Valerie Bloom is the 2022 winner of the CLiPPA award with her impressively wide-reaching collection Stars with Flaming Tails.  We were delighted to have the opportunity to talk with Valerie about her work, career and collection.

You were born and grew up in Jamaica.  What role did poetry play in your childhood and did you write as a child?

I grew up listening to poetry.   My mother and grandmother used to recite poetry all the time. Two favourites of theirs were The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Casabianca.  The Jamaican Poet, The Honorable Louise Bennett Coverley was a household name and I remember every weekday sitting around the radio with my family and listening to her mid-day programme, “Miss Lou’s Views”.

As children, we were encouraged to memorise the poetry of the Bible, and every morning and evening we’d recite a psalm during family worship.

 Then there was the National Festival where poetry was performed alongside the other art forms. The medal winners would usually be featured on the television, so we would be seeing poetry being performed all summer. At school I was always being coached to enter the festival though we never actually went. I think the logistics of taking kids from rural Jamaica to the capital for the competition was just too much for my teachers.

As soon as I could write I started making up poems and stories.  The first was published when I was twelve.

You moved to the UK in 1979, what were your early impressions and experiences of the country?

First impression was probably the same as that experienced by many people coming to the UK from a tropical country – cold.  In the middle of July, I kept asking if it was about to snow. I couldn’t imagine that it would get any colder. It was the first time I’d experienced cold sunshine.

Then I was struck by the beauty of the vegetation – the profusion of colours in the flowers.  I was quite distressed when winter arrived and I thought all the trees had died! 

If I was walking through my town in Jamaica and I made eye-contact with someone without saying hello, I would be considered ill-mannered.  I soon learnt that here, if you greeted people on the streets with a cheery “good morning”, you’d receive some strange looks.

I was invited to a poetry reading a little while after I got here and was expecting a performance such as I was used to in our oral tradition. I was amazed when the poet stood and read from his book the entire evening. I’d never seen that before.

Your first collection of poetry was Touch Mi, Tell Mi, can you tell us a little about how that came to be?

I’d been writing poems in Jamaican before I came to the UK. Soon after I arrived, I was approached by someone from the Jamaican Society in Manchester. They had been living here for some time and wanted to form a choir to sing Jamaican folk songs but had forgotten the words. They asked if I could help. I taught and choreographed the songs and soon they were performing around the country. 

To add some variety, I would perform a poem or two and people soon started inviting me to give solo performances of the poems.  At the performances I’d be asked where they could get the book but I didn’t have one.   

I was invited to do a weekly slot reading my poems on Radio Manchester and would write a poem during the week and read it on the radio the following Sunday.  

I went to see Jessica Huntley from Bogle L’Overture Books, clutching a handful of these poems, and asked if she would like to publish them. To my amazement, she said yes immediately. The rest is history.

There's a wonderful cadence and musicality to your poetry.  Does reading aloud or performance form part of the writing process for you?

When I’m writing I often think about how the poem is going to be performed. Poems are designed to be read aloud. They are as much about sound as they are about the words, so performance and oral delivery are important considerations when I’m writing. Sometime the performance even comes to me before the words and then I find the language to go with the actions.  I write a lot on trains, planes and in hotel rooms and sometimes I forget where I am and start acting out a poem I’m writing on the train.  I come to my senses when I realise the people around me are looking a little alarmed.

You've written across a broad range of forms - novels, poetry, for the radio and also for the jazz ensemble, Grand Union Orchestra - what has been the most exciting writing experience for you and why?

I did a one woman show for the Children’s Book Show some years ago. That was pretty exciting as we toured around the UK, but also I was able to incorporate story-telling, songs, movement, not just poetry. 

Stars with Flaming Tails is your most recent collection and there's a very experimental and playful element to the subjects and forms explored.  How do you go about writing and selecting the poems for a collection?

I’m always writing, so at any given time I have some poems which have not been published.  When I’m putting a collection together, I go through those poems to see which ones I’d like to use and then write others that would go well with them, whether in terms of themes, language or subject matter.  In the case of Stars with Flaming Tails, I got a bit carried away and wrote way too many poems for the book.  The fact that I had the sections into which the book is divided seemed to make it easier to write poems to fit those categories.  In the end it was Janetta at Otter-Barry books who helped me to decide on the final selection.

Children's poetry has not always received the attention it deserves, it feels to be in an exciting place with the CLiPPA, with Joseph Coelho being announced as the new Children's Laureate and with Manchester's new Poetry Library.  What do you think poetry has to offer?

Among other things, poetry develops self-awareness and empathy, is an outlet for self-expression and it helps children to make sense of the world around them.  It’s been shown to aid in cognitive development and encourages creative expression.  It frees children from the restrictions of grammatical rules, making them more willing and able to explore their emotions in their writing and because it’s usually a short piece of literature, it means it’s appealing to reluctant readers and writers. 

Can you give readers any insight as to what might be next for you?

There’s a chapter book coming out soon and I’m now working on another book of poetry.  Other projects are just in their embryonic stages so I can’t talk about them yet.

A huge thank you to Valerie Bloom for the interview and to Andrea Reece for the opportunity.