Kae Tempest edits the Observer New ReviewPoetryObserver New Review guest editor Kate Tempest asks seven fellow poets who she admires to answer one another’s questions about their craft, and how they define success
I find it frustrating when reading profiles of artists how little attention is paid to discussion of practice. I have found there to be a tendency to encourage artists to pontificate on current affairs, sensationalising their experiences of craft and work. I frequently cringe at lengthy descriptions of what an artist is wearing, or how they are sitting.
With this feature, I wanted to give seven poets whose work I greatly admire the opportunity to have a serious discussion about poetry, free from the usual angling of “page vs stage” or “new young star brings poetry out of the dusty library”.
I asked each poet to come up with a question for other poets, then to answer as many of the questions as they wanted to, in whichever way they saw fit. I think you get to know the poets pretty well from a feature formatted in this way and I hope it will encourage readers to reflect on their own creative practices, whatever they may be. Kate Tempest
Has a poem ever humbled or frightened you? What was it? When did it happen and what did you do afterwards?
Sabrina Mahfouz I am always humbled after hearing a poem I love out loud. Most recently, this was Fran Lock’s Cohort at Edinburgh book festival, after which I had to go on stage to read my own poems, which was just horrible!
Inua Ellams Aye. Selling Out by Major Jackson. I was humbled by the sheer scale of the poem. He lifts the story – of being mugged when buying cocaine after working double shifts at McDonald’s – into a mythic urban poem of rebirth, reincarnation and writing. I first saw the poem 11 whole years ago and I am still under its spell and after, I bought everything I could find of his.
Polarbear When I read Sharon Olds’ collection Stag’s Leap I remember feeling both, along with a bunch of other things. The poem Pain I Did Not in particular knocked me sideways and I spent a couple of weeks afterwards thinking about my parents’ divorce and my own perceptions of it.
Melissa Lee-Houghton At a live poetry event a film was shown on a projector screen, described and introduced as a poem. The title was something to do with raping babies. The images were naturally jarring as a counterpoint to the title. I could see no artistic intention behind the images or the title, and I felt disgusted that I’d been invited to view it. It did nothing more than confirm my view that violence is not limited to physical acts, and that matching violence with violence does not negate it. Then years later I wrote something violent. I realised it did more than negate it, it consumed it. I became violence. Language can be masochistic, violent and transformative. The aforementioned film poem seemed to me at the time to be a rhetorical act of sadism masquerading as art. I have no opinion of it any more.
Polina Barskova There are a certain number of poetic texts that humble me every time I reread them. For example, many poems by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, many of his poems I know by heart – and nevertheless often something that I notice suddenly overwhelms me. I just cannot believe that this is man-made; I wonder what kind of ear one should have to combine words like this. One of my favourite pieces of his, Mozart and Salieri, is dedicated to this awe that one can experience at the creation of the other artist.
Jay Bernard Humbled or frightened? A third emotion emerges. I have experienced humble-fright many times, most recently after watching Fun Home. It is a musical: musicals are poems, I don’t care what you say. I bawled like a child. It’s scary not being able to control your face in public. I went up to the eight or nine-year-old lead actor and congratulated her, dribbling from my twisted maw. I thought, am I an idiot? Then I bent over and sobbed into the table, on the roof terrace, in front of everyone.
Zena Edwards A Cedary Fragrance by Jane Hirschfield was a poem I read really early one morning. It’s such a short poem and I think it was its length that gave it its immediacy of slapping me out of weeks of deep depression. It reminded me of all the times I had refused to look at myself in the mirror out of fear of what I might see. So that morning I did. I got up, looked at the bags under my eyes from crying, my grey skin from bad eating and the utter shock from realising I had allowed the depression to make a home in me without boundaries. So I had a long alternating hot-and-icy-cold shower, walked to the corner shop, came home, cooked and ate a huge slap-up breakfast and set some rules for the black dog to sit when I said so.
Some poets claim that a poem is like a living creature: once it’s out there is not much you can do to ‘correct’ or ‘improve’ it, while others edit meticulously, not leaving much from the original, draft form. What is your take on it?
Sabrina Mahfouz Everyone has a different approach and my take on difference in all forms is to not apply hierarchical structures to it as much as is possible in a society completely obsessed by and built on hierarchical structures! I mostly think of my own work in “polished notebook form” – I don’t put it out there with a finality, it has never reached the point at which I believe it is truly finished. If I waited for that point, I would never put anything out at all. Performing and reading your poems do give the opportunity to constantly edit text even after publication, even if just for that audience.
Inua Ellams If this were some sorta scale, with “once it’s out, don’t touch” on the left and “edit until death” on the right, my leaning would be centre-left. Definitely not far left as I tweak an archipelago of small things: images, tenses, small syntax etc but never the whole continent. I think of poems as photographs, snapshots, exact moments of the world as seen through a particular lens, and they are to be read as such. If it keeps changing, it loses itself in time.
Polarbear I think of them as time capsules. Fleeting attempts to represent where I am at a particular moment, handed over for people to make of them what they will. Usually everything has been done and redone so many times by the time I share a piece that the letting go is the biggest joy. My experience of rereading old work is pretty much a 50/50 split between pleasant nostalgia and pure embarrassment. Neither of which inspire me to tinker.
Melissa Lee-Houghton Although I don’t have a take, I suppose I could describe the ways in which I avoid staying attached to previous work. It occurred to me at some point that I never “dated” work and had made unconscious and ruthless efforts not to remember when, where or why a poem was written at some point in my past. Consequently, I can only recall the exact place and time of the writing of two of my poems, and I never return to them except during the process of editing a book. I don’t relish having to read them or look at them again after time has passed. It is important to me that if they should exist, they should exist untethered to time and place; it’s my way of defying stasis, attaching myself unnecessarily to memories and ideas, and being free to exist subjectively and autonomously, not on pages where I would remain a caricature, stuck.
Polina Barskova I do think that a poem is a reflection of its own unique moment – it reminds me in this way of a theatre performance or a photograph: it happens, it’s an event, it has its momentum. Everything you do to a poem after it’s born, shaped – is secondary, you can question its punctuation, for example, but it won’t change the essence. I often compare it to a birth of a child, a rather traditional comparison: after it’s born, there is only so much that one can do to “improve” it. Consequently, I think the crucial role of a poem is to fully make its moment of making present.
Jay Bernard I am not against this, I would not rule it out. But every time I come close to it, I think it is better to do the work of writing back to the original poem. My intentions are not pure enough to rework the piece itself; I want to paraphrase and state what I really meant, I want to signpost and virtue-signal, and claim inarticulacy rather than ignorance or laziness. My younger self was doing what they could. I am suspicious of this revisionist impulse and haven’t yet come across a truthful, honest reason for rewriting.
Zena Edwards A poem being birthed is in dialogue with the writer and any dialogue worth having has resonances that ripple out over time and will change or find newness in the hearts and minds of the reader or listener. The poem is then in dialogue with them and is almost none of the author’s business. That might seem harsh to say but I’m inclined to just let it go and live its own life. I’m not saying I haven’t ever revisited a poem. As a singer, my body is a sound board and the sonics of poetry inform me whether a poem is “ready”. Its like hitting an off-pitch note. You know when it’s wrong – it doesn’t strike the right chord.
When it comes to canon and legacy, how are poets across the generations informing each other’s craft? (This isn’t about dead white men but culturally and intersectionally diverse poets who are still creating and evolving as artists.)
Sabrina Mahfouz If only culturally and intersectionally diverse poets were considered part of the canon! There are many people – mainly university students – campaigning for this to become a reality, but it is currently not the case. There is so much dismantling, decolonising and most importantly in my opinion, de-lionising of canons to do.
Inua Ellams My entire last book is an answer to this question. In 2014 I turned 30 and wanted to mark it with a project about the end of childhood. I wished to reconstruct my youth by writing response-poems to the work of British and Irish poets published between 1984 and 2002 (from when I was born to when I turned 18). I wanted to stay as close as possible to aspects of the originals – subject matter, structure, syntax, length etc – but I would reset the poems. For instance, a poem on climbing a hill in southern England to watch roaming sheep could be reset to climbing a hill in northern Nigeria to watch wild antelope. I hoped the project would show the ways poetry transcends time, borders, history, culture, race and empire, to illustrate cultural differences and similarities. I carried their legacy forward by creating contemporary work in direct response. The book is called #Afterhours, it was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize.
Polarbear I think poets inform each other’s craft across generations as much or as little as anyone else informs other lives in that way. I think a sense of heavy duty to what came before is at once useful and restrictive. For me, the things that influence most are those which are found rather than prescribed. I find it interesting how an awareness of contemporary styles and voices can inform how I might read something from generations before.
Polina Barskova It’s a very big question: naturally, for me one of the most interesting ways to answer it is through thinking about translation. I think it’s tremendously interesting that cultures can touch each other by transferring whole planes, areas of ideas and emotions – like it happened, for example, with the German Romantic poetry that was hugely popular in Russia in the 19th century. Suddenly a culture discovers that it lacks a certain area of expression and it goes and “borrows” it from another culture, thus making the way of legacies very confused, sometimes remote.
And in general there are so many instances of “across” in poetry: it’s not only adjacent generations; we’re free to “visit” whoever and however far – be it Catullus, or Dickinson or Genet. You can make yourself close to your poet of choice. More often than a poet from the generation before me, I need a dialogue with somebody long gone: in poetry you can do it.
I had a student recently obsessed with Shelley; he read him so much that his own language became full of Shelley. I think this ability to fill ourselves with different traditions, it’s one of poetry’s most powerful qualities, to serve as a time machine.
Jay Bernard I appreciate the Apples and Snakes spoken word archive, which documents a very specific British aesthetic. I think about Sandeep Parmar’s work a lot – “we are mostly locked into a semi-confessional, detached and wary handling of the self as a stand-in for the folklore of universal human experience” – which continues and expands in Threads alongside Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Khapil. I was pleased to come across trans Ukrainian poet Friedrich Chernyshov in the last issue of MPT [Modern Poetry in Translation] – “no moustached customs bedbugs/pointing their dirty nailbitten fingers at my/anal plug.” I have no grand theory, but this intersection of the archive, the avant garde, race, trans politics feels current and true.
Zena Edwards I am highly attached to the works of Jean “Binta” Breeze. As a poet rooted in dub culture, which is a peaceful yet radical culture, I pay a lot of attention to the depth within me her work speaks to and helps me discover. Her poem Ordinary Mawnin captures the most intimate conversation a person can have with themselves when it comes to human purpose. It conveys how the existence of a poor, working-class black woman in the Caribbean can be crushing and beautiful at the same time.
Also Jean was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her 20s and is an advocate for mental wellbeing and addressing the stigma. Mental health is something rarely spoken about when it comes to black women, yet we have the highest rate of sectioning and prescriptive mental health drugs intake in the UK.
When I heard Jean’s poem Riddym Ravings in the 1990s, read in rich Jamaican patois, I knew that there was space for me to be able to speak my poetic voice. Permission was given from an elder that I was to write my radical point of view about things that are important to women who looked like me, from my working-class background. Jean freed me from writing work that could be gentrified into “the angry black woman poet” trope that a lot of poets of colour who come from the Caribbean can find themselves in. And I want to make a distinction between African writers and Caribbean authors. As there is no generic, monolithic “black” poetry. We have different voices. As do African poets.
How do you define success?
Sabrina Mahfouz Getting my son to nursery in time to make it to my first meeting of the day where I make actual notes and then managing to meet that day’s writing deadline before picking him up again and playing games for hours without a tantrum from either of us.
Inua Ellams I don’t have a working definition. This is a huge problem for me because I don’t know when to stop. The typical markers: being published, making enough from your work, recognition from your peers, I achieved within years of starting out. I started writing in 2003 and my first book came out in 2005. I performed so often, so many cash-in-hand gigs, that I didn’t have to do anything else. I had a 22-year‑long immigration case, which was only settled this year, so for the longest time, I wrote and performed imagining I might lose it all the following week. This meant I cared about it, but also, couldn’t care too much about it. I cared about work, but could lose the very ground on which I worked. It put everything in perspective. These days, I create large-scale poetry projects that push me to my creative extremes. I write myself into straitjackets. Perhaps success, then, is finding a way out.
Polarbear An email at 4am from a stranger. A nod from someone I respect. A smile.
Polina Barskova For me success in poetry is to create something that surprises you, not others, but you, since you know your own practice and habits the best. For me success is to be able to change your ways, to reinvent and rediscover them. This is that rare and satisfying feeling that you’ve done something new, different, some new dimension has emerged in your writing. It might be a tiny thing of course: a combination of sounds, letters, one fragment of an image.
Jay Bernard Penny Arcade’s piece Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! puts it well: “15 years ago, I faced the hideous truth about myself: that I didn’t deserve anything, that I wasn’t worth anything, that no one could ever love me. It was a big relief.” This seems like a good place to get to.
Zena Edwards Adulting in a way that I’m proud of is success. That includes the intergenerational participatory work I do with young people who don’t see themselves living even into their 30s because they are so distressed by the political climate and the levels of violence on the streets we are seeing. There is a specific state and social dehumanisation happening that is really worrying and is usually reserved to folk who live in war zones, so for me, if I can encourage a young person to find a spark of genuine hope for a future in uncertain times, I can go to bed and sleep easy. On a personal note, success for me, Zena Edwards, is owning two ex-racing greyhounds, two cats and a horse.
There’s an image of poets being overcome with inspiration and having to write everything out of nowhere and at once. Does this ever happen to you?
Sabrina Mahfouz It used to. When I had other jobs. Whether in nightclubs, in strip clubs, in government offices, I’d suddenly get some images and the exact right words to describe them in my mind and I’d start scribbling on whatever I could, though I’d never finish it in one go. Now writing is based around deadlines and invoices – who’s paid me and what that means I need to write. I know it’s very unromantic, but it’s the reality of writing for a living with no other financial support. The depressing marginalisation of working-class voices across the arts means the normalisation of an idealised notion of inspiration can go unchallenged much of the time.
Inua Ellams In my early days of writing, yes. An image would strike fast as greased lightning and I would have to find a white sheet to mark it all down, or else imagined something bad would happen to me. There was visceral, physical and psychological imperative to do that. These days because of my work schedule and deadlines, I do not have the freedom to drop it all for a poem. When an idea comes, I look it hard in the face and make a deal. Dude, I say, I can’t help you right now. If you wanna be born into the world, come when I’m poised to give birth.
Polarbear Sometimes, although less than it did. I think the satisfaction I get from writing these days has more to do with my brain scattering ideas ready for the slower process of gathering, sifting, then refining and shaping the music of something.
Melissa Lee-Houghton It is to my horror that my years alive have granted me a voice which grates and churns and that I gave it a space to be captured and shared. There was a time last year I think I may have been dying, and instead of feeling peace at last I attempted to annotate WS Graham’s Implements in Their Places. I was horrified that I couldn’t put the pen down even when the main thrust of my ongoing project of staying alive had become more of a burden than something I enthusiastically prolonged. I blame poetry.
Polina Barskova Actually a lot. In difference to writing prose or working on scholarship, poetry often arrives to me rather rapidly. It’s been like this for the whole time I’ve been writing from age eight. It arrives rather like a concentration of sound, of rhythm – these are more primary than words as such, and the effort is to stay with the flow of this music, to follow attentively its development. For me the question is what idea fits the best that form that is given to me.
Jay Bernard I wish. Can I counter this image with something closer to reality? Feeling poem-y, which for me is like the sting of an ever-present ovulation, but also feeling admin-y, which is the equal and opposite pain of dealing with a tax form but just not knowing how to word the email.
Do you ever regret sharing your work publicly? Do you trust the reader in a world of instant gratification and instant communication?
Sabrina Mahfouz Yes, every single time. And also yes, every single time.
Inua Ellams I never trust readers. No poet should. Mistrust is the small print in the contract between poet and reader. Antonio Porchai [the Argentinian poet] said: “I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.” I expect my audiences at best to only grasp a palpable fraction of what I mean to communicate. To trust them, they will have to have lived my life, and they should only trust me if I have lived theirs.
Polarbear I don’t trust anyone really. Myself included. The greatest thing about words in print for me is that they’re not begging for your attention. The megaphone scrapyard of the internet becomes irrelevant. If you put a book down, it’s still there tomorrow.
Melissa Lee-Houghton The entire impetus of my ambition as a writer has been to continually affirm to myself that I am not an object, but the subject. It is a great misfortune that along the way I indeed became merely an object to many people who encountered my work and needed to objectify its author to fulfil its validity or meaning.
Polina Barskova It happened that I was able to publish from a very early age, though it must be said in such special publications as The Sparks of Lenin and such… This made me feel that publishing is natural. It’s a very powerful thing to free yourself from your words, to let go of them. And next to this there exists a question of what shouldn’t be published – how one decides that. Is it some form of punishment for a poem or for a poet? What does it mean to decide not to publish a poem – what kind of relationship do you establish with this “unchosen” text? Maybe you hide it as an intimate treasure, or as a precious fruit that will bring even better fruit next summer? I live in the same tiny town where Emily Dickinson lived – and I think about her strategy to hide rather than to publish a lot.
Jay Bernard Regret? Trust? These are big words and I don’t know if I apply them to social media. I share my work readings, basically, and the occasional film. I don’t think I come across well in other forms. But once when I was 13, when the internet was still a dark and strange place, I shared my poem on a creative writing forum and received a truly Victorian ass-whipping. So maybe deep down I am distrustful.
Zena Edwards I don’t do regret. Life’s too short. I think trusting the reader doesn’t factor for me. I agree we do waste a lot in a throwaway culture and a poet cannot afford to be too attached, especially if they put themselves into the electric stream of online media.
I feel “trust” is a huge word to use in this context because I don’t think its our job to police how people engage or consume our work. That’s their responsibility. Ours is to keep showing up at the page and write authentically.
Was it for this?
Sabrina Mahfouz This sounds very much like a line in a poem but I have no idea what it means, so will leave the reader, who may have had more sleep than me, to ask it to themselves!
Inua Ellams I remember watching an episode of Batman of the future [the animated series Batman Beyond] where a villain takes over the mind of his targets by pretending to be their consciousness. The villain fails to do so to Bruce Wayne, who ultimately deceives him. Terry, Bruce’s assistant, asks how Bruce separated the voice in his head from his actual self. “He called me Bruce” Bruce says, but Bruce calls himself Batman. It was for that.
Polarbear I really don’t think so.
Melissa Lee-Houghton This “question” feels unfortunately apt. A reference to [Wilfred] Owen’s Futility is well suited to the current era. I wake each day with a sense of foreboding. I’ve installed myself in an isolated place and haven’t written poetry in over a year. If there is a window through which I see any part of the world now it is a computer screen – and the information it relays is soluble, dissonant and contagious. I believe there is much futility in proposing to ascribe answers to any of the questions suffering poses. There were no answers when Owen wrote that poem, and there are none now, but each attempt to translate human experience through poetry is valuable. Poetry is an open question and can suffer no retort.
Polina Barskova For me writing poetry never was a choice. So, I just attempt to serve this weird impulse in me – to be as observant and kind to it as I can, to take care of it, as one does to a difficult, demanding beloved cat.
Jay Bernard Both in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Wilfred Owen’s Futility, and I’m sure other places besides. I often turn this question over in my mind because, like poetry, it is cellular, it has its own little logic. Was what for what? Yet it doesn’t feel like a question that can or should be answered literally, nor should it be paraphrased – it is more like a tarot card or tea leaves, which provoke new combinations of thought and therefore new insight. You know, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, but a few hundred years older. And I use it to remind myself that poems aren’t simply about answers or information, which is easy to forget.
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