We had the pleasure of coming across Fly on The Wall Press, a pioneering force based in Manchester, during a book fair, and we found their ethos particularly intriguing and innovative. In fact, they curates and publishes unparalleled political fiction, evocative poetry, and genre-defying anthologies addressing urgent global concerns, and they do their job so well that they won Small Press of the Year, British Book Award 2024 (North).
One of their authors, Ricky Ray, winner of the 2023 Aryamati Poetry Prize (collection), agreed to answer some questions about his latest book, The Soul We Share.

Hi Ricky! Pleasure to have you here! Let’s start with your book. What is it about?

In visceral, vulnerable poetry, I soften the ache of living in a disabled body with the joy of ‘being lived’ by the places I call home. As you accompany me and my soul dog, Addie, through scenic woodlands, cities and swamps, the lines between humans, animals and nature begin to blur and move in concert. We encounter an existence lived not ‘upon / but as one’ with the Earth — a union of man, dog and
planet, which reveals that soul isn’t merely an energetic trace we possess: it’s an animacy deeply shared.

Why should a reader pick your book instead of someone else?

I think Maura says it best: “These moving, well-made poems follow the author’s meditative engagement with a beloved companion dog but also with creatures of other kinds and most particularly with the earth itself. These are poems of true immersion in the belief of the earth as Gaia, whilst at the same time making known and felt the author’s painful and disabling condition, his everyday life and his hopes for the future. Unlike any other collection I have come across, these poems are remarkable in their success in showing the reader both a deeply personal and a universal story.”
—Dr. Maura Dooley, citation for the Aryamati Prize

Who is Ricky Ray?

Ricky Ray is a poet, essayist and eco-mystic who lives with his wife and the ghost of his old brown dog in the old green hills of New England. He is the author of four books of poetry, including The Soul We Share, winner of The Aryamati Prize, and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, a finalist for The Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and has received the Liam Rector fellowship and the Zoeglossia fellowship. He lectures on poetry, animism and integral ecology, and he serves on the advisory board of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard.

Why choose poetry over fiction?

I’m not sure one ever makes such a choice. Perhaps I’m wrong. We do, on occasion, create and undergo the experience of choice, while essentially being driven by processes and compulsions we can’t detect or fathom. The tug of poetry or the tug of story can simply be the tendency of one’s character, or the way one’s being flows, given the landscape at hand.
In any case, it wasn’t — and isn’t — a choice for me, for many reasons. I remember a fictionist in my MFA program (which I undertook after being a poet for 20 years), who said she felt like poetry was an entirely different art, a different language, by which she meant it wasn’t something she could write. That’s how fiction feels for me. Invented character, plot, dialogue, dramatic tension, the chords of it sustained for
hundreds of pages — my god, I don’t have the faintest clue. Maybe one day I’ll find myself writing fiction — I’d welcome the occurrence — but the merest semblance of ability or inclination hasn’t shown itself yet.
I was strictly a poet for a long time — decades. Eventually I learned the poetry of non-fiction, but both poetry and non-fiction, inasmuch as they actually are distinct modes, seem to mutually draw from the energy and being of the immanent world, and by and large to attend there. They do, like fiction, draw from imagination, yes, and dwell in the dark of inwardly manifested possibilities, and walk across the page as living mystery, but they seem to me to keep the felt, physical, outer soul in focus, even while
attending to the inner. That’s how poetic perception, sensation and participation in creation works for me.
Fiction seems to excel at invention, at gathering the whole glowing tapestry of knowledge and sensation into the mind, and reweaving it into the glorious world of the possible, the worlds beneath the world, and to walk so deeply there that the storied world steps out of imagination and begins to take up residence in the flesh, to live through the actions of those fuelled by the stories, thereby integrating into our little corner of the cosmos. It’s another kind of magic, and it’s marvelous.
Then again, I wonder about our insistence on genre. There’s narrative poetry. Lyric essay. Poetic autobiographic fiction. Song in all of them and all of them in song. Are they siblings or species? Are they faces of the invisible continuity to which we all belong? I think, now, of someone who feels the poetry of the day in their bones, and witnesses some phenomenal event that simply must be relayed, but relayed with embellishment, the fictionalisation of the poetic moment of memoir making it that much more alluring and special. And I wish I could hear that story, all day long.

Do you consider yourself a poet or a writer? And why so?

Both. The word poetry has Greek roots that roughly translate to “make” or “create.” A poet is a maker. To me, poetry is therefore also a condition of being. A poetry that begins long before words, but which uses words to deepen and further the soul. I consider Mother Earth to be a maker, a poetic being, a trait she inherited from her mother, Grandmother Universe, and a trait she confers upon us as movements within
her. I don’t compose poetry alone. We compose it together. Or more accurately, I participate in their poetries with both my life and my lines. This could also mean that a fiction writer — a highly skilled maker — is a poet, too. A poet who happens to make stories. While other poets make chairs, or clothes, or feelings.
I’m also a writer because I utilise the act of writing in my creative practices. Nowadays we call anyone who publishes a piece or a book a writer, but many such people never actually write a word. They type it, they speak it into devices, they dictate to others who type, but they shun the pen. They’re beautiful storytellers, beautiful poets, but writers? Let’s see. The word write comes from a lineage of understanding that means to score, to scratch, to tear, to leave a mark. If no mark is left, if nothing is scratched or torn, is it writing? On the other hand, if a screen is marked, if the mind is marked and scratched by words, and if the itch of that scratch leads to the words being shared, even if only by the tongue, isn’t that a kind of writing, too?

What is the most challenging part of your work/writing process?

Trying to listen to the music in the air. To put my ear to the lips of the Earth and hear her. To feel the rhythms in my blood, the trees, the land, and understand the integration of my own heartbeat in their measures. To let the warmths and shivers that pass between all forms of being play across the strings of my senses without turning away. To let them sink in. Become me. Offer a song to my voice. To weave all this into quickly dissolving snatches of feeling and hold the feelings present long enough to transmute them into words.

What’s more important for you: form or content?

If there’s a form, is there not content? If there’s content, doesn’t it have a form? I think we’re talking about two ways of experiencing the same presence. A difference in the way we look. A difference in how and where perception lands. Is it body or soul or the realisation that both are both which entices lover to lover at night?
In practical terms, I think it’s a difference in approach, which is largely a matter of disposition. When we climb a mountain, do we stick to the trail, bushwhack, or a little of both? Is the path we take, marked or not, understood to be as much a path as any other in a given climb? When we regard a statue or painting, do we focus on the overall transmission of feeling, then admire the details, or start with the curves and
colours and lines, then open up to the full transmission of what the composition conveys?
Some poets naturally attend to shape first, then discover what that shape contains. Others are drawn to the movement of the words, and discover what shape they make. Many poets do both, depending on the orientation of their intuition at the start. In either case, once you’re in the thick of composition, I find the light flickers back and forth hundreds of minute, barely perceptible times.

What is, in your opinion, the biggest myth about poetry?

That there are hidden meanings and they must be discerned in order for the poem to be understood. And, equally important, that there are no more meanings and a poem has been fully apprehended.
Many of my poems are acts of symbolism as much as they’re transmutations of feeling, but in the sense that they are felt at all, then they have been understood. That understanding may not register in the mind. It may be akin to the body’s awareness that there is a corner ahead, and an alleyway down that corner, but even so, the poem has been given space to reside, and from that space the ability to grow.

do you think poetry is still as relevant in the 21st century as it was, for example, in the 19th century?

I can hardly fathom a measurement of relevance when applied to an ancient and worldwide phenomenon that ultimately transcends cultures and species. I’m a poet of hearing, of feeling. Dogs are magnificent poets of smell. But my core response is that I believe song is the bedrock of what we typically call poetry.
Not just lyrics, but the feelings that create the lyrics, that create the music, that create the connections we feel under song’s spell. Poetry is at work in all of it, and thus, its relevance is as important and ever-present as the desire to feel, to speak, to sing — to be felt, heard, received.

What is the approach to poetry for contemporary readers? Reading poetry can be more challenging than approaching the latest commercial paperback, but it seems like poetry still has a wide grip. What are your thoughts about it?

I think it’s less a matter of being more challenging than a matter of getting used to a different type of energy. A matter of exercising a relatively unused muscle. The mind works through pattern, familiarity and repetition, just as the body does. Both are congregations of muscle working and growing, evolving and devolving in concert. The way into the poetry is the way into any interest: look, listen, feel, and let the arrow of one’s attention land. Keep attending. Each repetition will lead to a familiarity, a kind of kinship between reader and arrangement of words. And with enough familiarity —once the sense of kinship comes to mind as much as the interest did — then we enter the valley of care. I wouldn’t say poetry is by nature challenging. There are very straightforward, brilliant poets. But it may be strange. New. A way into the movement could be reading the lyrics of one’s favourite songs. Or finding the sentences in
one’s favorite prose that seem to elevate above the others and practically hover on the page. Then, try reading poems in the digital space and in books. And eventually, try feeling the unspoken poems in the air. My wife says it’s like looking at a painting. Only a little may get through. But that little is the beginning of everything. The painting is different every time we approach it. We are different constellations of human in each approach. There are glances that reveal next to nothing, and glances that reveal a feeling so sizzling we part ways transformed. Glances that leave us lonely. Glances that remind us we cannot be alone — although we can feel alone — for we share this planet’s soul.

Even by just reading his words, one is mesmerised by the lyricism that comes across them, and even more intrigued to grab his latest work and immerse themselves in its magic. Grab your copy here and let us know what have been your thought about it.