Ken Owens: How did the relationship with your new publisher, Fly On The Wall Press, come about?

Colin Dardis: I had had a poem published last year in their anthology, Please Hear What I Am Not Saying, which helped raise funds for the mental health charity, Mind. I have struggled with my own mental health since I was a teenager, so naturally, I was very keen to support the project. And because of that, I was on their mailing list, and followed their social media accounts, so I saw the call out for chapbook submissions back at the end of 2018. Isabelle Kenyon, the publisher and editor, does amazing work, and had impressed me with her ambition in putting together the Planet In Peril anthology and getting a letter of endorsement from Sir David Attenborough! So I knew I wanted to work alongside her and felt she was someone I could trust.

KO: How did you choose the poems for this collection?

CD: Well, I almost actually missed the deadline to submit to the call out! It had been on my mind as a consideration, but then I realised on the very last day that the deadline has approached. I knew I has quite a number of poems about dogs, or that used dogs as a central image or metaphor. If you consider the number of idioms with negative connotations that use ‘dog’ in some day, it’s clear the animal is a symbol for the more unwanted side of humanity: a dog’s dinner, sick as a dog, work like a dog, the ‘black dog’ of depression. So I thought these could form the main body of the work, focusing on how generally humans treat each other.

This is possibly going to annoy some people, but the process from submission to acceptance was quite easy. On that deadline day, with perhaps twelve hours until it closed, I got together every poem of mind I could find: dogs, birds, cats, wolves, cows, etc. The bulk of the book involves dogs, but there’s a second section, ‘Other Animals’. I frantically redrafted and edited the work, putting them in a loose sequence, wrote my cover letter explaining the collection, and waited. A week later, I got an email accepting the work, it was that straightforward.

KO: So, hey presto, instant book?

Ha, not quite! Obviously, since then, we’ve weeded out some of the weaker poems, made a few tweaks, and added in a new poem. But overall, the gestation of the book was an easy labour. The poems themselves had been written over a period of ten years or so, sitting on my laptop, doing nothing. Perhaps six or seven had been previously published. But the putting-together-a-book process was a lot easier than the process of my previous collection, the x of y. From original manuscript to publication, that took about two years. Things tend to move slowly in the publishing world. To move from submission to actual physical book with Fly Press in eight months is amazing.

KO: For someone who has a history of depression, did you find writing the poems cathartic, or help you deal with issues surrounding mental health?

CD: I think every poem can be cathartic: as a writer, you are happy when you are productive. It feels good for me to produce any new poem, even if it doesn’t come out as an overly strong piece; the main thing is the creative process, that you can still produce. With the past book, the poems were very introspective; there was an awful lot of ‘me’ there. With Dogs, I wanted to be a bit more outward looking, to observe and reflect on the state of humanity. So there are loose themes of chauvinism, bullying, just how hard life can be. There’s some positive stuff too though, simple things like celebrating nature, and the need for kindness. Some of it is subtle, some in plain sight, but I’m happy at least that the book considers other people rather than just myself.

KO: What are your hopes for the collection; what mindset do you want the reader to be in after reading it?

CD: Ah, well, first of all, I just hope people buy it and like it! There’s a curious shift in confidence that’s experienced before you publish a book. You could think each poem is strong and works well beforehand. But actually handing something over, and presenting a solid body of work, feels rather daunting. You start second-guessing everything – does that line work? Should that poem follow here, or be placed later? Should I have dropped that other poem? All you can do is try to ride out the doubt and forge ahead. That’s how things get achieved. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself, I just hope I have said something of merit that people can find some kind of affinity with. The last poem in the book in a call to arms of sorts, so perhaps people with read it, and want to go out and try to spread a little more kindness and love throughout the world.

KO: How do you control that pressure of worrying about how a work is received?

CD: A poem is successful already if you feel you have done a good job and said what you wanted to day. If you’ve written your best, applied and executed language to the best of your ability, that it’s a good poem. But once a poem enters a public realm, there’s a second level of success that you can’t control – whether people like it or not. A book could get amazing reviews from a handful of critics; but if only those critics read it, and no one else buys it, is it still successful? I try not to worry about that side, but naturally, you want your book to do well.

I recently started a sound art project, D.A.R.D.I.S (Discord and Relative Depression In Sound). It’s an ongoing experiment, very much breaking new ground for me, but basically anything that’s recorded and mixed, goes out. I release everything via Bandcamp, and it’s nice not to have to worry about an audience, but just to revel in the creative process and explore possibilities. I put out an ambient soundtrack through the project, You Fathomed Things, a companion piece to Dogs: a half hour or so of sounds designed to be listening to while reading the collection. Again, it’s a new experiment for it, a new trick for this old dog, but let’s see how it goes.

KO: You have said of the x of y that although the poems deal with themes of depression and anxiety, that there remains an undercurrent of hope throughout. Has hope disappeared now from Dogs?

CD: Hmm, I’m not sure… it’s something I was a bit conscious of when putting the collection together. One of the main themes is how humanity heaps misery upon itself, that we need to kinder, more considerate, more careful in our interactions with others. So if there is hope to be found, I guess it is subtle. Perhaps overall, Dogs is a bit bleak, so I felt it didn’t hurt to have the occasional lighter poem in there. It’s beneficial for me personally to explore this darker side of my outlook, but I’ll fully aware that for the reader, it could be just depressing, rather than enlightening. It can be tough to find the right balance between insight and misery!

KO: Do you feel this message of treating others with more peace, love and understanding has come through based on how the book has been received so far?

CD: Ah, well, perhaps that’s a little hippy-ish, but as Elvis Costello once sang, “what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?” I can only hope that the message is related successfully. The book is designed to be read as a whole; to extend the music analogy, it’s a concept album in a way, rather than a pop album with a few hit singles and the rest being filler. When I read a poetry collection, I like sitting down and reading it from start to finish, at least with my first reading of it. I want to consume it whole, to fully experience what the poet has to say. That’s partly why I recorded the instrumental soundscape album, to be listened to when reading Dogs as a whole. But I know a lot of people don’t necessarily approach poetry that way. Perhaps I’m greedy! But like with anything else, you can just put it out there and see what happens. Writing the poems is the easy part; getting people to read them, that’s where the hard work lies.

The Dogs of Humanity is available to order now from Fly On The Wall Press, ISBN 9781999598693, £7.99