Zoë Skoulding: Ideas about the city relate to the way people inhabit spaces; I’m interested in the ways in which cities have been looked at and explored, and how poetry can be part of that exploration. There's also a sense in which the city is something from which we never really escape. Looking around a small town like Menai Bridge, I notice surveillance cameras in which my movements might be picked up and observed somewhere else, so even living somewhere semi-rural we’re all urbanised in the sense that we are all connected to each other. I'm interested, too, in how Bangor connects to other cities – I think of it as being bilingual, having divisions, fault lines running through it, and in order to understand that I might think about its connections to other European cities with their histories of cultural fracture. Bangor is a key point of connection in north Wales and that's what cities have always been: a place where trade and communication join up with elsewhere.

Zoë: Parking Non-Stop (see www.skald.omnia.co.uk) has grown alongside the poetry. Alan Holmes, Dewi Evans and I have been working on our first album, Species Corridor, since 1999 so it’s has had a very long gestation period. That too is about finding connections between places. We make recordings of the slates in the mountains, smashing them in quarries and so on, or we make sounds out of broken and rusting agricultural machinery lying around in the landscape. Then Alan patiently collages the results together to make rhythms and juxtaposes them with recordings of other places as part of what becomes a musical composition, with instruments and vocals. However, the core process is to allow sound environments of different places to talk to each other, for example the rhythm made of slate is put alongside a recording from a cellar in Budapest or a train in Slovakia, and these sounds become a conversation. This happens when I'm writing too - I might start off describing something nearby but it’s likely to join up with ideas and observations from somewhere else – language is always from somewhere else, and it makes its own connections. There's an interest in space with both projects but if you're listening to how places sound you’re aware of being in them and responding to them rather than looking from them at a distance. I try and achieve this in my poetry, too trying to feel what it’s like to be inside a place but also inside the language that describes it. I think of reading and writing as physical: the space on the page is one you physically navigate as your eyes move through it, and this movement is connected to the form of the poem as it moves from line to line.

Zoë: Psychogeography was a term coined by the Situationists of the 1950s. It's to do with thinking about your whole response to a place, and everything that maps leave out. One of the Situationists’ techniques was the 'dérive' where you drift through the city in whichever direction seems to invite you, just as now we've wandered onto the pier as it seemed like a good way to come. The Situationists believed in the transformation of everyday life, and in how artistic activity might not be making objects to buy and consume, like paintings in a gallery, but a revolutionary transformation of the way in which people live in a city, how they overcome alienation through the playfulness of chance encounters.

Zoë: Guy Debord said you couldn't as it became too depressing, but he was Parisian so had a particular perspective on such things. It doesn't work in the same way but I’ve tried it. One approach to the dérive is an algorithm, where you decide you're going to turn right then left then left again in a pattern. It’s quite easy to do in Paris but I've tried doing this in Menai Bridge and just ended up walking miles along a road with no turnings. More successfully, I've tried using maps of different cities to disorient myself in rural places, to find ways of thinking about landscape that don’t fall into Romantic cliché. For example I went to Llanddwyn beach one afternoon in driving horizontal rain and took with me the directions someone had written me for Copenhagen, so I was reading instructions to cross the road, or look out for shops and bars, but there was just grey desolation and sand blowing into my eyes, and the paper I was reading from got wet and dissolved. I was quite fascinated by the lack of connection between what I was reading and this quite extreme physical experience, which made me think about the beginning and end of cities. When you juxtapose the city with the countryside you're looking at the past or the future, before cities were there or after they’ve gone.

Zoë: (ctrl+alt+del) is beautiful, and I think every issue after issue 1 is a great achievement. Keep going! That's what you do with magazines, you just keep going until people notice that they're there. That's the big difference between a book and a magazine, a book comes out just once, but a magazine comes out again, again and again, so it takes a different kind of determination. Printed publications are actually becoming more precious now in the digital age, and their value that hasn't diminished in the way that people imagined it might.

Zoë: Yes I suppose it can be seem like a small world, but on the other hand one can think about it in terms of a gift economy built on personal relationships. We have the idea that anonymity is openness because it's based on cash transactions, but there are other models that can help to create a strong community of readers and writers – for example I’ve just been involved in a collaborative chap-book project with Dusie, in which 50 poets made books for each other. It’s true that a lot of poetry’s audience is other poets, but what that means is that poetry readerships tend to be highly engaged and personally committed, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You’re right, though, it’s important to look outwards – sometimes a good way of reaching other audiences is through mixing art forms, as we both do.

Zoë: When that was published there was a much stronger divide between so-called mainstream and innovative poetries. Since then, things have become much more fragmented; the internet has had a huge influence on opening up the publishing scene, for example Shearsman and Salt have brought books into publication which previously would have been less visible before, so all of that's entirely changed. I do think there's still a need for more debate that opens up different kinds of poetry to new readers and explains what is going on. When we encounter this dizzying range of approaches to poetry it becomes important to take a critical view of it, as each approach to poetics is not just another style but an expression of different underpinning ideas and politics. Reading means thinking, and thinking sometimes means disagreement, even anger, when the basis of what you believe is challenged. The internet is a valuable medium for this debate, as are magazines like Poetry Wales!

Zoë: I admired Robert Minhinnick’s editorship very much, especially his enthusiasm for locating Welsh poetry within international relationships, and his generous support of younger writers, from which I benefited. However, any editor inevitably brings a distinct perspective to a magazine, and there are various conversations I particularly want to encourage, for example about Wales’s relationship with experimental writing, about the relationship between critical and creative practice, and about how the value of cross-cultural poetic exchanges can be deepened. At the same time, the magazine also has its own trajectory, and I also see my editing as being in dialogue with a tradition of writing in Wales that reaches back at least as far as the magazine’s beginnings in the 1960s. I’m pleased to be working with Fflur Dafydd as Welsh-language editor, and I think there’s scope at the moment for some very interesting cross-currents between Welsh and English, between mainstream and experimental writing, between international poetries. The Galician poet María do Cebreiro said in a PW interview last year that she saw poetry as a space in parenthesis, a place for stepping back and working things out. I’d like to see the magazine as that too.