At The Guardian, Lisa Allardice Interviews Hera Lindsay Bird

Hera Lindsay Bird tours the UK this month, in conjunction with her debut collection Hera Lindsay Bird and her forthcoming Pamper Me to Hell & Back. With The Guardian's Lisa Allardice, she discusses her first collection's title, her experiences as a bisexual person in the queer community, and the support of her family. Allardice asks, "Why did you call your debut collection Hera Lindsay Bird?" We'll pick up with Bird's response, from there: 

That’s my name! I was thinking about the great female pop stars of the 90s, when it was compulsory to name your first solo album after yourself, and if you were Janet Jackson, the second one too. But a lot of the first collections of poetry I owned were collected works and therefore all my Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson books were called “Frank O’Hara” or “Emily Dickinson”. I also thought that naming it after myself gave people permission to read it as a collection of personal poetry. I know it’s not fashionable to care about whether things in literature are true, but I can’t help it. I just want someone to tell me how to live.

In the first poem, Write a Book, you write: “You can get away with anything in a poem/ As long as you say my tits in it.” Is this an ironic comment on all the autobiographical sex in your work?
Yes, but then the next line is: “But it’s a false courage to be so modestly endowed… and have nothing meaningful to say.” People talk a lot about the sex in my book and to be honest it’s usually so banal or offhand I kind of forget it’s there until I end up having to read it aloud to a room full of children and distinguished arts patrons. When people talk about my book being provocative, it’s funny to me, because it’s really a trojan horse of sentimentality. I feel like I’ve put a leather jacket on over a Laura Ashley pyjama set and got away with it.

In that same poem, the first lines recall wetting yourself at a supermarket checkout when you were 14. Is there anything you would be too embarrassed to include in your work?
I’m always too embarrassed to include things, but I write them down thinking I will never publish them and then after about a day they don’t embarrass me any more. It’s the cheapest kind of therapy.

“The official theme of all my poems is/ You get in love and then you die,” you write. One critic described you as “simultaneously the most romantic and anti-romantic of poets”. Would you call yourself a romantic? Do you write love poems?
Yes, and yes! I don’t know what being a romantic really entails, apart from in the Lord Byron sense of sitting around a lake in jodhpurs playing with miniature boats and fucking your sister, but most of my poems I would describe as love poems. I feel like being a romantic implies you have an optimistic world view of romance, which is not the case, and I do enjoy watching public wedding proposals where women turn men down, but I am sentimental to the core.

Read more at The Guardian.