I drink, therefore I write

I'M STARING out of the pub window at the sight across the road - maybe 100 kids or more are milling around on the opposite corner in the bruised-blue, failing light of a Friday evening. It could be threatening, but it's nothing of the kind. It's just a typical weekend night of happy- go-lucky boozing in Clapham Old Town, home to three of south London's most popular pubs.

Neil Rollinson swings away from the bar, nearly hitting me in the face with his pony-tail, and passes me a pint of Adnams - he's bought the round (he buys the next one, too) because he's flush from having just won two major literary awards, first prize in the National Poetry Competition and an Arts Council bursary.

He looks to see where I'm looking. "I love pubs," he says. "I love everything about them - the banter, the cracks, meeting people. The idea of Schubert, who wrote all that great music, getting slaughtered every night with his mates, that's a wonderful image. What's better than a pub after a good day at the typewriter? Off you go, throwing caution to the winds, along the road to ruin!"

We're lucky to find a seat. The theme goes on and on once we are settled - there's always a lot to be said about booze and poets. How long did he expect the pounds 5,000 to last that he'd just won for the poem about his father drowning kittens in a lake. We decide to do a quick calculation on the beer mat. I'd asked him to bring along one of the two flashy Montblanc pens that came with the cheque (Montblanc sponsored the National Poetry Competition this year), for such a job as this, but he didn't get the message.

Well now... with an average pint at two quid in the ruinously expensive south, that would be 2,500 pints max. Divide that by 5 pints a day (average), and the bitter truth emerges: the dosh will run out just short of the glorious millennium.

That sobers us up enough to go on to other things. Montblanc, the sponsor, for example. The very mention of the word irritates Rollinson. "They wanted to delay the announcement of the prize for three months so that they could drum up publicity, which meant ridiculous suggestions, such as appearing with those two tossers on the Big Breakfast. What do they know about poetry - I ask you?"

He refused. Finally, he did a couple of radio interviews and some press. Montblanc were annoyed, as was Rollinson, because if the prize had been announced in February, as usual, the extra publicity would have helped him to secure reading dates at literary festivals. Now it was too late.

But what about the pen? Would he use it? Yes, for writing letters to his mother - things like that. But doesn't he write poems in longhand? Never. He needs the sight of it on a computer screen if he is to begin to believe in its independent existence as a poem, something more credible than just random, aimless scribbles on a bit of paper.

What of those people who argue that there is some kind of mystical link between the flow of the ink, the pressure of the hand on the paper and the movements of the human soul? So much toss, he thinks. What about the time before poetry was committed to paper, when it existed only in the memory? Wouldn't the shift from memory to written language have represented a loss of authenticity, too?

Rollinson has nothing of the self-conscious bard about him. Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, his father worked as a foreman in various textile mills. There were no books in the house and only one newspaper that he remembers, the Sunday Post. He took one A-level - art - and it was his art teacher who changed his life.

"He taught me new ways of looking at the world. He taught me about composition in painting, how to observe colour, appreciate form and texture. No one had ever talked about those kind of things before. I was suddenly able to see the world in a different way." These lessons, including an ability to write with a painterly vividness, have carried over into his poetry.

Poetry came relatively recently though. After school, he went to Newcastle College of Art, but he didn't finish the course. That was about 15 years ago. Then he drifted - London, India, the north again... he started writing poetry seriously about 10 years ago. Now 37, he's been anchored in London for the past few years.

Rollinson is, in many respects, a fairly representative modern poet. There is a great directness and openness about him, a total absence of the old-fashioned, self-preening, literary side that is common among poets. He is a poet who writes openly about sexuality, which most poets have been coy about, unlike writers of prose. He is a poet who loves performing his poems in public for the ego-feeding buzz that it gives him, but also because its a way of testing the value of new work. Poetry, in short, is a job, a full-time commitment. It is not some mystical encounter that obliges you to act in fanciful ways, like a kind of secular priest. "I've never gone along with that, the idea that poets are different or visited in some way. I view it more pragmatically. It's a job that has to be done and I like doing it."

But does he call himself a poet, and risk the consequences of other people drawing all sorts of peculiar conclusions about what such a thing might mean. "Yes, finally, at last. It took a long time though..." And what does he think is wrong about the poetry scene these days? He sniffs and claps his hands. "Too much crap being published. Too much poetry being written by people who do not read much poetry.

"You know, even published novelists, when you get them in a workshop and ask them to write a poem, start writing in this amazing, old-fashioned vernacular - all thees and thous - that is straight out of the Romantic poets or maybe the Victorians. It's as though the 20th century never existed.

"What you can do - and it's what I do all the time - is actually read what poets are writing about nowadays, and familiarise yourself with the language they are using. Then, perhaps, you might begin to learn the rudiments of how to write like someone who is alive now!"

He slaps the glass down on the table. That's it, folks. We bolt outside. It's a balmy night with lots of boozy noises in the air. Someone falls backwards into someone else's arms. We are teetering on the brink of the 21st century out here, and Rollinson, a nimble, wiry, cheerful man in a shabby old grey mac with big holes in the pockets, seems all charged up and ready to go.

Neil Rollinson's `A Spillage of Mercury' is published by Jonathan Cape, price pounds 8.