I first experienced Sholto Buck’s poetry on stage before encountering his poetry on the page, as shared with me via a mutual friend – one of the few people whose taste I trust. Fittingly, this interview is based on a conversation we shared at the launch of Sholto’s second poetry collection, Light Film (Pilot Press, 2025) – now printed here for you. Months before this, we met in the courtyard of The Alderman in Brunswick and on that very night, the digital proofs of Light Film were sent through. On his phone screen, Sholto showed me sinewy poems shaped from cinematic glimpses, flirting between the manuscript’s demarcating stars, pinpricks of dark light on the white page. I read ‘Body Cream’, one of my favourite poems and embodying Sholto’s ‘bratticism’: ‘I am not / your woman patient, I’m / a water sign’, and this poem began forming my questions for this exchange.

Mysticism and poetry may enact the same function, breaking the infrastructure of language and all it seeks to contain. The field of ‘this is real’ / ‘this is not real’ is sliced through by beams of light, which Sholto, as the poet, both witnesses and (re)creates. Such enactments summon eerie, asynchronous moments IRL. I read ‘Knife + Heart, 2018’ – an erotic, queer, fallen paradisiac poem – on the train. As I looked up, I saw another passenger reading a painstakingly tabbed, hand-annotated bible. This reminds me of moments when reading Sholto’s debut collection, In the Printed Version of Heaven (Rabbit, 2023), as it kept me company on a residency in Ηράκλειο/Heraklion – the striking blue cover of this book continued to match the blue of the desk I sat at, the bedsheets I slept in, the tinted water glass I drank from, and the city’s grimy ocean inlet I gazed across.

Sholto’s writing works of its own accord, and that accord is elemental to the aesthetic he has evocatively crafted. Aesthetic, in contemporary usage, often gets conflated with a superficiality, but its etymology takes form in αἰσθητικός – an engagement of or for the senses that is perceptible – sensorially experienced. Light is not only a visible experience but a wavelength, and how the speed of causality – cause and effect – is measured. In Light Film, light is a sensibility, a lyric, a divine wavelength – a perfect curve, a perfect arse, a perfect melancholy.

Georgia Kartas: The most recognisable reference of Light Film is film as in cinema. Cinema is invoked so vividly in your poetry that I could sense the Tarkovsky poem was based on a Tarkovsky film before I read the poem’s title. Can you expand upon your experiences of watching films and of writing poems that begin from watching such films? What do films activate in the body for you?

Sholto Buck: There are lots of ways to answer this question. Firstly, cinema was for me an important part of growing up with art. It informed my aesthetic instincts as well as my sensibility as a person, showing me gestures I sought to recreate in my daily life. I also have a background in photography. So, when I write poems, I’m drawing on the image-making instincts that I developed from this practice. Watching films as I write helps me attune language with these visual impulses.

Watching a movie is just an excellent prompt for writing, and it suits the way I make poems. I’ll watch a film and continuously take notes for the duration of it. This gives me a pool of language to draw from, and I use this to build a poem, or poems. Since for me, most of my writing is concentrated on the act of editing, I find it difficult to actually generate large amounts of text. The duration of a film gives me a controlled arena for writing to ‘happen’ in.

Ultimately, I love drama and fantasy and delusion. It’s a folly to say what this book is about but if I were to try, I would say it’s about the tension between reality and fantasy, and the wreckage that is created when you lean too far into one over the other. When I started writing this book, I was in a state of profound boredom and disappointment after having finished my PhD, coming to the end of a huge project and needing to find what I wanted from the next part of my life. I had a lot of feelings but nothing really going on, in my thinking brain or in my life, to attach them to. Writing along with films gave me a channel to focus through.

I often found that despite having plots and characters of their own, I exploited the images and atmospheres of certain films in order to write in the direction of what I was feeling. For example, the poem ‘Watching a burning house’ came from watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), but the tension of that poem has more to do with the experience I was having of myself, than it does the content of the film.

GK: Out of all the poems that take their titles directly from films, the collection opens with ‘Sebastiane, 1976’, after Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane. What is the significance of this poem?

SB: This poem drove me insane in the last few months of editing the book. I nearly took it out altogether. I realised the only place it could fit was at the very beginning, as a kind of mad, horny prologue. Start the book with a bang, etc. Opening the poem with the line ‘everything in this book happened to me’ felt like a good way to invoke this tension between reality and delusion. Obviously, it didn’t all happen to me. I am a relatively straightforward writer in that my instincts often fall along the lines of ‘write what you see, write what you feel now’. The problem is that my life isn’t that interesting. So, the heightened stakes of Jarman’s Sebastiane helped me give some shape to what was directly in front of me.

GK: Everything in this book happened to ‘you’, the ‘you’ between reality and delusion. Say in ‘Peppermint frappé, 1967’, the ‘I’ of the poem identifies with the screen and transports into it. And in the poem ‘Monologue’, there’s an address ‘the poet’ with the vocative ‘Sholto’ – and there’s the deliberate tongue-in-cheek self-referentiality of the poem titled ‘Sholto kind of rhymes with sorrow’. How does the pronoun ‘I’ work in your poetry and in this collection? What are your thoughts on the poetic ‘I’?

SB: Because of the cinematic influence on the book, the ‘I’ throughout the poems is shifting and performative. You know, one moment it’s ‘a gay guy saying nothing’ and then it’s ‘the actress on the verge of tears’. I love the idea of a speaker acting as different characters, putting on different costumes as they push deeper into a fantasy life. There’s a kind of theatrical joy I get from the ‘I’ in poetry. Like, I’m putting on a show.

But also, there are more functional purposes at work here. For one thing, there is a lot of shifting in my poems, huge jump cuts from one place to another, or from image to abstraction, you know, are we inside a film or is this ‘real life’, and whatever this might mean. I think the ‘I’ can be a way of tethering the poem to something that feels stable. Maybe this is another way that cinema has influenced my writing. Like, ok, this story is strange, but there is someone telling it to me, or like, there is a perspective or a lens that this perception is being experienced through. It helps me to structure my work and bring a sense of perspective to the dream world of my poems.

I have at times felt a pressure, having grown up around so much poststructuralist queer theory, and Marxist theory, to Destabilise the ‘I’! Dismantle the individual! Centre the collective or whatever. This also comes from inside literature too, this distrust of the lyric ‘I’ in LANGUAGE poetry etc. But, I … just don’t think that’s how I write, or read. I know I’m probably pushing the limits of this proposition, but I find it’s very rare that I’ll read a poem with an assertive ‘I’ and think, you know, oh this is so solipsistic or like, what a fixed subject position! You know? I don’t feel so aware of the ‘I’ on this level when I read others’ work. It actually feels generous, like I’m being held by the speaker of the poem, and when that happens, I’m a lot less aware of myself as the reader, than I am when I’m reading badly edited work that’s got big conceptual ambitions but little editorial rigour. I’m trying to write the sort of poems I want to read. I want to give the reader my best, my ‘I’ and all. I’m giving you mine because I want you to give me yours.

GK: The stars that segment sections of this book seem like pinpoints of light or – just to Barthes it up – a punctum. Why did you decide to use stars as markers within this collection?

SB: The stars, as a structuring device, were a late edition to the book. I always had section breaks, but for a while I was separating them into cinematic acts. However, I felt like they weren’t quite working, and Elaine Kahn, who helped me edit the manuscript, said to get rid of them and find something more open, so I changed the section dividers to stars. Stars work because they have an independent relationship to each word in the title of the book. Starlight and film star. They’re also chic and glamorous and sacred, yet relatively inexpensive as symbols. Like an emoji.