killed in the London Blitz in 1940. I was born five years later and my parents named me John after him. 

Years later I felt some right to the name Looker, and also some obligation. In a family of immensely practical people, I was the bookworm and I sense that it comes from my unknown grandfather’s DNA. 

He left us his books, the best books in the house. There was a glass cabinet with volumes of Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and so on.  When I was old enough I dug deep into these. 

Also I discovered a box far back in the cupboard under the stairs with the original John Looker’s books on theosophy and comparative religion – hidden because they were felt to be disturbing. 

Other than that my life is unremarkable: happy childhood on the southern edge of London, uni, civil service career, happily married raising a family in the Surrey Hills, and now lovely grandchildren. 

I travelled widely through my work, though, and this fed into my poems. Often with a historical twist.

So for example, I was in Bogota and in their gold museum there was an exquisite gold sculpture from pre-Columbus days: a miniature raft carrying El Dorado, the prince covered in gold dust. Years later I used that in a poem. It began: 

  “Beneath his feet the raft rocks, unevenly. 

   Disdaining the cold, he stands proud 

   to receive the gift of the sun as it clears the peaks …”

but it ended with intimations of the approaching conquistadors. That poem was published in an anthology marking the Austin International Poetry Festival’s 20th anniversary.

As soon as I could read, I suppose. AA Milne, Lewis Carroll, Hiawatha. That’s pretty normal isn’t it?

The trouble was, in my teens I became painfully self-conscious about reading and writing verse. I was afraid that poetry was for wimps and cissies: probably the influence of the Beano, the Dandy and too many boys’ comics. I hated Wordsworth’s daffodils poem. 

I remember one day, walking through the corridors at school, clearly saying to myself ‘I do NOT write poetry’. So for a few years I only wrote songs. It’s just that I was hopeless at tunes. 

Well, my poetry-free spell came to an end when I was sixteen and allowed unsupervised access to the school library. I discovered three poets no one had told me about: John Donne, Wilfred Owen and DH Lawrence. They were a revelation. Clearly masculine. I was reassured that poetry was for men, for blokes. 

A huge influence then was my English teacher, Mr Egford. He took us beyond the syllabus and introduced us to TS Eliot and others, and he encouraged me to write. 

I might also point to a painter. Years ago there was a tv programme about Howard Hodgkin. He had canvasses stacked all round the studio and he explained how he would take one, put it on the easel and contemplate it, trying out minor revisions. He would have several on the go for months before signing one off. I find I do that with things I’ve written. 

I see that I haven’t answered your question in the conventional way. My wife and I enjoy such a wide variety of poets together that I’m not sure where any influences lie. 

Actually that’s not easy to talk about. I like a project. My first book looked at life through the emotions and experiences we encounter at work.

That was The Human Hive, published by the independent publisher Bennison Books. I owe them a lot because they also published Shimmering Horizons on the theme of the journey, the quest, the odyssey. 

One thing those two books have in common is that they are not about me. Or not directly. They look outwards. They try to look for our common humanity – down the ages and round the globe. 

There’s a new project I began in 2021 which should keep me happy for a number of years. It’s a sequence of poems which also looks at human life historically …

… but I don’t mind talking about something else. I decided at the start of 2023 to write a poem for each of our ten grandchildren, pitched as best I could for the interests and age of each grandchild – because they range from young adults to five years. 

It started when a granddaughter took one of my books to school to show her teacher an earlier poem about herself when a toddler. I’ve just finished and given the last of the new poems to a grandson. They’re not for publication of course. 

I’ve never performed in a gig. Although Magma once invited me, and others, to read at the launch of their European issue. My poem was about three exhilarating moments in European history: the arrival of Christianity, Petrarch and the Renaissance, and Copernicus. 

There was also the launch of an anthology in New Zealand, published by the Caselberg Trust to round up the winners and runners-up from their annual competitions.

I had a poem in it called Conversation with a Sea Lion. I wasn’t able to get there but two daughters live in Dunedin and they went and were made very welcome. 

My poem was performed by Peter Haydon, a New Zealand actor and tv presenter. They sent me a video. He was brilliant. The poem is on my blog at https://johnlooker.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/conversation-with-a-sea-lion/

But if you’re looking for a memory of something embarrassing, I can think of a grandson who came home from school complaining about a poetry lesson saying “Even Grandpa’s poems are better than that!”

Oops! Looks like Dobby got to John after all! Wasn’t John Looker a wonderful guest. Very interesting. Do look at John’s site, it’s a real treat http://Johnlooker.wordpress.com

Thanks for coming to the studio, PL’s. We’ll be back with more poetry action real soon.