In Conversation With Danny Hayward

On poetry, noise, and It Was Like Watching

Hayward reading from his book It Was Like Watching at The Poetry Project.

I was introduced to Danny Hayward’s work after attending a reading at the Poetry Project in April. Following a warm welcome by Wendy Lotterman, Hayward took the podium in the Parish Hall of St Mark’s Church and began reading from his book It Was Like Watching (2026).

It became clear that Hayward was not reading an excerpt, but the book in its entirety. Within his gentle cadence and flitting sentences, I noticed certain lines reappear in new contexts, like variations on a theme. As his oral performance intensified, the work seemed to branch out, revealing a complex, interwoven structure that pulled everyone in.

Hayward lost his spouse, Marina Vishmidt — renowned writer, editor, and critic — in 2024 after a prolonged illness. The book is dedicated to her and manifested after her death. Moved by the work and Hayward’s arresting recitation of it, I reached out to see if we could speak further about Hayward’s identity as a poet and the process that led to It Was Like Watching.

What follows is a transcription¹ of our conversation. I hope you enjoy.

Brooks: To open things up, I would love to learn a bit more about your background as a poet and writer in general. You can start wherever you’d like.

Danny: I’ve been writing poetry for about 20 years. The space where I started to do it was this community of poets in Brighton, which at the time was mostly attached to the University of Sussex. In the UK there was then a network of sub-scenes of poets in Brighton and in Cambridge and London. Of course there were poets in other places too but there were these scenes or locales in these places which tended to interact with one another. So a lot of my friends who were poets came from one of those three places. Out of those scenes emerged these clusters of small presses which were the spaces of production and distribution of the poetry that I was reading and writing for a long time, and still are in lots of ways. I moved to London in 2010 to do a PhD, at the time of this emergent student struggle around university fees. It was taking place around the same time as various other street movements or general uptick in social contestation in the UK. And that was very important for me and my relationship to the university, which in some ways it terminated, in the sense that I didn’t want to stay within the university after my main relationship to it became, as I felt it to be, a struggle against the new fee regime. But in determining the political parameters for a lot of the work that was going on at that time, that my friends were writing or that I was writing, I feel like in lots of ways that determined my trajectory and the trajectory of most of the people around me. So I’m not sure that I would describe myself now as a “political poet,” but my whole experience and subjectivity and my relationship to language, my understanding of what poetry is for, came out of this experience of entering into a large-scale process of political struggle with my friends who were poets.

B: Do you feel like your style or approach to writing was changed by being in that group at that particular time, or did it change more through other channels of your life?

D: I think there are so many answers to that. On one level, around 2010, there were these student occupations which were spaces where we were organizing readings. It was part of the social life of poetry that was taking place in politicized spaces, which were occupied by quite diverse groups of people, not all of whom were poets — although lots of them would be artists or students of some kind. So there’s that. I think there was also this feeling of collective urgency that came out of that moment. Poetry became this way of responding to the political situation and also carrying on a conversation with the people around you. You needed to be reacting all the time to what was taking place. Poetry was a space in which you could do it. And you were thinking collectively. I think for me that has had a long term repercussion that I still feel very strongly that poetry is a collective practice in some ways. Obviously it can seem quite isolating or individualizing: you are the poet, you speak with the first person pronoun quite often, you present your experiences, you are the owner of them. But for me the way into poetry, or the moment in which I began to write it, was through this experience of intense collectivity, which was in some ways also non-poetic, although it was mediated through the process of learning to become a writer alongside others. I think actually I would say that although I studied poetry before that and wanted to write it, I found it very difficult to do that in a university environment defined by individualized assessment and the kinds of hierarchy that emerge in those institutional spaces. It became possible for me when the bar was lowered slightly, and at that point poetry began to feel like a dimension of collective communication within this larger process of political struggle that we were in at that time.

B: I feel like for some poets the academic environment is what galvanizes their interest, or exposes them to writers they are inspired by, but there’s so much truth to being in a group and using poetry as a way to better communicate.

D: There was a line in this poem by Sean Bonney that was important for lots of my friends at that time, which I’ll misquote slightly, but he says — he’s talking about going to protests — the problem was the fucking slogans: they were awful. [Laughs] I think there is this sense that whatever poetry is, it might allow for a better form of address, at least a different kind of address than the kinds of formalized communication that take place within existing environments of political organizing. That poetry is a way to introduce counter voices into those spaces which are aligned with the fundamental ambitions of a collective struggle, but which don’t necessarily speak in the spontaneous language of that struggle, but which argue with those spontaneous languages, or dissent, or create forms of internal interference. That text by Sean was important for a lot of us, and I think that still rings in my head as a way of thinking about what poetry might be within a political process. Not just a way of raising up into elegant rhetorical address, fundamentally shared demands, and forms of consciousness, but a kind of noise within the political process, or a way of picking up frequencies which other people experience but for which there aren’t words yet.

B: How did you start reading your work? It’s something some poets do as an attachment to the work they put out, but for you it seems like an augmentation of your voice, in a positive way.

D: It’s a sort of contested question among poets who have been and are important to me, because there are some who are very much unconditionally opposed to the idea that a reading should or could augment poetry, which really only truly exists on the page. But then most of the poets who were important for me when I was getting into poetry were great readers, and a lot of them weren’t just poets. Some of them had theatre backgrounds, some of them thought about the relationship of their writing to music as being as important as the relationship of their writing to modernist poetry. And I was more preoccupied with music when I was a teenager than I was with poetry or literature. I’m still very preoccupied by noise and questions of rhythm or velocity. But I don’t have a developed argument about my relationship to reading. It’s just that trying to find your way into the internal velocities of the text and to mediate that with your body always felt like the obvious way to read right from the beginning.

B: Who were some of those poets who were important to you as readers of their work?

D: Sean Bonney was an important figure for me, who along with his partner Frances Kruk, were thinking a lot about histories of punk, noise, the static of language that can enter into poetry. Both Frances and Sean were great, riveting performers of their work. So they were central figures. My first university teacher to introduce me to an enormous amount of poetry was Keston Sutherland, who was always a gripping reader of his own poetry. I’m not sure what Keston would say about the role of performance in his writing, but for me his readings were always like performative events and I feel that he had connections to other writers whose background was really in theatre, specifically avant garde theatre. Which was always oriented towards producing a kind of physical shock reaction in its audience.

Danny Hayward | It Was Like Watching

B: I’ll use that as a way to transition to It Was Like Watching. I was curious where this particular book originated? Which sentences or images came first?

D: I think the very first thing that I wrote, which is in the book, is the very last pages, which are lineated — you could read them as poetry, I guess. It’s not really important to me. I don’t remember writing them, I found them on my phone while I was in the middle of composing the poem, when I was kind of stuck with it. It was the first attempt I’d made in the days after Marina had died to try to remember in writing a lot of what happened in the palliative care ward where we were living in the last weeks. But for me that text is a kind of readymade, because although I wrote it, I have no recollection of doing so. It was just there on my phone. This sort of mysterious artifact. I wrote that part first but I found it a bit later on.

Marina died in late April 2024, and at that point we’d been living in Vienna (Austria) for six months, more or less. So we had had this strange experience of moving to this other country and then her health deteriorating really quickly, and then she died and I was in this place that was still quite strange to me. I had never lived there before, I didn’t have a lot of connections there. It was this big existential crisis to lose my love, who I’d lived with for nearly 13 years, which was at the same time strangely lacking in any sense of choice. There were just things I had to do. And I was writing to a lot of people — Marina had a lot of people who cared about her and many of them were writing to me. So I was constantly in correspondence with people, remembering her life and our life together and receiving very emotional communications from people who had been close to her. I spent several months mainly just writing emails. It was this space of very intense emotional experience for me, where I felt like I was able to touch the bottom of myself very easily. And it went on for a while. Then slowly, the tide recedes, plenty of other disasters are happening in the world, and people reorient themselves towards other things. So all of those communications began to slow down. I also found that I was beginning to repeat myself, and the things that I had been writing about, which produced intense feelings in me of love or recollection, started to cease to have that effect on me, and I began to realize that I was going to have to find other ways of writing if I wanted to keep writing. That was kind of the starting point for the book because I found myself in this city, in Vienna, in the summer of 2024, suddenly with fewer people around me and fewer people contacting me, and I realized I could seal myself off a bit, which I did, and I didn’t see very many people at all for about six weeks.

I spent a lot of time writing constantly in my notebooks, and I came toward the end of that period and I knew that I was going to have to travel to this German institution where I was going to work on Marina’s work. So I had this cut-off point where I was like, Okay, I’ve got this whole summer to write whatever I want to write. And no longer in this communicative dialogue, this email correspondence, but just for myself. But then I have to leave and I have to stop and I have to work on Marina’s work for her since she can’t do it anymore. I got to the end of the summer and I had tons of notebooks and I transcribed it all in a furious rush in the last few days that I was going to be in Vienna, and I read this massive word document through and I was like, fuck, this makes absolutely no sense. I’ve no idea what any of this is saying, it’s a complete mess, it’s a disaster. I mean it’s full of very passionately felt emotions and disorienting images but I have no idea how any of it holds together. It’s not a book at all. But that same summer I’d been reading a lot of the poetry of Alice Notley, who at a similar point in her life to the point I was in then, in 2024, had lost her husband. She had been with him a similar length of time as I had been with Marina. So there was this point of narcissistic identification for me where I wanted her to explain to me what I was experiencing. [laughs] And there’s this book of hers called At Night the States, which is about this experience. And a lot of the poems are about a shared love of hers and Ted Berrigan’s, which was the poetry of Frank O’Hara, which I hadn’t read systematically for a long, long time. I ended up going back and reading the whole of the collected works of Frank O’Hara for the first time, like it was a novel, from the first page to the end, from when he’s in his early 20s until his death. At that point I had never really tried to look back on my own life because that’s not what I thought poetry should do and that was not how politically I had understood myself. That was not politically how Marina had understood herself either, incidentally. Retrospection was not a major aspect of my life or my poetry or my politics. But suddenly I had to do it. And so I read the whole of the collected poems by Frank O’Hara and many parts of it really stuck for me, but the poem that really entered into my head and lodged there was a poem which is not one of the most celebrated — I don’t think I’ve managed to find it transcribed on the internet, for example, insofar as that’s a register of whether a Frank O’Hara poem is a big one or not. It’s this poem called “A Young Poet,” which is written by O’Hara when he’s in his mid to late thirties and he’s just encountered John Wieners who is 23 years old at the time of encounter. “A Young Poet” is a very short, loving vision of John Wieners, which ironizes his idealism about poetry and the kind of life you might lead as a poet, and foresees what might become of him, at least tacitly. But it’s also a very beautifully loving poem of retrospection, in which Frank O’Hara, coming to the end of what would be his life, sees in John Wieners more or less how he was at the beginning of his life as a poet. And because the parameters of biographical time in that poem mapped onto this period of my own life that I had been trying to produce a record of, the time of my life with Marina, which started when I was 24 and finished when I was 37, it had a massive effect on me. I started to think about whether there was a way to reorganize this enormous document full of what felt like garbage, using this conceit of writing about other poets. That was the origin of the tic that runs all the way through It Was Like Watching, of poems being attributed to different speakers: “another poet, another poet, another poet.” I added material, so some of the other poets are me, or represent bits of my own life, some of them are bits of the lives of other poets within this community of poets I grew up around in the UK. But that was the moment where something clicked for me in this book and I realized how it might be organized, at the moment in which I came to this Frank O’Hara poem and began to think about ‘poems about other poets’ as a genre.

B: Something you touched on is this musical aspect of the work, which really came through when I heard you read it. Can you say more about this idea of variation through repetition, and was it something that was in the work early on, that you honed through revision?

D: I started out with this enormous sack full of disorderly fragments which were written longhand into notebooks. I definitely didn’t start out with a particular sound structure in my head. What I could say is I feel like in my time of writing poetry, at least in the period where I felt a little bit like I had some sense of how I do it, I’ve had two modes of production. I used to write these longer poems which were all about sustain. I would try to make them into these quite propulsive, ratcheting things that would move in a single arc and increase in intensity, and that was the sound structure of the first poems I wrote that I was kind of happy with. But two things happened for me. One is that I began to find that quite asphyxiating sonically because they kind of sounded the same all the way through; they often also relied on repetition but dynamically there wouldn’t be much internal difference. They could be intense but also monotonous. One person who wrote about them once said that she wasn’t sure whether they were energizing or depleting. [Laughs] And I understood that response. So I wanted to try to enter into a space which was more rhythmically or sonically or tonally differentiated. The second thing is my mode of production was also altered by living with someone who was really sick, who I had to look after quite a lot and who often needed over a period of several years a lot of medical care where I also had to be present. So my ability to write became much more interrupted, and my work became more fragmented, and a lot of the books I wrote before It Was Like Watching I think of more as zines than as books, compendiums of fragments, progress reports. They were what I could throw together in two or three months where we had a clear period of relative good health and both of us could focus on our work. That was still how I was working in the summer of 2024 where I started to write the material that ended up in It Was Like Watching. The difference was I had a bit more time to gather the elements together, so this book more than those early ones has a clear arc where it loops back in the end to something like where it began. It maybe has something more like the trajectory of the earlier poems, which had a clear through-line from where they start to where they end. But it’s also totally pulverized in that the inputs were composed in a very chaotic and non-sequential way and then had to be reorganized and shuffled a lot before they began to look like a book.

B: What was that process of revision like? Was it more structural or was there new writing prompted by revisiting sections?

D: I realized — at least this is true for me — that I can’t persuasively write poetry as another poet. Pretending I’m somebody else and writing from that perspective doesn’t work for me because it just becomes a game and you’re faking and you don’t believe it and the energy bleeds out of the language. So when I wrote all of this stuff initially it was my poetry and my self-description. But obviously even as such it was internally differentiated or even contradictory. I tried to compartmentalize it or reorganize it according to some sense of how different time or material might be grouped together. Then it was attributed to “another poet, another poet…” one of the many “another poets” who appear in the book. At that point I began to identify sections and I could feel how I could add material in order to make it a bit more persuasive, that the core text of each section wasn’t just me. So it was this process of writing, and then recomposing, and then filling out the fragments in order to create these variably more or less persuasive images of different writers.

B: It’s interesting that you use the word “persuasive.” It’s a word I don’t often associate with poetry.

D: Yeah. I had to tell some lies, you know. To fill out these images of other poets. They’re composite figures, or they’re fakes and sometimes they’re totally intentionally two dimensional and unreal. It’s not like they’re all meant to be vivid three dimensional images of real writers who you can imagine breathing and walking and screaming in the world. Sometimes they needed biographical or geographical details just to differentiate them a little bit from one another, which again is partly just a formal means of making the work feel less continuous when you introduce interruptions into it or to generate this feeling of perspective switching. For me there is something about music there too, because the switching of perspective is not happening so much for the reasons that it might in a novel, where you have a narrative with some internal conflict and it gets played out through several perspectives of multiple characters. Switches of perspective feel for me also like rhythmic elements. It’s like suddenly someone else is speaking. Different voices interrupt one another. The sound space of the poem changes at the point at which a new voice intervenes or interrupts. In order to create that effect, even just the effect of rhythmic alterations, I had to try and think about who these different voices actually were. And that characterized a lot of the middle stages of revision of the poem after I first composed the fragments.

B: Right, there’s a choral quality to the voices. Using different voices and shifts in perspective almost like a conductor. Something else that stands out about the book is that it is packed with references, spanning from traditional — there’s the Andrew Marvell poem that you quote — to references to Instagram, Red Bull, Xanax. I was curious what your feelings are about blending those things in poetry, an art form that can sometimes sit in a high tower.

D: I mean it’s the stuff and bric-a-brac of our lives, right? And Andrew Marvell is stuff and bric-a-brac just as much as Red Bull and Xanax are. I did some literature degrees once and was taught that stuff and I love it, I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t. That Marvell poem is significant for me in that it was this moment where I realized that something which has existed in my head as a boring concept derived somewhere from an English literature textbook all of a sudden relates to my own life. So I was thinking about the immortality topos in love poetry and this idea that the love poem will preserve into all futurity the image of the disappeared beloved or the beauty of the beloved. You get this in Shakespeare all the time. And I had never realized that that might seriously be a task for poetry, even if it’s an impossible and corrupted one, until someone who I really loved actually died and I realized that the only way that they could exist in my life was through representation, the primary form of which that existed for me was poetry. It was like a theoretical problem in literary studies suddenly became an absolutely imperative existential problem for me, the problem that’s in the background when I’m staring at my fucking laptop monitor and thinking what words go onto the page now and in what order. And the Marvell poem is also just the weirdest entry in the genre of the poem concerned with language and immortality.

Red Bull and Xanax and Instagram, junk and filth… I mean for me this is also related to the question of noise. Unvalued materials. Things that don’t seem to exist as compositional elements within the conventional or official theory of music. And I guess in my ‘political’ thinking I’m very preoccupied with flattening hierarchies of value. I’m not sure if I know well enough how to do it yet, but I do feel like everything should enter into the poetry on a kind of flat plane as it were. All of the shit in your head from looking at your computer and all the things that you’ve learned about the history of poetry exists on the same ontological level. They’re devalued by virtue of their entry into poetry. But that devaluation is itself something which is precious or becomes the gift that poetry can give back to all the things that it relies on and which it uses. I’m not a musician. I guess I feel that insofar as I think about music it tends to be through the category of noise and for the same reasons to do with what is valuable, what isn’t, how you can obliterate that order of value and use that rubble that falls out as a way of building things.

B: It’s an equalizer. It makes you reconsider the value those noise elements in our day to day lives can have in a poem where they are elevated by virtue of the poet including them.

D: In the Marvell poem everything is subject to entropy. I think it’s kind of beautiful and quite unique for that reason. But I guess I also just believe this, that everything gets destroyed and if I was thinking about what really fixed itself into my head about the night immediately after Marina died when I was leaving the hospital — it’s in the poem — sitting in this taxi on a Friday night, listening to Gabber remixes of Avril Lavigne as the taxi driver drove us through the center of the city, I guess he assumed towards like a fucking club, right? Because how did he know that that’s not what was happening with us. We were just a bunch of relatively young people getting into his car. I haven’t found those remixes of Avril Lavigne since and I’ll never look for them, but for me they’re both total trash, total garbage, and also they anchor me into the reality of that moment in time like nothing else, not even the presence of my closest friends. It’s the weird distorted sound of this atrocious music that fixes itself into my head and allows that specific episode in my life to revitalize itself in memory. And maybe in language, too. So that’s what I mean about trash, that its value is totally contingent on the reality it assumes in our minds and our relationships to the work in which it also becomes material.

B: Which connects back to what you said about how you started to see this book as being a form of retrospect and looking back and to do so you can’t gloss over those things, you have to accept them for the place that they hold in those memories.

D: Exactly, and I think the other thing to say about the book is that I definitely don’t think of it as an indestructible work of remembrance. It’s full of things I stole from other people, starting with Frank O’Hara, but tons of other language that is taken from elsewhere, from other poets, from acquaintances talking on Facebook, from films I was watching at the time. It’s not a monument to the singularity of my experience. It’s like bricolage of other people’s experience of grief, including Alice Notley’s and her relationship to Ted Berrigan, and the tradition of other poets writing about bereavement which I used to structure my own. And I feel also as my poems become more like zines they are also like those loaves of bread that you can tear into pieces and share — sharing loaves. They aren’t intended to endure unblemished for all eternity. They might be ripped up again just as I ripped up other things in order to make them.

1. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.