Interview with Maitreyabandhu by Sarah Wright

In 2010 Maitreyabandhu won the Ledbury Poetry Prize for his poem ‘The Cutting’. This year, he will be performing poems from his pamphlet ‘The Bond’ at the festival. I took a few minutes to ask Maitreyabandhu a bit about the inspiration behind his poetry, and what we can expect to see from him at Ledbury this year.

When did you first discover a love for poetry? And what elements of the form particularly drew you towards it?

It wasn’t until I was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order 22 years ago that I really discovered poetry. I’d not done well at school, so I assumed poetry was beyond me. But a friend introduced me to Shelley. I was exhilarated. I went on to read all of Shelley, Keats, Dante… Of course I wrote poems all that time, especially on retreat (though my notebook jotting could hardly be called poems!) In 2005 I at least started typing my poems up. Then I got some encouragement from a poet friend, and I was off! Since then I’ve been writing intensively.

Your pamphlet, ‘The Bond’, was published last year. Was there a particular inspiration for the collection?

The poems from ‘The Bond’ are a result of my last seven years of serious writing. Looking back on it, the turning point was being awarded a place on the Arvon/ Jerwood mentoring scheme, with the wonderful Mimi Khalvati as my mentor. It was from her that I began to grasp of the craft of poetry (and the sheer hard work of it!). She taught me – in the deepest possible way – what ‘working on a poem’ means. I owe everything to her. 

Your poem, ‘The Cutting’ won the Ledbury Poetry Prize in 2010. Would you say that the poem is autobiographical?

As far as any poem can be, yes. But I’m not as interested in autobiographical writing as my pamphlet might suggest. I’m more interested in the place where personal history becomes something more akin to myth; where memory and story meet and suggest something beyond themselves. I especially relate this to meditation. In meditation I often have memories, which seem to have some sort of significance or resonance, some mythic outline almost. I start from there.

Childhood seems to be a recurring theme in many of your poems, and in ‘The Small boy and the Mouse’ you refer to a ‘kind of quiet’. What do you think can be gained from looking back on childhood experiences?

When I started writing seriously, I was determined not to write about my childhood. It’s too easy in a way, and after all how many poems about childhood do we need? But my childhood kept getting into the poems whether I liked it or not. It seems to me that childhood is the time when we are most vividly in touch with imagination and that we need to re-capture that vividness in our adult life, with fully adult consciousness – ‘to know the place for the first time ‘ as Eliot put it. When you think of it, so many poets seem to write well when they write about their childhood – Heaney for instance, or Wordsworth come to that!

In 2009 you won the Keats-Shelley prize. Do you believe that Keats or Shelley provided inspiration for any of your poetry?

Well, they’ve both given me tremendous inspiration in my life, my spiritual life as a Buddhist that is. I think Shelley is very close to being the greatest western Buddhist poet!  His vision is remarkably like the inner feeling of Buddhism. I’d love to be able to write with Shelly’s visionary uplift, but I can’t manage it. Keats to me is a great exempla of what Buddhist’s call ‘mindfulness’, and certainly I’ve tried to learn from that. They are poets for life not just poetry.

As an ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, do you find that there is a connection between your spirituality and the poetry you write?

I hope all of my poems are expressions of my Buddhist practice. There are those that (for me at least) are explicitly Buddhist, and those that arise out of my Buddhist practice, especially my practice of mindfulness and meditation. But I hope they all (whether overtly Buddhist or not) express human qualities – such as awareness, sympathy, intelligence, honesty and so forth. It is those qualities that make my poems ‘Buddhist’ or ‘spiritual’. To the degree that I really am a Buddhist, it will naturally show in my work. I shouldn’t have to put it there.

What can the audience of your Twenty-minute reading at Ledbury this year expect from the event?

Not a monk in robes for a start off! What I hope the audience can expect is honest, well made poems. At least that’s what I’d like them to be: honest-to-goodness poems – no posturing, no obscurantism, no game-playing, no cleverness – just the poem itself in the right form. That’s what I hope. But it’s not up to me to judge if I’ve succeeded in doing that.

What plans do you have for the future of your poetry?

I’ve just heard that Neil Astley (Bloodaxe) has agreed to publish my first collection, The Crumb Road next year! You heard it here first ….The rest is just a matter of writing better stuff, and being some use in the world.

By Sarah Wright