Mark Fiddes (by Julian Hanford)
This month, I spoke to brand writer and poet Mark Fiddes about solitude, inspiration, and travelling with cheap biros.
Where are you from and what do you do?
I have ended up in the Middle East via London, Barcelona, Oxford and Washington, D.C. I was born in Northampton, home to shoemaking, Bauhaus (the band), John Clare and Alan Moore. This makes me an enthusiast for a sound Goodyear welt, sharp cheekbones, birdsong and slant metaphysics.
I have two writing lives. The first has been spent creative directing global brands like Jaguar, Nivea and Durex across different continents and cultures. I am currently working with Foster + Partners on the visitor experience for one of the larger national pavilions at next year’s Expo in Osaka, Japan.
My other writing life is all poetry to which I returned after a long absence around 12 years ago. I have written three collections. ‘The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre’ and ‘The Rainbow Factory’ were both published by Templar Poetry. The latest ‘*Other Saints Are Available’ comes from Live Canon. I participate in Lit Fests around Europe and the Middle East while contributing to such publications as The Irish Times, Poetry Review, Southword, Oxford Poetry, Shearsman Magazine, The North, Stand Magazine and Magma.
The first life pays the bills. The second is more a way of understanding the world. As Robert Graves famously remarked: “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.”
Where did your love of words come from?
Scottish schoolteacher mother and artist father. A friend of the family was novelist J. L. Carr (A Month in the Country) who lived in nearby Kettering. My Dad used to illustrate his series of poetry pocketbooks. I asked Jim once how to be a writer and he advised me to “keep noticing things and never take yourself too seriously.”
The Puffin Club was a major influence, too. Championed by Puffin children’s books pioneer Kaye Webb, it introduced me to everyone from Alan Garner and Edith Nesbit to John Masefield. I still use the recipe for flapjack from the club’s quarterly magazine.
At College, I tried to switch from Philosophy, Politics and Economics to English. Luckily, I was saved by then Professor of Poetry John Jones who questioned my motivation. I told him I wanted to write. He explained that the worst thing I could do was study formal literature and that Aristotle and Kant would be much more stimulating. Maybe I caught him on a bad day.
What made me join 26 and how have I been involved?
I believe I heard it about it through D&AD when ‘26 Letters’ was created to celebrate the reopening of the British Library in 2004. I worked with German typographer Christine Fent on the letter B coining a controversial ‘B List’. It was then I realised that John Simmons had a larger vision, to bring words into public discourse in new and beautiful ways.
Having allowed my membership to lapse because of travelling away so much, I rejoined a few years ago to support the mission once more.
What is your best writing scenario?
Solitude. It’s so precious and it feels like such an indulgence. Often ideas will arrive in the back of a cab, or stuck in an airport or in the middle of a hundred slide PowerPoint presentation to the low drone of management consultants. Any inspirations I note down with a cheap biro in my little black book.
To give a poem breath, I then need a café table on a busy street, or the terrace of my partner Maribel’s family place in Catalonia, or simply a table after breakfast. My practice is to devote at least an hour every morning to writing before the world invades.
What are you working on right now?
Many of the creatives I work alongside are part of the greater diaspora in the Middle East from zones of conflict – Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Iraq. Given the current situation, they sit with mobiles on alert for bad news from home. It’s horrifying, so I’m working on a cycle of poems about being a neighbour to war. In ‘Gauze’ I do not take sides. It is more a form of poetic journalism, not unlike Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’.
My other project right now is performance based. I’m the worst at switching off during a night of spoken word as an audience member. I find the necessary ‘suspension of disbelief’ hard to recover with each new poem. Collaborating with a wonderful Danish cello/bass player, I am creating semi-improvisations in which the music and words dialogue to shifting soundscapes. It helps that the cello’s register is remarkably similar to a baritone. Not quite Brahms and Goethe, but neither is it Chas and Dave.
Which piece of writing are you proudest of?
Usually whatever’s currently on the go. Looking back, the National Poetry Prize piece ‘Polite Safety Notice’ about toxic masculinity is still hard to read aloud, for all the right reasons. ‘Beige’ which will appear in the new collection – about cities in wartime – hits home right now. For its comedy appeal, the one that always works live is ‘Solo Doloroso’ about my partner’s extreme chagrin that George Clooney – Superstar Coffee God – had announced wedding plans to human rights lawyer Amal. He was definitely lined up as a future consort.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Probably like most 26 members, I edit the world constantly for material. Watching. Listening. Talking. Reading. As Kafka noted, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” For writers, cynicism can be our worst enemy and hope our greatest and most beautiful deception. We have to negotiate both and still be alive to enchantment.