I was driving to London the night before I was due to speak with Jennifer Lee Tsai, Simon Maddrell and Neil Douglas, about different ways in which our personal experiences can also be inherently and creatively political. To get myself in the right headspace, I’d cued a London Review of Books podcast featuring So Mayer and Sarah Schulman. They are both distinguished, deeply committed writers and activists. Piloting my car towards the motorway, a huge, blood red sun sunk slowly below the horizon, as if to emphasise a world already on fire. Heading east, the light fell quickly, as dusk began to thicken the end of what had been a hot August Sunday. Sarah Schulman and So Mayer were discussing their two new books, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, and Bad Language, and how those of us who want to make a difference can try to do so.
With decades of civil rights activism behind her, including ongoing support of Palestinian rights, and within the legendary Act Up, Sarah Schulman’s position was that “the real challenge is to be effective”. I’d been re-reading Simon Maddrell’s and Jennifer Lee Tsai’s debut collections, Lamping Wild Rabbits and Melete, together with Neil Douglas’s online pamphlet Ghosts of Former Patients, over the weekend, ready to introduce them, and speak with them about their work. When So Mayer said ‘In poems, words are actions”, I found myself nodding vigorous agreement towards the red lines of rearview lights streaming ahead.
When I read Neil Douglas’s work, I living alongside meticulously anonymised ‘looked after’ children he worked with as a community paediatrician, travelling across the sand dunes of Northern Africa ferried by traffickers, or delivering tiny packages of illegal drugs to middle class houses. With Jennifer Lee Tsai, I walked among Liverpool’s longstanding British Chinese communities, and followed the routes and histories that led them to build Europe’s oldest Chinatown, and become creative, world-changing players within our society. Plants grew up around me in Simon Maddrell’s worlds, and helped me feel and know how queer communities make and claim the strength and beauty of their beings in the face of ferocious adversity. By the end of the weekend, I’d been changed by the act of reading them and made different by the imaginative engagements their poems offer.
A selection of photographs of local poet Simon Maddrell. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIENSEN PAMBEN.
The four of us go back. We’re all part of a very loose collective I set up eight years ago, through which people exploring complex materials work in solidarity with each other, whether offering feedback, insight, or support and encouragement in the face of challenges. Ours a delicate and subtle form of activism, whose processes are mainly internal, taking place within the individual creative members.
To write a poem is put together a puzzle. You have to figure out where to find specific words that can explore and dynamically engage with an idea, experience or thought experiment. Once you have done that, and arranged them, you have to see how they come apart, and are interpreted, and then put back together to be experienced once more in action.
To have some people to try out your poem-puzzle along the way is always helpful, to know if it working as you hoped it might. When the puzzle plays out, and the poem happens, as you will see take place over and over again with Simon, Neil and Jennifer’s work in these readings, the results can be mind-changing for the individual reader, as well as game-changing for how things we once thought we knew now appear new and different.
We really hope you’ll enjoy hearing Neil Douglas, Simon Maddrell and Jennifer Lee Tsai reading a selection of their poems that politicise the personal in different ways, and then hearing us briefly discuss their work together, thinking in particular about how the poem stages itself for the reader, and the role of research in forming work, available by following this link.
If you’re looking to work on putting together poems of your own, I’ll be running a supportive and friendly online workshop on ‘Writing into the non-verbal as radical liberation’ on 15 September 2026 as part of Romalyn Ante’s Tsaa with Roma series, tickets available here.
Thank you for reading.
alice hiller