Spotlight On Writers – Marc Brightside

I grew up in Croydon, a town in South London, in the UK. Anyone who knows Croydon will probably confirm that it isn’t necessarily the nicest part of the country, but it served as a memorable backdrop for my childhood nonetheless. My family are/were largely from Scotland, but we came down when I was only two-years-old, so I have few connections to the land up north.

More than anything else, people watching. I use public transport a lot and I’ll often wear my earphones without any music playing, just to hear what ridiculous nonsense strangers come out with when they think no-one is listening. People have this bizarre sense of security when talking on their phone; they’ll quite happily talk about abortions and credit card fraud as though it’s completely inconsequential. Occasionally, I wonder if they know they can be heard, if there’s some kind of willing suspension of cynicism in effect. After all, it’s a lot easier to get something off your chest when you never have to worry about meeting the recipient again.

It’s partly because of this that I end up in conversation with strangers a lot, to varying degrees of personal detail. Once, a chance encounter with someone on the replacement bus service ended with me having tea in their house at two o’clock in the morning, and this later inspired a poem, ‘Hello, I’m in Eastleigh.’ If you’re a creative, you can’t afford to just stay within your echo chamber – you need to be willing to hear other points of view and challenge your own ideas.

That’s a tricky one. To me, context is always the most important element to language. Without context, words mean nothing, and having thirteen syllables and a three-page etymology is never going to change that. That having been said, rhythm is very important to me, even as a page poet. In a poem about the fledgling stages of a romantic relationship, I described the moment in which, “…full stops faded into colons and parentheses.” I wanted to convey the moment in which formal text messages or emails start ending with a smile, and something about that final word just felt perfect to me, the vocal rhythm of ‘parentheses’ and way its consonants roll over its vowels so seamlessly.

For similar reasons to the above, I also like ‘clandestine’, ‘emphasise’ and ‘ornamental’. There’s something wonderful about well-constructed words with very mundane definitions.