Q. Hi Mona, just to start would you be able to tell us a bit about your poem ‘After Party / After Life’ and how it responds to ‘Watch That Man’? 

A. I was commissioned to write the poem in response to ‘Watch that Man’, the first track on ‘Aladdin Sane’. Commissions are really hard for poets usually, because it’s really hard to write a poem, or conjure a poem, from a different place. You don’t want to impose yourself on the poem too much. But with this poem, and this commission, it was actually much easier than I thought it was going to be. The reason for that is I think Bowie has always been a part of the cultural weather, for me, and for lots of artists, and so I wanted very keenly to have a relationship with him as an artist. In this poem, the conversation is literally me as a poet talking to him in the after life after he died, and it’s a sort of strange conversation in which I am trying to work out what it’s like to be Bowie. I thought that so much of what that man was around was a kind of strange after party, and the poem very clearly uses this cut up technique as a way to shift that from the after party to the after life.

That’s really interesting. I feel like poetry can sometimes feel detached from other forms of art, in terms of how it is presented, but you mention despite that Bowie has always felt part of the cultural weather. Obviously, he was also famous for the way in which he controlled his career, how he continually reimagined himself and his work through these different personas. Do you think poets can take inspiration from this? Are poets expected too much to establish their style and then just stick with it? 

I think my view is that we, as poets, are doing something really strange. What we are doing is effectively translating the world around us into language. And we are always told that we are trying to do this in a new way – to ‘keep it new’ – that’s the Pound mantra. But there’s a lot of ways of doing that, lots of ways of making sense of the world. But translating the world into a poem takes being part of the world, and I think Bowie is part of that too. You can’t really be writing now, or be an artist now, without accepting that he is a part of your cultural learning, even if it might not be overt. I don’t think I agree that poets are detached from that. I think poets just do different things, we are often at the edge of language, maybe we are less literal and more abstract. I think sometimes that an audience can find that difficult, but our job is to make sure that we can make that world relevant to them. 

So with that in mind, where does the recurring line – ‘you poets are all the same’ – fit within that imagined conversation between Bowie and yourself? 

It’s basically that conversation around ‘what is poetry for?’. Every single poem I write is a question that I am trying to answer: what is poetry for? What is language for? What is its purpose? And I quite like the idea of having that conversation with Bowie, because Bowie is in this poetic universe but he’s not a poet.

In this case I am ironically using the poem itself to have this conversation, and for Bowie to then give me a poem inside that conversation as well. It’s a kind of curiosity around what Bowie would think of poetry. Because he actually, I think, read very little poetry. I know, for example, when he listed the books he had read there was very little poetry on there. I think he’s got Frank O’Hara on his list and little else. Even when he was asked very famously, in a Rolling Stone Magazine interview with Burroughs in 1974, if he’s influenced by Eliot, Bowie says no, he hasn’t read him. I found that very, very interesting because I thought if there is one artist and one cultural icon that Bowie would have been interested in it would be Eliot and ‘The Wasteland’. He was such an intellectually curious artist Bowie, I found it really astonishing that he wasn’t interested in more poetry. But maybe he was and he just imbibed it in a different way. So I suppose, I am sort of going to Bowie and asking him in this poem, what do you think of what we do?

I love that idea. And it’s true he definitely always remained on the cutting edge, even as a musician, he was always lifting up and championing new music even as he got older, he remained curious about things all the way until his death. In terms of your own personal relationship with Bowie’s music, has it changed in the writing of this poem? 

Well, I think it’s more an opportunity for me to recounter some of the lyrics and the music again. Going back to ‘Aladdin Sane’ and some of his other albums and trying to work out what he was doing as artist. Bowie was eclectic; he was an artist, he was a painter, he had very good instincts for things like photography, for example. I think that is what I’ve appreciated more going back to those artistic products that he made – hearing those things and touching those things again – this is somebody who was a really serious artist. He was a genius at mimicry, but he never made the process of his mimesis apparent. He was very good at borrowing while making things new. It never felt in his hands like he was doing it as a tourist, he actually loved the things he was borrowing. I think that is incredible for an artist to do that over a body of work of… how many decades? I think we can learn a lot from him, his music, and his art.  

That’s probably why he was such a good actor too, his capacity for mimicry. One final question, and a slightly impossible one at that, if you had to pick a favourite Bowie song, what would it be? Would it be ‘Watch that Man’ or was that choice incidental? 

Well, I love that song and I love that album… hmm… this is hard.

I’m sorry, it’s a horrible question. 

Well, I play Heroes a lot. It’s become one of those songs that I feel empowers me. But ‘Aladdin Sane’ is an incredible album, because it is so unexpected. But I’m not sure if it’s my favourite album… there are tracks on it that I really like – I love ‘The Jean Genie.’ But I don’t know where to start with Bowie. Every album that he made he was chewing on something different. So I don’t know the answer to that question. Everything he touched turned to gold. 

Thank you so much for speaking with us Mona. 

Thank you.