Category: Interview

‘What is ever easy to write? I’m interested in what gets lost in memory, where it goes – how the body holds’: Rachel Long talks to alice hiller about the power of ‘girl-speak’ and art as transfiguration in ‘My Darling from the Lions’.

Photo of Rachel Long by Amaal Said.

Sometimes distance generates its own form of closeness.  Or at least that was our experience, when Rachel Long and I connected through zoom to go deep with her debut, My Darling from the Lions, which was shortlisted for both the Forwards and Costa prizes in 2020. Each of us had instinctively positioned ourselves by a window – as if to share the same autumn afternoon light, notwithstanding being on opposite sides of London.  Over the course of the two hours which followed, we talked about what it means to create as women, where we find the spaces and energies to nurture ourselves as artists, and why poetry is sideways-thinking.  We asked how someone accesses their own ‘true’ perspective or ‘spirit level’; we agreed on the generative nature of play, and why translating another poet’s work can lead your own into new dimensions. Specifically, in Rachel Long’s case – that working with Adelaide Ivánova fed into her own poems of witness around the subject of sexual predation and assault. We then moved into a closer discussion of the extraordinary sequence of poems in which Rachel Long responds creatively to the challenging subject of sexual abuse in childhood – about which I also write.  Together we explored language as reclamation, and how the process of articulating, and shaping, may enact a form of restitution and healing.  Reviewing the transcript, we both felt that this second half of the conversation formed its own unit.   I have therefore divided the interview into two segments, so that our readers have the option of either reading it right through, or in two halves as feels right to them. At the close of that tough year, I had no doubt that this was one of the most nourishing, but also radical conversations, I had in the whole of 2020.  It’s the greatest honour to be able to share Rachel Long’s words with you, as we go forward as readers and writers into 2021 together. 

AH: Can I start by asking about how My Darling from the Lions came into being Rachel Long?  When, and how, did you start writing?

RL:     I feel that in many ways I was maybe always writing it.  I loved writing even as a child.  I didn’t know what I was writing for a long time, in terms of subject or form.  I return to the subjects that I have long been fascinated with – the lives of the people around me.  The complexity of people’s stories, of how appearances are not necessarily the reality of what is going on inside.  My mother came to the UK from Sierra Leone when she was eight. So many of her stories of growing up are holey snippets.  The older I get, the more I realise they might actually be some kind of fiction or poetry.  If you question something in one of my mother’s ‘origin stories’, she gets almost confused, or contradictory very quickly. The stories become murky, vague, abstract. 

AH:     I love that idea of murkiness. It’s full of possibility, and also really honest. In the collection, you explore everything from the harm caused by racism and sexual predation, all the way to what it’s like to grow up in the UK of dual heritage, this can’t have been an easy collection to write – at a creative as well as on a personal level? 

RL:    What is ever easy to write? I’m interested in what gets lost in memory, where it goes – how the body holds it. Being of dual heritage… I grew up in a white working-class area on the outskirts of London. My schools were majoritively white, my friends, half my family. I’m not sure that I thought of myself as Black for a long time. Mixed, half-caste, (dark-)light-skinned, all the rest of it, but not Black particularly. That was an understanding, a knowledge and an acceptance of a self that I had to carve out later, as I grew up, as left that estate, as I read, spoke and understood myself within a much wider context.  When I was a girl, I thought that you had to choose what colour you were.  I remember sitting in the back seat of my dad’s car, Dad driving, Mum in the passenger seat, and suddenly thinking, you must choose, now, whether you want to be white like Dad or black like Mum – isn’t that… disturbing? And as if I thought that I get to choose how the world perceives me.

AH: Picking up on what you were saying about claiming your Black identity as you grew older, certainly in decades past in England, the dominant culture wasn’t respectful of different identities. There was a pressure to only tick one box or feel of less worth if you didn’t tick that box.  I knew Poly Styrene, of X-Ray Spex. She used to pretend to be Greek as a teenager in the 70’s.  Once she became an artist, she was able to claim her dual heritage identity more fully. 

RL: I understand that.  It’s interesting that she could become closer to herself through her art. 

AH: Poly was freed to claim her identity partly by working with live theatre as a teenager. Were there people who made becoming a writer more possible for you?

RL: What a beautiful question. Yes. I loved school. Primary school particularly, I felt so much freer at school than at home, and I loved learning, like very honestly loved it. My formidable headmistress, Mrs Wiley loved literature. She would make us recite poetry.  Her favourite poem was WB Yeats’ ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, (with the line “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”).  Our morning assemblies consisted of who could get through the poem. I became good at reciting and at being shy, but showing off. Because of my love of English and of reading, she recommended me for some residential creative writing courses. On the weekends, and during the holidays, from when I was about 10 to 17, I spent time in the Essex countryside, which I loved, reading under trees, and watching Man Ray films at ten, or discussing silent French movies before sneaking off to play spin the bottle. As I got older obviously, that crux of being 14 and ashamed of everything, I completely hid what I had ‘got up to at the weekend’ from my friends – except perhaps my best friend.  It’s good to be able to trust one person at least in life…. Anyway, my 10 year-old brain is going whish whish whish whish, just totally like woah, this is… beautiful, I feel like this is what I’m here for.  We did things like creative dreaming – all of us, a gaggle of geeky ‘chosen children’ from all over the country, laying down in the grounds listening to what the grass was telling us.  What a radical side-education! Without those easters and summers away, I hate to think where all my dreaming or talking to grass would have been wasted. On boys probably, in phone boxes, at the bottom of bottles. My childminder Barbara was also an amazing education for me. My mum and dad both worked so I would go to Barbara’s after school. Barbara loved sewing and knitting.  She taught me to sew (I was never great at knitting). She taught me to draw and paint too, how to look after flowers. I feel very blessed to have had this creative education, to have learnt what I love from others, particularly from women seeing and encouraging me.  

AH: At such a young age, that forms you as an artist. It’s letting you know that this is the way to be.  

RL: Absolutely.  If I didn’t have those people then, I would have had a different path, one I suspect I would not be happy in at all right now. I can’t think about the ‘other path’ for too long, I always well up very quickly, as if the possibility of it is still uncomfortably close. I suspect that is the same for most children, that they’ll thrive if opened up to what is possible. 

AH: For sure. And there is the simplicity of playfulness. When I was pregnant with my second son, I did a playing course.  There were no children there. It was for parents to enjoy playing.  I built bricks and did all those things.  That really was a brilliant thing to take back into my parenting.  I connected with my joy and playfulness.  

RL: I love that! What we do as poets is sort of play. Serious play. 

AH: Yes, exactly.  When it stops being play, it stops working.  Being exposed to poetry early, you learnt how to tell without telling, because poetry works with a backward logic.  You don’t just state a sequential narrative.  You let it ooze out.  It’s like sideways thinking.  To develop your ability to sideways-think young, has to be a fantastic thing. 

RL: I think you just nailed something for me Alice – or kind of opened something up for me – about sideways thinking.  I don’t usually credit my parents for making me very creative, but I think the ways they are as people, people who don’t hide, but also don’t necessarily access or communicate how they more deeply feel, has influenced my work. 

Mum will tell you exactly how she is feeling, but I think what she says is the surface, a lot of her anger and worry is fear.  I think that underneath she is a lot quieter, shy, strange and dangerous, but she would never absolutely communicate that.  My Dad says nothing about anything. So maybe as a child I watched them and understood something essential about what is said and unsaid, about how much you can communicate in your not-saying, in your subtle showing.

AH: To be able to connect the surface and the depth requires opening the channels in the way that you did as a child through creative play.  For a lot of people, knowing how they feel isn’t easy.  Connecting what they are experiencing on the surface with what’s driving it down below is tricky.   Somehow art communicates this, even if it doesn’t do so explicitly.  It lets it be understood. 

RL:      Definitely. 

AH:      Nowadays, as a poet and a teacher, you work with language to expand and change awareness, and make the new.  Were there artists who enabled you to see that your voice, as a women of colour, needed to be realized in a way that did not try to erase the contexts from which it took its shapes?  Specifically, the female and the domestic, including the shadowed hinterlands between adolescence and adulthood, which are vulnerable times for many of us? Asking this question, I had in mind your poem ‘Apples’. It starts with the speaker running for a train –  “tits play-doughing/ out of a shit bra” – then slides through an admission of  her being “magazine educated” into a childhood memory of :

When the mum of my then-best friend said
her daughter wasn’t allowed to play with me 
because I was another N-word – meaning
Mum went round in her dressing-gown to slap her silly
with her tongue, then returned to scatter the kitchen 
and shred Dad’s Guardian for not sticking up for us,
for never saying anything – 

RL: The person who comes to mind most is Caroline Bird, who was my Jerwood-Arvon mentor in 2015-16.  Working with Caroline completely accelerated my work. I felt seen and heard and ‘good’, like I could do this, that it wasn’t all rubbish and a waste of time. Caroline was the first person to read my work and really see and hear me. Not in a weird tokenistic or racialized or classist way, as sometimes is ‘the way’. She read me un-bemused, nonjudgmentally, deadly seriously; essentially. That was radicalising for my poetry, for my practice, and for my personhood. Over that year I was able to let go of a lot of shame and therefore I could begin writing it. That came from finally not being or feeling judged, or boxed, or expected of. I realise that you’ve asked me about women of colour influencing me specifically and I have immediately offered Caroline, who is not a woman of colour – how can I phrase this so that it doesn’t sound ‘colour blind’ – let me access my own perspective… I don’t write (or read, or sleep or dream any of those essential, private, self-onto-self things) as a ‘woman of colour’. I write as myself — by that I mean, I don’t think our truest, deepest selves, at spirit level, register or identify with concepts of race, gender ecterea, the spirit doesn’t need these codes I don’t think, they aren’t necessary, and if the spirit level is also likely where the writing is from, then essentially do any of us write as our society-necessary, society-inflicted, society-worn labels?   It is only later, when another person reads the work, that certain societal lenses may be worn to read and interpret the work.  For example, in my poem, ‘Jail Letter’, I sit between my mother’s legs getting my hair plaited for what feels like all of Saturday. Only to go to school on Monday and be laughed at because my hair ‘looked like spiders’, but also because I had a Wednesday clip in and it was Friday or something. Sitting there as a girl, I did not realise the racial politics of hair, its implications, the perceptions of beauty and the precedence of European ideals, none of that, at least not consciously.  I might have felt, suspected, some of it. I was just sitting there, bored out of my mind, in some discomfort.  I wanted the poem to reflect that. I didn’t want the poems to have a knowledge of a context that is implausible for the little (mixed-race black) girl in it to reach yet. I badly want to leave the brackets out there because to constantly be a bracketed girl is not the girlhood I wanted, nor should any girl be bracketed, does this make any sense? 

AH: Yes it does.

RL:     Anyway, I wanted the poem to stay true to her authentic universe rather than be unhonestly aware of her place within the wider context, or indeed other people’s perceptions and dictations of it. And I think, I hope, that by doing that it makes the poem sad and funny, because she doesn’t realise, as she’s sitting there getting her hair plaited, what the reader might think about who she is and what she means, or what her hair means in the world, to others. I was supposed to be talking about Caroline and other influential women and I’m talking about authentic poetic universes!  

AH:   I was reading Toni Morrison in the 80’s.  I felt understood by her writing, and I felt I understood myself. I was born in 1964 and sexual abuse in terms of children wasn’t discussed much until the 80s, by which time I was in my 20’s. It was to do with finding myself in her work as someone who was living a life, carrying a history, that most of society denied and excluded, before I could even articulate my own experience coherently.  

RL: Morrison is one of the best writers that we have had on this planet.  The fact that you feel personally understood and encompassed by that work, and that it also speaks to a universal experience – maybe it’s to do with identity, but also bloody good writing.  

AH: Also, being formally inventive, because you need to make a language to say something that hasn’t been said and isn’t being said.  You have to find a language that will actually do that. We both saw the Faith Ringgold Exhibition at the Serpentine.  I feel that about her work.  And in terms of our work as artists, that is a fantastic challenge to be set – because you know you really have to rise to it.  That creates newness, originality, invention. 

RL:  ‘Apples’ is partly inspired by the experience of reading Morgan Parker’s collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night.  Parker really harnesses a multiplicity in her work. She has all of these apparent contradictions and juxtaposition, all going on at once, which is, of course, most like life. One particular poem of Morgan’s is ‘How to Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity.’  Just the way it runs, it switches up, it is sliding-doory. This being of multiple things all at once inspired  ‘Apples’.  I think I have long felt lots of different things at once, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes only things other people said or thought were contradictory, but I knew them intimately to be one. I realized when writing ‘Apples’ that I had long felt like lots of apparently-different selves presenting as a single person.

AH:  I love her work, and the way it takes from daily life, and makes it strange and powerful.  In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nihisi Coates makes a point of recording complex situations in direct, accessible language. Was that part of your intention for My Darling from the Lions?

RL: It’s the way I speak. It’s uncomfortably pronouncing words I confidently but silently read, it’s mispronouncing the same words my mum does, the dreaming holidays in the countryside talking to grass.  It’s the mediocre comprehensive secondary school, using a flirtier voice to convince the bus driver to let me on without a ticket, and that voice sticking.  It’s the sudden grammar school sixth form,  University upt North, and only just now realising that I speak in about five different registers.  Sometimes I am very aware and ashamed of it, and others I’m like, well, I start sentences with ‘I’m like’.  I want to write in a way that feels true. Poetry is opening up a little in terms of reflecting a plethora of different voices and moving away from having one overarching voice that we must all listen very carefully and above all others to.  My poem, ‘Helena’ was written after a conversation I had with a poet, who is from Peckham — not so far from where I grew up in south east London also.  He was like, no you don’t talk like you are from South London, and sort of laughed at me for even thinking that I did/still did (did I ever?).   So, then I went away and thought, OK, how did we used to speak when we were at school? –and or just after, at like 20, 21. As I was writing ‘Helena’ I realised that it is starkly different to how I speak now, even the pace of it is different, we spoke all in a rush to each other, all the time – and we swore a hell of a lot more. What I found interesting to was recalling old sayings, old ways of using language, ‘swear down’, ‘I’m not being funny, mate’, ‘at the end of the day’ (not all of these made the final edit, but at one point they were all in there). The poem is not a pretty poem, but it was liberating to write in a vernacular that was so essentially us, ours, that felt so much like I was speaking to Helena again, like, really.  Our kind of ‘girl-speak’ was so rooted in a specific place and time. 

AH: I love that. Going further with the idea of ‘girl-speak’, and the collective, you work with experiences you identify as not having happened to you personally, but that open to larger themes.  In ‘Helena’, the speaker is witness to Helena coming round to their mutual friend Tiff’s flat, after being attacked by the bouncer at the nightclub where she worked. The language is raucous, high-energy girl-talk, that takes a turn for the nasty.  Helena is speaking.  Scarlett is Tiff’s daughter

The er/a and i/e/y rhymes punctuate the sonic patterning of this section with groan and cry sounds, without compromising the spoken feel of the language, or the heartbreak-humour with which Helena creates a retrospective shield for herself against the rape, which the reader is left to imagine.  You translated the Brazilian poet and artist Adelaide Ivánova for a chapbook with the PTC last year, whose work denounces crimes of sexual violence.   I wondered if this collaboration informed your work of witness in ‘Helena’, and if you could say something about the poem?

RL:   I don’t think until I read your question that I truly understood how influential actually translating Adelaide Ivánova’s work was for me.  In being invited by The Poetry Translation Centre to translate Adelaide’s work from the literals, and in being introduced to her when she came to the UK to launch and tour the collection, I was influenced, massively. I was moved by her activism, in life and on the page. You’ve made me think about what the act of translation does spiritually; to read someone else’s work, to be deep inside it, to experience and walk around in it.  When I’m translating, I always feel like I’m in somebody else’s room.  I look around this room trying to work out who this is, essentially, where things go, trying to understand why things are placed where they are placed, and I can, as the translator, move some things around, ask questions, understand.  But it’s Adelaide’s room, her creation and design.  When translating I aim not to rearrange too heavily, small touches, to extend my room metaphor, I suppose quarter-turn certain plants towards the window, smooth the covers, plump some pillows.  Being in Adelaide’s room, the rooms of her poems and experiencing each of them was a joy and a challenge and a privilege.

AH: And they have incredibly tough subject matters. 

RL: Incredibly tough, incredibly brave and dangerous too.  Working with Adelaide probably did give me the permission, however subconsciously, to write ‘Helena.’  

AH: Because it is a very tough poem.  You give the story of the rape very clearly.  It’s a horrible rape.  We know it wasn’t the narrator’s experience.  That’s made quite clear.  It seemed to me something that was very important to get on the page.  Rape is something that people do to each other, and the person to whom it’s done often feels so bad that they tend not to talk about it.  That silence makes it more possible for the crime to continue. 

RL: Absolutely.  It was a tough poem to write – alleviated only by the fact that I kept going back to writing in our voices, and that did alleviate it in a way, because the way we used to speak, in a rush, all at once, angry and sad and laughing at once felt true, and like taking something back, her voice, her clear-as-a-bell voice.  That’s what I think I wanted to get to with ‘Helena’.  When things happened like that, we didn’t have the exact language, but we knew how to speak to each other, we knew how to tell each other things – but no power to actually help each other.  Now, god forbid, if a friend of mine came and said something like this to me, I would be so better equipped, even in terms of language, and then other things thereafter, to be able to offer assistance to that friend if she wanted it. We didn’t, as girls.  We glossed it over, at least in terms of what we said aloud, because we all knew that it was bad, but it was so bad the consequences of doing ‘nothing’ always seemed better than the repercussions of saying ‘something’ to people outside of our circle, outside of our experience and language. 

AH: As human beings, when tough things happen to us, sometimes we shut them down to some extent, because we are at a point in our life when that’s the only safe thing to do.  Helena said what happened, and then she took the shower.  She was supported, and she took the shower, and washed it away.  That’s an honest account of how we cope with very difficult things.  

RL: I think about being that age again, with my girls, my sisters, my old friends or just other girls I went to school with.  Really horrific things happened. Regularly.  You’d come back to school on a Monday morning and each Monday there would be some standardly horrific story of what had happened at one party or another at the weekend, or at a bus stop, or in a local park.  The frequency of these violences done unto us girls almost normalized it. It’s so heartbreaking to remember. 

AH: I grew up in the late 70’s, early 80’s.  I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of my Non-Existence, which has just come out.  She describes that omnipresent violence and threat of violence so strongly.  I thought It wasn’t only me.   She was having that experience on the West Coast of the US, in San Francisco. She described that predatory environment, being followed home, feeling that she was permanently on verge of being raped.  She managed to escape rape, but some of her friends didn’t.

RL: This is not even a long time ago.  So, it makes me glad to measure at least how far we’ve come in terms of speaking out about these.  I think we have to be careful, or I do, not to be angry with our previous selves, because that was the world only moments ago, and it was the world that made those conditions, not us.  

AH: Often when I have written about something difficult, I do a short Buddhist meditation around self-compassion. I never think I need to.  But then I do it – and I feel so much less bad.  I have to keep going back and being kind to that girl who I was.   

RL:    We had to survive in the only ways we thought were available and possible, right? 

AH:    I think a lot of tough things that happen to us as children, as adolescents, as young women, we seal away inside ourselves.  We build protective tissue around them.  At a later point, we often have to deal with them.  When you’re young, you’ve got such a strong instinct just to survive, that you keep going through it somehow. I think you have a different level of life energy at that point, that drives you forward. It changes as we get older.  That’s my sense of looking back on the hair-raising escapades of my teenage self, operating in a menacing world. 

RL:  Definitely. 

This is the point at which Rachel Long and I felt there was a natural break.   In the conversation that follows, which was all part of our single meeting, we talk about how you can respond with agency and creativity to very difficult experiences, and the ways in which this process of articulation can become of itself reclamatory and healing. 

AH: This seems the right place to ask you about the sequence of five or so poems within My Darling from the Lions, recording the sexual abuse of a young girl child by one of the minsters in the church she attends with her family, and the aftermath of this crime in her subsequent life.  Because of my own background of having been sexually abused as a child, these made a great impression on me from when I first heard you perform them live.  The first of these is ‘Night Vigil’, which is the third poem in the collection. It begins in a child-adult voice “I was a choir-girl. Real angel/ – lightning faced and giant for my age.”  There is tongue in cheek wonder at its midnight start – “a time too exciting to fathom. / How the minute and the hour stood to attention!”   The miracle stops there, however, as the rest of the poem falls down through time, to an ending its beginning could never have anticipated: 

During the Three Members’ Prayer, my sister fell asleep
under a chair, so she never knew

how I sang.  Or how I fell silent
when the evangelist with smiling eyes said in his pulpit voice,

Here, child. 
Had she woken, I would have told her Sleep, sleep!

so, she’d never know Smiling Eyes
also meant teeth,

or that he had blown candles for hands,
with which he led me down an incensed corridor,

and I followed. 

           While this is a very difficult experience to take on board, you generate protection for the reader and creator alike through the child’s desire to shelter her sister, and through the way the imagery lets what happened be apprehended step by step.  The “blown candles” and “incensed corridor” are simultaneously sacred and penetrative.  We have in that moment the choice to understand the simultaneous desecration of an act of faith, and a child’s body.  

       Workshops I have taken with you instigate an alchemy of deep, internal self-liberation. ‘Free-writing’, along with engaging with secondary sources, such as dreams or artworks, help generate less ‘managed’ creative responses?  Was that how you put ‘Night Vigil’ together? How did it come into being kind of creatively?

RL: Maybe I should keep a kind of diary or a log of how each poem was written because I find it really hard to remember them.  

AH: Like dreams. 

RL: They are like dreams, that’s perfect Alice. Yeah, they are like my dreams. I can’t remember how I got there.  Even sometimes with the edits, if I was to go back and find a real old version of that poem, I wouldn’t remember it.  The only thing I do remember is that this poem was much longer.  At that time, I was on the Jerwood-Arvon mentoring scheme with Caroline Bird.  She was the first person to read that poem.  As I said, I was grateful for the way Caroline read me.  I had never written like this before. I had never framed such a peak experience. She didn’t do that awkward thing that people do, she read it as an artwork, or a draft of a work of art, and did not focus on the ‘apparently personal’ experience in the poem, but the poem as an experience itself. I’m trying to recall now, and I think part of what made the early draft longer is that it continued with the girl down the corridor. Caroline asked, why don’t you end it here?” — end at the girl following the man down the corridor, the poem becoming the corridor. In this way, the reader experiences it as the little girl, and becomes the girl, walking, ever-walking down that corridor with that man.  The corridor then also becomes a metaphor for how the experience goes on, haunts you in many ways, forever. 

AH: Exactly, and it’s much scarier. 

RL: Much scarier, yes.   And then she went “whoosh” with the pen, and she was like What do you think? And it kind of made me go eurgh like in my stomach.   I was like yes; this is what it felt like.  As a poem that was the closest and most fitting frame for it.   If you end a poem in a place where you have refrained from summing it up or allowing your older voice to come in and intercept it – you leave the reader in freefall.  

AH: That is an amazing answer.  It’s just a stunning, stunning poem.  I heard you perform it live, and really longed for the time it would be published, and I could read it on the page because it felt so important to me personally.

RL: Is that when we met that night, was that in the Poetry Cafe with Kaveh Akbah?

AH: I think so, yeah. 

RL: It was so beautiful, and you were so generous afterwards, thank you. 

AH: It was just so impactful for me.  I had a hunger to be able to have those poems on the page.  I knew they would make my life feel different – and they did.  I’m really serious about that.  There are many reasons why this collection has been important to me, but I hungered to be able to read those poems.  

The next poem but one after ‘Night Vigil’ is ‘The Clean’.  It starts out sounding like it’s ‘about’ bulimia – “Imagine/ eating all the snow/ you’ve ever wanted/ in one sitting, / not having to pay for it.”  But then, after adding in “avocado”, “toast butter/ cascading your fingers” and “pink prosecco”, it morphs into something sadder.  Or maybe just more specific, if you take the view that many eating disorders stem from something the individual cannot stomach. The second stanza reveals:

I know a place 
that is snow falling
from the Artex ceiling
into a room 
you will never return to.
A promise 
piling like cable knit.
4-ply snow-day snow. 

Some of the biggest things I write about are things which I had the least control over, but which have impacted me very deeply.   Following on from ‘Night Vigil’, this room full of falling snow feels like a frozen, traumatic moment which is continuously happening, but cannot at the same time be properly felt.  Does that seem like a fair reading to you, and would you be able to say something about these first two stanzas?  

RL: I think it’s a stunning reading.  What I wanted to do with ‘The Clean’ was to write about a woman with bulimia, and then in the second stanza, perhaps trace through the colour as it was, through this whiteness.  But then in the same sense, trying to walk through the colour into why this woman is kneeling at this bowl of whiteness and expelling.  Without wanting to say explicitly, because I don’t even know if that is necessarily explicit even to my understanding, but to wonder whether that because of sexual abuse, in childhood in that snow room, as in that frozen room, whether that is the reason, or a contributing reason, to why she has bulimia. 

Is there something about her body that would be less, have been less desirable to someone else had she looked different? Had she been in a different body, if her body did something different, would that be able to change the outcome? This is what you said about lack of control. Bulimia is very much about what can and cannot be controlled.  

AH: This is a generalization, but ever since the sexual abuse began when I was a child, I have always struggled with IBS.  It is as if my body wants to throw things out.  The snow room isn’t the end of ‘The Clean’, though.  The final verse begins “I know a place where/ the sad can’t go.” Now, expulsion becomes a political act as the speaker instructs the protagonist “Go on, baby, give it back/ to whence it came. / Dispel three dinosaur dinners/ like forgiveness, / like it never happened.” The subject is told “Girl, you can be new, / surrender it all/ into one bowl. This, / your hollow.”   The suggestion is that voiding, and expelling, are also creative acts, because resisting and rejecting what was forced in without consent.  In this context, is it fair to think the holding pages of the collection make a kind of bowl, and create opportunities for restitution?  Not just by vomiting forth, but by expressing things that were silenced at lots of levels.  

RL: Yes.

AH: It seems to me that the turn in the poem was crucial.  That’s why I wanted to put the question into two halves, that turn into restitution and beauty, without denying.

RL:  Thank you, Alice. An act of restitution and freedom from your own body. You can be free of it.  An action can be erased.  You can float above it.

AH: Speaking it and putting it in words is part of that process of creative expulsion.

RL: Yeah, absolutely.  You have reminded me. I always did feel like that –   free and light.

AH: I am really interested in how we make it through and how we make it through partly creatively as well.  Rather than just casting people as being without agency, also looking at the ways in which we claim ourselves.  Bulimia is widespread through society.  Many people experience who are not necessarily artists.  There is a sort of restitutory justice in the body somehow.  

Suggesting that maybe something has shifted, and become freer as a result of this act of voiding and voicing, the next poem, ‘Open’, moves from a place of potential trauma to one of freedom:

Open

This morning, she told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, Tiff, like screaming?
She says, No, Rach, like abandon.

It is one of a sequence of poems, all titled ‘Open’, that link and orchestrate the collection, changing small but significant details with each iteration.   You said in your Forwards interview with Kim Moore that Don Patterson encouraged you to develop this strand.  I wondered if you could say something more about it?

RL: I was speaking to the brilliant Nuar Alsadir about dreams for a radio programme.  She said something like, I liked the ‘Open’ sequence, I liked how they show these flashes of awakenings, these flashes of desire. She thought that they showed the waker’s unconscious desires.  More and more with this book, post-publication, I discover new things in it. Oftentimes by readers – who have far more insight than me into what I have apparently ‘done’.  Don Paterson really did encourage them significantly, I think originally there were three, but he suggested weaving them throughout the whole first section of the book. As soon as he suggested it, I was like, of course! It made poetic sense, narrative sense. Don is an extraordinary editor. I think that increasing my explorations into that ‘Open’ sequence opened up what the whole book concerns and interrogates, intimacy, desire, dreams, the material and immaterial, appearance and reality. 

AH: I make all my work completely blind like a mole digging for the surface, with no clue really as to what I am doing.   You find out later.  The news catches up with you.

RL: I like that, like moles.  

AH: We have very, very powerful paddles for digging up through the earth, as far I’m concerned. I have to work blind.  I can’t just sit down and do it.  It has to come to me. 

RL: Same.

AH:  ‘8’ is another poem which continues ‘The Clean’s’ process of marking the white page.  Its act of witnessing is also the relocation of a moment of private, concealed horror to a public externalized space.  As with ‘Night Vigil’, the speaker moves back and forward between being a bewildered, uncomprehending child to a more knowing adult.   So, readers can have a sense of how the poem works, I’m going to quote the first section in full:

8

‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’
– Psalm 51:7

this memory can’t skip       it hops
on one leg     the other     making
the buckles on my mary janes
bounce then clang      cute shackles     my feet
will hopscotch-land on 8       wash me 
at 8 I can’t tell time      i’m led
through school and play      tea then bed at
8      i can’t read faces       tell hands
to stop      unfreeze my grin      that room
his weight       wash me and I shall be 
the girls at school call that place mini
but mum says it’s a front bottom

Later “time decides itself   till i’m pressed/ apple    against that wall   that sunday/ that school”. The voice of the poem is somewhere between a playground skipping song and a crime scene report, with “wash me” breaking through over and over again like a child’s plea to undo the moment when “touched/ by the hand of his clock i am/ instantly older”. 

While the narrative is devastating, sonically, this is a very lovely poem, especially when you perform it live, partly because of the way the rhymes and half-rhymes dance through the lines.  I wondered whether choosing to tell ‘8’ in this way – weaving the everyday words the child might have used into the story it is suggested that she was unable to tell – is a form of restitution and reclamation of the child’s self and innocence, conferring a retrospective agency through beauty, and as well as through witness?

RL: The language had to be the language of the girl at eight. The lines all being of eight syllables was because I had the image of the girl  playing hopscotch, the beat, the rhythm, the form came from that.  Even like the lower-casing of the letters.  I wanted it to look and feel on the page as if she is writing and/or telling it.

AH: Because it is the only lower case i/ first person in the collection?

RL: It felt right for this poem. She has been made less of a capital I, rendered less of a person by another, a big I. 

AH: But it’s also like a sort of crime scene report.  I mean we get what went on.  She speaks, but she is also spoken for by the poem.  That to me is its power.  She stays small but the poem is actually pretty hardcore in what it delivers.  That’s an amazing achievement that you can do both at the same time.  

RL: Thank you Alice.  Do you know, it also came out of, Kathryn Maris’s brilliant Poetry School class which we were both students of at the same time  One week she set us an assignment to write in the intonation or rhythm of a prayer.  What I handed in the week after was not very good, but with much longer to think about it and let it ruminate and ‘come out’ in its own time, I do think that exercise was the catalyst for ‘8’  

AH: Some of her prompts were very valuable to me.  I did a really good Poetry School workshop with Shivanee Ramlochan online at the end of 2019. There are some poems that I very very definitely have no intention of ever writing.  Those are the ones that it is useful to have prompts for –  because otherwise  I will strenuously protect myself from writing them for decades.  A prompt can knock out that  little peg that you have blocked into the hole.  Then the poem pops out.  

    Thinking about healing, wholeness, and restitution, are central to the beginning of the second section, titled ‘A Lineage of Wigs’. The first poem, ‘Orb’, floats like a rainbow soap bubble of a praise poem.  It calls to mind some of Selima Hill’s brevity, but takes it to new places:

Orb

Mum combs her auburn ‘fro up high.
So high it’s an orb. 
Everyone wants to – but cannot – touch it. 

The “auburn ‘fro” is an angel’s halo vested in human form, and an emblem of unbroken-ness.  Is that ‘perfection’ something you wanted to assert and reclaim?

RL: Yes, absolutely.  The word orb changed.   It was crown at first, because in that sequence there is the image of the queen arrowed on a sofa.

AH: Yeah, I remember that. 

RL: It did sort of look like that. I think to me when I was younger, looking up at my mother .  I’m really enjoying the way that you have read and seen the poem.  That was exactly what I wanted to do with it.  I’m so glad you have read and seen it like that. 

AH: It felt like a really important reset point.  We go from a tough poem to a place of wholeness and beauty and unbrokenness. The last question I’d like to ask you is about the title and the cover, which shows a young Black girl in a candy striped dress, with her back to the reader, looking inwards towards the poems that lie ahead.  Can I just ask you about the title?

RL: My Darling from the Lions is taken from Psalm 35. ‘Rescue my soul from their destruction, my darling from the lions.’  It is a ’ Psalm that  I heard a lot growing up, either hearing it recited in church, or by my mother from her bedroom, or we were instructed to say it, for protection or for strength.   The collection wasn’t always called My Darling…  Even up to a year before publication it had a different working title. But, for some reason, I must have read Psalm 35 again or seen something of it, or was reminded of it, and by this verse particularly and it was as if it was the first time I’d read it,    I was like that’s so beautiful.  A darling for a soul. There is so much rich and stunning language in the Bible,  the poetry of it all. .   When I read that verse again, I thought, this is what I am trying to get to with the collection.  The girls and the women particularly are threatened by different  lions.   I wanted it to be a sort of a call for help and protection from something higher, whether that be God, or art. I wanted the collection to pose the question: can the spirit survive life intact? I also love the idea of referring to oneself as a darling.  You can,  even when something ugly has happened to you,   begin to love yourself enough to refer to yourself as you would another woman or another girl. I would call Tiff or Helena darlings. Hey, my loves, my darlings. 

AH: That’s absolutely beautiful.   I think that’s the perfect place at which to end.  It’s been an amazing privilege to talk about this extraordinary book.   I have waited a long time to be able to hold these poems.  I’m so grateful that they are out in the world – and that they will be coming out in America as well with Tin House.  My Darling from the Lions is a wonderful book to read – and will  change how people think.  Thank you Rachel Long. 

RL: Thank you so very much, Alice. 

Rachel is at @rachelnalong on twitter.

Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions was published by Picador in August 2020. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Costa Book Award 2020. Rachel is the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for women of colour. 

You can order My Darling from the Lions https://www.waterstones.com/book/my-darling-from-the-lions/rachel-long/9781529045161

Rachel Long will be appearing with Amima Jama and Sarah Lasoye as part of Octavia Collective : Creativity in Solitude on 25 February 7-8pm at Goldsmiths CCA. Tickets are here https://goldsmithscca.art/event/octavia-collective-x-goldsmiths-cca-creativity-in-solitude-a-reading/

‘Unfamiliarity, the state of being unknown, is not the same as non-existence. Migrant nurses exist. We do exist in this world. But somehow we are not known.’ –Romalyn Ante and Pascale Petit perform and speak with alice hiller about the work witness in their new collections, Antiemetic for Homesickness and Tiger Girl.

Romalyn Ante by S. Chadawong.

Poet Andrea Gorman spoke out at Joe Biden’s inauguration against the force in America that would rather ‘shatter our nation rather than share it’.  In her stunning poem, ‘The Hill We Climb’, she stated instead ‘there is always light…./If only we’re brave enough to be it.’ Anyone listening will have felt the restitutionary power of her words, written and delivered, as she stated, by “a skinny Black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother.’ 

Globally, one of the most necessary questions today is around who gets heard – and who does not.  It has been at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.  It is equally central to the legacies of empires round the world, as Satham Sanghera argues in his powerful new study, Empireland, and to our relationship to our environment and the fair distribution of its resources.

Being heard is also crucial in poetry, as two new collections by Pascale Petit and Romalyn Ante remind us. Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl draws the life of her half-Indian grandmother, born in secret to her great-grandfather’s serving maid, together with conditions in and around the Tiger reserves of Central India.  Romalyn Ante’s Antiemetic for Homesickness explores more recent experiences of migration to the UK, and working within the NHS, against the healing, nurturing background of the Filipino culture which her family brought with them, and which continues to shape their understanding of themselves in the world. 

I had the great privilege of hosting a performance and conversation between Pascale Petit and Romalyn Ante, towards the end of 2021, with a very enthusiastic live audience.  Immediately afterwards, coming up to the holiday period, with infection levels rising steeply, and restrictions changing all the time, was not the right time to share the recording.

But now, with the UK, Europe, and much of the rest of the world, in varying degrees of lockdown, and everyone still separated in physical terms from each other, co-experiencing resources such as this conversation seem to be of the utmost importance in maintaining our sense of connectedness with each other as fellow human beings, and as creative artists. 

To maximise accessibility, I have transcribed both my own introduction, and the conversation between the three of us.  To experience the full event, specifically and crucially, Pascale Petit’s and Romalyn Ante’s readings of their poems, please click on either the video or audio links below.  The video link has close captions enabled via Youtube, although you will need to turn these on in the control bar at the bottom right of the screen. Apologies for the occasional surreal spellings.

If you would like to see the texts of the poems, they are available in Tiger Girl and Antiemetic for Homesickness through the buy buttons below. There are also links to some of the published poems on Romalyn Ante’s and Pascale Petit’s websites.

Photo by Brian Fraser

Romalyn Ante Antiemetic for Homesickness. 

Pascale Petit Tiger Girl

https://youtu.be/V57ZxGbGAQc

Audio Link

alice hiller’s introduction to Pascale Petit and Romalyn Ante, 26 November 2020:

After a rough year and a tough November, it’s a real pleasure to welcome you to this act of creative community.  We’re here to celebrate the deep, healing play of Pascale Petit’s and Romalyn Ante’s brilliant new collections, Tiger Girl and Antiemetic for Homesickness.  Both Pascale and Romalyn are poets of courage, as well as of distinction.  

In a week when we learnt that the UK’s foreign aid budget commitment will be broken, and while so many vulnerable voices are being excluded from the global conversation, Pascale and Romalyn give witness to a wider range of experiences than many poets.  They also help us ask ourselves and our governments, whose foot is being kept on whose head?

Writing about life in the Philippines, Welsh gardens, and the stunning nature reserves of central India, Pascale and Romalyn move our minds to places of delight – even as they remind us that the world is still far from being a fair or kind place for many human and creaturely lives, and the fragile ecosystems and economies which sustain them. 

Our format tonight will be that Romalyn will read from Antiemetic for Homesickness, published by Chatto, followed by Pascale from Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe. Afterwards, I’ll open  a conversation between them.  

Before the readings, I’d like to say a few words about Pascale and Romalyn. Winner of the Ondaatje Prize, and inaugural Laurel Prize for Mama Amazonica, amongst very many other distinguished awards, Pascale Petit is also a radically empowering supporter of new voices in poetry  through her mentoring, teaching and judging, as Romalyn and I can both testify.  

Over eight collections, Pascale’s poems have brought an artist’s eye to the Amazon river and its rainforest, the arid landscapes of the Languedoc, and the markets and historic sites of Paris including her beloved Jardin des Plantes.  Tiger Girl, from which she’ll be reading shortly, gives us one of the most life-filled portraits of a woman of colour, and of mature years, that I have read in a long time.  It should be bought for that reason alone, aside from its many other treasures. 

Moving between between continents, Tiger Girl documents Pascale’s time growing up in Wales with her fierce half-Indian grandmother – who took in washing, told fortunes and made her garden a canvas equal to any artist’s.   The poems also respond to Pascale’s experiences on recent trips to nature reserves in Central India.  Celebrating the magnificent wild creatures who inhabit those parks, Pascale also registers the damage to them by poverty-stricken poachers, from whose social class her Indian great-grandmother, her great-grandfather’s maid, would have come. 

Mentored like me by Pascale under the Jerwood Arvon scheme, which brought the three of us together, Romalyn shares with Pascale an intuitive sense of the mythic residing within the everyday.  She is similarly the recipient of many distinguished awards, including the Poetry London Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Primers Prize, and the Creative Futures Platinum Award. 

Having grown up in the Philippines until she was sixteen, before coming to Wolverhampton, and subsequently training as a NHS nurse and then counsellor, Romalyn conveys how “the wind has the ears of a wild boar” and explains why you have to turn your shirt inside out to find your way home, whether that home is warmed by the “smoke of a Brummie accent”, or cooled by the night breeze.  

Antiemetic for Homesickness moves compellingly between the landscapes, and foods, and folklore of the Philippines – and life as a nurse within the NHS, while living in the Black Country.  Exploring what it can mean to make the UK your home,  Romalyn also witnesses the racism to which so many people who come here have been subjected, and how they have made strong, creative lives notwithstanding the challenges faced. 

The co-founder of  the wonderful harana poetry, for poets working with English as a parallel or additional language, like Pascale, Romalyn is both an outstanding poet, and  a key figure for the expansion of the possible in poetry, both through her own work, and her support for others.  She also gives us life from a nurse’s point of view, as never before, another reason to buy her essential Antiemetic for Homesickness. It’s my great pleasure now to hand over to Romalyn Ante.

[Romalyn Ante and Pascale Petit introduce and read their poems, available via the Youtube or Audio links.]

AH: That was fantastic Pascale.  Thank you so much.  It’s amazing to hear the two of you reading together. I’m going to ask you a few questions because I’ve lived with, loved and thought about your collections since they were published.   The first question is about making  worlds visible that are known to you, but not to your readers?  Pascale, I’m thinking both about your poems about wildlife in Indian National Parks, but also about your poems about life in rural Wales? Romalyn, I’m thinking about your poems about rural life in the Philippines, but also about the day to day life of a nurse in the NHS?  We can really feel the worlds you both have made in your poems.  I wondered if that was an  important part of making them?

RA: Thank you Alice. That’s a very important question. In the UK Filipinos are the second highest immigrant NHS staff, next to Indians. In the US the highest number of immigrant nurses are Filipinos. Most recently, specially during this pandemic, the West has been really dependent on migrant nurses but little is known about us, our own narratives, our own lives.  I feel that mostly people only see us on the surface without knowing our pasts and our own tales, why we came here.   I have people commenting to me ‘So you’re Filipino.  If you’re Filipino, where are you from?  Are you from Korea then?’  They don’t even know what a Filipino is.  There are also some readers’ comments.  You shouldn’t really read GoodReads comments.  But I do.  I read my reviews because I want to improve. There are some comments, ‘I don’t know.  I can’t relate.’ But for me the truth is unfamiliarity, the state of being unknown, is not the same as non-existence.  Migrant nurses exist. We do exist in this world. But somehow we are not known and what puzzles me is why is the United Kingdom or the West so dependent on a sector of people that has so little voice, and that has never been heard of.  And this is the reason why I wrote this.  To really show them not only the physical place we came from, but also to show them our narrative, what propels us to do this. 

AH: That’s a fantastic answer. Thank you so much. 

PP. Thank you. Roma that was fantastic. With Tiger Girl, I wanted to honour my grandmother, and write a book almost of love poems, you know, and acknowledge that she was the daughter of a maid and she was taken in by her father’s white family and she was very poor when I lived with her in Wales.  We didn’t have indoor toilets or running water.  Really quite poor.  Children don’t notice that. What I did notice was an enormous garden and lots of animals, and the incredible world of the garden which she worked in all the time, and which I worked in for her as well. That’s one half of the book. The other is where she came from. The story of the tiger, and my wanting to see tigers, and to see this wildness that she came from, that she’d encountered as a baby, and the terrible realisation that that wildness is so so threatened and endangered.  Even the tigers that are safe are fighting each other. Daughters kill mothers and so on because the forests are too small for them. Even though the tourists are only allowed in 20% of the National Parks. There’s still not enough space. They have enormous territories.  Having seen the tigers, and seen how – I’ve seen wild jaguars as well in the Amazon rainforest – to see what they are like, in their territories in the wild, is so different from seeing them in zoos.  Of course there are far more tigers in zoos than there are in India.  There’s about 2,800 in India, and only a handful elsewhere. So that was the world I was trying to bring forward.  

AH:  Most of us never get to those reserves, to see them through someone’s eyes, to see them emotionally, rather than just on a wildlife documentary, is incredibly powerful. I really appreciated that. My next question is  you both work within your collections with a powerful and healing female figure.   For Pascale, it is your grandmother. For Romalyn, it is your nurse mother.  Did it feel important to honour the ways in which we as women can nurture each other?

RA: Yes, definitely.  In Antiemetic for Homesickness the mother is the one who leaves to provide a better life for her family.  So if you think about it, the mother is away from the very essence of being a mother, which is to take care of her own children. And I think by shedding light on that fact, I also needed to shed light on the fact that in leaving there could also be healing. So even though the mother has left, as a sacrifice almost, she still heals the socio-economic problems that her family has.  She still heals people abroad. She heals people where she works.  That’s incredibly important for me, not only as a nurse, but also as a daughter of a migrant nurse.  I feel very similar to Pascale, writing about the voicing of the poet is really healing the world that is full of annihilation.  

PP: When I wasn’t with my grandmother, I was in various homes and things in France.  If I was with my parents, it was a bad experience. I eventually went to live with my mother when I was a teenager, when my grandmother kind of threw me out, which she had to do, she was tired, she had a teenager on her hands.  But my mother was severely mentally ill, and couldn’t really look after me, and was a malevolent force for me. I had a malevolent maternal figure there, so it was wonderful for me to have a chance in this book to write about a really benevolent figure, who not only was benevolent, but was a very powerful person. She was known as the local witch where we lived. As a good witch, but she was. And she also had an extraordinary second sight. I did have the experience of being with her and her telling me about ghosts.  For example she saw the postman who lived down our lane.  For example she said ‘I’ve just seen him walking down our lane and he said hello to me as if everything was normal but his feet were floating off, weren’t touching the ground, so I knew he was a ghost.  I knew he had just died.’ And he had. So there were always those kind of experiences going on. She also used to tell fortunes.  People in the village used to come.  The vicar and the doctor would come to have their fortunes told. I would go with her as well to fairs to see her tell fortunes. 

AH: Looking back, women have been disempowered for centuries. It’s really important that we make work than honours female power, female goodness.  It seems to me a very positive thing to do. But at the same time these healing figures work within very injurious and injured societies and you both show them as being capable of deeply wounding those who are dependent on their care and provision.    Pascale, you explore your grandmother returning you to your mother.    Romalyn, you look at the impacts on you of being separated from your mother when she goes to nurse abroad, and not seeing her for several years.   In each case, the wounding behaviour is driven by larger socio-economic pressures, and the vulnerable positions which these women occupy.  The fact that your mother left the Philippines to give you and your siblings a better life, Romalyn.  It was the only way she could materially improve your lives.  Your grandmother had very limited resources Pascale. We’re now talking in the pandemic about the impact of material strain, of poverty, on families.  Was it also important to show that in difficult circumstances even loving people can in injurious ways, through no real volition of their own.  Or does that feel too challenging?  

PP: It can’t be challenging. You need to write the truth.  For me, I was thirteen. So the injury wasn’t being moved from my grandmother. I was still a child.  She was still the best thing that ever happened.  The real wound was not being allowed to grieve her loss, when I lived with my mother.  That was the wound.  I never realised that I wasn’t allowed to grieve.  I just knew it was a subject that mustn’t be mentioned.  I wasn’t allowed to grieve for my grandmother, who I saw as my mother, because my mother couldn’t bear that. 

RA:  I think what you said a while ago Alice really resonated with me, when you said we left because we were propelled by socio-economic circumstances.  See, even though in Antiemetic for Homesickness, the left-behind-child was left by her nurse mother, this story is not unique to me. It happens to a lot of children, millions of children around the world. Your parents don’t even need to go abroad for you to be a left-behind-child.  In China, parents go to richer cities to help financially with the family.  My mother left because she really had no choice. But then again, she made a choice.  Her only choice was not having any choice.  She left knowing that the people she would leave behind would be hurt.  That knowledge hurt her, I’m sure, in return.  For me it’s not just me who is wounded, it’s the mother who is wounded. It’s very timely and relevant to this day, especially when I see my colleagues, or my mother even, who has been going all around the country helping in the pandemic front line, my other Filipino colleagues who could choose not to go home, as their homes across the street, so they don’t put their children at risk of Covid. So mothers have always been leaving their children, and this story has always been happening. But then again, it’s not the children who get hurt. The wounded one is also the mother.  And I think that’s what Antiemetic for Homesickness is also about. 

AH:  That really comes across. It’s very important.  I see we’re coming to the end of the time.  I have one final question.  While neither of you holds back from speaking about difficult subjects, both collections give the gift to their readers of being able to abide in beauty.   Romalyn, you let us glimpse the pre-colonised life, and warmth of community, in the Philippines.  Pascale, your work gives itself deeply to the natural world.  Was that an important thing to do, to give the gift of beauty, when the world is facing so much difficulty?

PP:  Absolutely.  You can’t write about the threats to the natural world without showing why, without trying to show – it’s a real challenge – the awe and the wonder of it. That’s something I’ve always felt.   You have to show what it is you’re trying to protect.  What the non-human world is.  I keep getting these flashes which are images of the planet without one human life on it, without animals, and that’s like hell.  I don’t want that to happen.  But I need to show the beauty and the awe. The wonder of tigers. 

AH: Absolutely.  Stay with the programme Pascale! Romalyn?

RA:  I echo what Pascale has said.  It’s very true to me.  It’s also one of the reasons, when Chatto asked me what kind of cover I wanted, I really wanted it to be colourful, with some kind of insignias of the Philippines, the sun bird, the abaniko flower.  For me these beautiful images serve as anchors, and guides, that will lead us back to healing, and perhaps to hope.  It’s very similar to what we hope for now. We look for that beauty. When we can go again to our favourite coffee shops again, or we can hug our parents again, or meet up with our friends.  I think that’s very important to look for beauty, because beauty gives hope. 

AH: I think that’s the perfect note on which to end.  I’m going to thank everyone who’s joined us. I’m going to especially thank Pascale and Romalyn for these two brilliant books. The season of gifting is coming upon us. These have to be top of your list. This has been a stunning evening.  Thank you so much.  Everybody, buy the books. Thank you so much. 

Romalyn Ante’s website is here.

Pascale Petit’s website is here.

Romalyn Ante Antiemetic for Homesickness. 

Pascale Petit Tiger Girl

“Ask yourself what makes you unique, different and amazing”: Arji Manuelpillai talks to alice hiller about saying the difficult thing in his debut ‘Mutton Rolls’ by “reflecting the way the mind moves” and embracing “exclusion as a force of creativity.”

Arji photo
Photo Credit : Martin Brown

Traveller, writer, theatre-maker, and freestyler, Arji Manuelpillai is a poet whose work has always derived energy and resonance from its live components.   While Mutton Rolls, his debut pamphlet from Out-Spoken, was launched online from his living room in lockdown, this in no way diminished audience numbers, or the warmth of their appreciation. Mutton Rolls’ poems find their subjects in UK raves and garage forecourt shops, but also on Sri Lankan beaches and in the aftermath of bombings and tsunamis.  Like strobe lights flashing moments of visibility, they illuminate growing up in Britain with the double consciousness that derives from knowing your parents and family once lived somewhere else, and explore what it means not always to be made to feel welcome.  Witty, joyous, and irreverent, the poems we talk about do not hesitate to call out the unacceptable.  They can spin in a second to catch your heart  – and hold it in a net of words that makes it beat differently when let go again. 

AH: I’d like to start by asking you about your experience of the last few months Arji.  You launched Mutton Rolls within the full UK lockdown.  You also ran free poetry workshops with special guests on zoom which attracted huge attendances during the months when we were largely unable to meet in the physical world.  How has this been for you?

AM: Such a pleasure to be here with you Alice and thanks so much for taking the time to chat to me. It has been a whirlwind few months. With so much of our collective futures turned upside down, I’ve found it difficult to manage my own expectations and keep the positivity up. However, in another way I have lived my whole life as a freelancer and with that sort of lifestyle comes an ability to adapt to the challenges with innovation and creativity. I can think of nothing worse than being furloughed at home being unable to work on new projects. So I was thankful for the opportunity to start Arji’s Poetry Jam, to continue with workshops with young people, help create a Refugee Week education resource for Kazzum Arts, and to plan and deliver a great release party for the pamphlet. It has been interesting as I feel like the online thing has provided people with greater accessibility in many ways. It creates a global playing field with fans for the workshops appearing in NZ, Finland, Canada and New York. It also made me feel like anything is possible with a little creativity. Right now, I’m spending a whole lot of time on Zoom but I’m really missing the real life groups, the community and the love of people connecting and creating together. I’m praying for the future, that we will return and still create wonderful work someday.

AH:  I understand that.  I feel the same way.  It’s really fantastic that you have been able to continue to reach out and deliver to so many different groups against all the odds.  People who want to find out more about these projects can check out the links on www.arji.org.  Coming back to the current situation, you tweeted your uncle was one of the first doctors to die from COVID 19.  The poem ‘after being called a paki’ confronts the racism which your father and his generation were met with on arrival in the UK.  I wondered what it’s been like to publish a pamphlet which calls out UK racism past and present, and then have the #BlackLivesMatter movement rise up so powerfully here and round the world, speaking to and with so many of your themes?

AM: It has been so interesting to see how people respond to the poems about race. I’ve been surprised by some animosity towards poems like ‘white people’ and then I’ve had some really heartfelt messages from other South Asian people who connect with the work. I hadn’t really realised how important it was to speak to my community and capture those feelings until it was actually out there. This was highlighted by a good friend of mine who doesn’t ‘do poems’, (those are the people I really love to reach).  He told me how he had never found the words to say how he felt growing up as a British Asian but now suddenly the book had captured them. I felt moved by that. As the BLM thing started to rise I was fully engrossed, angry, unsurprised, pretty much like most of the minority communities – but as it moved forward I started to unpack some of the racism within the South Asian community. I think we have to remember that the racism that black people feel in this country is unique to this country and the people within it. Black people deserve this space for discussion and the recognition of the racism they face and it is up to us all to face that head on and bring sustainable change. That’s not to say the South Asian experience isn’t important or valid.  It is just accepting that the grouping together of races doesn’t help any of us. I am fortunate to have worked with inspiring black men and women and will continue to fight for change and equality. I believe that this is a movement of hope and change is possible if we are willing to keep trying.

AH:   I absolutely agree with you, and I think your work is unquestionably part of that larger movement, and has been for many years.  Calling into question the stability and integrity of contemporary identities, and the pressures to which people can be subjected, your opening poem, ‘credit card’, begins  “someone pretended to be me/ filled my details out online”.  The intercepted card is imagined/described as being used to facilitate an impeccably ‘middle class’ spending spree which includes “crème fraiche” for leek and potato soup, and ends up funding a seat at a shared table in a café “on the white side of Peckham” where the thief is supposed to have:

had a tea and carrot cake
read the paper, lent
back in their seat

so their hands fell to their sides
and the lady to the right
casual as breathing
pulled her handbag close

The only skin tone that is mentioned is “white”, but the “casual as breathing” action of the woman has the effect of putting the “someone” under suspicion for no reason that can be deduced from their tea drinking, paper reading or carrot cake eating.  Would you be able to say something about the relationship between the speaking “me” and the observed “someone” in ‘credit card’, and why you chose to open Mutton Rolls with this poem? 

AM: This poem is one of those poems that fell out of my head on a long walk. Someone actually did fraud my debit card and went to Morrisons and spent a small amount of money on groceries. I couldn’t get this idea out of my head, that someone was just hungry, no drugs, no alcohol, just hungry. All of those preconceived prejudice I had were thrown away. Almost in the same week I was in a theatre show, it was a play set in South Africa. In the middle of the piece I sat back in my seat and the lady beside me suddenly reached to her side, grabbed her bag and put it in her lap in the most awkward position. I sat there for 2 hours wanting to ask her why she had done that but I didn’t have the guts and it probably would have seemed over-the-top. As with many of my poems, it is the coming together of two contrasting ideas that gives birth to a real ‘charged’ feeling. So, let’s go back to the debit card thief. I started imagining a whole world for this thief, I created short vignettes of them all round town and the question kept coming up as to why they might have stolen the card. I was moving towards the ‘someone’ wanting to feel like they were part of the elitist class, like they could dine in the places the middle class dine but at the bottom of all that, they never truly belong. I combined that idea with the concept that no matter how well the thief works, he can never shake his class away. Hence the lady pulling her bag in at the end. I love that poem as it is all about wanting to belong and that’s the reason I put it at the opening of the pamphlet. 

AH: Wanting to belong gets imagined in a different way in ‘brown boys in Kavos.’ The poem begins among a “tulip-topped spliffs” and “the backwash of cheap vodka” at “4am in a balmy Greek heat.”  A hymn to the hedonism of “rumbling dance floors”, its heroes are “four brown corduroy-coloured boys” who are “failing to get laid/ in the ‘getting laid’ capital of Greece.” Their charms are coming off worse to “sweaty charisma and beautiful blackness” on the one hand, and “glitter soaked torsos/ all fearless and normal and slavemastery.”  Against this temporarily disheartening outcome, their salvation, and reclamation of themselves comes in their solidarity, as the sun calls into life a new day:

brown boys think themselves ugly

but not yet ugly because they are brown
the sun is reaching over the rooftops
brown boys light cigs and laugh
an orgasm is caught in the breeze

I wondered if the idea of working collectively, and in concert with others, resonated with you, as part of a creative and transformative process?

AM: Everyone who knows me knows that I believe creativity is best enjoyed together. The camaraderie, the sharing of ideas, the spontaneity, I believe it is at the centre of a healthy mind and spirit. I have spent most of the last 15 years in participation arts because I truly believe making art together is integral to a happy society. In other parts of the world participatory arts is just art, by which I mean, everything is focussed around making art together. This is really true when we think about poetry. Poetry communities are integral to the scene, taking a poem to a group and sharing process is everything.  Without it I really feel I would not be half the poet I am. This is one of the reasons why I feel there needs to be more mentorships for minority groups to encourage collaboration and connection.  It is these communities that will nurture and grow Britain’s best new poems. Many publishers at the moment are asking for BAME poets to come forward but we need ‘quality’ –  and to make ‘quality’ poets you need quality mentoring spread over long periods of time. 

If you are interested in finding yourself a group perhaps start at The Poetry School where regular bursaries are available. Alternative options are Malika’s Kitchen and Covent Garden Stanza (run of course by you Alice). These are free groups but you will probably be asked to send samples. Loneliness is affecting us all at the moment so don’t sit in silence, connect with others and use art as a vehicle for transformation.

AH:  Again, I can only agree.  The Poetry Society co-ordinates Stanza groups up and down the UK, with further groups available in a few other countries, or with online membership.  I’ll put details at the end of the interview.  I know that the support of our stanza group really helped me personally during a very difficult few weeks in lockdown, It’s also been a fantastic place for me to try out new work in a safe place.   Going back to Mutton Rolls, while ‘brown boys’ has a sunrise ending, ‘half catholic’ strikes a more sombre note. The first person speaker reveals himself to be a man who, while attracted to women, also responds to men with desire. As a woman who is drawn to both women, and men, this is a duality which I recognise.  Reflecting how Catholicism can become a force which risks alienating people from themselves, the speaker remembers how:

at fifteen I touch a man in a way
that makes me wish God didn’t exist

throw up behind a Ford Fiesta
brush my teeth till the toothbrush snaps

“in Lourdes years later” he promises “not to want/ a man again” and prays for this to happen.  Returning to the motif of theft, also present within ‘credit card’, the poem ends:

after the tsunami
I watch a man 

pickpocket a corpse
quietly as though hiding it from the sky

The pickpocketing is presumably a matter of economic necessity, in order to ensure survival.  I wondered if you could say something about why you chose to set those two narratives consecutively, and whether the reader was being asked to think about the historic thefts and appropriations of colonialism, and their enduring impacts through time?

AM: This poem is the coming together of a series of moments in my life. All of them are strung together through a feeling of humiliation and shame, a sense of not belonging and being unable to conform to a system that didn’t necessarily fit me both religiously, ideologically and spiritually. Landing in Sri Lanka during the Tsunami was one of the most pivotal moments of my life. It came at a time when I was turning to activism and God, observing the situation unravel was painful. I was amazed by the level of blind faith that many of the victims had, even after they had often lost their family, friends and livelihoods. Their faith gave them strength, it was something I envied but also something I ridiculed. This for me, connected the two parts of my upbringing. One side of me is always in awe of my heritage as a Sri Lankan Tamil, half Catholic and half Hindu. With that side comes all of the myths and stories and the rich cultural history of tradition and ritual. But the other British side was often disillusioned, faithless and sceptical of it all. That dichotomy is at the centre of the poem and a great deal of my work. I dabbled with the ending for a long, long time. Finally I came to this idea of a man stealing money while only caring about God watching. It seemed to connect to the British impact in Sri Lanka, it shows the power of capitalism and it also illustrates shame and it also connected with the desperation to survive.

AH:    That’s an incredibly rich explanation Arji.  It really captures how poems can hold multiplicities without forcing a single or simple resolution.  Belinda Zhawi talked to me earlier in this series about the impacts of colonialism in Zimbabwe which was similarly powerful. There is an ongoing, and fruitful, tension in your work between narrating your experiences as a person, not least in several powerful break-up poems, and as a person of colour.  Many writers are responding to this, not least the poet Cathy Park Hong in her study Minor Feelings, whose work speaks to many of us. ‘nominated for a BAME prize’ tackles this complexity head on, beginning “it’s always in capitals/ like someone is shouting it.” The speaker states “I feel almost unBAME// in my M&S shirt and trousers”, and seems to position the BAME branding as something which risks diminishing and ghettoising artists, and over-simplifying complex, nuanced narratives.  Is that a fair reading?

AM: I think that is an extremely astute reading. I feel like BAME as a title has a truckload of problems associated with it. It boxes us all together, which dilutes the differentiation of culture between countries and religious groups. It gives people the perception that we are ‘all the same’ when in actual fact the continent of Asia is as diverse as you can get and Sri Lanka is a place made up of so many different minority groups. I totally sympathise with those that have tried to champion the representation of minorities in the arts but BAME is starting to feel a little dated. On top of this I’ve seen the term become quite divisive within the arts sector. Artists like me get a role or new project but it feels rather shadowed by the idea that ‘I only got it because I’m brown’. Often other artists may think me not deserving of the opportunity and that hurts. By segmenting us off, and doing call outs and competitions just for specific groups, it ends up feeling like we are in some way not applicable to the same rules of quality as our white counterparts. This is the opposite of what we as a society are trying to achieve. The funding and grant system in this country is creating divisions amongst artists, from those that do or don’t get funded, to those that can or can’t write an application form.  Sometimes it feels like we spend so much of our time divided instead of innovating together.

I’m not sure what the answers are, but I believe the start is to have a universally clearer understanding of the differentiation between countries, cultures and traditions. When we begin to accept our own ignorance we will begin to move into a space where we are ready to grow and learn. This space is a position of true power.

AH:  Undoubtedly your work is helping this transformation. The back cover of Mutton Rolls says you , like the speaker of ‘nominated for a BAME prize’, were “shortlisted for the Burning Eye BAME Pamphlet Prize 2018.”  I wondered if I could ask you here something about the first person “I” of your poems?  Do you see it as primarily specific, that is linking the work with you, Arji Manuelpillai, as a series of statements of witness? Or is it more a ‘first personal universal’, so that the I becomes a portal through which the reader can look with a greater degree of empathy and understanding?  Or both?

AM: You are the first person to call this out. Yes, much as I love and respect Burning Eye, they did inspire that poem. After I was shortlisted I found it interesting how I didn’t tell my parents it was a BAME prize. I was almost embarrassed by it. So I create vehicles for the personal messages to travel through. I do feel like the work is reflective of where I was at during that time. I wanted it to be like a calling card for my style and voice. The voice is very much me, the situations (though not always completely true) are very much like me and I’m proud of that. I hope that they will provide a greater understanding and empathy from the reader but I also feel they are fragments of myself and not designed to lead or coax the reader into any set reaction. I think in the newer work I am creating I am more interested in the ‘I’ taking a back seat, perhaps even disappearing and allowing the reader space to walk around, wander and discover. I hope that doesn’t sound too over-the-top. I feel like my new work is going to discuss life in a whole new nuanced way and I’m super excited about it.

AH:    I really look forward to those poems Arji.  Many of your Mutton Rolls poems explore the emotional lives of men.   ‘Cecilia says we’re all fucked up’ is an unpunctuated prose poem that explores the conversations between a psychotherapist and her client.   There is a surface play of humour and irony, riffing on the neutral décor and demeanour of the therapist.  This anodyne professional setting elicits the revelation “my friend died when I was 24    I never got to say goodbye.” After the apparently desultory meandering leading up to this, however, the closing lines have all the impact of being dropped down through a trap door 

                            I was busy being strong   that’s why abstract
paintings work so well    she’s leaning back  must be time  wipe
the tears away like face paint    how long before I’m wandering
drunk down the Old Kent Road     not knowing how I got there

Could you say something about the poem’s ending, and what it means to you to find forms through which to speak of things which can’t easily be said, but are powerful forces within our lives?

AM:  This poem was a real turning point to me. The Cecilia in the poem is actually Cecilia Knapp and the poem came out of a need to connect many opposing internal dialogues with the running dialogue with a therapist.  After I finished it I took it to a feedback session and I literally wasn’t sure whether it was good or really rubbish. I think the poem began to unpack a need I have to move towards reflecting the way the mind moves without the need for set narrative. My favourite poets are doing this currently, the work of poets like Jericho Brown, Chen Chen and Morgan Parker have led the way in this, but poets like Wayne Holloway Smith and Emily Berry have paved the way in England too. I feel that this poem was the start of that hunger and movement. The final lines took a lot to muster, the balance was integral and it was discussed over many a cup of tea with Hannah Lowe, who helped me learn about the soft step off. She always says ‘go in hard and get off lightly’ (or something like that). Finding this form and flipping the camera upside down allows us to capture the intricacies of this complex world that we live in. During this answer I’ve name-dropped a bit. I am doing this because it is important to remember that these poems are the product of many discussions, feedback sessions and books by other poets.

AH:   You mentioned Wayne Holloway-Smith in the roll call.  I know you’ve taken workshops with him.  Wayne is concerned to investigate and call out how the complexities of masculinities are represented,  and to challenge cultural and class stereotyping.  To what extent do you feel your work is in conversation with his poems?

AM: Wow, I never thought of it like that. I’d be honoured for people to even consider them in connection with Wayne’s work. He has been a real inspiration to me.  His work unpicks so much about being a man and growing up but it also deals with emotions in an incomplete and broken linear. The real admiration I have for Wayne is his attitude to poetry itself. His mindset is settled around feeling, process and freedom, not necessarily making sense or clarity of narrative. He isn’t bothered whether things look or sound like a poem, he is just about how it makes an audience squeal or turn in their seat. He has taught me to be the sort of poet that doesn’t give a f-ck, to innovate, challenge preconception and industry notions of acceptance, to dig into process, to grow, discover, play with it all and take nothing for granted. Everything we read in the Monday night class we question, poke fun at, pick apart, no one is on a pedestal, everything isn’t about what’s happening but what is ‘working’. Some people say ‘oh it doesn’t seem much like a poem’ and that really doesn’t bother us, I want to make people think and Wayne has taught me that. Thematically, any connections between our work is simply because I have spent too many Monday nights in his group. 

AH:  I’m sure Wayne will be happy to read that.  Your wonderful poem ‘regret’ was placed in last year’s Oxford Poetry Prize.  It offers a vignette of “my mum chatting in Tamil to the boy at the petrol station counter.”  Snatches of their conversation are represented in Tamil, and the mum is shown as being completely at ease and lost in this moment: 

she is Aunty, he is Thamby
and the queue behind us can wait 

The speaker, however, is excluded, catching only snatches of the conversation, “plucking subtitles from their eyebrows”.  Yet it is from this sense of not-fitting that the poem’s voice and consciousness grow. I wondered if you would like to say something about the creative potential of dislocation and exclusion as a generative force for you as an artist, in this poem and more generally?

AM: I feel like not belonging drives the majority of my work. We spend most our years growing up hoping to fit into the system only to realise our uniqueness is what makes us special. In my workshops with young people I’m always encouraging people to think about their exclusion as a force of creativity. Ask yourself, what makes you unique, different and amazing. This poem is a very truthful representation of my mother and I in a petrol station. My Mum is an amazing conversationalist. Whenever we go anywhere she is talking to the cashier or catching up with someone in the queue.  In England, India or Sri Lanka she’s always speaking to people and often I wish so much I could join in. I mastered the English language but perhaps in doing so sacrificed my Tamil heritage. This poem isn’t just about language though, it is also about the love I have for my Mum.

AH:  Another important woman in your life has been the poet Hannah Lowe, who was your mentor on the Jerwood Arvon Scheme, and who, like so many of us, works from a place of cultural multiplicities. I was massively helped by having Pascale Petit as my mentor on the same scheme.  Could you say something about your experience of being mentored by Hannah?

AM: Getting the Jerwood Arvon mentorship was probably one of the biggest achievements of my writing life. It provided me (and you too) with a community of artists, a space to create and a mentor who really believed in me. Hannah has been completely instrumental to my growth as a poet and artist. Her work transcends cultures and backgrounds, her control of narrative is second to none and her ability to mentor is truly masterful. Hannah is always focussed on clarity of image, constantly pushing me to make even the abstract hold true conceit and is always encouraging me to take the reader by the hand and lead them from line to line. This has been so influential to me. When I’m lost, I often see her on my shoulder asking ‘I don’t really get this bit’ or it’s not really clear enough’. She is also a poet who believes in accessibility of the work, so she pushed me to make sure the poems reached the readership I wanted to reach instead of tumbling into abstraction. In many ways Hannah and Wayne sit on opposite ends of a poetry spectrum. This was a wonderful thing to experience, it allowed me to see how poetry could pull and shift in different directions, it allowed me to ride a very thin line between being abstract and being very clear and it also showed me that finally my own choices had to be made. As Hannah once said to me ‘just be confident with what you’re trying to do’. Hannah’s passionate, down to earth, giving nature is something that I will always be thankful for.

AH:  ‘after the Sri Lankan bombing that kills 360 (after the 20 year more than killed significantly more)’ uses the powers of miniaturisation deployed by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem ‘Brazil, January 1 1502’, and by Rachael Allen in her poem ‘Banshee’ – to name but two other poets of the tiny. Elizabeth Bishop is describing the rapist-conquistadors who are “hard as nails/ tiny as nails, and glinting, in creaking armour.”  Rachael Allen (interviewed last year in this series) is reanimating the murder of a woman whose aggressor works “like a small model forester/ axing up plastic logs.”  

Your poem begins “after the news   my skin feels darker”, and uses responses to the bombing in the Grand Cinnamon Hotel as a prism to make more visible the complexities of only being “Sri Lankan / at weddings and funerals  or for inquisitive white people”.   The poem ends by distilling its contradictions into three singing lines:

from here (on the toilet) it’s all just a cluster of tiny red faces
wailing in a language I don’t understand    in a country I can’t
oh look!  that’s where Mama and Appa first met  

I wanted to ask you to what extent the miniaturised space of the poem – which takes huge subjects and telescopes them down – creates a measure of safety for dealing with difficult or otherwise unmanageable materials? 

AM: I think you’re really onto something there. I’m really interested in pulling big political constructs into my poems and sometimes that can be a very daunting thing. Finding methods to do this is tricky. I’ve found that keeping the subject of the poem down-to-earth and ‘local’ allows the overriding message to have its own open plain. In this poem it all centres around the speaker watching a video online yet the focus is bigger. All political problems have a microscopic impact on our lives, that means taking a subject like war and persecution and asking yourself where does that sit on a local level. This can be a very fruitful task and I feel it allows you an ability to not seem ‘over-the-top’ or ‘self-righteous’ which is always the problem of political poetry. I want to take risks and over the last year since the pamphlet has been released I have been researching political poets. Most of them from USA. Tracy K  Smith creates letters charting the journey of black slaves from varying people in history. Patricia Smith tells the story through accounts from victims and family members of violence. These poets are a real inspiration to me, they take the human, local situations and show how they are the repercussions of larger political problems. I believe poetry needs to reflect our politics and begin to unpack some of the complexities of our political system. Often these systems seem too much to deal with, too complicated and too daunting but it is important we find ways to do it, it’s important we do not turn away, but instead create vehicles to promote discussion. 

AH:    I can relate to that, albeit in a slightly different field.  As you know, in my current work I am trying to use my own direct experiences of being abused as a child to give witness to, and change awareness around, the global crime of the grooming and sexual abuse of children, and look at its aftermath for vulnerable teenagers.  To make the poems, I have to find or open myself to imageries and forms that can hold the materials so they become accessible to, and safe for, the reader, notwithstanding their potentially very difficult subject matters.

More generally, poetry is about control, but it’s also about the reverse – abandoning and opening yourself to let complex things enact a form of authentic aesthetic identity in language. Could you say something about how, when, and where your poems come into being, and your process of working with them to their published forms?  I know you also freestyle, where improvisation and being able to trust yourself and go with the energy, is a key?

AM: I am a true believer in play as a means to creation. I believe that being playful will allow us to open ourselves up and throw away the inner voice obsessed with judging our success. Freestyling is the epitome of this. A rapper freestyling is a magical, spontaneous force of creativity. For me, I freestyle best when I am relaxed, when the audience lack judgement, I can move into a space where my brain seems to work outside of itself, where I don’t think of the words, the words just fall together like bubbles pulling together in a bath. This feeling is as much about the people around me as it is about my presence in the moment. I believe that workshops and feedback groups should adopt this way of thinking. The workshops should initially focus on connecting people, creating a relaxed and free space full of love, while allowing people to express and discover themselves in a wholly present way. After this, the poems will simply flow naturally. I chase the feeling of freestyle when I am creating poems. I’m always looking for experiences that bring the playful from me, that pull me out of my usual surroundings and throw me into a space where I must be fully present. I’m all about the process, the feeling of building a poem like a house, and living in it, taking risks and pushing it to see how far it can go. In terms of practise, I try to wake up each day and put something into being. Anything, just accepting whatever comes out can be really rubbish or be the start of something really good. Recently I have read more as this has been a weakness for me. 

AH:   I wanted to ask about your brilliant final poem, ‘because it’s in the Lonely Planet top five places to visit’.  The poem intercuts a couple telling the speaker about how the husband proposed “as the sun / licked the sea red   and birds punched shrapnel in the sky”, on the sand outside their beach hut, with the speaker’s account (thought, not spoken within the live conversation) of the island’s recent bloody history, to which they appear oblivious or indifferent :       

              will you –  I used to march to make change   but
since then     I march just to sleep at night         that country
changed me she says   the bars  the sea-views  biryani kothu roti
plus the people are so generous    they don’t hassle like Indians
they’d drop a bomb   wait five minutes    drop another to
kill the rescue party    they spent the whole evening staring
out to sea      she says it’s their paradise    they made a pact to
go back there every ten years      to that bar    in that country where
bombs rained into no fire zones    where bodies are hidden sixty
to a hole   it’s hard to put into words    he says as their fingers
weave together   it’s somewhere we could call our second
home   the soldiers were spread across Tamil land   few tried
for war crimes    I don’t know why you don’t move back there

In your opening poem, ‘credit card’, identity is precarious, deniable, steal-able.  Here the only two points at which the speaker uses the “I” pronoun come around his attempt to assert a contradictory narrative, as quoted above.  The reader is given the sense of a narrative about Sri Lanka which is being repeatedly drowned out by the denials of history and blithe rewritings of the tourist industry.  The final phrase first person phrase, spoken by one of the members of the couple, – “I don’t know why you don’t move back there” – is moreover one used by people challenging migrations globally.   Would you be able to say something about this poem and its ending?

AM: The poem was originally built in a train in India. Remember when I talked about the local situation being used to talk about global issues? In this poem the local situation is a Californian couple. Yes, they did indeed speak in detail about how they loved Sri Lanka. I actually spent a little while explaining my mixed feelings about the place but it didn’t seem to faze them. The recent groom said ‘well you could say that about a lot of places’ and that message stuck with me. I wanted the poem to capture this conversation in a new way with multiple perspectives. To create a range of conversations happening simultaneously. That is the spoken words, the internal dialogue, as well as the dialogue to the reader. There is a line that I really battled with ‘I used to march to make change…’ that line is a clinical line for me as it is the speaker’s internal dialogue, it comes from a different place. The ending has gone through many different stages, it used to have more of a back and forth but I found that pulling it back left the reader on more of an edge and let the poem live on after the poem was finished. This is a real life situation for a lot of second generation migrants. There is conflict between our own feelings and those that go there, there is a conflict between the politics of oppressors and the politics of our supposed mother land. I attempted to capture this conflict in the use of this cut and splice form.

AH :  It really works for me, Arji.  Can I end by asking where to next?  What are your plans for 2020, and beyond?

AM: I’ve been really productive since lockdown from writing to workshopping and I’m looking forward to an August break in Wales. I’m also about to become writer in residence for a pub in Dorset where I will be writing a series of poems in conjunction with local patrons of the pub. I’m also currently commissioned by Stockton Council to write 40 poems for isolated people across the North East so I’ve been writing poems and ringing people up out the blue to share them. I love that so much. 

In terms of poetry I want to be pushing my process and work as far as it can go.  I feel like I’m only just reaching my stride and I have a whole lot left to give. I am really excited about the new work I’m writing connected to race and hate crime. I’m messing with the ‘i’, writing from a range of perspectives and most importantly, still enjoying it. It’s a risky, deep vat of possibilities so at the exciting part of the process. I want to be more political in my poems and create work for those without a voice. I want to push the boundaries of what we can say and how we say it with regards to race, it’s a dicey game but also very exciting. There’s a lot to keep an eye out for, you can follow me at @theleano, or Arji Manuelpillai on insta or you can join the mailing list at www.arji.org. Thank you so much for having me on here Alice, you are an inspiration to so many of us poets.

AH: Thank you so much for such an amazing set of answers Arji.  As always with these interviews around the idea of ‘saying the difficult thing’, I feel I have gained so much by being given an insight into to the workings behind your poems.  I’m really excited for your new work and so happy to have had the chance to share the poems in Mutton Rolls with our readers.

Mutton Rolls can be bought here from Out-Spoken’s website for £7.00..

If you want to find out more about joining a Poetry Society Stanza workshop group to develop your poems and connect with other poets details are here at the Poetry Society’s website.

For details of Arji’s ongoing creative adventures, including films he’s made, and performance collaborations, sign up to his mailing list at www.arji.org .

To check in with Arji’s Pickle Jar podcast, where he checks in with poets making and chatting, click here. 

“As long as the body is moving/ the heart will follow”: Troy Cabida on how “tenderness becomes a strength” when writing into the bi-cultural, bi-queer British-Filipinx space – and how he is taking to the skies with his Bad Betty debut ‘War Dove’ despite lockdown.

Troy-18Troy Cabida is the first poet I have had the privilege of interviewing about ‘saying the difficult thing’ in their work during lockdown, and the second librarian poet in this spot, following on from Karen Smith last year. Troy tuned into poetry while still at school (further details below) and has shared with us a live recording of his poem ‘In Conversation with Past Troy’ to a backing track by Gabriel Jones of Bump Kin, from which the title quote is taken. If you want to carry Troy’s live voice in your ears alongside our conversation about War Dove, Troy’s debut with Bad Betty Press, published on 2 May 2020, click on the link here  now. 

Like Romalyn Ante, who also spoke with me, Tagalog was Troy’s first language. Romalyn and Troy both choose to write in English at present. Troy is originally from Las Piñas City, Metro Manila, but is currently based close to me in southwest London, which makes us both neighbours of the magnificent Brompton Cemetery. Built as a Victorian burial ground, with flamboyant avenues of tombs, it has over time also become an impromptu nature reserve, and was a legendary queer hang-out in the 1970s and early 1980s before HIV/AIDS took hold, which works for us both as out bi-queer poets. Had social distancing not been in force, we would might well have hung out in its café for the interview.

Photo 10-04-2020, 18 20 31Widely published in Bukambibig, harana, TAYO Literary, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Macmillan,   Troy was a member of two legendary London co-operatives, the Barbican Young Poets, and Roundhouse Poetry Collective, which previously nurtured Belinda Zhawi and Dean Atta, amongst other distinguished poets. Belinda’s and Dean’s interviews also feature in this series and tutor and poet Rachel Long’s is also available. 

While he has not neglected his own career, Troy has also been generous to other emerging and established talents, editing The Murmur House and Síblíni Journal as senior editor and Issues 3-7 of the Thought Notebook by Thought Collection Publishing. He is also editor for 30 Days Dry by Chicago poet-playwright Robert Eric Shoemaker. A notable and powerful live performer, as a producer, Troy’s projects include London open mic night Poetry and Shaah, his debut headline show Overture: An Evening with Troy Cabida, Poems for Boys,  a night that gives space for male-identifying poets to talk about their relationships with masculinity and Liwayway, an open mic night and art collective bringing together UK-based Filipinx creatives spearheaded by Jessica Manuel for British-Filipinx poets, singers and rappers.

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Rachel Long

As a fellow poet who, like Troy, identifies as bi and queer, and also carries two languages in my psychic toolkit, not to mention a whole load of supplementary musical and other inspirations, it was really powerful for me to hear what Troy had to say about his own experiences of realising these doubled aspects of his identity, and negotiating them relative to his private, public and creative selves.   I was also really drawn to hearing how the extraordinary poems in War Dove, his debut pamphlet just launched with Bad Betty, found their voices and forms, within the context of both London, and the wider world, including through some targeted “binge-watching’ of the series Sorry For Your Loss, and how the poems fuse the multiple languages and registers through which Troy speaks to us all.

AH:     Can you tell me about your path into poems Troy? When and why did you start writing and performing?

TC:       I was introduced to poetry back in 2010, through a blue GCSE English anthology everyone in my generation will probably remember with utmost emotion. We studied Derek Walcott, John Agard, Carol Ann Duffy and I remember specifically a worksheet highlighting poetry techniques like the simile and the enjambment and how they work within a poem. I experimented writing when I got home that same day and fell in love.  I started submitting my poems for publication after I left sixth form, around 2013, and started doing working as an editor for several journals and manuscripts to get myself acquainted with how poetry works as a collaboration rather than something purely solitary. It’s great because turns out, there were people that liked my work and accepted them into their publications, many of which I highly regard.My first experience performing was at the open mic night BoxedIn back in 2016. I remember my performance was so stiff, but I just knew where to go from there to become a better reader, and I owe that confidence to the hosts Sean Mahoney, Amina Jama and Yomi Ṣode, who have and continue to curate a night that listens to poets but also challenges them to be better. I initially found performing to be daunting because I didn’t know how to place myself within it but then found it fun and a way to get an immediate response for your poems. An audience can be a very good sounding board.

AH:     Were there any poets, songwriters or other creative figures who made this seem more possible? I know you have been part of the Barbican Poets and Roundhouse collective.

pascale freeword centre
Pascale Petit reading from her forthcoming collection ‘Tiger Girl’ at the Free Word Centre

TC:     I’m lucky to call the Barbican Young Poets and Roundhouse Poetry Collective strong support systems in this crazy poetry scene. Being a member of both programmes taught me about community and knowing how to work and give parts of yourself to create a tight unit. I have to shout out Jacob Sam-La Rose, Rachel Long, Bridget Minamore and Cecilia Knapp, who are all amazing. I get a dopamine rush every time they say something nice about my work.  In terms of poets, I really admire Joseph Legaspi, Pascale Petit, Richard Scott, Amina Jama, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Helen Bowell, Andrew McMillan, R.A. Villanueva, Romalyn Ante, Kayo Chingonyi, Terrance Hayes and Chen Chen. I always find myself going back to their work. Then musicians like Karylle, (((O))), Curtismith, Janelle Monáe, Bamboo, The Corrs, She’s Only Sixteen and Yolanda Moon. I’m a huge fan of BTS. “Interlude: Calico” is written after their song “Serendipity”.

I binged on a Facebook Watch series called “Sorry For Your Loss” starring Elizabeth Olsen when I was drafting the poems, and I loved and studied the show so much that it ended up being a huge influence on the overall manuscript. Its execution of someone’s emotional journey from a major event, in this case the death of the lead’s husband, was handled with both logic and heart that I was inspired to follow that route with this pamphlet.

AH:     Your epigraph is in Tagalog, from a song by the indie folk Filipino band Ben&Ben, whose debut was out in May 2019.   What made you choose this as the launch pad for your work?

TC:     Thank you for catching that! It’s from their song “Lucena”, which I first heard around October 2019, around the time I was going through the manuscript by myself before Amy began working on it. Through that time, I couldn’t help but feel an emotional distance between myself and the poems as majority of them were written in 2017 and 2018 and studying them from that perspective dawned to me how different I am now from the person who wrote those poems.   I chose “Lucena” because it sings about the joy in letting go, in hitting the ground running after a long time of hurt, which I felt would work as the epigraph as it reflects where I was emotionally at the time of the pamphlet’s release.

AH:    As a dual language speaker, I don’t translate or italicise the French words I use in my work because I want to reflect the way that my mind doesn’t give primacy to

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Victoria Adukwei Bulley

any single language. L. Kiew, who I have also interviewed for this series, follows the same approach. What was your thinking around this decision for the epigraph?

TC:       I chose “Lucena” because it does so many things at the same time. I have this fantasy in my mind that when people read the lyrics, they’ll get curious and check the song out and then get a feel of its message and sound, which is anthem-like, like feet stamping and voices cheering. Starting the pamphlet in Tagalog is my way of letting the reader know that although the poems are in English, it’s still a second language to me, and that my relationship with Tagalog heavily informs my relationship with English. I often call English my “work language” and that I get tired of speaking it after 11pm. True story.  Also, R.A. Villanueva was once asked how his readers will understand his work if he doesn’t translate his Tagalog into English and he answered with a picture of Chewbacca. Now, I may not be the most prolific of Star Wars fans, but I share the exact sentiment.

AH:       The title of the opening poem, ‘Ladlad’ is glossed as “From Tagalog – unfolded; spreading out on a surface; to expose;” .  To the English ear, it reads initially as a twinned or dual male identity, like a doubled lad. The poem refracts a shifting expression of identities:

you stretching
out of yourself, your wrists bending
at the sides of a box struggling to contain you,
translates to you falling from somewhere high,
reminder that you are unpolished quartz,
your sense of a man cracked for wanting man
as if to say:
you deserve all that is twisting your heart,
all that is crushing your torso.

 It has an almost biblical feel – as if a new definition of masculinity, in a different shape to what has gone before, is being formed through and claimed in words, albeit not without great struggle, reflected in the stone imageries. Was that process in your mind while you were writing?

TC:          I was speaking to my dad about a friend who had come out publicly which I admired. We were speaking about it purely in Tagalog and it took me a second after we finished to realise that the word we used for “coming out” can be interpreted as derogatory.  When taken out of the LGBTQ+ context, “ladlad” means to spread an item so it is entirely visible, or to force the truth out of someone. To constantly use this word to describe that process made me feel uncomfortable, and then realising how it can even parallel with how Filipino culture perceives being gay: an immoral truth that can’t help but be a truth, but something others have the freedom to punish you for.   ‘Ladlad’ chews and squeezes the juice out of that word, uncovering any silenced or repressed emotions and associations that it passes down to people. In the context of the pamphlet, it being the first poem takes the reader straight into the psyche of the narrator, who is in the middle of this ocean of confusion and isolation that they have grown to believe that they deserve.

AH:        That’s a really moving explanation Troy.  Thank you.    Mary Jean Chan, Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Jay G. Ying are other poets who are currently making work that explores the negative impacts of societal hostility on the queer identity.  They

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Bridget Minamore

also claim the idea of the queer self as a place of cultural regeneration and onward transmission of new and different possibilities. Is that a project that also speaks to you?

TC:          I believe it’s really important for artists to create work that is true to themselves, as well as it is important to consume art made by those who live those experiences. Too many times I’ve read poems about the queer experience written by straight poets as a prompt for them to experiment with and it doesn’t sit well with me.   I used to have this idea that I shouldn’t be writing about my experiences of being bisexual because, for some reason, I didn’t think they’d fit the mould of what can pass as bisexual narrative. But then you try to ignore that thought and hope that someone reads your work and feel a little less alone.

AH:      Speaking from my own experience, I know that bisexual self can be a scary one to claim, not least because you fear hostility and negative judgements from all quarters!  I was terrified, joining Mary Jean Chan’s Queer Studio online course with the Poetry School, in case I would be rejected by more ‘purely queer’ poets.  But in fact the space was intensely freeing and supportive, and gave me an audience for whom I could write first drafts of poems about a relationship I had with a girl my own age when we were both teenagers – which was a seminal and reclamatory experience for me after I experienced same sex abuse in childhood.

Turning back to your work Troy, the poem ‘Hawk and dove’ continues a work of re-forming. It fuses poetry and martial arts, remembering “when I tried to punch you/ with a hand boxed like a rock/ only to see it crack open on impact.” Where there could have been harm, there is instead transformation and co-existence – “Fist bouncing from chest/ feather meeting concrete”.   Do you envisage language as having the capacity to operate in this fluid, shifting way?

TC:        I think poetry can break rules that other forms of language can’t. Poetry is often an artform where you can do that and then the craft reverts to freshness rather that disrespecting it. Jacob would always teach us to know the rules of a specific form, and then he’ll encourage us to break it apart if it serves the poem.   I imagined “Hawk and dove” to be about the playing of foils and how opposites can melt into one another. For me, it’s a nostalgic look into a relationship between polar Photo 25-03-2019, 15 05 55opposites: where the first stanza focuses on a dominant and physical figure, the second stanza is about the more pensive counterpart. Having both stanzas hold six lines each, to me, meant that they were still standing on equal grounds even though they were different.    In a normal situation, the “fist bouncing from chest” would have resulted in pain and then a cue to retreat, but in this instance, this clash becomes a gateway into a deeper relationship, where you can see “flickers of your eyes from mine to the ground”, and then the two personalities mix and learn from one another.

AH:     ‘The Afters of After’ is a coming out poem, which called to mind Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s voice, albeit that the outcome is very different.   Here the kitchen is homely – “moist from steam and cigarette smoke and white wine” – and the parents appear to be understanding:

They refer to a friend’s son, whose name was meant for me. Paul.
Remember him? He works in Malta now. He’s bisexual too!

 As the bisexual mum of a queer son, I had my own experience of this, when he came out to me in his teens, only for me to come out back to him. It was a very emotional but very beautiful experience for us both, that continues to inform our adult relationship. It seems to me that this is a very important exchange to record for other young LGBTQ+ people – to give them hope and confidence about revealing themselves to their families. Was this part of your intention within the poem?

TC:   That’s such a beautiful anecdote that you’ve shared. Thank you for sharing that, Alice.   When I was editing “War Dove”, I knew that I would be dealing with personal themes, and thankfully I’ve been able to add in experiences of levity into my poems because while there has been negative aspects to my process of coming out, there has been lighter stories that I can share, which I think should be celebrated. Coming out is an experience that has facets of both good and bad, and poetry has the ability to narrate all of that. One of the stanzas in “Makeup and heels and Reece King” came about because the first thing my friend Idil asked me upon finding out I’m bisexual, was my opinion on this model named Reece King. It was in an escalator in Debenhams.

In terms of my parents, I’m also so thankful that they’ve been supportive. It wasn’t always the case with them growing up, but it’s definitely something that’s changed. The moment I captured in my poem is my parents grasping the fact that their son has finally come out, after years of holding his breath, and they’re getting used to the idea that they finally can talk about this thing in front of them and the first story they manage to bring to the table is how their high school friend’s son is also bisexual, which I found so awkward then but really funny looking back now. From then on, our relationship has relaxed, my parents have spoken more and more, and I’ve felt comfortable working on becoming more open with them.

However, I understand that coming out to family, or anyone for that matter, is a concept that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and I totally see my privilege in having an accepting inner circle. Coming out or voicing out this aspect of your identity should be done whenever you are most emotionally ready. Do it for yourself and do it in service of your growth and healing.

AH:   Poems including ‘Buddy’, ‘Bonds’ and ‘Interlude: Calico’ give witness to the complexity of inhabiting a queer identity in a predominantly heterosexual world, and also to the sense of alienation and separation which can sometimes arise even when seeking to form queer relationships or simply enjoy more casual connections. In ‘Bonds’ the speaker uses the disjunct of a stanza break to state “Man, I have a feeling // we’re not watching the same thing.” Was this an area that you felt drawn to exploring?

TC:   I once heard someone say that poems about sex shouldn’t just talk about sex as it can become one dimensional, and I took that in, when drafting ‘Buddy’. I wanted it to be about the defence mechanisms we’re not aware of creating, due to loneliness. Oftentimes toxic relationships are born out of the desire to shut out parts of ourselves that we don’t want to deal with. Sometimes those kinds of relationships exacerbate those exact parts and when they come out, it’s in ways that they shouldn’t, which causes more damage.  ‘Bonds’ is a poem that I took the longest to edit because of the ending, where the poem jumps from the narrator to the subject, the person that the voice is sitting next to. It’s about dynamics in a relationship can develop because of unrequited love and an inability to heal past that.  Where “Buddy” uses couplets to indicate two people’s close connection, the subjects in “Bonds” have a barrier that keeps them from fully connecting, which I wanted to highlight through the three-line stanzas. The sudden shift is abrupt and uncomfortable because that’s another voice altogether and it’s a wakeup call back into reality, one that’s hard to accept because it’s not the reality that you want to be in.

roma reading poetry london
Romalyn Ante reading ‘Names’ at the Poetry London autumn launch at Kings Place.

AH:   Romalyn Ante writes in her poems of the sense of unreality which can arise from her Filipino heritage and identity being portrayed in crassly simplified terms by the European and American media. The opening stanza of ‘Examples of Confusion’ suggests the danger of becoming party to a news and entertainment media which marginalises and diminishes non-white experiences:

You can laugh through floods and earthquakes and dictators
but your heart cracks easy for emotions? You’re losing colour.

The action cuts between the speaker and his friend in a UK Costa, a vignette of family life in Manila, and a close up of the American actor Timothée Chalamet, when the camera is “romancing yet another scrunched up white boy forehead.” Chalamet made his name in Call Me by Your Name, but could be one of many young white male pin ups.  Would you like to say something about this poem?

TC:   Oftentimes, being Filipino means carrying a certain pressure to uphold a stereotype that we’re the happiest culture in the world, something that American media has perpetuated for so long. And to criticise that means I’m ungrateful for having what has been called a “positive stereotype”. It’s ridiculous because the conversation about mental health issues has been deeply vilified and buried in taboo, leaving many people confused and in need of a professional, which should be a solution as logical as seeing a doctor for a physical illness.

‘Examples of Confusion’  tackles my unrest about this situation of growing up in a culture that teaches us that it’s better to sweep things under a rug and weather the storm with a smile than admit that we’re actually struggling, which denies us human substance and depth. It’s really dangerous because it does get to the point where Filipinos grow up thinking we don’t even get mental health problems, that things like anxiety and depression are just for white people, which is far from the truth. The stanza about Timothée Chalamet’s performance came about because I had reached a point where I was able to feel more heard through art produced by non-Filipinos, which bothered me because I know I can’t say that that story is truly mine to compare with.  It’s funny because digging deep, deep into Filipino art and media outside of the mainstream circuit that encourages these stereotypes rather than challenging them, I managed to find like-minded artists who make work that I can 100% empathise with. And the biggest criticism they get is that they’re too radical or that they’re too ungrateful to appreciate what we already have.

AH:  ‘War Dove’, the title poem, draws many of your pamphlet’s themes together:

I’ve come to know the kind of tender
that packs muscle, that doesn’t cower
even to my own desires.
In front of the face that profits from my labour
but doesn’t know how to give back,
the doves around me fought to remain.

 You express a form of reclamation enacted in the teeth of harsh treatment and continuing adversity –  “the understanding of the apology, / the need for it to be verbalised and accepted/ to release the victim of their past”. What was in your mind when you were writing and revising this?

TC:  Whenever I read this poem out to an audience, I always mention how much of this poem isn’t trying to solve the problem against violence or toxic masculinity, but it’s rather thinking through those things and wondering what it can do internally to stop becoming a part of the problem, if such an act can ever be truly done.  The first stanza is after “Trevor” by Ocean Vuong, where he says that “tenderness depends on how little the world touches you”. I agreed with that for a long time until I started to realise that when you’re put in a situation where you can retaliate after being wronged, it’s actually perfectly okay to ignore the voices that push you to fight back and just remain still. Practicing compassion after being punched in the face. The idea that the world can beat you up and your response to that is to accept and find strength in the tender state that you’re left in makes as much sense to me as Ocean Vuong’s line does. And then tenderness becomes a strength, which defies the idea that the two can’t be synonymous with one another.  The third stanza was very fun to write because it was my attempt in understanding the concept of forgiveness, an action that hasn’t been truly perfected yet, in my opinion. It puts something so emotionally driven in a logical perspective because it’s looking for something that can’t be found through that emotional route. I grew up in a community where forgiveness is a hazy and mystical thing that you must experience and to give it concreteness, reasoning for its validity and actual steps to follow is somehow taboo and disrespectful, which I find so interesting.

AH:     As someone who was subject to sustained sexual abuse by a family member in childhood, forgivenesss and compassion are things about which I have thought often –  though without yet fully reaching resolution, I must admit.    I really value the subtlety and rigour of your thought in this respect Troy, particularly because I try to follow a daily Buddhist meditation practice which can generate a freedom to renegotiate my relationship with my past, without surrendering agency.  Your idea of how we can allow tenderness to become strength is very powerful and beautiful.

I’d like to close our page conversation by asking how it feels to launch your debut in lockdown?   Will you be doing some live events to share the work when it becomes possible for venues to open again?

TC:       So I’m launching the pamphlet online on Bad Betty Press’ Instagram Live and I’m sharing it with an amazing poet named Gabriel Akamọ with his own debut pamphlet called At The Speed of Dark.    We joked about how our pamphlets will make poetry history by being one of the publications released during the lockdown.    I was having a conversation with another poet friend about how the lockdown has affected the poetry scene and he said that despite not being together physically, the support between us have only gone stronger and have adapted to the tides. Moving our launch into the digital space is still as exciting as it would be on a venue because it means more people can watch alongside our community, watching at the comfort of their own homes. I’ve been contacting nights for a possible feature slot with them at the start of the year so I hope we can get those off the ground when it’s safe to do so.  I’m a co-producer for an open mic night called Poetry and Shaah with Neimo Askar, Fahima Hersi, Abdullahi Mohammed, Ayaan Abdullahi and Idil Abdullahi and when we’re all able to resume our normal shows, we’ll only go upwards from there. I’m asking them for a feature spot to help promote the pamphlet, so fingers crossed they say yes!

AH:   Thank you very much for talking to me so generously, and so insightfully, Troy Cabida.    We’re launching this interview after your launch, the thinking being that readers would already have joined you, Gabriel Akamọ, and your brilliant support acts, in the live event, the facebook link for which is here.   I’m also placing links to the publications and live videos we’ve discussed below this for our readers to follow, and most importantly, the buy button link to Bad Betty so they can get themselves their own copy of War Dove through the mail, and bring it along for you to sign when performances are able to take place in shared physical spaces again.   

To buy Troy Cabida’s pamphlet War Dove from Bad Betty click here.

To check out more of Troy Cabida’s work, a few links to click on.

Troy Cabida’s website.

New poem from BathMagg

harana poetry for the poem Ladlad.

Bukambibig here.

Tayo Literary

Ink Sweat and Tears

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

Slam: You’re Gonna Want to Hear This

Liwayway

Poems for Boys

Overture: An Evening with Troy Cabida.

‘I want the poems to be hospitable to multiple voices. I want them to be porous – a kind of listening device, as well as a speaking device’ : Linda Gregerson on making art by ‘running forward in the dark.’

Gregerson_3998_flat.flat.croppedA child of the upper Midwest, and descendent of Norwegian farming stock, Linda Gregerson is a poet of winter, able to bring snow, and the lives shaped by its rigours, to the page. She is also a poet of time – and of the bodily selves in which our identities are vested. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, amongst other distinguished accolades, she came to writing poetry through renaissance studies, and theatre making. We met last summer, under the plane trees of Russell Square in Bloomsbury, to discuss Prodigal, her collection of new and selected poems from 1976 to 2014. Gregerson was over from University of Michigan where she teaches, and has previously directed the MFA Program. Our conversation explored how Gregerson came to enter the worlds of ‘high’ culture, and academia, and claim herself creatively, while also remaining connected with the more visceral and direct voices of her upbringing. I asked her about the challenges of giving witness to the violent murder of a close friend, and exploring the sustained childhood sexual abuse of her own sister – without exploiting or diminishing these two women. We discussed how her poems work with contemporary scientific research, and what it can mean, as a woman, to write about blood. We also talked about writing towards lost fathers.  Overall, it was one of the most deeply nourishing conversations I had in 2019, and one which has stayed with me.     We opened with the multiple registers which her poems contain, and the gifts of open-ness, and possibility, which writing in ‘American English’ can confer.  Please note that the poems quoted are in a different font, as it was the only way to preserve the formatting. 

AH: Can we begin with how you work with words, Linda Gregerson?   You write of our “fractious, healing, double-dealing on-the-make vernacular” in your review of John Ashbery and Heather McHugh. Within your own work as a poet, and a critic, language is capable of sliding between registers with muscled suppleness, but also of breaking down into a naked vulnerability. Would you say something about this?

LG:     Thank you for the question. When I was writing about Ashbery and Heather McHugh, I was talking specifically about American English and the way these poets ride and celebrate it. I write like neither of them, but I think of myself as a very American poet too. I want American English, American idiom, American momentums – and stalled momentums – to be a legible part of the music. I commute among registers. Syntax is also really important to me. I want the poems to be hospitable to multiple voices. I want them to be porous – a kind of listening device, as well as a speaking device.

AH: As a reader, your poetry has the quality of a fairground ride. We plunge. We judder. It’s really visceral. And startling. I never see it coming. The syntax and variations keep me on the edge of my seat.

LG:   I take that as a high compliment.

AH: It is. The saltiness of everyday language is also arresting.

LG:     It would be affectation for me not to have that. I need that everyday register, I love it, it’s an essential part of the music available all around me. Also, some of the people I love and have loved most deeply in my life, spoke and speak a very particular idiomatic English, they’re upper Midwestern country people. My father never finished high school. He didn’t use what we would call standard grammar – and his voice was very important to me. I didn’t find enough space for it in my world when he was alive, so I need some space for it now.

AH:     Only time lets us see some relationships more clearly. Turning to your career, you have won numerous distinguished awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. I wondered if you would say something about how, where and why you got started with poetry? I know you were part of the Iowa Writers Workshop for your MFA. What got you to that point?

LG:     A very specific gift from a very specific friend. I did not write poetry when I was young. I still shudder at the memory of a poem I had to write for school when I was eleven years old. An impossible time of life in any case, and a dreadful poem. I spent each and every minute of each and every day trying not to be stupid, and here was a thing that made me stupider than I actually was. So I fled. The other arts were safer: visual arts and theatre, I had some wherewithal.

Years later, a poet friend and I had offices across the hall from one another, and we would simply talk. He’d say: These are poems. You’ve got to write them down. And me: You don’t understand. I have no idea how to make a poem. I have no idea how to read contemporary poetry. I can read Donne. I can read Shakespeare. I can read parts of Eliot – but I don’t have a clue when I open a journal of contemporary poetry. But he insisted; it was his way of making friends, and it wound up changing my life. So I staggered around trying to make poems of my own for a while, and it was a great piece of good luck that I was admitted to the workshop at all. They gave me financial aid! I was stunned. And the time there was transformative. I learned to read work in progress; I learned to read more broadly in contemporary poetry. The learning to write came in fits and starts, but the reading could be steady. It was like learning to breathe.

AH:     And they are languages, they are specific languages – that cannot in general simply be walked into.

LG:     I made all the mistakes one makes. At first I thought Ah – the key to this is compression. So it got over-elliptical. I made all the mistakes.

AH:     But that’s the only way that any of us learn to write – by getting it wrong so thoroughly that only the ‘right’ path is left.

LG:     Maybe it’s about exhausting all of the possibilities of wrongness.

AH      Very often you don’t like how you write. Your own voice is something that you resist. When you find that place of fit with your voice, it can feel dangerous. It can feel exposing.   There is a lot of resistance to inhabiting your voice – as well as a sense of relief at finally getting there.

LG:     For me, the key was finding that syntax was my real vehicle for thought.

AH:     For me it was imagery, and sound play. Once you have got your tools, the process feels slightly less dangerous.

LG: I knew what would tell me how to go forward.

AH:   Were there any particular poets, on the page, or in person, who spoke to you, or helped you when you were setting out?

LG:     That’s hard to say. The aesthetic that was dominant in the 70’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was of the school of James Wright. I adore James Wright, but I couldn’t pretend to the coherent voice I heard in him – which might well be a misreading, by the way. I had to learn to allow for interruptions and shifts of gear. And in terms of individual poets – Stanley Plumly and Bill [William] Matthews, Sandra McPherson, Louise Glück and Donald Justice were on the faculty when I was there. I learned from all of them, but as to “voice,” I’m afraid it was rather clumsily patched together.

AH: A voice has to be.   Elizabeth Bishop resonates with me, but I could never write like her. I read a lot of different materials right across the board, outside of poetry. I read fiction. I read non-fiction. You read science.

LG:     Yes, I far as I can – or I try to persuade scientists to talk to me. There is a great kinship between what we do as poets, and what my friends the research physiologists do.   There are the combinations you were describing earlier of intuition and pragmatics and technique – and being open to being discovered by one’s own mistakes. This is what experimental models do. The object of study is this exquisite, complex, brilliant language of the body, which constitutes us but is also beyond us. The devotion to something that is already articulate, that we are simply trying to catch on to, that’s what joins the two enterprises. I worship the laboratory scientists.

AH:     I’m interested in writing on the brain and the brain/body interaction. It’s something I am trying to read more about. I feel that poetry is also writing about this in another language.

LG:     We know better than to talk about inside and out, or body and mind, yet there’s a reason we default to such dualisms. All we can hope to access are these small portals. The sixteenth and seventeenth century poets I study believed that both science and poetry were acts of praise. A tribute to creation.

AH:     In a wonderful way, that leads into ‘And Sometimes’ which is the opening poem in Prodigal, the selection you have made of your own poems from 1976-2014 which will be the focus of this conversation. Many of the poems we’ll be talking about walk with darkness. I’ll begin, though, with one of the poems from the ‘New Poems’ section at the front of the book.   ‘And Sometimes’ continues right after this title

    thank heaven, the question includes
                 a layer
           of real delight.

The poem contrasts a chimp, who goes straight for the solution within an experiment, with a human child who continues to follow a more ritualized, multi-stage taught route to “this happy accession of/ able-to-make-the-whole-thing-work”, ignoring the shortcut. You go to asking how we find meaning in our lives, and suggest that it derives from different ways of “letting the outside in” – which may include the forms, and rituals, of poetry, and art. You end:

         Not
         a single path but many,
   the forms of devotion, I mean.

   The part that makes us human more
                 elusive
         than we'd thought.

Could you say something about ‘And Sometimes’?

LG:     Certainly! For context, let me say that I have two very good friends and readers. One is the poet David Baker. One is my husband Steven. David had kindly looked at the manuscript of the new poems section in Prodigal and he said Linda, could we have something a little happier? And Steven said Could there be a little light? It was also Steven who told me about that particular experiment. It just seemed to me so joyfully to put us in our place.

AH:     Yes, the chimp could just take the lid off!

LG:     So much for the superiority of human cognition, right? There is a fabulous poem in Christian Wiman’s most recent book. ‘From a Window’ is actually written from a very bleak place within his own cancer diagnosis, “Incurable and unbelieving/ in any truth but the truth of grieving.” It begins with a visual misperception, and finds its way to a renewed embrace of the life that’s behind that misperception. In the end, this releases the self from the self: “that life is not the life of men./ And that is where the joy came in.” It’s a ravishing moment; it makes me weep. We are not the measure of the universe.

AH:     I practice Buddhist meditation, which is about dissolving the self. It brings relief to let go of who you are, and step beyond this narrow prism into the light which passes through it – as happens also at the end of ‘And Sometimes’.

LG:     It’s also about affection for our limits, true affection. Mastery is an insufficient value.

AH: When we were talking about limits, and Christian Wiman, I thought how, when my first husband was dying of cancer, in some ways, paradoxically, as a couple we were happier then we had ever been. Obviously not when he was in acute pain.   But simply, because we knew his illness was terminal, without discussing it, we got down to just enjoying being together in the day, in the moment, in the time that was good. There was this extraordinary happiness.   Falcon had a metatastic adenocarcinoma spreading everywhere – and yet a friend of mine said, I saw you two driving in the car and you looked like a pair of 20 year olds.   We were let go from all the complex life structures that we built around ourselves – and into simply being.

LG:     Oh that makes sense – it sounds like a great blessing.

AH:     It was. The strangest thing is that life, when it takes most away, sometimes also gives most back. Art can be a form of algebra that expresses that equation – because it’s unquantifiable in more straightforward terms.

LG: I think that is very wise. It says a lot about this whole dilemma of how can we find consolation, or how does poetry provide consolation in the midst of darkness.   It’s not by euphemizing or evading. On the contrary, it’s by engaging in such a way that somehow it won’t have been lost on us – and so much is lost on us.

AH: The earliest poems in Prodigal are from Fire in the Conservatory, published in 1982. The first poem ‘How Love, When It Has Been Acquired/ May Be Kept’, alludes to The Art of Courtly Love – De Arte Honeste Amandi – by Andreas Capellanus. It begins:

That was when the war was on, the one we felt good
to hate, so of course I thought he’d come from there.
It was June. The light grown long again.
She’d roll his chair to the window

and back. But no, you said, it was love.
They were getting it wrong.
A leg. A leg. An arm to the elbow.
Like the man who burned his daughter to get

good winds.

I know you are also a Renaissance scholar. Could you say something about the energy your work derives from refracting between past and present times, and in conversation with works made by other artists, often in visual media. It seems to me that this can form a means of gaining a purchase – a kind of coming in close, through coming in slant?

LG:     So if I follow the gist of your question, you’re asking about the route that takes me from a medieval handbook to a Vietnam era clinic to Agamemnon and Iphigenia? This is always a bit of a conundrum. If I let myself, I’d be constantly trailing tag lines of Shakespeare and Milton, and this has nothing to do with systematic thought or “bookishness” in the narrow sense. Quite the opposite. A chunk of something stuck in my heart or head insists on being allowed into the poem; it might as well be a stone through the window. It’s very like the ambush to my senses when I’m walking past the linden trees just east of SOAS: suddenly they’re in blossom, and that scent! That’s how bits of these poets and writers and painters and theatre-makers, who mean so much to me, it’s how they enter– it’s that quotidian. It’s like the smell of bread baking. It’s just another thing.

AH: Like a kind of loop that plays in your head almost. It’s not a matter of I’m going to sit myself in front of this picture and write something.

LG:     Now I’m going to be allusive. God forbid! But then, the question is to make sure there is enough of a talking voice around it that it’s convincing. That it feels ordinary, and everyday, instead of deliberately . . .

AH:     Imported.

LG:     Exactly. “The man who burned his daughter” is Agamemnon, but that particular section of the poem was based on something quite immediate. I was 21, my then partner had had back surgery, and I was visiting him in hospital. And in the hallway I passed a young couple: the man in wheelchair had lost an arm and both of his legs. All I could imagine, because we were in the midst of that horrible war, was that he had been terribly wounded in Vietnam. But no. He had metastatic cancer; the couple were newly married; they kept cutting off parts of his body in an effort to keep him alive. It broke my heart, and made me know my own utter incapacity. What would it mean to do things right in such circumstances? How do you love wisely when you’re terrified and very young? I started thinking about the bargains we try to make with fate. The trivial: I’ve lost my keys, please please please let me find them before I’m late for work. And the not trivial: I make the same panicked begging sounds when I’m praying for the well-being of one of my daughters. What am I thinking? Maybe if I offer the right thing in exchange, I can have some leverage here? It’s a human instinct, I suppose, when something of utmost importance is utterly beyond our control.

AH:     It’s a sort of gaining of imaginative agency.

LG:     The foundational human dynamics are not new. Others have known them before. Which gives us, well, not consolation exactly, but some small shelter against the descent into chaos – others have been here before.

AH:     And we can find our way through somehow. ‘Geometry’ is another of your earliest poems – spoken in the voice of a snowplow driver, which seems to enact a process of creative making, through its making visible of a specific, cold, snowy terrain, to which many of your poems about your family return. It begins:

What I like best about the snowplow is morning
then night, but anyway without sun.
I drive from town to old 16 and back again, wider.
The sound I make’s all mine, like the tunnel from the
                                           headlamps,
mine. First I plow with light and then with the plow
The best part closes up behind. I could tell you but I 
                                                won’t
how the farms separate, each one parked around a single
                                               light
for prowlers or company. The light that’s modern and
                                               blue
stops further out and sharper than the yellow kind.

Would you say something about ‘Geometry’ and its landscape?

LG:     Sure. The landscape is a very particular one in central Wisconsin. I wasn’t doing many persona poems at that point, but I guess I have always been attracted to what Stevens calls a mind of winter – that wanting to be rid of the clutter and noise of life with other humans.   I am not particularly proud of that impulse, but it’s one I have felt. It’s one I saw quite often in my father.

AH: It seemed to me it was also an artist’s poem. It’s talking about an artist taking a space in which to be alone and carve shapes.

LG: There’s the snow’s cleanliness – the white canvas.

AH: And the making lines in geometry. It is poem about form and beauty. It really seemed to be an artist’s manifesto.

LG: It also winds up being a kind of love letter to that landscape – the upper midwest in America. Settlement pattern there is very different than in Europe. The particular beauty of European settlement is village life with its intricate patterns and then the fields beyond. In vast stretches of America, white settlement followed the logic of government survey: square-mile sections carved out, north, south, east, west. As a child, of course, I had no sense of political geography. I chiefly remember being driven through darkness when we went to see my grandparents. My father’s notion of travel was: if we can’t get there by breakfast time, it’s not worth going, so we’d leave at four in the morning. Wisconsin farms in the darkness: a single yard light, and clustered around it the house, the barn, some animal sheds, a silo, and then the unpaved turnaround for tractors and cars. There is a rhythm to that visually, when you are driving on a country road. Darkness and then this gathering of light, and darkness within the gathering. That did seem to me really beautiful. So I suppose the poem is not entirely antisocial: it’s about that space where, family by family, people would make a light.

AH: It’s also about separation and relationship – because the seeing eye needs the separation to function. When you are in a farm, you can’t see the rhythm, the visual music of the passing in and out of light. It’s only when you are alone and separate that you can see.

LG: Yes, thank you! And it’s distance that allows us to see pattern, to take it in somatically.

AH: I love that poem.

LG:     I’m so glad! I have ambivalent feelings about that book. I mean – it was my first. I hadn’t found a way of lineating my poems. I hadn’t found a way of generating something whose rhythms, the rhythms I intended, were accessible to a reader. The subjects of those poems are still my subjects, but the prosody wasn’t there yet so I am of two minds, two hearts.

AH:     I’m glad you put the early poems in. Your second collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, from 1996, makes extensive use of the off-set tercets in which much of your work is realized, including ‘And Sometimes’. Among other things, it’s a collection about families, and a collection about harm. They sometimes join together – within the same family, and the same poem. The first poem, ‘For My Father, Who Would Rather Stay Home’, suggests a man who comes from, and is himself, a hard place. The three line form makes the relationship of the father to his surroundings, and the speaker’s relationship to him, appear to be both holding together, and coming apart. It begins:

  No deadfall in these woods of yours.
                 No
          hollowed-out trunks.

  No needy,
                unseemly
          hanging on, as puts

  a man with a chainsaw
                to shame.

Could you say something about how you came to use this three-line form within the poem, and more generally?

LG:     Absolutely. The tercet felt like a lifeline to me. I wasn’t imitating anything. I don’t know how much I had even read of William Carlos Williams at that point. His tercets are extremely different. I just basically messed around the way we play with clay, or in a sandbox. I messed around, and messed around, and then finally I thought, Oh this really helps. The tercets with their indents gave me a way to register syncopation, and the multiple tracks that I think consciousness is always going on. It was also a way of launching a sweeping trajectory of syntax without allowing it to look or feel like prose. It literally has to do with letting in light and air – white space – and also allows for the stop, and start, and stumble that seems to me to constitute consciousness.

AH:     When I was looking at the construction of your work, I saw these long shapes, but I didn’t feel crushed or oppressed by them. They were giving me space to take them in, and sort of live with them, and sit with them, and then move on a little bit, and it was really wonderful.

LG:     One thing that I love about long, dependent clauses is that I don’t really know where I am going when I’m inside them. I need to be rescued.  I’m walking in the dark, or I’m running forward in the dark, and I find that very very helpful – because then I am required to discover something, rather than paraphrasing something I think I already understand, or formulating some deliberate image, or analogy, which is deadly for me.

AH:     ‘For My Father, Who Would Rather Stay Home’, is seen from the point of view of the

  beggarly
        daughters,
  who haven’t struck your bargain

  with the pure hard edge
        of luck.

Would you like to say something about choosing to identify this perspective, and also the larger concept of “luck”, which is something many of your poems investigate?

LG: I think that is a very good question. It’s not something I have thought of from that angle. My first impulse is to say well, it’s hard luck that I mostly mean to be trying to accommodate in my vision of the world – and the profound injustice of it all, the arbitrariness: Why is one child born deprived of oxygen? Why is one child born to a mother who is starving or drug-addicted, while someone else sails through with every advantage in the world? Why is someone who works hard all his life suddenly deprived of a pension because some business goes bust? And this is not to mention the spectacles of larger violence on every side. This is the problem that all theologies have tried to manage – to build into some form of meaning. ‘Luck’ is a shorthand, of course. Its very insufficiency as a shorthand is part of the point.

AH: It’s such a scary word. You can be lucky at the game tables – or you might lose everything. ‘Luck’ is the knife-edge word. It can tip you into desolation.   It has this bright sparkle of hope. This my lucky token. This is my lucky Shamrock. It’s very a plain word, – but it holds both sides the coin.

LG: Even the brighter side is one that seems actually rather dark to me because of the helplessness it proposes – the disconnect between one thing and another is really hard to bear as we make our way through the world.

AH: Some people have had a relatively protected experience of life. It doesn’t occur to them what it might be like for everybody else.   If you are not of that protected group, you have a clear idea of what goes wrong. Right now, some children are dying of dirty water, of malaria, while other children are buying drinks from vending machines. How do we square that?

Another kind of desperately hard ‘luck’ is witnessed in ‘Safe’ dedicated to “K.M.S. 1948-1986”. ‘Safe’ addresses the larger topic of violence through the specific example of a friend, who died after an intruder broke into her house and attacked her murderously. You have previously written “When poetry taps and exploits the charged realms of human extremity and public opinion, without taking on the real burden of history and choice, it willy-nilly evolves a politics of its own, and one that can only be called exploitative.” It seems to me that you not only avoided that danger here, but also managed to make a form of language which can hold deep horror – in a way that enables the reader to see it, without flinching away. You write about the hurt, by imagining undoing it:

                The broken
       point of the kitchen knife – and here

  let the surgeon be gentle – removed and the skull
                  knit closed
     and the blood lifted out of the carpet and washed

  from the stairs. And the nineteen-year-old burglar 
                                         returned
                  to the cradle

The long, almost languorous sentence structure, the ‘rests’ generated by the line-breaks, and repeated use of “and’, brings a quality of ceremony and graciousness to the devastating depiction, that enables us absorb it, in a way which a more violent wording might not have. Your words are also suffused with evident love for the attacked woman – which only makes her fate more personal, as each act of violence is to those impacted by it. Could you say something about how you came to write ‘Safe’?

LG: First of all – let me say a little more about that danger, the danger of exploiting tragedy, and harm that comes to others especially – however close we may be to them. I think it is very important to write with a continual awareness of that danger. Especially when I am writing about such subjects, I am walking a razor’s edge. If I go an inch in either direction, I am trespassing. I came to write ‘Safe’ because a friend of mine was murdered. We had been in graduate school together. The house in which she was attacked was one she was living in alone because her marriage had recently ended. To her a house meant a lot by way of psychological safety – to own one, to have it painted, to put her things in it, to cook there. Horribly ironically – to invest in good kitchenware, including a good set of knives. I mean it’s just unbearable, and this was a complex poem to write. I didn’t deliberately plan, I will go in and reverse time here, but I didn’t want simply to narrate the story – what would be the point? The point isn’t the story. One has to feel first and foremost the voice telling it – and the voice’s need to say these words, to speak these words, to write these words. That kind of wish – contrary to fact – to be able to undo the harm was a way forward. It also then enabled me to select certain details and to leave out many, many others. The leaving out was the crucial part. So I had that first section – the essence gives the basics of my friend’s death. But that wasn’t the poem. I think this was one of the earliest poems I wrote in sections, of the sort where the sections are not schematic. They are actually ways of trying to continue to feel my way through the challenge.

AH: As a reader, the great gift was the humanity. You dis-assembled her – and she re-emerged whole. That was the achievement of ‘Safe’ – that you witnessed to what your friend had been through and what came back was her whole self, her humanity, her life. By acknowledging her death, you could lay it on the page, and let her rise up.

LG: It so happened that my first child was very young at the time, and my friend Karin had sent her a gift of a silver spoon – a highly symbolic gift. Karin did not have it easy in life. It was hard for her to afford such a gift – which it made it all the more meaningful. The side that actually had to remain unspoken in this poem is that the young man who knifed her to death had been apparently stalking her. I fibbed. He wasn’t there to steal anything, he just wanted to cut her apart. I know nothing about him. I never knew his name. I didn’t go to the trial, none of that. But it made me think about that razor edge of luck — and I don’t want to trivialise it in some awful platitudinous way – the sort of ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ The woman in the bedroom, the boy on the stairs. There are imbedded, complex, heart-breaking stories that are part of this event that I will never know anything about.

AH: We were talking about people who had more straightforward lives and people who have less straightforward lives. As poets, we have to narrate the whole spectrum. We can’t say we will leave this difficult area in prison, or bury it underneath the earth with a nice gravestone.   We can’t do that.   We need to draw it into the whole story – because if we are also talking about a more equal distribution of resources, we have to know there is a kind of payback.  If you withhold mental health care, if you withhold education, if you withhold adequate housing, if you withhold adequate employment opportunities to generations of people – it will produce casualties.

LG: I was thinking a lot about such things. Nobody wants to hear a sermon, and I don’t know the solutions, I have nothing more than common wisdom and common feeling to offer.

AH: I think by witnessing to the murder, saying this spiritually beautiful person was alive, and then ceased to be alive, through a violent act, you did your work. You showed what lies under the ‘woman murdered’ headline with a blurry picture and one paragraph of story. That’s the work the poem performs. It’s an almost impossible subject to write about – to tread the line, to find the line – and it seemed to me you did it.

LG:     It was as important to me to convey the part where she actually didn’t die immediately. I wanted to convey what the paramedics reported to her family, that when they arrived, she couldn’t remember the attack but was worried about the blood on the stairs, was trying to clean it – and herself all covered in blood. That sense that the decencies of housekeeping were somehow something to hold onto.

AH: That was her identity. It was her sense of self. She was claiming herself notwithstanding her injury. I think in extreme trauma the brain can sometimes misinform the individual about what has happened – whether it is on the battlefield or in a traffic accident. It’s only after that connections get made again. There is a sort of mercy there. The subject of the next poem I wanted to ask you about is no less essential. This same collection also contains ‘For the Taking’. “Luck” is again at issue in this poem about the sexual abuse of a young child. You describe your sister’s “damp blond curls”, and her “o-/bedience”, and then, with a shimmer of a nod to Nabokov’s Lolita, continue to:

              the peeling brown shoulders–
              she was always
      a child of the sun. . .This

  was his sweet piece of luck, his
                find,
          his renewable turn-on,

  and my brown and golden sister and eight
               and a half
          took to hating her body and cried

  in her bath, and this was years,
               my bad uncle did it
          for years, in the back of the car,

   in the basement where he kept his guns,
               and we
           who could have saved her, who knew

    what it was in the best of time
               to cross
           the bridge of shame, from the body un-

    encumbered to the body on the
                block,
           we would be somewhere mowing the lawn

   or basting the spareribs right
               outside, and – how
           many times have you heard this? – we

  were deaf and blind
              and have
           ever since required of her that she

  take care of us, and she has,
              and here’s
           the worst, she does it for love.

In the UK at least, the widespread nature of the sexual abuse of children was only beginning to be known during the 1990s. You were giving witness to a very difficult, and tragic, family experience, relatively early on in your career as a poet. I wondered if this was an important thing for you to do creatively, as well as politically, and personally?

LG:     This was a poem that truly ambushed me. I sincerely thought I was simply writing about my sister and how lovely she was as a child. It’s a subject I’ve returned to recently. My sister died five years ago and the poem you have seen recently (‘Love Poem’ in The New Yorker) returns to those curls. The reason I must have been writing it in the first instance, that poem I thought I was writing so long ago, is because I’d failed to see it at the time, her loveliness. She was my little sister. She didn’t sit up straight. She was messy. I couldn’t stand it. So at first the poem was an attempt to recover joy in her loveliness – to properly take it in for the first time in my life – but very very quickly the act of describing began to feel predatory. There’s a dangerous terrain between appreciating the particular beauty of children and preying upon it. And for all our talk, all our efforts at enforcement, I don’t believe we have ever come fully to terms with this. We speak as though there were two worlds: the world of paedophiles and the world of others, the good people, utterly distinct. In fact, I think one of the things that humans find so lovely about young children is precisely their ignorance of their own beauty: a sort of inadvertency, the not-yet-risen-to-consciousness aspect. It’s enchanting, and not just to villains. And it is flatly not to be messed with.

When I wrote “For the Taking,” feminist film criticism had begun to establish a vocabulary about the violence of the male gaze, but the poem didn’t come to me through that lens. It didn’t live in the realm of ideology, or intellection. It hit me from behind, or within, the subject of my sister’s sexual abuse. I asked her permission before I published the poem, but what was she supposed to say? Silence – the enforced silence and the protecting everybody’s feelings – is part of the vicious damage that child abuse visits upon humans. It’s part of the cycle. Speaking out was important, is important, as you know in your own work. And still. To ask her permission was another way of making my sister responsible. More of the dreadful cycle. What the poem tries to acknowledge is the alchemy with which that beautiful child, and that beautiful woman, turned suffering into an aptitude for love. The fact that the poem could find its way to become tribute to her – that’s what finally allows me to tell myself it was ok to write it.

AH: As someone who was sexually abused in childhood, when the crime is witnessed in words, it becomes more possible for other people to acknowledge what has happened to them. Witness confers on the child who was subjected to the abuse, a kind of retrospective, and self-redemptive, agency. The patterns of grooming, and the abuses of power, implicit in facilitating the abuse – like your uncle taking your sister down to the basement where he kept his guns – become apparent. When the mechanisms by which the child was coerced and controlled are evident, then the impossibility of the child resisting become comprehensible. I resist ever using the word “victim” in that context – because that is actually a victimising act. I also resist “survivor” – because again that implies that you are always living in the aftermath of that experience, and whereas actually it is only one of the many events of your life.

LG:     It implies a tidiness and a wrapping up to the narrative.

AH:     Every life has many defining actions, and experiences. For me, aside from the sexual abuse in childhood, they include being able to love, being able to be intellectually interested and committed, being able to form relationships. Those were some of your sister’s other defining experiences, too. It seems to me that when we ‘say the difficult thing’, we can also then begin to say the whole thing. ‘For the Taking’ is a stunning poem. It works because it gives witness – but it also gives agency. And it doesn’t skimp on the crime. The physical actions of the mowing and the basting, cited earlier, carry the searing repetitions of sustained sexual abuse in childhood, without giving any details that would arouse a paedophile. As someone with this history, this reticence is crucial. Was this something to which you also gave consideration?

LG: Thank you for that reading — the “mowing the lawn//or basting the spareribs” – I hadn’t thought about their power to suggest somatic intrusion, to tell the truth. Certainly the need for reticence-with-clarity was something I felt throughout. But that pairing, well, it’s an example of how poems stumble toward themselves. Because the abuse was so dreadfully prolonged – it was years and years – and would happen most often when the family was together for holidays, I had inadvertently conflated seasons: at one point I had us mowing the lawn and basting the turkey, which would have made it another season altogether. So I had to do a little fixing. That’s the scotch-tape-and-scissors part of making poems.

AH: Also, just organising your materials – so they can move in a clear stream towards your reader.  All the rape in is there. It suggested to me an almost somatic transfer of knowledge between your sister and yourself – an unspoken somatic transfer – which I think can happen. Like how trees communicate by their roots, I think sometimes in families, people who are close to each other almost can absorb understanding from each other, without having to get out the pencil and draw the diagram. You empathetically absorb it – and that also acts as a tempering device for how you write about it. It gives you an unconscious frame of protecting the person you absorb the information from. That was how it came to me anyway.

LG:     I love that reading.

AH:     You write about your sister again in ‘Salt’, which starts out with your father sending her to bed with a broken collar bone, but then moves into the harshness of his own childhood, and specifically when he was taken, aged 6, by his tough, Norwegian father “Ole (like ‘holy’// without the h)”, in Ole’s capacity as JP, to cut down a body after a botched suicide.

Rather in the way that water condenses on a colder surface, you precipitate the mental pain leading to the suicide, and refracting out from it, into the description of how the subject “thrashed// for a while, and the northeast wall of the barn –/ the near wall –/ was everywhere harrows and scythes.” As before, the language is mellifluous and decorous, addressing the reader in the second person, in long, carefully punctuated sentences, and using predominantly formal language, but then just occasionally dropping us down a mineshaft into the every day, to evoke the enduring impact of the scene on your father aged 6:

  It wasn’t – I hope you can understand –
                 the
          blood or the blackening face,

  as fearful as those were to a boy, that, forty
                 years later,
          had drowned our days in whiskey and dis-

  gust; it was just that the world had no
                savor left
          once life with the old man was

  gone. It’s common as dirt, the story
               of expulsion:
          once in the father’s fair

  lost field, even the cycles of darkness cohered.
                Arvid swinging
          in the granular light, Ole as solid

  as heartwood, and tall...

Could you say something about the thought behind this poem – relative to the long burn of trauma?

LG:     I suppose it is also about, once again, the long burn of love. My father was a difficult man. He was an alcoholic. Nowadays we would say he clearly suffered from chemical depression. His anger was frightening. He was also marvellous. He was a real presence, as his father had been. That was true for a whole extended family.   My sister and I went off to University, had our families late – but the other side of the family did things properly. They got married early, had children and grandchildren, lots of boys. I have seen those sons of cousins worship at my father’s feet. There was an energy there when he was around.  He had wherewithal.  He had a shop full of lathes and drills and table saws and tools of every imaginable sort, some of them homemade. With the boys, he had a lot of patience. They would come with whatever needed fixing: their trucks, their chainsaws, a part for the sink. But this was all after he’d retired. Before that was really a life in exile from the life he loved – which was his life on the farm. There were six children…

AH:     Not enough farm to go around?

LG:     Exactly. He was born in 1912. During the depression, when the entire world seemed to be falling apart, that farm sustained a lot of people. My grandfather was formidable – I think he seemed to anchor the world. Even taking a child to see this aftermath of suicide – which was worse than my grandfather, to be fair, had expected – the sense was ‘better for him to see the world as it is early’.

AH: There is a truthfulness to it.

LG: We might call it trauma, but that’s never a word my father would have used. He was actually proud of his father for doing that. He was proud of himself for having taken it.

AH: He stepped up to the mark, even if the mark marked him.

LG: My mother suffered because of the drink and the anger – but not because he was ever vicious to her or us. He never harmed us ever. What has come to define him for me is the love he felt for his parents, and their way of life. It wasn’t that he was indifferent to us. I think his afterlife was just that. It was a kind of afterlife – it was a slightly lesser life.

AH: If you are out in the elements, there is almost a benediction – if you are someone who enjoys that expansive life, that very acute link to the changing seasons –

LG:     And physical work.

AH:     That sense of potency. You put crops into the land and – weather permitting – they come up and become food.   We were wired to do that.  Admittedly, many of us have no desire to now.   I think for some, though, it’s a calling. Why do people keep farming with very poor returns?   With the isolation, all those things? It answers to a deep need.

LG: In the part of the country where members of my family still farm, if a family does farm, it has to be way we write poetry. They have to have day jobs. They plow at night. You see the tractors with their headlights in the field. And no health benefits unless they come with the day job.

AH: With the National Health in the UK, we forget how exposed life can be.

LG: Farming that way is what one does for love now.

AH: What you do for love is what keeps your spirit alight. I think lots of people have that double-self. Better to have a double self than an extinguished self.

LG:     And here’s that word again, lucky – we are the blessed of the earth to have leeway for such a thing.

AH: I was talking to a tuk-tuk driver in India around 2000. There were women outside our hotel, all day in the pre-monsoon sun, breaking stones that go on railroads. I said This really makes me feel sad. He said it shouldn’t. That was how he afforded his tuk- tuk. He said Those women are buying their children food and education. For them it’s a really good thing.

For all this darkness, you are also a poet of light. ‘Salt’ records your sister’s pleasure in using the hammock as a swing, before she broke her collar bone.  ‘Bleedthrough’, takes as its starting point a Helen Frankenthaler’s painting (‘Sunset Corner’), with its layered and saturated cohesion of reds, within a framing of black. The poem responds in waves to an explicitly female sense of self – that “world of women with its four fleshed walls/ of love” – and questions how it speaks through and into art, but also how it makes art of the lived female life. Honouring your mother’s ability to “turn the most unlikely// raw materials to gladness”, you also acknowledge the fierce energy of fertility and menstruation – “the body/ in even its / flourishing seethes and cramps” – from which you move to the “labor-in-the-flesh” of painting – “the wash/ of acrylic, / the retinal flare”.

The closing image in ‘Bleedthrough’ is of a “just pubescent” girl washing out cloth stained with what appears to be blood, and suggests that our ability to see, to make art, to have a sense of identity, all derive from the totality of our life-experiences:

         The fretted cloth on the third or fourth rinsing goes

  yellow, goes brown, the young
                girl’s hands
         – she’s just pubescent – ache

  with cold. Some parts –
                the red’s
         bare memory now – were never bad. The sound

  of the water, for instance, the smell,
                the rim
          of the stain that’s last to go.

Although it’s a homely image, I wondered whether it might be fair to understand within this a refraction of your own transmuting of life into art, and a reflection of the way that working with even the most difficult materials, and making them over into a secondary medium, can contain its own healing and reconciliation?   I’m thinking again of your recent ‘Love Poem’, in The New Yorker.

LG: I’m not from that generation of women poets who found it inherently compelling to write about menstruation But the beautifully saturated colours in the Helen Frankenthaler painting did make me think about my mother when she was growing up: there were no such things as disposable sanitary products; they used cloth which had to be washed. There is a way in which the body comes, the senses come, to claim things.

AH: Every woman has had to wash stained underwear.

LG: And deal with the sanitary pads.

AH: Yes! The giant, bulky things.

LG: I didn’t dislike that smell. I was in horror at the thought that someone else might smell it of course, but I rather liked it. I guess it’s just the blessing of the physical.  When you are trying to wash blood out of things, you have to use very, very cold water lest you set the stain, and the coldness hurts your hands. It’s not about anything else. It’s just itself.

AH: It’s wonderful.

LG: At some point in my life I’m going to write an ode to lochia.

AH: That would be a really strong project. I think also, in a way blood is our ink, the ink our bodies make. It’s what literally connects all our parts. It’s the liquid in which we write the experience of our lives internally, but is made manifest externally – either through trauma, or through this natural process of menstruation. It can feel very delicate to approach – trying to reclaim a bodily part of ourselves, that is symbolic of our fertility – of our still livingness – of our aliveness, so we can write into our larger place of being. It’s a mysterious poem – but it’s also an anchored poem, in the physical self.

LG:     And maybe it’s just that very particular combination of centring experiences.

AH: Also, as you say, just thinking about that sense that when you wash something – whatever the cause of the stain – you are transposing it, you are creating a ritual of transformation to arrive in another place. In the same way, when we make art, we are also engaging in a sustained ritual of transformation that takes us to another place, that engages this other material – but also in some ways releases us from it so we get that distance which allows us to make and to invent rather than just be a kind of straight newspaper reporter.

LG:     That is very well put.

AH:  Thank you. ‘Still Life’ closes Prodigal.   Structured as couplets, the poem moves through deaths further afield – photographed in Qaa, and in Krakow during World War II – to a father dying from cancer. You allude in the final section to images derived from still lives, known in French as ‘nature morte’, whereby the marks of beginning death – “The lemon,/ for example, where the knife has been;” are what enable us paradoxically to recognize the “luminescent heart” of life. The poem, and the collection, end:

  I see you in the mirror every morning

  where you wait for me.   The linen,
        Father, lemon, knife,

        the pewter with its lovely
  reluctance to shine. As though

  the given world had given us
        a second chance.

Would you like to say something about this ending?

LG: I come back again and again to writing to and about my father – when he was alive, we didn’t have a sufficient language together. I was more or less useless in his world. He never gave me that impression, never said such a thing, but all the things he did in the world, I just no good at. I was sickly. I was bookish. If I ventured into the garden, I succumbed to hay fever. Useless. And later, I was simply flailing about, trying to find a life of my own –

AH: That was so different from anyone your family had yet made?

LG: Different, yes. I never had the wherewithal or the presence of mind to ask him more about his life. When my father was older we – my husband and I and our two children – would visit my parents twice a year. Once in the summer, and once at Christmas.   Each time we left — car packed to the gills, kids in their car seats, a mountain of snow on either side of the drive at Christmas time or summer heat and the corn getting high — I remember looking back, my parents on the porch outside the kitchen waving goodbye to us, and I would be seized with grief. We never found a way of being together, my father and I, so every time I left and knew it was that much closer to the end, I was simply seized with grief. I haven’t felt that way about any other loss. I suppose I keep trying to find my way to him by writing.

AH: He lives through your words, for us. He is a very powerful presence. While you don’t deny his complexity – you allow it with a sort of generosity. You allow it its strength, through your own tenderness and compassion. Your father’s seems to be a life that is very valuable to be able to speak of at firsthand. These complex male lives, which are not spoken by themselves beyond their circle, can be otherwise lives that people don’t have imaginative access to, even though they are lived by millions of people. I think it’s a really meaningful project, and a deep creative spur. It is a wonderful place to end the collection – with that sense of him appearing to you in the mirror. That sense of his presence, which is present in your own reflection.   Thank you so much Linda Gregerson.

Photograph of Linda Gregerson by Nina Subin

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014 (Mariner Books, 2015)
The Selvage (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)
The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996)
Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon Gate Press, 1982)

Prose

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2001)
The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

LGProdigal


	


	
	






	
	

		
“I would like this book to show people some of the many ways you can f**k with gender rather than always being f**ked over by it” : Dean Atta speaks with Alice Hiller about growing up Black and queer and coming out to yourself, and the world, in feathery, rasor sharp, high-heeled drag in The Black Flamingo.
	


	

		
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Sometimes I read a book which will change lives.   The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta is one.   A novel in verse, interspersed with stand-alone poems, it follows Michael, also Mikey, and Mike, and later The Black Flamingo, from his first hatching at the crack of the new millennium, through the multiple twists and turns, and fully-fledged transformations, that finally lead to his glorious coming out in full drag at university. Written for the YA market, but equally resonant for adult readers, it showcases the spare, intimate voice which led to Dean Atta’s debut collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, being shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, and saw him named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday. Dean’s poems have been featured widely on radio and tv, as well as on social media, which he works with as powerful channel of communication, using his facebook page to be open about intermittent negotiations with depression, as well as his writing, and performing, and political activism. The Black Flamingo is already picking up rave reviews and fan letters. As the bi-queer mum of an adult queer son, who rocks a mean line in drag himself, I connected with The Black Flamingo at many levels, and valued being able to ask Dean how the project came together and what his intentions were in writing a queer coming of age story that begins in very early childhood and encompasses the black British experience. We also discussed being emotionally truthful, how it felt to speak to a YA readership, at a potentially key moment in their lives – and whether a gender-liberated identity is possible.


AH: There is a scene about three quarters of the way through The Black Flamingo when your teen narrator, Michael, is asked in a barbershop, what he writes about. He replies:


I don’t say Coming out as gay.

I don’t say Sleeping with men.

I say ‘Identity and stuff.’


He doesn’t ask me anything else.


Have you sometimes felt that Michael’s story, of growing up Black-Greek-Cypriot-British, and finding and claiming a Drag identity, is one that people have resisted, or felt uncomfortable, about hearing?   If so, did this contribute to your impulse to write?


BedDA: I judged it in terms of Michael’s feelings of comfort and safety with whomever he is talking to. There is an earlier part of the book when Michael takes his time to figure out if he wants to tell his school friend Daisy that he is gay. I think I come from the school of thought that you’re sexuality is not necessarily everyone’s business, and it’s up to each person to decide if they want to come out and who they want to come out to. Coming out isn’t something you just do once and it’s over and done with. Michael finds himself coming out over and over again. By this point in the book Michael has come out to many people including his extremely supportive mother. I wanted to show him having lots of positive coming out experiences, throughout the book. However, the barbershop isn’t a place I could in good conscience locate one of these positive coming out moments. I would not feel comfortable to talk about my sexuality in a barbershop. There’s a lot said in barbershops that makes them feel unsafe in many ways.


AH: You begin, in the Prologue:


IMG_1639


Throughout, your narrative combines teenage and child selves, and flamingo and human selves. Was it a challenge to create a structure to hold so many intertwining strands? How did you set about it?


DA: Everything about writing this book was a challenge. The only easy part was getting the publishing deal because I didn’t do that, my agent Becky Thomas did. Once I was under contract to write the book the logistics of writing a verse-novel immediately became very daunting. I was very unsure how I was going to pull it off. The flamingo metaphor was central to the book and had to appear from the beginning and so the idea of the egg came to me quite early. There’s repetition of eggs, feathers and flight imagery throughout the book. Some were written into the very first draft of the book but many were added when I was redrafting. I initially wrote the whole book with Michael as a teenager starting when he sees The Black Flamingo when he’s on holiday in Cyprus, with all the earlier childhood stuff in flashbacks. However my editor Polly Lyall-Grant suggested that we could start with his early childhood and tell it chronologically. When I had moved everything into a chronological sequence we found it flowed much better as a story.


AH: The Black Flamingo is told in the first person, beginning with Michael’s parallel egg and millennium births, and his human parents’ separation.  It then cuts straight to his sixth birthday – for which he has asked for a Barbie. Michael’s words have complete clarity and believability, which comes across compellingly when you perform them. I wondered if you were you interested in capturing the voice of early childhood, for personal as well as political reasons? The early ‘chapters’ have great titles – ‘Barbies and Belonging’, ‘Sandcastles’.


DA: Michael’s childhood was initially written from the perspective of a teenager looking back knowingly on these younger memories. However when we changed this to have Michael’s narration start at six years old and age through the book I had to go back and rework these scenes to be more naive and less knowing. Capturing the voice of a six, seven, eight year old was really fun in terms of limiting the vocabulary and knowledge of the narrator without losing any of the emotional truth or poignancy of the poems. I had to take care not to put adult intentions, motivations or interpretations onto the actions of Michael in his childhood.


AH: At a time when education about identity and orientation is being challenged in some schools, did you feel that giving witness to the formation and articulation of a queer identity from when it starts to have consciousness of itself, was an important act, politically?  Fierce


 


DA: It’s an authentic story that is similar to my own in many ways so it just felt like I was telling the truth. In the sense that there was an emotional truth to the book, even though it is a work of fiction. It can be viewed as a political statement but it was just the best way to tell Michael’s story. Meeting Michael as a child makes the story somewhat similar a firework with a long fuse; a slow burn and big bang. What was most important for me about writing this book is that I wanted it to be full of love and optimism, I wanted Michael to have a loving family and friends that he could fall back on when he encountered more hostile and negative forces in the world.


AH: I read The Black Flamingo as bi-queer woman, and the mother of a queer adult son. It is incredibly moving, and totally gripping, partly because Michael/Mike and his mum are so warm, and human and believable, and involving. It is also really powerful because of the ways it shows his identity forming itself, relative to the world in which he moves, and the friendships he makes – and the challenges he faces through school, and then into university. It’s been published by Hodder Children’s Books, and is aimed at YA readers. I wondered what led you and your publishers to position it in this way? Your debut, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, was an adult publication. The Black Flamingo felt to me like a book I will be giving to both adults, and teenagers.


KissDA: Polly at Hodder is a children’s book editor so Young Adult fiction was the only option if I was to publish with her. I also had interest from a poetry publisher to do The Black Flamingo as a straightforward poetry collection and a non-fiction editor at another publisher to rewrite it as a memoir but I wasn’t so interested in writing about myself, I wanted to try something else. So creating a character seemed more appealing to me and writing a verse-novel seemed like an exciting challenge. Polly gave me lots of editorial support along the way to make sure the story was appropriate for teenagers and I arranged a number of readings with school groups and university students whilst working on the book to check we were getting it right.


AH: Was there a reason for Michael to be born in 1999, which I believe makes him a little younger than you are?


DA: Michael is much younger than me, I was born in 1984. I was sure that I didn’t want to make the book a throwback to the 90s and noughties. I wanted to use contemporary references and deal with the concerns of teenagers today. I wanted Michael to be a teenager today, so I worked backwards from there to pick his year of birth. Some pop culture references got confusing because certain movies have been remade from the 80s and 90s, and some music artists have been around for ages so I had to ask myself, Which version of the movie would Michael have seen and would he actually be into that singer or is that just my own childhood seeping out through him?


How to Come Out 1AH:  Your text combines the ongoing narrative of the novel-in-verse with shorter inset poems, laid out on lightly lined pages, as if taken from a notebook, and text messages in rectangular bubbles. Was it important to you to embrace multiple forms of typography, as well as different forms of poetry-making, within the project to create a more open, possible feeing?


DA: I just wrote the words. In some cases I specified that this would be written in his notebook or this would be on a mobile phone screen. But the design elements of the book are down to the designer Alice Duggan and illustrator Anshika Khullar. It turned out even more beautiful than I could have imagined.


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AH: Anshika Khullar’s graphics and layout – with its flowing illustrations all over the pages of flamingos, and seagulls, and drag queens, and feathers, and aeroplanes, and stars, and landscape features – is integral to the way the text performs itself. How did your collaboration come about, and what did it feel like to work together? When did Anshika come on board?


DA: We didn’t collaborate directly, Anshika was picked by my publisher on the strength of their work on Instagram. I was focused on writing the words. They were sent a brief for designing the cover before the book was even written. We were working simultaneously on the insides but never met or communicated directly, it went via Polly and Alice. Our publisher had a big summer party and this was the first time all four of us were together. This was after a year of working on the book. By this point the it had already been sent off to the printers.


AH: Malika Booker was another creative force within The Black Flamingo’s realisation. Could you say something about her role? I know you go back a long way with her through Malika’s Kitchen.


DA:   Malika Booker spent a few days working on it towards the end. She spent a day reading and making notes on the manuscript, then we had a meeting where we discussed her feedback. I took a day or two to digest it all and then we had a follow up phone call so I could ask her any further questions. Malika’s feedback was very tough but necessary. She was focused on the poetry. I had already put a lot of work into the manuscript and received countless rounds of notes from my editor and a proofreader on the storytelling, grammar and punctuation. Malika was looking for music, metaphor and striking images. She didn’t refrain from telling me all the places in the manuscript where these were lacking. To use Malika’s own words: “where it flatlines.” With her feedback I went back over the manuscript to revive the poetry. I believe that having Malika as a critical friend was crucial to the book working so well.


AH: Brighton, where Michael goes to university, also has a key role role. I know you wrote segments of the work on location by the sea. Did you already have connections with the city, and how did living there work out? The poem ‘On Brighton Beach’ speaks with great strength from and to the Greek Cypriot and Caribbean parts of Michael’s identity, as well as the traditional ‘island nation’ idea attached to Britain. It ends:


When

I need to breathe

I sit

on Brighton Beach.


I love to know

I live on an island.

I know my people

are island people.


DA: I think anyone who has lived or spent time by the sea will know how calming it is. I spent a week in Brighton at the University of Sussex working on the book but the bigger amount of time was spent in Southend-on-Sea at a place called Metal that hosts artist residencies. I went on three occasion for a total of six weeks. From my room at Metal I could see the sea/Thames Estuary and I found it so beautiful and calming. There is a part in The Black Flamingo when Michael goes to Brighton Beach when he needs to calm down after an upsetting incident. This has always been the case for me. If I can get out of the city and to the coast I’m happy. Brighton & Hove has the best of both worlds being a lively city and seaside resort. It’s a great place to be a student. I’m an alumni of the University of Sussex and they’ve continued to be really supportive of me and my books. I go back often to give poetry readings and workshops.


MasqueradeAH: Michael is Black-British-Greek-Cypriot, and part of The Black Flamingo is set in Cyprus, when he visits his mum’s family. He can follow Greek, but not speak it with any confidence. Not being able to speak your parent’s first language, as a result of growing up in the UK yourself, is something that Nat Linh Bolderston and Arjunan Manuelpillai are also exploring in their work. Was it a topic that you wanted to give space to?


DA: I have already touched on this in my collection I Am Nobody’s Nigger in the poem “Mother Tongue” but in The Black Flamingo I get to give more space to it throughout the story, when Michael visits his family in Cyprus, when he has a phone call with his grandfather, when he meets a Greek guy at university, you get so many occasions where he is at a loss for words.


AH: The Black Flamingo gives witness to the ways in which sections of UK society assault and challenge the Black British, and specifically Black British male identity, whether through unwarranted police harassment, or crassly stereotypical and inappropriate assumptions within daily life. Did you want to put that out there for teenagers, as well as adults, to think about, from within the empathetic point of view of the first person? This is a moment from just after Michael and Uncle B have been pulled over by the police for no reason whatsoever, driving to university, at the start of his first term. Uncle B says:


‘I always thought education

and money was going

to earn me respect,

but a successful black man

is a threat. Pulling me over

for driving a nice car.

This isn’t what I wanted

for your moving day

but this is what it’s like

to be black in this country

or anywhere in the world.

They interrupt our joy.

Our history. Our progress.

They know they can’t

stop us unless they kill us

but they can’t kill us all,

so you’re living your life

and suddenly interrupted

by white fear or suspicion.

They fear sharing anything.

Our success is a threat.’


DA: I guess there are many ways one could approach this, I like how Claudia Rankine in the book Citizen places the reader in the shoes of the black person experiencing microaggressions – small acts of racism – by addressing them as ‘you’ because it allows any reader to imagine themselves as that person in that moment. I didn’t necessarily write The Black Flamingo as a call for empathy, I think the ‘I’ first person point of view serves the book in that you can see how Michael realises things, and changes his mind about things, and sometimes misses things that might be obvious to the reader. He sometimes gets things wrong and misinterprets them. When Michael and his uncle have a run in with the police, Michael finds out for the first time that his uncle has quite strong views about the police and about white people, the reader finds this out at the same time as Michael. I wanted Michael to begin innocent and unencumbered and slowly learn what the world is really like. I think there are white people who still don’t realise these things, so they may begin reading the book as innocent as six-year-old Michael.


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AH: As someone who loves, and respects drag performances for their transformative, and radical possibilities, I found it really interesting to read how Michael puts his Black Drag Self together with the support of other members of the Drag Soc at university. Was that a narrative that you wanted to chart and share, at a practical level of wardrobe and make up, as well as through the larger philosophical questions that inform a performed gender-liberated identity? There’s a conversation with the Drag King David/Katy, who channels David Beckham, which goes as follows:


‘You don’t seem to want to change

much about yourself for the show,’

she says. ‘You want to keep the beard

but still pretend to be Beyoncé?’


‘That’s not it,’ I reply. ‘I don’t want to

pretend to be anyone, not any more.’


‘So who is The Black Flamingo?’

asks Katy, with genuine curiosity.


I reply ‘He is me, who I have been,

who I am, who I hope to become.

Someone fabulous, wild and strong.

With or without a costume on.’


DA: I think drag is about intention, it’s about character, it’s about costume and make up too. There’s just so much going on when you decide to do drag, whether you’re cis, trans or non-binary it will raise questions around gender identity, for yourself and for those who see you perform. I’m not sure if a gender-liberated identity can yet exist in a society like ours that is still so heavily gendered but I would like this book to show people some of the many ways you can fuck with gender rather than always being fucked over by it.


AH: It surely does that, Dean. I know you have been staging shows with other Black queer writers and performers in the run up to publication. Would you like to give us some other names to look out for?


DA: Keith Jarret, Lasana Shabazz, Caroline Teague, Olivia Klevorn, Travis Alabanza and Sea the Poet are all part of The Black Flamingo Cabaret. I hope in the future to include Adam Lowe, Remi Graves, Jay Bernard, Paula Varjack, Yrsa Daley-Ward and many many more Black queer writers and performers.


AH: Could you say something about the relationship between your own Black Flamingo drag act, and The Black Flamingo?


 DA: No. If people come to the The Black Flamingo Cabaret on 16th October at Kings Place in London, with Poet in the City, or when we do it again in the future, they can find out for themselves.


AH: Have you performed The Black Flamingo in drag to YA audiences yet? If so, how was it received?


 


Dean Atta - credit Thomas Sammut
Dean Atta by Thomas Sammut


DA: I haven’t done yet but mostly because I haven’t fancied getting into drag for a 9am school assembly. It takes at least an hour to do my make up and I’m not really a morning person.


AH: Point taken! Are there any live dates/ performances coming up, in or out of drag?


DA: The Black Flamingo Cabaret at Kings Place, Wednesday 16th October 7.30pm with Travis Alabanza and Sea Sharp Book here.


 


The Stories We Tell YA Panel at Waterloo Library, Thursday 17th October 6pm with Alex Wheatle, Patrice Lawrence and Alexandra Sheppard Book here. 


Being a Writer: Interactive Forum at Free Word, Wednesday 23rd October with Yomi Ṣode, Hannah Berry and Nathalie Teitler  Book here. 


YA Lit Day at Southbank Centre, Saturday 26th October 4.30pm with Sara Barnard, Yasmin Rahman and Nikesh Shukla  Book here. 


AH: Thank you Dean Atta. I’m really looking forward to your King’s Place show tomorrow – and many more beyond that.


You can buy The Black Flamingo here.


You can buy I Am Nobody’s Nigger here. 

	


	
	






	
	

		
‘I feel similarly when I’m watching a horror film to when I am reading poetry, like some kind of truth of the world is being exposed.’ Rachael Allen speaks with Alice Hiller on opening yourself to extreme states and alternative forms to reach, and make, the new in your work.
	


	

		
 


AUTHORThe first time I saw poet and editor Rachael Allen live a few years back, she performed her complex, vegan anthem, ‘Many Bird Roast.’ It’s a tumbling, shifting, exposing poem, that comes in “dandy and present”, and moves to a surreally different, but intensely truthful-feeling, place. Rachael gave it to the room with an energy which made the lines rise up like juggling balls, and then float, reverberatingly, as objects in a Dutch still life.   In our conversation, we discussed pulsing boundaries until they bend and melt, why the horror genre, and poetry, can each have the ability to expose truth, where human and animal rights meet, why it is important to be “serious” and “childlike” simultaneously – and avoiding getting hung up on the ‘right’ language around poetry. I was able to ask Rachael about the nameless, ambiguous female figures who slip in and out of Kingdomland, and she explained how the title poem, which came to her on a train journey, was her debut collection’s starting place, and the skeleton which gave form and direction to the material which took shape around it.  As founding editor of online journal tender with Sophie Collins, editor at the poetry press clinic, and Poetry Editor of Granta, it’s a real delight to be able to share her immensely thoughtful and rich words on ‘saying the difficult thing’ in her work with you.


AH: Can I begin by asking about your path into writing poems Rachael Allen?


RA: At 15 I read Modern Women Poets, an anthology edited by Deryn Rees Jones published by Bloodaxe, and it is one of the most important books in my life. I think I can say I started writing poems because of this book.


AH: Were there any particular poets, writers, or artists, who made this collection seem more possible to you? The historian, Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, is credited relative to the title of your final sequence, ‘Landscape for Dead Woman’, but several poems seem to be in conversation with her work?


RA: There are a huge number of visual artists, writers and filmmakers who informed the poetry my book. When I read the book now it seems to be just a mesh of influences. I love horror films, novels and stories, and there’s an untitled poem that’s a kind of homage to my favourite M.R. James’s story, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. Horror films in general are a big visual influence for me; the way certain images can initiate suspense and tension. This visual essay I read recently speaks to the aesthetic pleasure and beauty I find in horror films here. Horror films are epic to me in the emotions they can engender. I feel similarly when I’m watching a horror film to when I am reading poetry, like some kind of truth of the world is being exposed. But it was the visual artists I worked with during the writing of the book that feel like the most essential external influences. I collaborated with a number of artists over the course of writing the book, including Marie Jacotey, Guy Gormley, JocJonJosch, Oto Gillen and Vera Iliatova, and I wrote poems about sculptures by Anna Mahler. There are probably more poems indebted to my work with visual artists than not; it’s an incredibly generative process for me to work with other people.


kingdomlandAH: I know that Kingdomland was written over a number of years, and that some work appeared in your two previous collaborative publications,   Jolene and Nights of Poor Sleep. It nonetheless feels as if the collection was conceived as a whole, to be read consecutively, as well as through individual poems. Was that part of your intention?


RA: ‘Kingdomland’ is the oldest poem in the book, and I remember when I wrote it I felt a strong connection to the kind of landscape or world it felt like it was trying to access. I wrote the poem quickly on a train, and I remember worrying that I would lose whatever I’d been thinking at that time that gave me access to the landscape or world that the poem seemed to invent for itself, so I worked hard from that point to write poems almost fulfilling the world that I felt the poem was establishing. In my mind I see it as a kind of genealogical tree, and even if I wasn’t realizing it early on, I was writing poems that wanted to flesh out the universe that started with this poem. There was a quote by my favourite horror writer Thomas Ligotti that I very nearly used to open the collection, which is ‘The only value of this world lay in its power – at certain times – to suggest another world’, and while I struggle to articulate the thrust or overall feel or intention of the book, when I read that quote I remember attaching my idea of the book to it. I feel very close to that quote and the desire to create worlds.


AH: One of the elements which drew me to reading Kingdomland as a continuous experience, was the six lyrics which open and close the collection, and appear episodically between the poems – almost as a form of commentary. Resisting the convention that a poem is by default titled for its first line, they are each denoted in the contents by a forward slash and their page number. The first lyric begins:


Watch the forest burn

with granular heat.


A girl, large-eyed

pressure in a ditch


grips to a dank and

disordered root system


no tongue

flavoured camo


bathing in the black

and emergent pool.


It seemed to me that one of the things that these lyrics were doing, was requiring the reader to see the world from a ‘young female’ perspective of being vulnerable, and undefended. Would you be able to say something about your decisions around these lyrics, and your idea of the “girl” in Kingdomland?


RA: I’m not very good with structuring or appreciating white space, but while I was writing the collection I wanted it to be interrupted by fragments that would link both to each other and to the sequences in the book, something that would hold everything together. In Vera Iliatova’s paintings, who I worked with on a number of poems, girls appear silently in various landscapes – running through trees or swimming or sometimes with a more sinister aspect, like face down in water. I liked the idea that the collection could have people running through it, cropping up here and there, but sparsely, like in a nightmare. Disappearing for a bit then popping up again. I think that could probably be influenced by films as well. The fact that these girls are almost acting as untrustworthy guides through the poems speaks to the balance between some elements that dominate the book, I’ve realized since publishing, which are female characters oscillating between being sinister and coquettish, and whatever exists in-between.


AH: ‘Kingdomland’, the title poem, appears to sit on a fault line. It opens:


The dark village sits on the crooked hill.

There is a plot of impassable paths towards it,

impassable paths overcome with bees,

the stigma that bees bring.

There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive.

There is an impassable knowledge that your eyebrows bring.


While these images are of resistance, intimidation and obstruction, the sound orchestration – the gliding open vowels in particular – has a quality of propulsion, as if this dangerous journey can no longer be resisted.   Were you interested in exploring these conflicting energies within the collection, as well as this poem?


RA: This poem takes a lot from Lorca’s ‘Moon Poems’, and the poem has been previously published with a small epigraph line from Lorca, one of my favourite lines of poetry, which is ‘at the rise of the moon, bells fade out, and impassable paths appear’. What I love about these lines is they seem to offer an entrance into darkness and nocturnal thinking. I otherwise find it slightly hard to talk about this poem because it was one of those that almost just seems to drop into your head. I resist the kind of muse-struck mystical chat around poetry, because I think it can lead to a mode of thinking that tries to anti-intellectualize poetry, claiming that it needs to have come out of nowhere to be gifted some inexplicable brilliance, that it needs some kind of protective wide birth just in case we wreck it. I think this leads to people worrying they don’t have the ‘right’ language to talk about poetry, which I hear a lot from people who are more general readers. It can be really off putting. I work as an editor and can demystify a poem very quickly. But for all of that, this was one of those poems that just seemed to kind of write itself; which is the worst sentence ever, so I think I’d rather say I wrote it on a train from Cornwall, which is where I’m from and have conflicting feelings about, was probably the impetus for these feelings of resistance, intimidation and obstruction.


AH: The speaker of ‘Prawns of Joe’ (which responds to Selima Hill’s ‘Prawns de Jo’), seems to be haunted by a fatally injured female body – “burned in the oval/ purple and mystical”. She also expresses a light-filled moment which merges menace with possibility:


I hold her name like grit between my teeth

turning cartwheels by the edge of the stream.

The air is touchy, fiberglass,

summer streams through the trees like a long blonde hair.

I want to grab all the things that make me ashamed

and throw them from the bridge


Could you say something about these lines, within the poem more generally? They felt like a jumping off point to me, and a claiming of space at many levels.


RA: This poem is heavily indebted to Hill’s imagery in ‘Prawns de Jo’. I’ve spoken about Hill’s poem quite a bit, and Sophie Collins described the poem brilliantly as like a wound in the collection it’s taken from, Bunny, in Sophie’s extraordinary book Strange White Monkeys. So I think this poem could be seen as an exercise in being a fan, and how a poem – or a piece of art or music – can have a hold over you. I first read this poem when I was 15 in the book I mentioned earlier (Modern Women Poets), and now I think about it, I feel like the poem I wrote was perhaps me trying to exorcise certain feelings that poem held over me? It’s a frightening poem, and I think it frightened me when I first read it. It’s an incredibly tactile poem, talking about wigs and pubic hair and burned bodies. It struck me as not really a poem as I had recognised poems up until that point, and was probably the starting point for all my writing, that imagery, that shock factor and horror. I think this poem was written in the wake of all those feelings.


 AH: I remember Wayne Holloway Smith telling me, admiringly, that you were one of the most “hardcore vegan poets” he knew. Some of your poems – ‘Lunatic Urbaine’, ‘Beef Cubes’ amongst others – melt the violence done to animal bodies into the violence done (on occasion) to women’s bodies. It is as if you were making a double mirror which reflects and refracts both sets of attacks, and lets us see the actions and lack of agency underlying current power structures more clearly?


RA: I have spent a long time researching how humans have used animals historically. Animal rights are a big part of my personal ethics and the way I live my life, and there are a few important texts that helped me think these things through and write poems out of this. Carol J. Adams The Sexual Politics of Meat, Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital, Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and works by Gauri Maulekhi. In poems, Ariana Reines’ The Cow was huge for me, as I know it is for many other female writers. I was amazed at how a whole collection could dedicate itself to something as prominent (but ignored) as the abuse we see in animal agriculture every day, aligning that with violence towards women’s bodies in a way that still feels so incredibly radical, without making a metaphor of either, critiquing society through a critique of metaphor and damaging poetic structures, while utilising the power of them. She gives marginalised beings some kind of power in their margins. I think the way a society talks and thinks about animals speaks to how they treat other humans. This research into animal-human relationships has cemented my belief that, generally, the way we treat animals is barbaric. Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. I also know that not everyone has the room or time or want to consider this, and there are intersecting factors that make talking about eating and using animals tricky, and this was something I wanted to embed into the poems I wrote that try and think through human and non-human relationships, vegan ethics, and all the contradictions inherent in them.


AH: In ‘Lunatic Urbaine’ the voice reveals:


There’s nothing like a man

to serve you pain deep-seared

on a silver dish that rings

when you flick it, your table

gilded and festooned

with international meats,

cured and crusted, each

demanding its own sauce.

I ask to be taken home

but of course I am home,

so I turn my attention elsewhere.


Along with a complex complicity and vortex-like sense of powerlessness, I also found in the poem the kind of horror which some of Dorothea Tanning’s paintings of formal meals evoke. I wondered if you could say something about your table-setting here?


RA: I’m not much a fan of formality or formal settings but I do like aspects of ceremony and the performance inherent in formal settings, and I think that’s the thinking behind this table ceremony, it feels a little like a performance. And thank you so much for this comparison! Dorothea Tanning is one of my absolute favourite artists and writers. I adore her. She wrote this seriously underrated horror novel called Chasm that she spent 30 years writing, or something. I love her formal dining scenes, they are so claustrophobic, but also absolutely bizarre, and haunting and sinister. The way she twists what should be a homely or comforting scene is a draw to me. Tanning is a writer and artist who also knew the power of creating ‘horror’ in a scene. Some of her paintings haunt me. Maybe it’s easier to link to a few of my favourites? I think this one here.  The overbearing figure of the father! And the dog of course, which is in so many of her paintings. At her recent show at the Tate there was a small film where she talked about her dog as being descendent from a dog that was kept in a Tibetan monastery. That it held seeing powers.


AH: Speaking of visual artists, I wondered how your collaboration with Marie Jacotey came about, and what the process between you was? The first poem in the ‘Nights of Poor Sleep’ sequence – ‘Meeting you in the first place was great though’ – introduces the reader to very dark material, continuing after the title:


I am the girl with the chapped cheeks and blue bow

with my breasts taped down

dancing silently on my father’s lap

of course I wake with a start in the

new bedroom

painted blue

in a cacophonous pool of blood


the moon sways over me whitely

too quickly

bordered by trees

in the ghost town where I live


RA: I have been in touch with Marie since around 2013, when Sophie Collins and I published her in Tender, the journal we edit. But collaborating with her came through my work with the gallerist Hannah Barry at the Hannah Barry gallery, who saw an affinity in our work and put us forward for a collaborative commission for a magazine. I responded to Marie’s paintings, and she would paint in response to the poems I wrote. We made work for the publication, but afterwards, I didn’t stop writing poems that came from Marie’s drawings and paintings. I feel a deep connection with how her work presents female desire as intensely powerful and destructive, complicating agency and control, what it means to be submissive or to dominate. Her work objectifies bodies in a way that is subversive to me, and there is a kind of performative confessionalism in her work that I adore. It all feels like a performance in the absolute extremes of high emotion, it has taught me a lot.


rachael and marie


AH: In ‘Rodeo Fun on a Sunday’ (also within this sequence) the speaker refers to the man “who made me feel like I was falling from a cliff”, and afterwards to following their lover “around the larger parts of an unfamiliar forest”. Before this, ‘Monstrous Horses’ described “falling without help/down a steep white cliff”, and seeing a “forest so green/it is an optical illusion/ mounted on foam.” I wondered if you could say something about your use of landscape within Kingdomland?


RA: I remember a period of time spent trying to write these kind of staid landscape poems. As in, describing a hill I might be on top of or a sea I was looking out to, and the poetry was very trite. I was frustrated at one point that the landscapes in my poems, when written true to my thinking, feel like the set of a cartoon. When I have tried to replicate a real landscape I have always failed. I think I went through phase of kind of wanting to be like a proper nature poet, but I was just crap at it. Everything is ballooned and unreal. I think it was working on the Marie poems in their entirety that made me realise this could be a strength. I love cartoons, and I love the strange simplicity of a cartoon landscape, the limited colours and perspective, it feels naïve and knowing all once. I think to be serious and childlike at the same time is one of the most difficult things to do but is powerful and important. I was looking at some of the landscapes in Pingu the other day, and they were so melancholy and simple, and beautiful, surreal and quietly kind of epic. Edward Lear was one of the first poets I read when I was very young, and this probably made more of an impression than I realise. And my favourite poets, most recently, are poets who seem to have a child-like naivety in their poems, coupled with extraordinarily dark themes. Vasko Popa translated by Anne Pennington and Charles Simic, Sakutarō Hagiwara translated by Hiroaki Sato, Michael Earl Craig, Toon Tellegen translated by Judith Wilkinson.


AH: In my own work, I am interested in how trauma can result in inappropriately, or unwittingly, sexualized behaviours in adolescence. This inquiry also seems to be present in Kingdomland.   I’m thinking of “hot tight Penny” in ‘Beef Cubes’, and also the poem ‘You look unwell, my dear’ describing a young girl sauntering into a café, “lipstick on my teeth/ a pair of pants hanging around my arm/ little smacked-on stain”. The poem ends, in her voice, “I’m having problems with my vision, sort of short lines of blue/ perhaps becoming blinder”. Carolyn Steedman writes in Landscape for a Good Woman of the “refusal of a complicated psychology to those living in conditions of material distress” as being something her work seeks to challenge.


Carolyn Steedman’s work also writes “Part of the desire to reproduce oneself as a body, as an entity in the real world, lies in a conscious memory of someone approving that body” [p.95]. Your poem ‘The Indigo Field’ responds with compassion to the grief which can result from a termination, even when there may have been no other possible outcome for the pregnancy. Picking up the bees in ‘Kingdomland’, to give a suggestion of brutal, or forced sex, in the image of the bees “forgetting that they’re supposed to/ pollinate/ flowers instead of/ the roughly opened gland/of a mammal”, ‘The Indigo Field’ concludes:


You stood no chance

of being born

I tell myself, as the sea

cannibalises.

It manages to forgive itself

every day, without visions

of the baby

making her way towards me

across the indigo field.


Adjacent to violet, indigo is a darker shade than blue within the colour wheel, and I wondered if you would say something about how it entered this poem, and also how it relates to some of the other blues within your collection?


AH: Matthew Hollis who edits the poetry list at Faber counted up that the word I said most in the book was ‘blue’, which I think has no real significance other than thinking back to how I like to utilise cartoon imagery, as I also mention a ton of other colours, and think I just like and am attracted to very bright things. I am not (or at least I don’t think I am) synaesthetic, but when I am writing I can see some of the words and scenes of the writing as having a certain colour attached to them. Some poems feel yellow, some green, etc. I am attracted to visual works of art that utilise big blocks of colour to communicate emotion. I have felt physical symptoms when in front of some pieces of visual art, which is nothing too special, but they are usually pieces considered ‘abstract art’ with seemingly simple colour contrasts. There’s a big black painting by Rothko that made me feel nauseous when I first saw it. I had a panic attack once looking at Picasso paintings. I love Patrick Heron and Clyfford Still’s big stark colour paintings. Also Matisse’s swimming pool room in MOMA made me cry when I first saw it and makes me cry even when I think of it. It’s a small room that he made a frieze for when he was too old to make it down to the beach or swimming pool, and the frieze is made up of a collage of very basic and simple blue shapes of people jumping into water and water splashing. I don’t think this is doing much to answer your question, but I am led by the power that associations from colour can bring, so perhaps that’s where this indigo came from.


AH: I’ve also had that feeling of nausea rising from black paintings by Rothko, specifically in an exhibition in Tate Modern a few years back. For me, colour holds and triggers mood visually, as music does sonically.   ‘Seer’, which follows immediately after ‘The Indigo Field’, contrasts “The kind of dark you find inside a body./ The kind of darkness you find a body in.” Its landscape suggests a world in which we all of us, wittingly and unwittingly, can do violence to each other through our processes of interaction. ‘Seer’ ends:


The sky is wet with blood and solvent,

sinewy like a fish spine, illuminated

with stars like bone ends. If you climb

onto the roof and watch this weather

from the weather vane, to hold this

poor memory up, like a sacrifice

to the firmament, you will be exposed.


There’s a Jamesian suggestion of the impossibility of innocence, and I wondered if that was something that preoccupied you in these difficult times?


RA: I’m not sure if it directly preoccupies me, but I write about violence a lot, in various ways. The poem ‘Seer’ actually came about through another collaboration with the arts collective JocJonJosch. They’d sent me a photograph of a spooky old hotel – or at least that’s what it looked like to me – with sort of Blair Witch-esque scratches all in it, and what I thought was the word BLOOD sort of coming through in the background. It sounds a bit over the top, but I absolutely loved it, and wanted to make a poem about this hotel scene. Anyway, turns out I misread the word BLOOD and what was actually written was the word POTATO, which I think just proves we all see what we want to see.


AH: Keeping with the idea of blood, and of the idea of inscribed landscapes, ‘Banshee’, the penultimate poem, holds the room where the act which brought about the ‘Landscape for a Dead Woman’ finally becomes visible:


There’s the kitchen

where she was murdered

where she was delivered

into a weapon with force

like a small model forester

axing up plastic logs

in a red wooden clock


The reader is simultaneously drawn in, and exposed, by the miniaturisation of the scene, and the seemingly disarming, and tender, use of rhyme and sound patterning. Like a tiny mouthful, we swallow too fast to stop – in the way that the murder described must also have happened. We then learn that “her hair was a clotted/ pattern of wallpaper/ like a tapestry of rabbits”, and also that the murdered woman can no longer be thought of separate from what was done to her. ‘Banshee’ ends:


She dons now a grey sheet

the dusk colour of bonbons

to seem more like a haunting

light pools through the mock-glass

and the door she approaches

the red door approaches


Would you be able to say something about the creative decisions you made relative to the form and tone of this poem?


RA: I’d say this was definitely a cartoon poem, the miniaturization of it. As I was writing I could see the action being played out in my head, cartoon-ized. With a quite easy reason behind it, the poem thinks about a relatively difficult subject, and to write about it I had to create an aesthetic distance between myself and it, which was this framing.


AH: There is great impact for me in what you have achieved.   The “dusk colour of bonbons” has an alphabetised plangency – d, c, b but no a  – , as if this ending is also remembering its beginning, which helps us mourn and honour the living-ness of the life that was taken, without denying the crime that caused it to be forfeited.


As you mentioned, you are also someone who helps bring the work of other poets to the world through your work as an editor. Will Harris told me how much you have helped him with RENDANG, which is going to be Granta’s first full poetry collection, out in February 2020. What does it feel like to swap chairs, and help other poets to realize their work into its published form?


RA: It’s hard for me to talk about Will’s book without hyperbole or with restraint. I think he is one of the most important poets writing now, and I cannot believe I have been lucky enough to work on this book with him. It blows my mind every time I read it, and I find new things in it every day. I feel so lucky to have been able to be a part of it. I have been working as an editor for as long as I’ve been writing poetry seriously, so the two feel inextricable for me, it doesn’t too much feel like chair swapping as I love editing and making books as much as I love writing.


AH: What are your future projects – as a poet, and an editor?


RA: There will be lots of books coming through with Granta, confirmed in the upcoming weeks and months. I have missed working on pamphlets with Clinic after a little break, so hopefully we should be publishing more next year. I am writing lots of new poems, but I think I’m going through a phase of trying to be a nature poet again. Terrible. I’m writing a book of horror short stories that will probably never see the light of day but are working in spooking me out when I’m alone in the house, which is maybe the only reason I’m writing them to be honest, I’ve just run out of horror films at this point.


AH: Thank you so much Rachael. I really look forward to your poems – and the short stories!  For anyone wanting to go deeper into the creative power of horror, occult poems, fantasy landscapes and surreal worlds, I know that you’re running a two day pre-Halloween workshop at the Poetry School in London on 26 and 27 October (link below). Those of us not able to join you there will be looking forward keenly to all the new work you’ll be publishing over the next months and beyond.




Rachael Allen’s Weird Weekend






Face-To-Face Course


An intensive weekend exploring the strange, surreal, and weird in selected contemporary poets at the Poetry School in Canada Water, London, UK.


Taking cues from weird fiction and the genres that informed it – horror, sci-fi, supernatural, and fantasy – this course will spend time looking at contemporary poets, such as Noelle Kocot, Oki Sogumi, Daisy Lafarge, Jenny George, Kim Kyung Ju, Mary Ruefle, and Dorothea Tanning to see where aspects of these genres intersect with poetry. Expect horror writers, surrealist artists, occult poets, and fantasy lands.




 


 

	


	
	






	
	

		
‘I believe we are an integral part of this very sprawling, messy web of living things’: Yvonne Reddick talks to Alice Hiller on eco-poetics, oil, bereavement, Brexit – and editing the forthcoming Magma ‘Loss’ issue.
	


	

		
IMG_1486Born in Glasgow, and raised for the first years of her life in Scotland, the poet Yvonne Reddick has always had a profound affinity for wild, and mountainous landscapes. Her work explores the relationships between the natural world, and its human and animal inhabitants – within the dual frameworks of eco-poetics, and her own Swiss-French heritage. These deep interests have informed her three pamphlets – Deerhart, Translating Mountains, and Spikenard – and her academic research and publications on Ted Hughes. Meeting in Liverpool’s Bluecoats building, where she was due to read with Deryn Rees Jones at the conclusion of a year of mentoring under the inaugural Peggy Poole award, Yvonne and I began our interview among a clatter of teacups in the Bluecoats café, and finished it rattling back to Manchester on a late night train. We talked about writing in response to the loss of her father, and the creative workshops which Yvonne has led, drawing on making work from this experience. We also compared notes on the ways in which Brexit has impacted us as dual language women of joint English and European heritages. In conclusion, Yvonne previewed the forthcoming Loss issue of Magma, for which she and her fellow editor Adam Lowe received over 8000 submissions. Most recently, Yvonne has just won first prize in the 2019 Ambit Magazine poetry competition, judged by Liz Berry, for her poem ‘In the Burning Season’.


AH: Can I begin by asking about your journey into poetry, Yvonne?


YR: I started with things that everyone is exposed to in childhood – songs and rhymes. The breakthrough moment for me was reading Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry Anthology. My Dad had a copy. It was full of scribbled schoolboy notes – amazingly insightful things that were probably his English teacher’s words. There was work in that anthology that really stood out for me, like Ted Hughes’s work. I knew I was interested in what he was writing. I liked Seamus Heaney, and Peter Porter. I liked Sylvia Plath’s work. There were two women added as an afterthought to the second edition. It was still very white and very male – but it was an anthology of newer poetry than what we normally got at school.


AH: What sort of age were you when you came across the anthology?


YR: Ten or eleven. I can’t pretend that I understood all of it. I certainly wouldn’t have got the full meaning of all the poems.


AH: Was that when you were living in the Middle East?


YR: We had just come back.


AH: Were there any particular writers or teachers who encouraged you to think about becoming a poet yourself? Your first pamphlet, Deerhart, has poems about both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.


YR: Lots of writers’ groups were popping up when I was at university. Everyone seemed to go to poetry readings. My work was probably pretty rubbish at that stage, but we could still go to writing groups and have work critiqued, and share poems. That was a lovely thing.   There was a writer-in-residence at the college I went to. He was Peter Manson. I’ve met him since. A lovely fellow – very humorous, very experimental, some incredible play with language in his work, and yet my poems are very different from his.   He helped me to critique some of my early work. I was still sounding as though the New Poetry hadn’t happened. I was probably stuck at about 1900 with my diction.   It was good to have feedback from somebody contemporary. My PhD at Warwick University was when I got some really fantastic encouragement for my poetry. Jonathan Bate supervised the first two years, and the last year was supervised by Emma Francis and David Morley. David Morley is like a Romani showman among poetry professors. All kinds of things would happen. A Painted Lady butterfly hatched out of his bookshelf. He had a bird feeder right outside his office. He’d encourage his student poets – tell them to send their poems out to magazines, tell them that they should go to open mics, tell them to get pamphlets out. He gave us the practical nuts and bolts of a publishing career. To have that kind of structured advice was really helpful.


AH: When I did my PhD at UCL during the 1990s, I felt that poetry was a space that I could only respond to critically, not enter creatively. To have someone saying poetry was yours to claim, and move within, was presumably energising?


YR: It was a wonderful thing. I studied a bit later, at a time when creative writing was expanding. There were lots of visiting writers, and writers employed there, and writers finishing up their PhDs. It was an exciting time. If you are in that kind of environment, where you feel you are tripping over other writers, it’s lovely because you can support each other and it doesn’t feel like you are stuck by yourself – with no idea of whether your work is good. If you have a bad writing day, then people can encourage you. There is something lovely about that situation. I have it now with my poet friends.


AH: And did Deerhart come out of that period?


YR: No, Deerhart emerged when I was being mentored by Zaffar Kunial, the poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust. He had a year-long residency. Everyone in the village recognises the poet-in-residence. There’d be events happening all the time. It was a bit of a trek from where I lived in Preston – but there was that sense of a community for writers.


AH: There is a poem about Ted Hughes in Deerhart which contains the line “you write yourself into the river”.   You are talking to Hughes, but it seemed to me that you also have a project of writing yourself into the river – as an environmentalist and an eco-poet. Was always part of your intention or has it developed later?


YR: I think eco-awareness has always been part of my make up as a human being. I share it with our joint Jerwood Arvon mentor, Pascale Petit, whose poems are always an inspiration for me. I believe we are an integral part of this very sprawling, messy web of living things, human-made artefacts, non-human things. We depend on agriculture, the oceans, and everything else – just for our existence. I haven’t ever really seen myself as set apart. My sense of connection comes from doing things like catching newts in a pond when I was a kid. I always put them back! I used to know the calls of birds singing and I would respond to them. It sounds very idyllic – but it was only in a suburban garden that had slug pellets. I have always had a sense of environmental connection. The person to blame for that is Richard Adams. Watership Down was formative. I can’t have been much more than eight when I read it. I re-read it and re-read and re-read it as I grew up.


AH: I read Watership Down around eight or nine and it hugely impacted me too. It was in the early 1970s, and I had just moved to Wiltshire from Brussels. Being driven to and from school, we would go past blind rabbits, dying from myxomatosis beside the road, not able to get out of the way of the car. My father had just died and I found Watership Down almost unbearable. We are super-impressionable at that age. Very deep influences enter us, and then somehow they grow with us.  We respond to them in more complex ways as our intellectual apparatus develops. They are the seeds that are sown early on. Your second pamphlet, Translating Mountains, is also connected to the natural landscape. It won the Mslexia competition in 2017-8. It responds closely to the mountainous landscape around Ben Nevis, and also to the death of your father while hill-walking alone during a family holiday with you, your mother and sister. The opening poem begins with what is a suggestion of search party, and immediately gives us its terrain:


At the Corrie of the Birds


two figures emerge from lightless spruces

one wraps a delicate arm around the other.


They scan a map of densely-contoured crags

for a chance that is becoming remote.


I wondered to what extent focusing on recording the close details of mountains which you and your father both loved, helped not only to bring a degree of creative agency to your project, but also created a physical space, and spaciousness, in which to explore the constricting experience of grief and loss?


YR: I think the space, or at least the physical landscape, was key. It had been part of my life since I was very young. When I was very, very small, before I started school, I would be taken up to the top of the Cairngorms in the chair lift on family walks. Initially, I suppose that I would have seen those landscapes as very suffused with grief and loss about my Dad’s death. They would probably have seemed overlaid with memories. There’s that quite vulnerable stage that you go through in the immediate aftermath of bereavement – where everything reminds you of the person you have lost. What I have always been aware of, though, is that those hills were there before I was, and are going to be there when I am gone. We are making a fair bit of a mess of the planet in many ways, but the hills aren’t going to disappear. They are enduring. But they are also in the flux of being eroded. They are moving. Ground in Scotland is actually rising compared to England – after the weight of the ice from the last Ice Age was lifted. If you write elegy, it’s very traditional to return the beloved to the landscape. What I am doing is maybe a little bit different than that. I suppose it is envisaging how humans are very, very small compared to massive earth systems. That brings me comfort now – although perhaps in the immediate months and years after my father died, it didn’t.


scotland
Photo by Yvonne Reddick


AH: I felt that there was a dialogue between you and the mountains – and a process. As a reader, I had a sense of space, and of being able, through this, to be present within the writing, and also with the views. They made a loss, which was huge, become more bearable – almost as the air moved over it, and the landscape moved with it.


YR: I think that’s fair to say. There are interesting histories there as well.   Most of the west Highlands peaks have Gaelic names. This is a language and a culture that has been extirpated and sort of pushed to the margins of the Scottish Highlands. I was always aware that I was surrounded by a landscape that I did not have the skill to name. I was curious about who had been before me. If you read translated elegies by the Gaelic poets – Sorley Maclean’s ‘Hallaig’ chokes me up every time I read it – there is a very acute sense of what history had done in these places as well. I was born in Glasgow. I moved to Aberdeen when I was small. Growing up, I went back to Scotland almost every single year of my life, at least once. That was where we spent our holidays. My


IMG_1485
Train journey to interview Yvonne through hills she walks among.


parents wanted to relocate there in retirement. I wanted to work there. I’m in Manchester and Preston, so I have not quite managed, yet. I don’t really know if Scotland’s become a country of the mind for me – because I have been away for so long, but I always felt I missed something when I first arrived in England.


AH: It sounds like another strata of deep loss – which is also for all of us, the loss of the country of childhood, and of our parents as we knew them, then. While Translating Mountains responds to the practical realities of you father’s death – the search helicopter, the choice of urns, the inquest – it is ‘Risk’ in which you remember “The way he carried two compasses/ in case one failed, spare batteries for the GPS.” Was it important to you to use direct, everyday memories, and language, to keep his memory anchored, and is that a larger part of your elegiac project?


YR: I suppose so. I always think that the things of this world have a huge amount to tell poets. I believe in anchoring a poem in everyday objects. You give it a tighter focus than if you try to tackle massive abstract concepts straight out. It’s probably evidence of influence as well actually. One of my favourite elegaic poems is Mona Arshi’s ‘Phone Call on a Train Journey’. There is a list of things that are in the speaker’s brother’s rucksack. At the end of the poem, the rucksack, when handed back, becomes “(without the perishables)/ lighter than she had imagined.” It is just devastating.   There is such economy, such skill and it’s so moving at the same time. There are other elegies by women poets that I have really enjoyed. Karen McCarthy Woolf uses objects to bring together some sense of focus, in the aftermath of the shattering loss of her baby son. Equally, I wanted to get at least some sense of a kind of person my Dad was.   In that poem, ‘Risk’, there is a great deal of humour. Ironically, he was incredibly well prepared, whenever he went off walking, but he kept his ancient maps in feet and inches, even though everything had changed and the car park was in a different place. It was really quite funny. You would see scrawly hand writing on an old survey map and think he was calculating and how long was going take him to get from A to B. There is something very endearing in that methodical approach. I have some very, very fond memories of him.


AH: That really comes across in the poem. I definitely had an anchored sense of your dad. And it is lovely to hear you laughing as you talk about him. We think of elegy as the great Tennysonian weep, and so a memory can actually bring back the joy of the life that has been lost is a fantastic achievement.


YR: It is lovely to hear, thank you.


AH: I know you teach elegy. Would you like to say something about the workshops you run?


IMG_0407
Yvonne reading at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2018


YR: The workshops take different forms. I like to take people outside and get them to work in a nature reserve if possible. You can also do very powerful, transformative work indoors as well.  I have found helping other people to write about loss quite challenging myself. I have learned about what psychologists have to say about grief, also about expressive writing, and writing as a form of emotional release, to reflect the processes in your own mind. I have run workshops for the Harris Museum Gallery in Preston. A curator gave us objects that she owned, including a Victorian mourning brooch for us to write about. There is something quite comforting about seeing how other societies have dealt with grief. In Britain you get a certain amount of compassionate leave. Your friends and family will be phenomenally supportive at first – and then suddenly everything has to snap back to normal. That can be very disorienting. I think it’s not necessarily healthy. A friend of mine said how in villages in Ireland when she was a child the entire village would shut for a few days. And everybody would turn up for the service and the wake.   It’s not necessarily the stereotype of the incredibly boozy Irish wake. It’s that people will cook for you or come round to your house and look after you. We have a bit less of that in Britain. I think people are very reluctant to say anything about loss. The Victorians would wear mourning suits as a sign that something, something was out of the ordinary, and they would treat people differently as a result.I have also run workshops to write a poem that could go in a memory box, using the idea of a smooth river and this whirlpool of bereavement – then using metaphors and images and voice to describe your state of mind. It’s about re-ordering experiences to enable healing.


AH: I know people who have done your bereavement workshops and found them transformative. Several poets said how helpful the one you ran at the Aldeburgh Festival was, last year. Translating Mountains also engages with your Lausanne French-Swiss heritage, and the grandmother who willed you the crystals collected by her grandfather in the Alps. ‘Cristaux de Roche’ begins “their gleam haunts my sleep.” Did it help you creatively – to call on this lineage, and vest your identity symbolically in these fragments of the mountains?


switzerland
Photo by Yvonne Reddick


YR: I’ve walked around Mont Blanc. I used to go walking around a place Samoëns where my grandmother took us on holiday with my Dad as well. The Swiss have a tremendous attachment to some of their mountains. You would expect that. They have this fascination with the Salève which is Geneva’s mountain. I think technically it’s in France. My grandmother used to tell me the same and I would find it very funny. Just above Lausanne is Mont Tendre – Mount Tender is lovely. They have gorgeous names. One that I write about in the pamphlet is Lac de Folly. I suppose I wanted to bring out my connection to a place that was not in Britain, wasn’t in England, wasn’t in Scotland.


AH: I know you have recently returned from a residency in the Chateau de Lavigny courtesy of the Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt, which let you revisit places connected to your grandmother, and also make new work arising from the wild life and mountain landscapes. Could you tell me a little more about this? I gather it was a really amazing experience?


chateau pic
Photo by Yvonne Reddick of Chateau de Lavigny


YR: It was fantastic: I was really grateful to have time away from all the things I have to do, and which I use as excuses for not writing! The other writers in residence there were super – great company, and full of ideas and encouragement. I went to visit the flat where my grandmother lived in Lausanne. All the local shops she used to go to were still there. I completed some poems that I’d been storing up in my mind for a long time. One of them features the invisible border between France and Switzerland, under Lake Léman. I even tried my hand at prose nature-writing as well, which was good – a different craft from the technical business of fretting over line-breaks! Lavigny is a small village surrounded by vineyards. They specialise in growing Chasselas grapes. There’s an old tale that Joyce was partial to a glass or two of Chasselas wine, and the result was Finnegans Wake!


AH: Europe, and our relationship to it, is a constant presence within your most recent pamphlet, Spikenard, published by smith/doorstop in 2019 as one of Carol Ann Duffy’s four final Laureate’s Choices. Is she a poet for whose work you have always felt a creative affinity?


IMG_3551


YR: I’d admired her work since we read Mean Time at school. I think it was my first experience of poetry that was truly contemporary: from the 1990s, not the 1950s. I admire her for her fearless exploration of women’s experiences, and her affinity with nature. She’s been wonderfully kind to   me.


AH: Spikenard returns to the themes of family history, and your father, but also explores the relationship between two lovers, set against a series of landscapes whose changes, and degradations, witness to your environmental concerns.   Spikenard’s opening poem, ‘Desire Path’ – in which a young woman addresses her lover – is a hymn to life, and sensuality, written with open-ness, and courage.   It begins “Once, we thought we’d find a route around the borders/ and feel the bounds dissolve”. The second stanza continues:


I’d flash you the glance you called that French look

as you traced the curve of my back, the contours of my flank,

then I slid my Genevan tongue in your ear: Je t’aime, moi non plus,

as if I’d become two speakers who split and merged

as tides braid, then loose, the waters of the Channel.


Did you want to foreground the female body, physically and emotionally, as the starting point for the pamphlet? I know there are other themes also alive within this work.


YR: I hadn’t really intended to focus on the female body. In a veiled form, that is one of my Brexit poems. There is the kind of line, the fracture line of the English Channel.  Brexit is one of the biggest political issues that the UK is facing. It is huge deal for Europe. It feels almost as if the UK has decided to drift off across the Atlantic and I am getting further and further away from the the people I knew and loved who lived in Switzerland. It’s almost as if I’ve had my roots and connections to Europe cut, or weakened. That that for me is very scary and strange.


AH: I had a French Grandmother. Yours was French Swiss. Brexit was really personally traumatic for me. I am European, not English – if I have to choose.


YR: The morning after the referendum results, I was talking to a Polish academic, who had come over with a lucrative European Research Council grant. I got coffee with her. There were hardly any people in the café. We were shell-shocked. She couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely stunned. I had watched the news first thing that morning and I felt ashamed meeting with her. I thought it was a disgrace.


AH: I remember the whole of that day being as if someone had punched me. I had been punched by that news. Where I live in London, there are people of many nationalities. Everyone was reeling. We are an integrated community. I know French people who are moving back to Europe, because they don’t want to risk bringing up their children feeling that they are foreigners in England. Brexit has been like a form of bereavement for me.


AH: Spikenard also includes the sorrow that comes with the end of a relationship. ‘Firesetter’, which won the Platinum prize in the 2018 Creative Futures Award, translates a break-up into a forest fire. The poem is realised through a fierce, tense, shorthand of visual images – flaring successively up off the page. You write “Three months of drought; those trees were jackstraws. A flicker in the tinder, bird-call panic.” Would you like to say something about how the poem came into being, and         the terrains, and fires, which inform it?


YR: My friend told me about the Swinley forest fires which are not far from my Mum still lives. They took place in a pine forest that is a nature reserve. I used to go off on kids’ nature walks with rangers there, when I was young. As in the poem, there was a severe forest fire, that did actually burn underground. The soil is peat, and flammable. I found the idea that fire could spread under the earth, in rainy Britain, incredibly sinister. Whenever I am writing about fires, I am writing about climate change. Those fires are linked to the oil fires and the fires of industry and of combustion. In a sense it’s part of the same body of work for me.


AH: Fires are very frightening, but they are also a visible manifestation of something growing rapidly out of control – when you think of forest fires in California, or in Greece. A lot of environmental change happens slightly more slowly, and then catches up with us, whereas the fires are a visible experience of catastrophe. It’s very potent – not a metaphor, but an actualisation. This is another form of mourning, for the earth and its losses?


YR: I finished ‘Firesetter’ at the very beginning of a summer of terrible droughts of 2018. In some ways, I felt a bit guilty about having written that poem when there were far worse forest fires happening, say in California. But that summer there was a forest fire on Skye actually caused by somebody burning litter. It destroyed a plantation and some areas of grass and that was Skye – the rainy west coast. It seems absurd.


AH: You’ve also written directly about the fossil fuel industry. ‘In Oils’, in the Laureate’s Choice Anthology, explores your father’s life as a petroleum engineer, and remembers your own experience of living in the Middle East as a child while he was working out there, and the devastated landscapes after the first Iraq war. It’s called ‘Light, Sweet Crude’ in Spikenard.  You describe how he “drilled an emirate with straight-ruled borders”, and how, before your time, during the war:


‘The burning pipeline howled–

Sara said like a jet engine.

Fire-trenches and oil-lakes under a sky dark at midday’


What made you want to write about this topic?


YR: When I realised that commercial, printed ink was made of burnt oil, it was a light bulb moment for me. It made me feel very conflicted because my family’s living has been made from this volatile viscous substance, that is a cause of wars. Writing anything verging on the confessional – that makes me squeamish.   I will pour it into some kind of poetic form generally – to get some kind of distance, and to let the artistic process take effect, and let me let me mould the raw material. Otherwise it is too it’s too intense.


AH: That absolutely makes sense. ‘In Oils’/Light, Sweet Crude’ ends with memories of your father returning, “jet-lagged and running fumes,/ to plant English lavender on Texan time”, and then gives us the moment of his death, realised with an engineered precision that perfectly holds its grief:


A two-stroke heart has steely valves and chambers

but frail fuel-lines. He’d said he’d hike the path


above the falls, but dusk failed to bring him home –


The theme of fire returns in ‘Muirburn’, which was commended in the 2018 National Poetry Competition. It describes returning your father’s ashes to the earth in the Highlands. The scattering brings back the memory of him teaching you to lay a fire in the hearth at home – “how he taught me to breathe on the steeple of logs” – and then leads into a dream about a heath fire which beautifully concludes the poem:


A voice at my shoulder said, ‘You’ll inherit fire.”

And through the smoke I glimpsed a line of figure

on the hillside, beating and beating the heather,

as the fire-front roared towards them.


A volley of shouts: ‘Keep the wind at your back!’

My grandmother threshing with a fire-broom

Dad hacking a firebreak. My stillborn brother, now grown

sprinting for the hollow where the spring once flowed

the whole hill flaring in the updraft.


And there: a girl, running for the riverside –

she wore my face, the shade of ash.


Would you be able to say something about “inheriting fire”, as a woman, and a writer?


YR: Fire, and the use of fire are the only things that actually separate human beings quite decisively from other creatures. We are the only species to have domesticated fire. Loads of other animals – tusk fish, crows – they can use tools. Many other creatures have language as well. Fire is something that is unique to us. It has tremendous potential for good, with the fire of the hearth that is warming. Needless to say fires can be profoundly destructive. For me, that inheritance of fire is the inheritance of the age of fire. What was at the forefront of my mind was that my Dad had been cremated, and again this was another source of combustion. It’s like, you know how much more can we put into the atmosphere?


AH: The final poem, ‘Spikenard’, returns to the theme of breaking-up, and separation, exploring a woman who traces her former lover by following the scent the cologne she bought him – right up to the doorway behind which he is now – with someone else. I had to look up Spikenard. I was really interested to see that it is an essential oil, from a plant that was used in incense as well as perfume. It goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years, so ties in with the idea of oil, which runs into the other poems.


YR: I think that is a really wonderful interpretation.


AH: I know you have just been mentored for a year by Deryn Rees Jones, under the inaugural Peggy Poole award. Would you like to say something about that experience?


IMG_1505YR: It was Deryn who helped me shape the oil poems. I don’t think I would really have had the courage to tackle that material if it hadn’t been for her encouragement. It’s a topic that I think I will run with.   Going further back in my family tree, my grandmother’s father distilled oil from coal.


AH: Was this your father’s side?


YR: Yes, yes it was my Dad’s side. There was this family legend that my Grandmother was related to George Stephenson, the railway engineer. My Grandmother was a Yorkshire woman. She’d sit there on the phone with a Silk Cut cigarette in her hands – this plume of smoke. I have tremendously fond memories of her as a very strong minded matriarch. She is a link to an industry in the past that was coal capitalism.


AH: I trust there will be a poem about her, if only to capture those plumes of smoke. Just before we finish, I know you have just been editing the ‘Loss’ edition of Magma, which will be out in October 2019. Could you say something about how this came about, and what it was like to select and edit so many poems responding to this theme?


YR: I’m delighted to be helping Magma out as an associate editor, although I feel a bit like the proverbial poacher turned gamekeeper! It’s fascinating to be the one selecting poems – I’m usually the one sending work out for selection. It’s also a really difficult process, as you’ve got a limited amount of space and you wish you could take twice as many poems as you have room for. I’m working on the Loss Issue with author and editor Adam Lowe. People submitted over 8,000 poems – more than any issue of Magma had ever attracted before! Loss touches so many people, and it was amazing to have that kind of response. However, it meant we had to turn down some superb poems. I work as an academic, and universities are expected to make an ‘impact’: to run projects benefiting society, business or policymakers. I want to do what I can to support poetry and writing. Because I’d been writing about my Dad, a colleague suggested running writing workshops for people who had been bereaved, but the Magma issue is designed to expand the idea of loss a bit. Adam and I invited poets to submit work about anything from Brexit to losing a homeland to the loss of extinct animals – even beneficial losses, such as losing a gender label. We were lucky enough to get Arts Council funding, and with that, we paired poets with psychologists so that they could exchange ideas and write commissioned poems. We’ve commissioned reviews of books that resonate with the theme. I’m excited about launching the issue of the magazine later this year, with readings from some wonderful poets.


Photo 23-11-2019, 16 56 27


Yvonne Reddick’s editorial introduction to Magma 75  is here.


You can buy the Magma Loss Issue here.


You can find more about Yvonne via her website YvonneReddick here.


You can buy Translating Mountains for a special offer price of £2.50 here.


You can buy Spikenard for £7.50 here.


Details of Ted Hughes Environmentalist and Eco-Poet are available through Yvonne’s website. 


You can buy Poetry, Grief and Healing here.   The book combines poems and writing exercises for people to develop their own creative responses to grief and loss.


All photos by Alice Hiller unless otherwise credited.

	


	
	






	
	

		
Interview Index
	


	

		
‘I am a different person in one language than I am in another’: L.Kiew on combining Teo Chew, Hokkien and English in ‘The Unquiet’ – then rewriting privilege by letting words become ‘beasts that rub up against each other’.


‘I’m trying to write the stories not only of how my family suffered, but also how they survived’: Natalie Linh Bolderston on witnessing and healing in ‘The Protection of Ghosts’.


‘When your mother is being unmotherly, it’s taboo to show that’ : Karen Smith on the transformative power of creating in her debut ‘Schist’.


‘I wanted to think about the possibility of a revolution based on female principles’: Rebecca Tamás speaks with Alice Hiller.


Belinda Zhawi: I started writing fundamentally because I felt represented when I read Black writers, and then I felt that it was my duty as well to contribute.


“Everything I write, I give access to devastate me first” : Shivanee Ramlochan, on ‘saying the difficult thing’ with “weapons of conjure.”


‘vulnerability as power’ : Romalyn Ante speaking with Alice Hiller


 


 

	


	
	






	
	

		
	

		
‘I am a different person in one language than I am in another’: L.Kiew on combining Teo Chew, Hokkien and English in ‘The Unquiet’ – then rewriting privilege by letting words become ‘beasts that rub up against each other’.
	


	

		
Lisa poetry cafe


Identifiable in any gathering by her scarlet hair, L. Kiew is not a poet who seeks to conform. Her pamphlet, The Unquiet, was published by the prestigious independent publisher, Offord Road Books, earlier in 2019. A Chinese-Malaysian living in London, and working as an accountant, she is someone whose work I have loved for a number of years – for its originality, and willingness to take risks to arrive in new places, and open different ways of seeing and speaking. Over coffee in the Poetry Café in Covent Garden – ahead of a reading by her publisher Martha Sprackland – we spoke about her rebel great-grandmother refusing to have her feet bound, Chinese ghost stories, diaspora experiences, writing in multiple languages and dialects, arriving in England from Malaysia, and what feminism means outside of America and Europe. To give readers a sense of her multi-lingual poetry live, L. Kiew recorded three of her poems, which are available at the end of this interview, with more on her website.


AH: Your biog says that you’re an accountant and a dancer. Were you always a poet as well – and when did you start actually writing the poems down?


LK: I probably wouldn’t have thought of myself as a poet until my late teens. As a younger child I was happily writing little stories. In my late teens and early twenties I began to think a lot about language, and about the people I was speaking to, and about the challenges of communication. That is when I moved into poetry. I was very influenced by the more experimental work.


AH: Were there any poets who particularly inspired, encouraged or supported you?


LK: Very early I found Lisa Robertson. She was very very influential. I stumbled across Reality Street Press, so I was reading a lot of work from them. That really opened up things for me and made me think about language in quite a different way.


AH: When you are starting out, if you can find someone who is working in your area, it radically expands the field, and your sense of the possible. When it’s on the page, you can engage with it at your own pace. If you are taught in class, often it is being slightly pulled out of you – whereas sometimes you need to work more quietly.


LK: The curriculum was always quite conventional. The canon of English poetry. Obviously it is changing now. I read English at University.


AH: Likewise. Sylvia Plath was as close as we got to contemporary poetry.


LK: She was for me too. Sylvia Plath was quite a big influence on my work, as were a lot of the Imagist Poets.


AH: I really loved HD.


LK: That was a kind of beginning.


AH: Did you have any kind of mentors – or were you just writing on your own?


LK: Pretty much writing on my own. There was a writer in residence at the University. I saw her once. I felt very outside the thing that everyone else was doing so it didn’t really gel. All of my engagement was pretty much on the page.


AH: ‘Swallow’, the first poem in The Unquiet is about working within  a multi-tongued framework. You write about “overeating from the dictionary” and “nouns as sticky as langsat”, but also that “The words I swallow become/ feathers poking through my skin.” Would you say that language learning can be a form of migration in itself, separate from travel?


LK: Yes, because I think when you learn language, you move from one view of the world into another. It is about a change of state. I am a different person in one language than I am in another. Jennifer Lee Tsai write about this in her poem ‘Another Language’, published in Wild Court this year. It is a poem about being different in Cantonese and being in English and I feel that very much too.


AH: I grew up speaking French as well. Your thoughts take different shapes, reflecting the word containers that are available. I wondered if it was important for you to allow your readers to make this journey as well, into a different language, through the physically embodied textures and sounds of Malaysian dialect words with which your poems enact themselves?


LK: Language is a visceral thing – because it comes out of your body, and you experience it through the body as well. I wanted that to be in the writing. I also wanted that sense of when you walk down the street, and things are partially heard. For me, language is all about the lines between one kind of experience and another. I think of conversations and literature and your experience of reading as beasts that rub up against each other. You may rub a little longer some times than others. Sometimes you rub, and you move on. I wanted all of those to be possible in the experience of reading The Unquiet. 


AH: When you read words that you don’t understand, you pronounce them in your head because you are trying to get the physical feel of them, to make an engagement. That is definitely a kind of rubbing that also opens your head to different sounds.


LK: I think you can engage in things in all sorts of different levels. One level doesn’t have to be privileged over another.


AH:     Absolutely. Would you be able to say a few words about your own childhood – because that is where your understanding of the world originated? You were born in Malaysia, where both your parents were scientists?


LK:     Yes, I grew up in Malaysia until I was 10. I came to the UK to boarding school – only going back in the school holidays. Both my parents are scientists. My mother is a botanist and my father is a zoologist. Nature plays a really big part in my writing as well, because of that experience.


AH: Once you started to come to England for boarding school, you were cutting between Malaysia and England, so you were having parallel but very different climates and landscapes?


LK:     Yes. In Malaysia, my parents would do field work at the weekend, so we often went on expeditions with them, when they were collecting locally. When my parents went on longer expeditions, we went too. My father ran a field study station for the University for many years, and we spent a lot of time there as children. People in Asia are very tolerant of children so the university students let us be underfoot. I had this wonderful experience – of playing there all the time.


AH: This was in the rainforest? With that density of sound and heat and visual stimuli?


LK: Whatever the students were studying, we were looking at too. We were alongside when they were trapping and collecting things in the rainforest. It was all very close.


AH:     It sounds really fantastic.  Like Natalie Linh Bolderston, whose pamphlet The Protection of Ghosts has just come out with V. Press, your poems occupy the voices of people from multiple generations. I’m thinking of Ląomà and Ah Jek in ‘Haunts,’ but also ‘Pitched in’ and ‘The Catch.’   Could you say something about those three poems?


LK: Some poems in the book are about ghost stories that I remember – family ghost stories. ‘Haunts’ is a series of ghost stories that I was told about people in the family. The Chinese love ghost stories. I really wanted to explore that because it’s not a genre that translates into English much. I was really wanting to write a whole series of ghost story poems.


‘Haunts’ is also about my great grandmother who came from China. I have been thinking a lot about her life, because she moved at a time of great transition. When you look back, she was an incredibly strong woman. For her time, she made very very difficult choices.   She chose not to have her feet bound and she came all the way across to Malaysia. Because her feet were not bound, she had to marry a much much older man. He died very early and then she had a whole brood of children that she needed to bring up. She was a very successful matriarch in that way – but also so incredibly tough.


AH: She would have had to be tough from the start to be able to resist foot binding at a young age?


LK: She had an iron will, I have to say. You have to admire those people who get through life with that strength when so many around them are, in a certain respect, powerless around certain things.


AH: What period did she come over to Malaysia?


LK: I don’t really know. Sometime between the turn of the century and before the second world war.


AH: There is real sorrow, and pain in ‘Pitched in’, which ends simply “dragging steps/ msa”msĭ/ the water is dark”. The words feel wrung from the speaker, but also flinty. You begin:


kangbāng covered in dust

a worn shirt on the line

with no one to fill it


Father at the door

I refused twelve

this was all that was left


kiaogià empty rice bowls

anguish springs like bamboo

on steep slopes


LK: ‘Pitched in’ covers choices about whom you marry.   I was thinking of my grandmother’s generation, where those choices were not great. ‘The Catch’ comes from a family story about my great grandmother and how she didn’t have sons until quite late, and she adopted one son.


AH: ‘The Catch’ has this wonderfully direct, but also swimming-with-feeling, emotional language. Its metaphors are viscerally embodied, and through this, inclusive of the reader. We get the mood of the poem, its love, combative-ness, and wounded-ness, because we can intuit them from the diction. I’m assuming ‘our little fish’ is her son? The poem in total reads:


When he brought that stinky parcel

of catfish home from the market,

Mother-in-law turned her eyes away

like swifts swimming across water.


My heart was an empty

house with its red door swinging wide.

I held our little fish

safe from the monsoon, the gossip


of storm clouds hurled and smashed papayas

against the shutters.

It’s impossible to wash the face of

our house clean.


LK: In Asia, it was quite common that if you don’t have a son of your own, and somebody else had an abundance of sons, then you would come to an arrangement. It is a rumoured in the family that is what she did, so one of my great uncles is apparently adopted. As with all family stories, only half of it comes down to the next generation.


AH: Children come into families in many ways. What matters is the welcome that they receive, rather than the door that they entered through.


LK: Yes, and in Chinese culture a son is very very important. A son is always treasured.


AH: I love all the physical textures in the poem. The “storm clouds” and the “smashed papayas” – and how they speak to a world of unarticulated, but deeply felt emotions around this tiny baby coming into the house from a different background. You’re making in your words a very different world to what some readers in London know – and making it very tangible and palpable. Having been born in Singapore, I really appreciate it. You register heat, and humid atmosphere. That level of physical detail makes different realities three dimensional – rather than saying one place is real and everywhere else is ‘on the map’.


LK: It’s very real for the characters in the poem. I wanted it to be the same for the readers.


AH: That really comes across. There’s also a strong strand of feminism which runs through The Unquiet, again spanning generations, and social classes.   ‘Francesca’ pays a beautiful tribute to a housekeeper “who walks to church/ daily, strong as bamboo// as persistent.”   Elizabeth Bishop also wrote about women in positions of service, and more recently the film Roma honours a woman obliged to take this role in her employer’s family. Was it important to you to give space to this area of working lives? You say also that she “makes sweet/ and sour pork better than anyone” and “tends/ the avocado tree, […] picks its fruit”.


LK: We privilege experience in different ways. I feel that work is equally valid regardless of where it is done. Everybody has a thing they do incredibly well, that is very valuable. I wanted to foreground that because it’s very easy, when you read from a position of education, to say ‘They weren’t educated. They didn’t have great options, so their lives must be less rich’. I don’t that is true. It is really important to show that all of these experiences are equally valid –regardless of their relative socio-economic position, regardless of the position that we read into it coming from the west and being educated, and with a certain reading of feminism as well. It is really interesting to be asked about feminism in relation to this because I read feminism as a western concept. I don’t think my great grandmother or Francesca would recognise it in the articulation that exists. They would say ‘well of course we do these things but there are constraints’. But you know you can get around these constraints. It’s just a different articulation.


AH: I think if you have Francesca’s role, you are a functioning economic unit and that gives you agency. Every being needs agency. Having a value put on your services gives you the ability to pay for food, to pay for housing, to educate your children. It’s a very powerful way of claiming your space as a human being.


LK: There were people who chose domestic work as a career path.   That’s not any different from any other career path you would choose. You know I would say Francesca, from the stories that she told me, chose it deliberately. It wasn’t that there were no other options. This is a path she deliberately chose.


AH: That was a real profession and a respected vocation. I just love that poem. It’s really beautiful and unapologetically celebratory. It really chimed with me.


LK: She is a marvellous and again, a very strong woman. Lots of strong women in my background.


AH: ‘Learning to be mixi’ is one of several poems which suggests that acquiring English language and culture can be a bruising, as well as enabling, experience, socially and personally.   You write:


I was buckled in, and taken off

to England, the boarding school

(not like Enid Blyton, not at all) and

Cambridge, the colleges,

the backs and the hate,

suppressing the suffix-lah,

being proper and nice, cutting

my tongue with that ice.


Could say something about this? It sounds as if you were not necessarily treated in the kindest way?


LK: England was a huge culture shock. I considered myself a speaker of English.   My mother was English. I didn’t perceive myself as being unfamiliar with the culture, having read English storybooks.   You have an expectation – then you arrive. It is so so different. As a child you just go through life. It happens to you.


AH: You live in your skin; you get on with it.


LK: It is only now that I am an adult, and have contemporaries with children at that age, that I look back and think that was actually quite a bruising culture shock. Behind this writing, there has been a lot of reflection – to do with reaching a certain point in my life and seeing other people’s children.


AH: The boarding school I went to very hierarchal and very prioritising of social class and conformity. My father was dead, and I was in a dormitory with girl whose mum was a single parent.   The third girl was from Northern Ireland. We felt marked as different.


LK: There were a lot of children who went home every weekend. The ones that were left behind at the weekend had our parents very very far away. It made a barrier.


AH: Certainly in the 70’s, when I was growing up, English people were not very tolerant of difference. There was a reluctance to allow people to integrate in the schools that I went to. Hopefully that is shifting now.


LK: Yeah, it has shifted a lot. Not everywhere to the same extent but there is certainly a lot more openness. Moving from England to Scotland was a really interesting dynamic. Scotland was very mono-cultural but with a very strong self-identifying of itself against English. As long as you were not English, you were in. It’s been interesting to move around the United Kingdom.


AH: ‘Speech’ begins “Ah Ba speak red: liddat tone/ of voice sure salah wan.” The poem goes on to enact a merging of dictions, and dictionaries, ending:


And I let my words landslide,

ferrous, carrying both stone chips,

rice and tapioca roots.

I dig down, ah, I speak lah,

pearl and pebble, new shoots.


Did this combining reflect an act of healing that has taken place within the pamphlet by bringing in so many different sorts of words?


LK:     As I wrote the pamphlet, I began to really embrace that movement across languages and through languages. Recognising it very much as the identity that I came from – because in Malaysia people are usually multilingual to varying degrees. That kind of dropping between languages is very common. Going to Malaysia with my partner was a lightbulb moment. I realised that shifting between languages within a sentence – something that I took as absolutely normal – was not something that everybody else experienced or practiced. I wanted to embrace that part of myself as I think in different languages. I grew up speaking different languages all simultaneously.


AH:     My father was half-French so I have French and English. I learnt Italian, and can follow Spanish, so I’m quite happy to shuffle languages. My Italian and my Spanish are not particularly good but but I can get by and listen to radio or tv in all those languages. It gives you a different mindset.


LK:     In England people tend to view a language like EU customs tracks. You are put into lines, but life is not like that. There is a lot of movement with the writing across languages. It is much more common than it used to be, and also in more of the poetry coming out of America, with writers who grow up with additional languages.


AH: Although you don’t give translations, because the words that you use are phonetically spelt, rather than written in ‘Chinese’ characters, and can be sounded out, I didn’t feel closed out as a reader. I could still get their sound quality. It didn’t feel that you were putting up icy walls that I couldn’t go across.


LK: I chose romanisation for The Unquiet because actually for me there is an interesting politics around the learning of characters, especially now when the only way to be able to learn them would be through Mandarin. And the primacy of Mandarin is a kind of construct that has come out of the rise of communism in China, and the development that they describe as Mandarin being the common language.   That wasn’t the case previously.  You can write all Chinese dialects in characters but when you do that, what tends to happen is that most readers will then attempt to read them as Mandarin, which they are not. I didn’t want that at all. I wanted to foreground the primacy of dialect in that space.


AH: Which is also functioning much of the time within the spoken space anyway?


LK: Yes. It is also about levels of literacy and levels of education which sit behind the text on the page. I am English educated, but I am not Chinese educated.


AH: You presumably hold the dialects primarily orally? As sounds in your head?


LK: For me, Teo Chew, Hokkien and other dialects were always oral languages. A lot of the older generation would never have completed school, so would read little or nothing. There is not much literature in dialect available outside of China and I’m not sure how much there is within China itself.


AH:     So in fact the ghost stories you re-tell are political, in that they are a form of family literature, and shared storytelling. They may not be written down but they are your heritage and a resource. When we have stories in common, or stories that echo each other – even when you said read Enid Blyton and I got it – there is bonding over those common imaginative currencies.


LK:     Yes, I think stories are common currencies across a lot of cultures. We all have a degree of archetype. They get changed according to the context – but there will be things that people recognise.


AH:     I felt it with the “red shantung” dress in ‘Haunts.’ ,


Ląomà believes the dead

cling to their possessions.

My dress is red shantung;

its last occupant is

heartbroken and tugging

on my hem.


The widower holds me

at arms’ length, cold and stiff.

I waltz around, around.

When I sink down, a white hand

strokes my feet, smearing black

blood over my cracked heels.


It is saying that clothes which pass between owners carry stories, but the dress is also the vessel in which you choose to pour a meaning, that is probably an archetypal, universal one – which each culture, and reader, will particularise. It is a story about past and present, and difficult relationships, and strange things, but also how we make, and find, images to understand our lives. On that note, would you like to say something about your decision not to give any translations, so the English language reader has to try to hear and feel the words they don’t understand, rather than simply dismissing them into meaning? Poetry has that ambiguity built into it. When you don’t translate a word – are you making it an extreme poetry moment?


LK:     The whole thing with poetry for me is the consciousness of language. I am foregrounding of it, and foregrounding the sound and the shape. For readers who can’t access the meaning automatically, they have to engage in it quite differently. I wanted those things not to be that smooth. I like your phrase ‘dismissing it into meaning’ because there is sometimes a tendency in how literature works that everything is made easy for the reader.   That is, easy for the educated reader.   So again there is a sort of dynamic of privilege that is in language. Choosing not to translate was partly about undermining. I want to privilege people who come from that multiple dialect background, and who can recognise some of it. I didn’t want to privilege the reader who has gone to Oxford and who has Latin and Greek but not any other languages. In their text, they might not translate classical Greek on the assumption that all the rest of us should understand. I wanted to shift that dynamic. We have Google translate these days and so actually it’s easy to find out.


AH: Yeah, I really loved it as it was. I think your realisation was a great triumph. Towards the end of The Unquiet, in ‘Cryptography’, you write about words which lie “like a forgotten cellar/ under the house of your childhood”. In ‘Lassaba’ there are “paper wings/ filling the hall with their shadows”. Whereas the earlier ghost poems called up histories in which there was suffering and cruelty, this seems like a more nourishing form of haunting – allowing the past also to be present in a sustaining way, and establishing a form of equilibrium. Does that seem fair?


LK:     The past is who you are, and you can’t change it. Those stories form who you are. It’s about reaching an equilibrium, because you have to acknowledge it, and take where you are, then grow from that soil.


AH: If you said to me cheese soufflé, I would straight away see the cheese soufflé in my French grandmother’s house, because that’s where I ate it. Whatever that word means to anybody else, to me it means a kitchen in Normandy, how we beat the eggs, grated the Gruyère, the way the spoon broke the crust when it was served. Soufflé is just a word – but it holds so much for me.


LK: And it informs all your future cheese soufflés doesn’t it?


AH: I made it when my elder son came home from university for the first time. It was a deep celebration. I wanted to reach back into the good part of my past and have it with us. On that subject, I know you were with Nina Mingya Powles and Natalie Linh Bolderston on a Bi’an retreat for writers of Chinese heritage. Nina tweeted that there was a lot of food talk. How was that as an experience?


LK: It was actually amazing; I have to say, completely, completely amazing to be in a diaspora group.


AH: Nina is New Zealand Chinese. Nat is Vietnamese Chinese English.


LK: It was amazing to meet people who come from different places in the diaspora, in different the waves of diaspora. The commonalities and the differences were extremely interesting. Those sorts of things are really enriching and so very fascinating – because it wasn’t just a retreat for poets. I only really interact with poets on the whole, so it was fascinating to meet people who write fiction, who do life writing, who write for the stage and who write for the cinema. It was a really broad experience. We did some fascinating workshops around translation – which was also really interesting. Working with a group of people with different language levels to read across languages in terms of translation was absolutely fascinating.


AH: Nat and Nina I know came back very happy.


LK: It was an amazing experience.


AH: Have you taken part in any writers’ activities in Malaysia? I know that Romalyn Ante has been really supported by a programme, which she won a place on in the Philippines, for Filipino writers. Did you ever participate in anything like that – or maybe there aren’t those kinds of programmes in Malaysia?


LK: Not that I’m aware of. Malaysia until fairly recently had a small publishing industry. So most Malaysian writers you would come across, Malaysian writers in English, tend to have come overseas and are published overseas first.


AH: Before we go down to hear Martha and Jean Sprackland read, can I ask, in conclusion, where are you headed next, creatively and geographically?


LK: Creatively I am working towards my full collection. I have been exploring the language that people use about the natural world, and what is a native species and what is non-native species. It is very much about belonging – but also drawing on that heritage that I have, from my parents’ scientific background.


AH: That sounds really good. Are you going back to Malaysia, working on this?


LK: I don’t go back that often – every three to five years or so. The more I thought about it, the more I realised lots of things migrate. If you look in your garden, and see where your plants originally came from, you suddenly discover that they are from all over.


AH: I have this ferocious yucca – which is definitely not from an English hedgerow.


LK: Lots of plants we think of as very common, or that have become very common like cyclamens, are not from here originally.   Cyclamens are from around the Mediterranean and down to Middle East. Tulips are as well. Lots of plants that we think of as native to the UK are naturalised. They weren’t originally from here.


AH:     That sounds like a perfect note to end on. Thank you very much, and thank you also for give us live readings of some of your multi-lingual poems, featuring Chinese dialects, Malay and English, which readers will be able to hear with these links.


‘Learning to be Mixi’


‘Cryptography’


‘Swallow’ recorded by Lunar Poetry podcasts.


You can buy ‘The Unquiet’ here.


L. Kiew will be performing at Rich Mix in London’s Bethnal Green on Saturday 13 July  – ‘with a sword on her head’.  More details here.


There’s also a link to L.K’s website with more information about publications and performances.   L. Kiew is shown with fellow poet and Westminster Library collaborator Joanna Ingham – whose debut pamphlet is due out with Ignition on 22 July.


 


Lisa and Joanna