Eyes Open ... Open Wide - The Interview
EYES OPEN...OPEN WIDE is a collaboration of poetry and photographs by Steve Stockman and Gordon Ashbridge. All of the proceeds go to Capetownship a project of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Queens University through Habitat For Humanity. If you would like to contribute to fighting our enemy - the shack then send a cheque for £8 payable to Habitat For Humanity NI to Eyes Open..Open Wide, Derryvolgie Hall, 49a Derryvolgie Avenue, BELFAST BT9 6FP, N. IRELAND.
LUKE MCAULEY: Four years since Dare. That’s a long time…
STOCKI: Yes it is. I can remember after I finished Dare thinking that I could do with a break. It was not so much a conscious decision as a hunch that warned me I wouldn’t be as prolific again. And I literally stopped carrying my note book around for the first time in twenty years. Then of course Phil Baggeley at Gold Records convinced Sam Hill and I make a record and I was forced to write a few things. But having written twenty five poems a year for years I have cut back to around ten. If I was a smoker that would be seen as a success!
LM: Any reason for the hunch or the lack of poetry?
ST: Well I have a family now. That takes up that free time when your mind can play around with words. I think my job has developed quite a bit over the last few years. I have taken on a lot more responsibility and the Cape Town team that Dare was released to raise money for was 15 and this year we take 70! I have also written two books in these last four years and lots of magazine articles. I stopped thinking in rhyme.
LM: Obviously, not completely.
ST: No, there was still the need in me to deal with certain issues going on in my life or my world that I had to meditate on, ponder over, be in dialogue with and those things. It has been those scenarios that have been the inspiration of this collection.
LM: You make it sound more like having to write these poems than doing it for fun.
ST: I do actually. It is only as I say it that I realise that that is really how it has been. There are a lot of heavy issues in this book. The Omagh Bomb and 9/11 both produced prayers. Omagh was an underlying influence in some of the poems from Dare. 9/11 hovers around a good few of these. There is a lot of more personal death. My Granny passed on last year. A friend had a child who died shortly after he was born. A student lost her boyfriend in a car accident. There are other friends who have been going through very tough times. The poems are like prayerful dialogues with God in how His love and mercy resides so close to such every day tragedies.
As well as that there was the birth of Jasmine and the ongoing growing up of her and Caitlin that fires lost of thoughts.
LM: So the way you write has changed then.
ST: I think so. No longer do I grab a line and build something round it over 100 mile journeys. I live where I work now so that can of decadence is gone. Now they are more very intensive meditations. As well as those incidents I have told you about, the cross and resurrection, the mystery of faith and my trips to Cape Town are all covered in that kind of way.
LM: Has writing the other books affected your writing?
ST: I hope it has improved the writing. Spending three years studying the best wordsmiths of the twentieth century has probably made me feel even more insecure but I hope it has made me fussier. It is probably another reason that there have been less poems. I throw out more rubbish!
LM: And it is those trips to Cape Town that you mentioned earlier that the book has been done for.
ST: Yes. My poetry is more charitable than literary. It is the place in my life where I feel most insecure and have most inferiority complexes. I am amazed that people like them so much.
So I bring them out for charity. Dare and this one are for Capetownship which is a project that we run out of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Queens University, Belfast. Through Habitat For Humanity we build houses on townships around Cape Town. There are a few poems here about those trips but I have to say I have never been able to really captured those townships. Wide Eyed…Eyes Opened tries to but I am not sure.
LM: So what ones then are you most satisfied with?
ST: Oh I don’t know. I guess Stop The Spinning Wheel about 9/11 and the Iraq War is a favourite. I was satisfied with the images and the message. The Factory Of Magnificent Souls is one I like even though I use the same word to rhyme together which is pretty unforgivable to me. It is about Mandela and was written on a bus on Robben Island. How To Paint, My Love says a lot of the stuff I have been trying to preach about for five years and does it in a subtle poetic way so that worked. It was written about lots of things but used in a sermon at a wedding of my friends Sam and Miriam so I like that.
I have been using the end of Bigger Picture which I wrote in 1990 as a benediction after we used it to end Gracenotes. It is one of my older poems that I am not embarrassed about and lots of people love the benediction.
LM: Working with Gordon Ashbridge. How did that come about?
ST: We’ve been mates for about eight years. I’ve wanted to work with him for a good while. Gordon is fantastic. I love his photos. When I put myself down he gives me huge grief but he could beat me at that game any day of the week. He’s a fireman and he senses people don’t take him seriously as a thinker or an artist. Maybe some haven’t and he has listened too much. He’s a great thinker and a wonderful photographer. I want to tell the world how good he is. He sends us cards using his stuff and the photos are always awesome. First and foremost though he is just a most loyal friend.
LM: Will you do more together?
ST: I am determined to. If he doesn’t get too famous! This book is a little dissatisfying for me in that we are squeezing his photos into my poetry book. We need to do a real collaboration where we both start with a clean sheet and see what we can achieve.
LM: So the title was inspired by Rich Mullins?
ST: Yeh, Rich has a song called Here In America and they did a video for it in Ireland – don’t ask! There is a scene where he and his mate Beaker are drinking coffee in an Irish bar. When it comes to the lines I quote in the book – So much beauty around us for just two eyes to see but everywhere I go I’m looking – Rich kind of stares up close into the camera and he has a Mullins glint of wild eyed mischief. It summed him up in so many ways. He milked the world. It inspired Caress Of God’s Grace and we felt with the camera angle to this collection it was a perfect title.
LM: So what would you want people to get from the book
ST: A little encouragement to eye ball all of life’s experiences good and bad and find God hanging around somewhere in the scene; to leap into the mystery. There is a great scene in Bruce Almighty where Bruce is exasperated about being God and asks God if he can ask questions. God answers, “Yes that is the beauty of it.” I hope we can encourage people to find that beauty! I hope they will also be encouraged to look a little more carefully at the beauty and truth in every scene physical or spiritual. A poem to use personally or communally and a lot of amazing photos.
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