Brian Turner

I wasn't so much considering audience when I was writing the poems, but when I came back home, then there was a possibility of publication and some of the revision, that became part of the process.

The poems are very rough in this book, which I like, actually, because it mirrors more the experience.

I think Isaac Rosenberg, he died before the war ended in World War I, and he talks in some of his letters back home about how rough...

He doesn't use that word.

I think he used the word raw or something.

And he somewhat laments it and recognizes that in time the poems could be polished and made more sort of in keeping with the canon that had been handed down at that time.

But he argued for the quality of the roughness because it spoke to the moment.

And I think I would echo that, you know.

And that's what I value in some part, among other things, that's something I value in that first book.

I had written, you know, it's my first published book, but it's my eighth book.

So I've written seven others before on a wide variety of subjects, and I'm sort of hoping that can happen in the future too.

I'm just rambling here, but there's some people who struggle with writer's block, and I'm looking at parts of a white wall nearby and thinking of that sort of classic image of the blank wall that blocks us kind of thing.

But for me, I'm not sure if it really works like that.

I don't stumble with writer's block.

It's more of there's too much to write about, and it's just a very short life.

So this focus, if I'm going to write about something, what do I write about now?

And what do I need to be an embedded poet for now in the world?

I do, some.

All of them come, all of these poems in these two books, Here Bullet and Phantom Noiser, I mean, you look at them, they seem very much a keeping in the sort of war-lit tradition.

But they're really not poems about war.