So what's your book about? The question poets dread. We don't do plot in the singular unless we're reworking an ancient classic. We do plots or no plot at all. So we answer with a string of abstract nouns and sound like the obscure blurbs on the back of most poetry collections. Or we do what politicians do and answer a different question: what inspired your book?

Half way through writing Bloodshot Monochrome I lost the plot. I forgot what drove me to write in the first place. It was called Body Language then and needed intravenous inspiration. So I did what I make my students do, the best creative writing exercise on the planet called 'Be a replicant'*.  In half an hour you create a unique arts playlist. You uncover your passions, your obsessions. It's serious fun. Here are some of mine:  Don't Look Now and '70s spine-chillers beginning with 'The'; '40s film noir; fairy tales and femmes fatales; Northern Soul; songs and sonnets. I like repetition of sound and scene, cyclical plots complicated with double crossing, déjà vu and double entendre.

I like lists. They're methodical and when you're blocked you need the concrete to access the abstract. I downloaded the list to the right side of my brain. I lifted the title for my book from a line in my film noir sequence, 'Vicious Circle'. I wrote poems that openly referred to songs. I quoted Shakespeare and The Beatles. I reworked fairy tales and biblical narratives. I stole plots from films and friends who live dangerously. I used old and new poetic forms. I sampled and remixed sentences from the works of dead poets, some of them not dead enough so I asked for permission and was turned down. I rewrote the poems in my own words. I stole. I did nothing new to create something unique. That's what writers and artists do. Without theft there is no art.

Here are ten classics that inspired the book in chronological order:

1. When I consider how my light is spent a.k.a. On His Blindness (John Milton, circa 1652)
I've revisited this sonnet more than any other and have always found it profoundly moving. Each time I reread it passes the hairs-on-the- back-of-the-neck test. It yields more meaning. Light is synonymous with hope: in the first eight lines, Milton is in the dark and in the final six he is enlightened by 'Patience'. It has a killer last line. It's very personal for me. I don't share his faith but he reminds me not to fight the meaning of my name. Patience is a name I'm still growing into. This poem inspired 'Problem Pages' where I take on the role of literary agony aunt, responding to dead poets. At the time, I wasn't aware of Milton's influence. If you reread a poem enough times it becomes your own.

2. The Postman Always Rings Twice (Dir Tay Garnett, 1946)
You may know the Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange version with the infamous sex scene involving fresh bread and a kitchen table. If so, I urge you to watch the original noir, a lesson in sexual restraint and how a femme fatale can make white the new black.

3. The Killers (Dir Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, this fills in the back story that's left to the imagination on the page. It's well executed, with Burt Lancaster excelling himself as Swede, the ex-fighter waiting to be assassinated. The killers' repetitive dialogue in the opening scene has the cumulative menace of Goodfellas' Joe-What-do-ya-mean-funny?-Pesci. Gangsters not only get the best lines, they know how to repeat them.

4. Ball and Chain (Big Brother and the Holding Company, Monterey, 1967)  
LSD was stronger in the sixties, so strong you can get high simply by watching the video of the Monterey Pop Festival. There's a fabulous sequence where Janis Joplin's bejewelled foot leaves the ground as she hits those top notes: the best is when she harnesses one of her all out screams into a quivering moan. The contrast is so striking, Mama Cass is blown off the planet.

5. Black Power (James Coit, Phoof Records, circa late '60s)
I could have chosen a record more soulful by someone like Jackie Wilson who had remarkable vocal range. But this track turned my brain inside out. It's uncharacteristically political. It's Northern Soul at its most raw, a 100-mile-an-hour stomper. The first time I heard it on Colwyn Bay Pier at an alldayer in 1978 I thought, What the hell is this? The older crowd in circle skirts and 40-inch bags were dancing a strange dance, walking from side to side as if on roller skates. Suddenly, on the first note of the musical break, the boys dropped onto the floor doing the splits and handstands, the girls spun till you could see their knickers. Then, when the vocals resumed, they continued their strange gliding dance. I was hooked.

6. Don't Look Now (Dir Nicholas Roeg, 1973)
Based on Daphne Du Maurier's short story, this thriller plays with the image of a small red hooded figure with a backdrop of a Venice so faded it's almost translucent. Throughout there's a claustrophobic sense of grief, menace, alienation, misunderstanding and premonition. The deliberate lack of subtitles adds to the feeling of looking in rather than at, the film.

7. Gangsters (The Specials, 2-Tone Records, 1979)
It wasn't just the tuneless tune, Terry Hall's deadpan expression and the cool 2-Tone clothes. It was the way it catapulted into the charts turning everything it touched monochrome.

8. The Shining (Dir Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Stephen King famously rejected Kubrick's film because it ignored the novel's alcoholism theme. But the book doesn't contain the All-Work-and-No-Play-Makes-Jack-a-Dull-Boy typewriter scene. If you happen to be Jack (Nicholson) and type the same words repeatedly in different formats, you're either a literary genius or mad. He thinks he's the former: you know he's the latter.

9. The Back Seat of My Mother's Car (Julia Copus, 1995)
A fine poem about marital breakup from the child's perspective where form mirrors content. Copus invented the 'mirror poem'. The second half of her poem is exactly the same as the first in reverse order. Only the punctuation changes. The sense of déjà vu is unnerving. Never has repetition worked so cleverly to show how memory plays tricks on us, how each time we remember we re-create, how the unreliable narrator is alive and kicking in poetry.

10. 101 Sonnets (Ed Don Paterson, Faber & Faber, 1999)
First there's the informative, accessible introduction that makes you want to read on. The opening poem is Robert Frost's The Silken Tent, a stunning love poem that subverts the Shakespearean form thus commenting on the 'bondage' of the form itself. There are gems by Wilfred Owen, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, R S Thomas etc. Then follow the Notes, erudite and idiosyncratic comments on each sonnet. Still the most inspiring sonnet anthology in print.

* "Novelist, children's writer and film-maker, Philip Ridley listed 100 texts - comics, films, novels, songs, poems - explaining, 'If you were to make a replicant of me (à la Blade Runner) these should be the first things filed in my memory'".

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