THE BLACK EDITIONS INTERVIEW: pete donohue

The first Black Editions chapbook is from the Hastings-based poet pete donohue. His chapbook victims is an exploration of life and death. and is accompanied by the wonderful artwork of Dutch artist Marcel Herms.

Here we explore the writing life, we find out more about the poetry collection and pete recommends some of his favourite writers and poets.

on the writing life

As a child reading became compulsive and soon afterwards writing too. Navigating a difficult childhood, for various family reasons, my creativity was rarely acknowledged and never really encouraged. Instead, I wrote in secret using writing as a form of escape into an imaginary world less difficult to cope with. All those early scribblings are unfortunately lost now.

As a teenager, I studied the Romantic poets and, as well as their emotional content, was drawn to works inspired by the highs and lows of drugs and alcohol – something I knew a lot about from real life. Then I discovered Kerouac and the Beat poets, closely followed by Bukowski and the so-called Meat School. During this time I obsessively read any literature that came my way and experimented with writing my own poetry and short stories. By then I’d moved away from escapism into dark reality, much of it inspired by my own experiences and influenced by the counter-cultural literature explosion of the sixties and seventies.

Since my mid-teens, I’ve always written songs as well as poems, a very similar creative process I’d say, and it was my songs rather than poetry or prose, that for many years made it out into the wider world. I formed a punk/new wave band in the late seventies and through subsequent decades performed as a solo singer/songwriter and with various acoustic bands I put together. All this time I was still furiously writing – poems, short stories, novels, essays – but could never get anything published.

I’ve always known deep down that the mainstream literary world would never accept my work but it didn’t stop me trying. Like the music business, it’s incredibly hard to break into. The way to really get stuff out there is through the DIY ethos of the original counter-culture and punk movements. Seven years ago I became involved in the newly created Hastings Independent Press, a fortnightly free alternative local newspaper run entirely by volunteers. I wrote poetry and short stories for it and then soon became the Literature Editor, which I still am today.

Through the Hastings Independent, I met many like-minded poets and writers and got into the performance poetry scene which was really expanding in Hastings and beyond. I became the host of a regular poetry open-mic at one of our local independent bookshops and started sending out my poetry and short stories to various litzines and independent publishers throughout the UK and US. Within a year I had had dozens of pieces accepted and published and that gave me the heart to become more and more prolific. In the last two or so years, I have had five chapbooks (victims will be my sixth) and a full collection of poetry published.

on his collection victims

The poems in victims are all connected by my interest in a bridge between the natural and the supernatural – how are the living connected to the dead, the mind and body to the spirit? I’m fascinated by that mysterious world of darkness that lies between consciousness and nothingness, how it can seem both comforting and terrifying at the same time. Can we enter the realms of nothingness, partly or wholly, without being completely consumed by it? This is something I’ve explored through many of my poems and short stories.

Recurring themes are the same ones that feature in much of my work: overcoming demons or learning to live with them, enforced and organised religion, the nature of sin and guilt and their relationship to mental illness and addiction, visions and dreamworlds. The title victims may seem like a negative one but I mean it in the sense that we can all be victims of both ourselves and the world we experience yet also can strive to overcome this. I believe that writing and reading poetry can be a way to combat despair.

I feel the illustrations by the celebrated Dutch mixed media artist Marcel Herms visually reflect this collection perfectly. He has collaborated with numerous underground poets and writers as well as punk and alternative bands. I first came across his work through another Hastings-based poet, John D Robinson, and made contact. Marcel kindly illustrated the cover for my full collection swallowing paregoric babies last year after I’d seen a new painting of his on social media and, thinking it absolutely represented that title, asked him if I could use it. Marcel knows my poetry but the victims paintings were not specifically done for these poems, they just happened to fit them – it was synchronicity and serendipity, perhaps we communicated through the realms of nothingness.

favourite literature

It’s very difficult to narrow down my favourite authors and poets but I can tell you some I keep re-reading: John Milton, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson, Richard Brautigan and John D Robinson.

recommended reading

À rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (1927)

And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave (1989)

The Flame by Leonard Cohen (2018)

COLLECTION NOW SOLD OUT