Writer
Michael Rosen's interview
| BBC Host | Hello, and welcome to tonight's Live Chat with Michael Rosen.
He is from London. He was born in 1946. He started writing poetry when he was eighteen. His first collection was published in 1974 and was called 'Mind Your Own Business'. He went to medical school for a year. He presents a show on Radio 4 called 'Word of Mouth'. His books include 'Don't Put Mustard in the Custard' and 'The Hypnotiser'. He goes into schools in the UK and abroad to spread the joy of poetry!! Michael describes his poetry as 'Spoken' and 'Bitter-sweet'. He's an Arsenal fan! He teaches at a University in North London. Michael is here and we're ready to go... WOW! Here's the first question. We're off... |
| Rosie banks | How old were you when you started writing poetry? |
| Michael Rosen | 16. The first thing I wrote, was a poem about a moth. It was sort of an imitation of a poem by D.H. Lawrence about a bat. I had written one in school as part of school stuff when I was 13, about a man who was standing on a beach, and I think he was dead! A bit difficult. But I was 13. It was what is called a dramatic monologue because we had just read Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." |
| Do | What would you have done if you hadn't been a poet? |
| Michael Rosen | Either a teacher or an actor. I did fancy myself as a bit of the old tragedian bit, but every time I did it people laughed. I kind of mugged, pulled silly faces. When I did comedy too. It was a bit grotesque. I'm interested in clowning, and my performances in schools are stand up comedy with poems. |
| Ellie | Do you ever get writers block? and if so, what tends to trigger it? |
| Michael Rosen | I get it when I'm in a kind of rut, writing too much of the same thing. I usually read something very different from the stuff I write, to shake me up a bit and show me other possibilities. It happens a lot to writers, for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it's to do with the rut thing, but people sometimes want to stay writing in the same vein. I try to switch around and try to find another vein altogether. |
| Jo | How long does it take you to write a poem, on average? |
| Michael Rosen | Probably about a day. It might not be all in the same day, but it might add up to about 12 or 16 hours' work, spread over a week or two. Or I might write it in a day, scribble, go off, have a cup of tea, come back. But yes, about a day. Sometimes it comes out in one go, but rarely. D.H. Lawrence tried to write in a way he never corrected, he wrote it straight out, and that immediate spontaneous thing, he thought was worth keeping. That's another view of it. I try to make it sound spontaneous, but it's not. I'm a cheat, he was honest! |
| Dean | What is your favourite book that u have written? |
| Michael Rosen | This always changes. At the moment, it's probably You Wait Till I'm Older Than You. It's got a poem in it called The Torch, which is the best kind of thing I can write in that vein. That's to say, an event that happened to me when I was a boy, that is full of twists and turns, and the outcome is surprising. I think I probably haven't written one of those as well as that anywhere else. It's also got one or two other good things in it, so it's my favourite. The title is a kind of sequel to Quick, Let's Get Out of Here, and also the Hypnotizer. |
| Digit | Various other illustrators have drawn pictures for your poems, are you good at drawing or was it wise to pick other artists? |
| Michael Rosen | I'm absolute rubbish at drawing. Usually people learn to do things like perspective and depth and composition as they grow up. But I draw just like I did when I was 6. Nothing's changed! I never learned beyond the age of 6 If someone wanted a book illustrated by a 6 year old, but sadly usually publishers want books drawn by adults, so I can't do it. I can say Quentin Blake is my favourite illustrator, and I was sad when he said he couldn't do anymore of my books. |
| Jono | What is your next goal in life? You've achieved so much, but what's next? |
| Michael Rosen | To write another good book. Oh, and I guess to make another interesting radio programme. |
| Ben | Do you think you will ever stop writing poetry? |
| Michael Rosen | No. Poetry is a way of handling anything that you feel, think, say, see, touch, and so as you go through life doing those things, and once you get into the poetry habit, you can turn to it whenever it suits you. It helps you understand who you are and how you fit in with people and things in the world. |
| Alisdair Taggart | What are you reading at the moment? |
| Michael Rosen | Romeo and Juliet. Trading with the Enemy. An account of how some Americans cooperated with the Nazis. |
| Freda | Is writing a long book very different from writing a short story? |
| Jono | What is your ideal working place and surroundings for your inspiration? |
| Michael Rosen | I don't have one. I can usually write almost anywhere. I don't necessarily need quiet. I've learned how to write on the move, and sitting in the midst of other people. It doesn't necessarily make me a nice person, but I can do it! It's a bit antisocial. I'm watching an invisible telly in my head, and people think I'm rude, or withdrawn, or grumpy, but I'm just concentrating on my invisible telly! |
| Mossy | What makes you laugh? |
| Michael Rosen | Billy Connolly used to make me laugh. Used to because these days he's a bit vain and pleased with himself I like all of Paul Whitehouse's stuff. I have laughed a lot at Trigger Happy TV but it's probably quite cruel. Mark Lamarr, I think he's very clever and funny and I try to watch Never Mind The Buzzcocks. There was a programme on the radio, Dead Ringers, which is coming to telly in March, I think. Jon Culshaw is really funny, I think he's the new Rory Bremner. And there's a comedian called Dylan Moran, I think he's very funny. |
| BBC Host | Holly, hello and welcome to the chat, we're LIVE from the bbc.co.uk Chat Studio with Michael Rosen. You can send him a question! Just type it into the box at the bottom of the page then press return/enter. Carol Gibson, it's your question coming up next! |
| Carol Gibson | I am 16 and love writing, how can I get recognised? |
| Michael Rosen | Think of throwing a pebble in the water and watching the ripples go out. So start trying to interest the people nearest to where you throw the pebble in, nearest to you. So show the people around you, who you respect, what you've written. Listen to what they say. That might be your parents, or your teacher, or relations. Encourage them to be honest. You don't have to agree with everything they say, but think about what they say. One or other might suggest somebody they know, and the ripples get wider. They may suggest printing off 20 or 30 copies, and handing them out at some place you hang out. A church, youth club, synagogue. Spread the net wider, and hear what people are saying. Then bit by bit you'll find out if you're any good and whether it's worth going with the ripples even further. I would get it appraised before sending off to any publishers. |
| Jonny | Were you an organised person at school or did you reform at a later age? |
| Michael Rosen | I think, like many people, I was organised in some spheres of my life but not in others. When I was 16, or 17, I was very organised with my history lessons. But with my English, which I was better at, I was kind of chaotic and read round all over the place. But being chaotic in that way, maybe was better than being very organised with the history. Maybe we need both. |
| Gogo | Why do you like writing for kids? |
| Michael Rosen | It happened by accident. At first I wanted to write about my childhood, in the voice of a child, as a way of exploring who I was and where I came from. But I didn't have a child audience in mind. I imagined adults would be interested. But publishers told me they wouldn't, so the first set of poems about my childhood in the book Mind Your Own Business, ended up as a children's book. Once I was in the children's book world, I never got out. Until this year, my first book of adult poems is coming out with Penguin. That's called Carrying the Elephant. |
| Sophie | What proportion of your poems get published? |
| Michael Rosen | Probably about two thirds. I'm mostly happy with that. |
| Gogo | Was English your best subject at school? If not, what was? |
| Michael Rosen | English, yes, the best, closely followed by history, and biology. I wish I could have done drama at school, I belonged to a theatre as a kid and spent hours going to plays. But we couldn't do it for an exam. |
| Kelly R | Which medium do you prefer, radio, books or doing shows to an audience? |
| Michael Rosen | It's not really a matter of preferring, I like doing all of them and mixing it up, that's what keeps it all fresh. If I just did one, I would dry up and get fed up. It's bouncing off all of them that keeps me alive. There is some feed through between the performing, the writing, and doing the radio, but not a lot. |
| Jenni | Is there anything you would change in your life? |
| Michael Rosen | No. Everything is very nice and sweet and wonderful! |
| Rebecca Hughes | Do you think that kids in school study enough poetry? |
| Michael Rosen | I think the problem in schools is that children have to spend too much time describing little bits of poems and not enough time enjoying simply reading them, and having fun having a go at writing them. You discover that if you pull the petals off a flower, it's not a flower anymore. |
| BBC Host | There's still 20 minutes to go with Michael .... plenty of time to submit a question and get it answered.... |
| Justine Vare | Do you read your children bed time stories? If yes - what do you read? |
| Michael Rosen | Some of them are too old for me to read to them, and one of them is too young. So not now, but I used to read to them lots and lots. Occasionally my own, but only when they asked. The ten month old doesn't get the jokes yet! |
| Vaughan | Do you wish you were a child again? |
| Michael Rosen | No. I'm very happy being the geezer I am. |
| Digit | In your earlier days - did anyone try to bring you down by trying to make you change your job? |
| Michael Rosen | Ye-es. I think various people have wanted to say that what I write isn't poetry, or isn't good enough, and it annoys them that I've been quite popular with what they think of as trash. So really they want to say, get off the poetry patch, you are just a weed, and you are strangling the flowers. But I always reply by saying, don't worry, don't call it poetry if it offends you, and call it "stuff" or "bits" and then you don't need to get all huffy about it! |
| Sara | Would you advise someone who likes writing poems to try and be a poet? |
| Michael Rosen | If you write poems, you ARE a poet. If you mean try to become a professional poet, then I'd simply say if you don't mind being poor, then absolutely! I scarcely earned any money between the ages of 16 and 30, and I only earned a bit of money between 30 and 35 because I did some TV work. Sorry, correction, I mean 16 to 34, and only earned money after 34 by doing TV work for Channel 4 in a series called Everybody Here. It was a children's programme, I was Dr Smarty Pants. |
| Deborah Lees | How can you remember your childhood so well? |
| Michael Rosen | I'd put that another way, I don't understand why other people don't remember their childhood very well. Maybe in my case, it's because in our family we would very often tell each other stories about things that we'd all been involved in. You'd think that would be a bit weird, because if we were there, we didn't need to tell each other about it. But that's the way we were. |
| Jono | When did your work begin to peak? |
| Michael Rosen | 1983. I think that was when I published Quick, Let's Get Out of Here. Speaking To You was published in 1985, it was a collection of poems I edited, not wrote. I think I began to realise what kind of poems I was writing and wanted to write. That is, writing about things that had happened to me in a kind of spoken voice. |
| James | Have you ever tried any other factual/creative writing? |
| Michael Rosen | Yes, I just published a book about Shakespeare. It's a biography and a description of the times he lived in and the way he wrote. It's called Shakespeare: His Life and His Work, so that's a very different way of writing. I'm writing a book about Shakespeare for adults now. I also write about language for sixth formers, in a magazine called E-Mag, and of course I write my radio scripts. |
| Firaas | When you were younger - didn't you consider poetry a very feminine thing? |
| Michael Rosen | I think when I was younger I thought it was difficult, odd, a bit unfriendly, and often about things that I wasn't very interested in. But I never thought of it as feminine, perhaps because most of the poets we read were men. |
| Jane Simons | What were your mum and dad like? You mention them a lot in your poems. |
| Michael Rosen | My dad was much kinder than I make him out to be in the poems, and he's very reasonable to let me write about him as this grumpy old fellow. My mum, who isn't alive, was quite a surprising mixture. She was in a way unknowable. She used to pretend she was sillier than she was. Really she was very intelligent and very thoughtful, and very serious. They were both teachers. My mum at primary and my dad at secondary school. Later they both taught students how to teach. |
| Jono | 'They say 'Money Isn't anything' do you do poetry for a living or mainly a hobby? |
| Michael Rosen | I do several things for a living, which takes the pressure off the poems. It means when I write a poem, I'm not thinking "will this make me a living?" because I can make the living from performing and doing radio as well. So I can write any kind of poem I feel like. Without thinking of the bank manager! |
| Emma Dodd | What do you think makes children nowadays tick? |
| Michael Rosen | Probably much of the same kinds of things that always made them tick. Having a good time in spite of anything that knocks them down. I guess many children have different ways of having a good time from the way I did, but mostly I've noticed children don't like dwelling very much on things that are too sad or too unpleasant. |
| Bryan Hancock | Did your brother really squirt you with dirty washing up water as in 'Washing Up'? What does your brother do now? |
| Michael Rosen | He most certainly did. Then went on to become one of the people in charge of the fossils at the Natural History Museum. We get on very well together and e-mail each other every day. He's 4 years older than me. |
| Ben | Do you ever write stuff that you wouldn't want published? |
| Michael Rosen | Yes, I've written plenty I wouldn't want to publish. Sometimes because there are people I don't want to see it, or sometimes because it doesn't say what I really think. And so maybe I have to wait until I can find a way in which I can make it say what I really think. That's what writing often is; trying to say what you really think. |
| BBC Host | Sophie - it's your question coming up next! |
| Sophie | Have you ever kept a diary? |
| Michael Rosen | Yes, I kept a diary for two terms in my 3rd year at secondary school. I gave up because I thought I was a pretentious twit! I wouldn't have minded if my mum found it because there was nothing really private in it. The nearest it got to being private is I wrote at the end of each day the name of which girl I fancied, or I thought fancied me! |
| Eleanor | Have you ever written collaboratively with people? |
| Michael Rosen | Yes I have, I used to be in a little theatre group, and we wrote things together. That was in the early 70s, and the radio script that I write is usually a result of collaboration between me and the producer. |
| BBC Host | We're coming to the end of tonight's chat, just time for one more question ... it's from you Isabel.... |
| Isabel | What kind of person do you find most irritating? |
| Michael Rosen | People who want to try and exert power over you, just for the sake of it. |
| BBC Host | That is all we have time for. Here's Michael with a final word... |
| Michael Rosen | If you think poetry is difficult or hard to write, then just try speaking onto the page. If you think poetry is hard to read or understand, just try and find a book of poems that isn't. And it will probably help you, in the end, understand the other ones. |
| BBC Host | Thanks to our guest Michael Rosen, and to all of you who logged on tonight. Sorry if your question didn't get answered - there just wasn't enough time to cover them all. We hope you had fun. Take care! |
