My Inspiration: Koef Nielsen

Local wordsmith, Koef Nielsen returns to the poetry scene with his first collection since 1980, Aerogramme. The collection reflects on experiences of childhood – It’s followed me all my life – through to contemporary material realities. The act of passing through these experiences – the journey itself – is perhaps the collection’s most guiding theme. Didactic and oftentimes wry, this collection is a reminder of Nielsen’s impressive literary command.

Ahead of the event, Nielsen recalls his inspirations for creating the collection…

Aerogramme is the title poem in a collection of largely unpublished poetry written over the last 40 or so years. Since the last thing the world needs is more bad poetry I have tried to do my bit by not adding to it! These are different poems about different things and situations, but I hope my voice is consistent, straightforward, not needlessly complex and I am guided by concentration, breath and the rhythms of everyday speech.

Inspirations come in many guises – as poets, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, not so much as “nature” poetry but in their language and speech patterns, Creeley, Pickard and Bunting for their concision. Yeats for I made it out of a mouthful of air. From people, heroes such as Tony Harrison, whose drive and intelligence unfolding through his career have awed me ever since Newcastle is Peru, the late Martin Turner who introduced me to Pound while were at school together, and, again, Tom Pickard, with whom I worked over 50 years ago in his bookshop, and at the Morden Tower. His uncompromising commitment to his talent through all opposition and adversity has never failed to inspire me. The Morden Tower, which Tom and Connie founded and made work, was a huge catalyst for poetry in the UK. I seriously believe that Newcastle was nearer then to the West Coast and the Black Mountain School in the US than to London – but this independence has always been the city’s strength as a seed bed for talent across all disciplines.

Looking at the collection as a whole, it’s to some extent haunted by loss. The title poem illustrates how it can dog you, mostly as you are totally unaware, yet catch you when you least expect it. Similarly Christmas Card shows the same disruption. Contacts is about the difficulties of letting go of people you’d rather have kept. Lest haunted by loss sounds grim there is a lot of variety in this collection, from attempting to divine a football result from the behaviour of birds, The Divination at Selhurst Park, to Cupid updated, Incel Valentine, and what happens when you run out of skin at the tattooist, Nojoku.

I hope more than anything that readers find these poems accessible – poetry should not be “difficult” or require a Mensa IQ to decipher, it’s more about using words to unlock a response, searching for a key that fits to make sense of the situation and the world to myself and to the listener.”