(Featured photo by Nathan Chandler)
The last time I met Max Wallis was late last year in a Bavarian beer house on Old Street. The place was charmingly full of kitsch woodwork and Eastern European waitressess. The beer overpriced but the conversation rich. Max was a friend from college who had dropped out of a degree in Biology and ended up on an English masters through the quality of his poetry and prose alone.
Since then even more has changed. This week I found Max naked on the Opium bed in Coleridge’s study and last month, his first poetry pamphlet ‘Modern Love’ was released with Flipped Eye Publishing.
SG: Writer, model & internationally published poet, It has been a strange few years for Max Wallis. I thought we would catch up so you can tell Crack In The Road why, how & who?
MW: [In Biology] I kept on getting firsts but no satisfaction. My workload was getting crazy and I wasn’t sleeping because I was writing all day and then doing university work all night. I snapped and had a bit of a breakdown. Applied for the masters never thinking I’d actually get on … but did.
SG: In Modern Love and many of your earlier poems there’s a real blend of Baroque technique and 21st Century lyricism. What inspires you?
MW: Everything. My first pamphlet’s all about love so naturally relationships and everything inbetween have impacted that. It’s a bit like novel writing though, some of the best advice I got when I was younger was that it’s okay to lie in poetry – people have this prevarication that it’s about catharsis but really it’s just as much about narrative as fiction.
I like the beauty in small things and how it’s possible to write about modern life in poetry. What’s the meaning of a text message? an email? facebook? is there room for poetics in them? I think there is.
SG: Poetic reccomendations?
MW: I read more than I ever used to. The bloodaxe anthologies are practically encyclopedias to me and I read The Rialto, Magma & Popshot Magazine a lot. I tend to buy pamphlets rather than collections though.
SG: You tell me your first open mic didn’t go down so well?
MW HA! 2008. Awful. Utterly awful. I was a nervous wreck and had to loop my legs around the chair to hide my shakes. Then I wrote a poem about dicks and the social networking side of the gay world and, because it was so outlandish, in a way it was easy to perform. It wasn’t me speaking. It was a performer.
SG: And performing on stage now?
MW: Ah I love it. If you can make someone cry, cheer, laugh or anything in a room full of people then you know you’re doing something good. I choose the set list in advance so that there’s a flow to the material with sad ones interspersed around happier, funny poems. But on the day I can swap and change. I know them off by heart so it’s pretty easy to do. I still get nervous though, just don’t shake!
SG: Ever had a particularly bad reception?
Once I did particularly gay material in a pub in Manchester, full of chavs and their girlfriends. I opened with a poem all about threesomes and genitalia. The lads all kinda bared their teeth but the girls laughed so it went okay. One time I did the threesome poem in front of another group and one part goes ‘and where’s the passion when all you have is this ration, this tiny slice of double-human pie, two guys plus you aside not inside’ and someone yelled ‘I BET THEY WERE.’ I just looked at him, and performed the next stanza never looking away ‘skin upon skin upon skin upon bone and yet you’re alone and watching them groan, attempting those manoeuvres a tactical chooser trying to negotiate limbs’ and he was chucked out.
SG: Theres been a lot of buzz about Modern Love but tell me in your own words, what is it all about?
MW: It’s a tale of love, naturally, over the course of one year between two characters. You take their journey: of yearning to sex to betrayal and everything that follows. But each poem is self contained and understood out of context but together they make something entirely different. I loved writing it. I had the idea for the pamphlet for around a year or so and I guess I just finally got to the position where I could writing it.
SG: With arts funding cuts & possibly more competition than ever before, how do you find the motivation to keep going, instead of throwing in the towel and getting a McJob?
MW: To be honest I’m supported a lot by friends and family. I don’t think I’d be able to do it without them. Modelling brings in cash but it’s early days. Eventually I want to earn enough from those aspects of my life so that I have the time to write and, not worry about earning enough money from my poetry & novels.
Modern Love is available now, direct from the Flipped Eye Bookstore or from Amazon.
For more of Max’s escapades you can follow him on twitter or find him on Tumblr