Food for thought

WHEN Tony Harrison had a cottage in Wales, he had a neighbour who was a preacher who used to say that he got three "warms" from wood: collecting it, chopping it and then burning it. Harrison gets his three satisfactions from food - shopping for it, cooking it and eating it - although he can add a fourth: growing it.

"I grow apples and mulberries and figs and I go out and tend to my trees. I've got stacks of apples in my pantry, hundreds and hundreds, and that is very satisfying," he says.

"When I get stuck I go into the garden and the rhythms of that help me to unlock something in my head. I think it is very important to keep a sensual contact with vegetables and fruit and stuff that grows."

Harrison, 67, who has lived in the same house in Gosforth for the past 35 years, is Britain's leading dramatic poet. He is also the acknowledged master of a poetic form he reinvented, which is the subject of the first ever festival of its kind, the Newcastle Poetry Film Festival. Although poetry film is not a term he uses himself.

"To distinguish them from films in which there is some connection with poetry, I call them film poems," he says.

These are works where the poem is created alongside the film, rather than a film which uses images simply to illustrate an already-written poem. In this latter category falls Harrison's most controversial work, V, written after he saw graffiti on his parents' grave in Leeds.

When it was first published, in 1985, it didn't cause much of a stir, but when Harrison's own reading was shown on Channel 4 two years later, it provoked an outcry with its use of four-letter words. But this is not what he thinks of as a film poem.

"When you use two kinds of things, you look not for just a mixture of the two, but for a new, third entity. I have made over a dozen film poems and I think of them as a combination of image and verse which is giving you a third thing."

Before Harrison, there were few examples of this form, other than the WH Auden-Benjamin Britten collaboration Night Mail, which he saw as a teenager and follows the night mail train from London to Glasgow. Although this lodged somewhere in the back of his head, he only turned to film poems after seeing some of his poems put to film on Late Night Line-Up, an arts show of the late 60s/early 70s.

"They put pictures to them which I thought were appalling and so literal, and I suddenly thought there has to be a better way of mixing the two things.

"I started writing to existing cut film, like Auden did with Night Mail, but later there was an opportunity to work changing the shots, and it became more organic," he says.

Although V does not come into his category of film poems, it prompted director Peter Symes to contact him about making a four-part series about death and funerals, which became Loving Memory, screened by the BBC in 1987.

"For the first time I started working where things were being filmed and getting ideas for the way things should combine. I started writing bits and we edited a bit," he adds.

The success of Loving Memory was followed by The Blasphemer's Banquet, a defence of Salman Rushdie, then under a fatwa for his Satanic Verses, and shown by Channel 4 despite the Archbishop of Canterbury's plea that it was insensitive and should be withdrawn.

Subsequent film poems The Gaze of the Gorgon, the text of which won the 1992 Whitbread Award, Black Daisies for the Bride, focusing on Alzheimer's patients and winner of the Documentary Special Prize at the Prix Italia in 1994, and Shadow of Hiroshima, persuaded the then-head of Film Four to commission Harrison to make a feature-length film poem, albeit on a small budget.

The result was Prometheus, and an experience which he says nearly killed him.

"It was very, very hard work. I was working in this organic way, so I would write enough verse to attract a good actor in a role, but not a complete script.

"It was a very punishing schedule, I never slept practically and I had to do everything. I was totally exhausted when I finished it," he recalls.

Since then he has only made a short film poem, Crossings, which invoked Night Mail in following a train, but this time focusing on the industrial landscape of the North-East as foot-and-mouth ravaged farmland.

"With a poem on the page, where you can re-read it and look at it more than once, you can sometimes do something more complex and difficult than with one that is a film, where you can't make the poem too dense and you have to leave room for the flowering of images.

"In a way, I think it is a new form and sometimes you allow the words to carry the meaning and sometimes you allow the images. You think: 'How do I shoot it? Is it a long, complicated thing?', in which case you might have a long tracking shot, or a shot that develops and takes time to reveal where it is going. This gives you an opportunity to make something more complicated in verse."

He has also been acclaimed for his work with the National Theatre and his translations of work by dramatists including Aesychlus and Moliere, and he says his film poems have made him freer in his other work, more direct and accessible, citing the poems he wrote for The Guardian, just after the first Gulf War and also his poem-despatches from the Bosnian war, as examples.

"It has helped me to develop a more political and public side of my poetry, but at the same time it doesn't rule out private poetry. I still write that," he adds.

He has been dubbed the poet laureate of the hard-left, but ruled himself out of the running for the official version by writing A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of King Charles III. He followed that with Laureate's Block, where he also revealed his affair with actress Sian Thomas, although he was still married to his second wife at the time.

This year, he was given the Northern Rock Foundation Award, the £60,000 prize meaning he can take time off from readings, which he says he "sometimes" enjoys, but are a distraction from his writing.

He does most of his work in his home, where notebooks line every room and where he lives alone. He tries to balance the solitary writing with the more collaborative film and theatre work, although he admits it is rarely ideal.

"I like the ritual of being here week after week. You need that as a writer, you need to be alone, you need to go to bed thinking about what you are writing about and get up thinking about what you are writing about," he says.

"The whole house is work-space and as soon as I walk in the house I get into the mood. I just have good rituals here and I have regular habits."

Although he likes working with other people, he says he is not very social and rarely socialises. Few people have his phone number, and he usually only answers the phone between 5-7pm, although it doesn't ring much anyway.

"You do get lonely, of course you get lonely, but you have to learn to live with that if you are a writer. I walk up and down the stairs, that is what I like, the space of it, now that the kids are all gone.

"The house is just full of my work. The thought of ever moving is just terrible. I have got millions of books and papers and notebooks."

Among his rituals is a regular shopping trip into town and to markets to buy fresh food. He dislikes supermarkets. "Cooking is poetry by other means. It is sensuous. I like cooking with fresh ingredients and I like shopping for them. I work inside my head, so I can be working when I'm stirring up my risotto," he says.

He takes his time over his meals, both preparing them and eating them, believing it isn't an activity that should be rushed. "A lot of people eat quickly because they want to do something more important, but then you think for what do you gain this time? For watching more crap on the telly?

"You won't see a microwave in my house. I like to cook, I like the taste, I like the results, I like buying the fruit, buying the vegetables, I like peeling them and cutting them up. It is a simple ritual, but simple things are very important. We lose sight of that at our peril."

* Newcastle Poetry Film Festival runs from tomorrow to December 9 at the Tyneside Cinema and Side Cinema. Details from 0191-232 8289.