Poets for the Planet

Your recent work sounds fascinating. Could you tell me more about the poems you have been producing? I am particularly interested in how lockdown has informed your writing process and perhaps, even, the poetic forms you have used to express your ideas.

My mum died from Covid-19 in April. In common with many families at the time, we couldn’t be with her during her final days in hospital. I suppose, I looked to nature to help with the distress and grief – I love walking anyway so it was instinctive to seek solace in the countryside. Writing about my mum and her death has helped with the grieving process. One poem – a commission for The Poetry Society – describes a walk my mum and I went on a few years ago, before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Others explore the idea of nature as healer, how wellness in humans is inseparable from wellness of the environment.

The canal poem is quite blocky and as it progresses, its shape slips towards the edge of the page (variations of the word ‘slip’ appear in each stanza) before regaining balance. I’ve used the canal as a symbol of hope for environmental recovery – 50 years ago British canals were in a terrible state but today many are thriving corridors for nature.

By contrast, the form of many later poems has tended towards the slim-line. (I notice you wrote quite a few slim poems in your debut collection.) They allow the poem space to breathe, and thin columns can imply strength alongside a certain precariousness, which chimes well with eco themes.

In ‘Zebra’ I was never overtly political in terms of eco-poetics or my eco allegiances, although I did allude to the problematic relationship humans have with their surroundings in poems like ‘Zebra on East 55th and 3rd’ and ‘Darklight’. Recently though, I have addressed these issues head-on, which can feel quite exposing. But I think, as poets, we’re often guilty of putting subtly on a pedestal when it can sometimes work against a poem by drawing a veil to hide behind. Putting a message or idea out there more directly – if approached in a compelling or original way – can still create interest and intrigue.

Writing about your debut collection, Clare Shaw says: ‘With its depictions of 1980s gay culture and multiracial heritage, Zebra is a love poem to identity.’ How important are issues of identity to your work as a poet?

Clare Shaw also lives in Hebden Bridge and has written powerfully and movingly about the personal and environmental costs of flooding in her wonderful collection, ‘Flood’ (Bloodaxe).

But back to identity – who I am in terms of race, class and sexuality affects how I navigate life, how I view the world and how people view me. It makes sense to sometimes explore my own identity on the page, doing so can bring something fresh or surprising to a piece. It’s nothing new, of course. British poets have put themselves in their work for centuries. Until recently though, the white male voice was the default – and some critics still hold this up as a kind of ‘universal voice’. Thankfully, more and poets who don’t write from a white male perspective are starting to get heard.

As a Black British poet, I have also found myself battling that default voice. Of course, I am happy for all people to write poetry. However, in the early stages of my writing career, I did worry that my cultural traditions would not be taken seriously.

In terms of eco-poetry, which poets have inspired you to write outside of what is seen as the English poetic tradition?

Alice Oswald and Pascale Petit both seem interested in nature’s uneasy relationship with people and culture, and both have startlingly unique – and very different – voices. In terms of writers ‘outside’ the English poetic tradition, Jorie Graham comes to mind, and her fellow US poet Camille T. Dungy, who is also the editor of the pioneering Black Nature: Four centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press) which came out a decade ago and includes poems from many greats including Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay and Audre Lorde. More recently, lots of emerging poets are tackling eco-poetry from new and fascinating angles. I’m currently enjoying Anja Konig’s Animal Experiments (Bad Betty Press) – a witty and razor-sharp take on the nature crisis.

As a Christian, I read your poem ‘Apple’ with awe. I wonder if you could shed some light on how you composed this poem. From the point of view of identity and ecology, how does this poem reflect your overall view of poetic creation?

Thank you. I was raised a Catholic and, in common with many lapsed Catholics, religion and religious guilt weighed heavy in my youth. ‘Apple’ is obviously a twist on the biblical forbidden fruit story – I wanted to put the snake inside the apple so it resembled a maggot, and implied that something was rotten, although the snake itself is beautiful albeit dangerous. Could it be that society is somehow rotten at its core? I made the snake tiny to show how sin – or perceived sinful behaviour – is often conflated with difference (and its effects exaggerated) in the minds of the fearful and those who benefit from instilling fear in others. Sometimes we have to go against society’s rules to find ourselves, one person’s sin is another’s salvation. This point relates to poetry too – as artists we shouldn’t be afraid to go against current poetry trends, and to follow a path that feels true to ourselves.

In terms of form, I wanted the poem to be small, bite-size, and to hang mid-air in the centre of a lot of white space to create a contemplative energy.

I’m not entirely sure why but most of my poems are written in traditional English poetic forms such as villanelles and sestinas. What is your relationship with ‘traditional’ English forms? Also, how does poetic form in general inform your eco-poetics?

You subvert traditional poetic forms brilliantly though. The restrictions of form in many of your poems somehow echoes the restrictions faced by black and brown people in a country that romanticises its colonial past. In your sequence of sonnets in Road Trip – ‘An Interview With Comedy Genius Olivier Welsh’ – the voice and concerns are very modern and multicultural so using the sonnet form is both jarring and incredibly powerful.

The sonnet is perhaps the only traditional form I use in ‘Zebra’. I like its relative brevity, how it looks on the page – I think of it as a girdle in the way it creates an idealised beauty through constraint – but I prefer to use it in non-traditional ways. In fact, alluding to tradition (whether poetic forms or classic themes) is something I often do — before turning away from it. I’m no purist.