Featuring essays and memoir by Mary Gaitskill, Susan Pedersen, James Pogue and Snigdha Poonam, as well as criticism from Christian Lorentzen.

Fiction by Kevin Brazil, J.M. Coetzee, Sophie Collins, Victor Heringer (translated by James Young), Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff) and Alexandra Tanner.

Poetry by Najwan Darwish (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), Zoë Hitzig, Tamara Nassar and Bernadette Van-Huy.

And photography by Rosalind Fox Solomon (introduced by Lynne Tillman), Jesse Glazzard (introduced by Anthony Vahni Capildeo) and Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (introduced by John-Baptiste Oduor.

Cover artwork © Simon Casson

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Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born writer. Her latest novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), was shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2020. She is a lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The two authors discuss the taboo of memoir-writing in the Caribbean, historic misconceptions about Trinidad and the enduring legacy of colonial rule on the island.

Monique Roffey:

Memoirs rarely come out of the Caribbean, mainly because the islands are small communities where everyone is interlinked via marriage or blood. Can you talk about how you forged ahead, despite this daunting and nuanced web? Was it a case of ‘writing your truth’ over keeping quiet?

Ira Mathur:

Journalism is about the story, not the storyteller, and belongs to the public. Memoir is personal. The crucial overlap between the two is a devotion to truth-telling.

My background is that of a journalist. I like connecting the dots. For example, my time with Derek Walcott was recorded as meticulously as I remembered it. But unlike journalism, I wrote this memoir like one would a diary: based on fact but deeply subjective. I excavated and examined my interiority and memory, which we all know has moments of being unreliable.

I wrote it to get a monkey off my back: to understand myself, deal with private grief, offer a record of the vanished world of the Raj to which my mother and grandmother belonged, and make sense of my life as someone balancing precariously between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds while belonging to neither. I’m speaking to the divide drawn between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in which ‘New World’ means the Caribbean and Americas ostensibly ‘discovered’ by Europeans who subsequently suppressed and erased Indigenous peoples. In this memoir, I saw more clearly than ever that the personal is political. I saw that I had a duty to share my story because I believe that our individual histories of migration and colonial violence have the thread of damage done to entire societies. Walcott thought there were as many stories in the New World as there were people and wanted. In the absence of recorded history of the people who were brought as indentured labourers and slaves to islands like Trinidad, those stories form a crucial part of our ‘New World’ identity.

As a journalist, my impulse is always towards objective truth. I am telling my subjective truth here. It’s not an act of bravery but a journalistic instinct that has stayed with me in writing this memoir. Once readers see that it’s not just about me but a story echoed in other post-colonial continents, the fear of feeling exposed disappears.

Roffey: 

You’ve been writing this memoir for maybe twenty years on and off. For the last five years, you’ve pursued it doggedly. You’ve drafted and redrafted, hit many walls. It’s been a labour of love and persistence. Can you talk a bit about the highs and lows?

And considering that other Caribbean writers face similar taboos and constraints, what message of encouragement can you offer to other memoirists from the Caribbean?

Mathur:

It goes back further than twenty years. I’ve been thinking through these themes from about six when I already felt the burden of my grandmother’s stories which go back six hundred years. She told me stories as if handing me the responsibility of retelling them. I understood that I was her repository, her medium, a recorder of the past.

I have been making notes for years, but I only began writing the memoir seriously after I attended the Bocas Lit Festival in Port of Spain, run by Marina Salandy-Brown. I met you and the other writers there and attended workshops by Marlon James and sessions with Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Nicholas Laughlin, and Shivanee Ramlochan. I began writing seriously from then onwards, starting with short stories.

One of my writing career highlights so far was attending your workshops in Port of Spain. I initially sat around your mother’s dining table alongside other Trinidadian writers, many of whom have gone on to be published, including Ayanna Lloyd Banwo and Alake Pilgrim.

In your workshops, I realised quickly that telling narratives in the long form is almost the opposite of journalism, where all the critical information is presented in the first few lines. I was inspired by your technical knowledge of the craft and insistence on digging until it cuts.

Lows, I have discovered, are essential to this craft. Writing is a job which requires unending patience, humility and toil; there are moments when I have felt lost in the labour of my mind and doubted myself. I struggled, for example, to cohere my life lived on three continents into one narrative; how to connect the story of my ancestors who lived under the Raj and witnessed the mutiny in India to the indenture of the New World.

My advice to others is to press ahead, do many drafts of your work, dig deep, put it aside from time to time, and get it critiqued by editors, not family or close friends.

Roffey: 

Generations of women in your family endured unhappy, arranged marriages. Trauma has been handed down over generations, yet your family is part of a ‘privileged’ elite. Can you talk about the commonality of misogyny? Does it exist across all classes?

Mathur:

Yes. Misogyny is a global scourge that cuts across race and class. For my grandmother – a privileged, talented, wealthy woman – it meant sacrificing a scholarship to study music in Vienna in exchange for an unhappy marriage. Her great-grandfather, an army general, forced all the women in his family to marry according to his wishes, using the women as vassals to build dynastic links with other great families.

Roffey: 

Why must Caribbean women’s stories be documented?

Mathur:

Since gaining Independence from colonial rule, communities have not only had to heal the wounds of colonialism but also locate an authentic identity for those peoples who have been dislocated from their history and original culture by slavery and indenture. Caribbean women have roots in the Old World, but there has been no way of tracing where in Africa or India they come from. By insisting that English was the only accepted language of education and communication, other languages were broken, and the links to faraway continents turned flimsy.

Still, despite the many problems in the Caribbean today, gender equality has become less of an issue. Women have taken the reigns of family and community. Women in public life and education today are trailblazers. In 2022, there are eight female heads of state and prime ministers in the Caribbean. In Barbados, both the president and prime minister are women.

Caribbean women have been leading island states, from Dominica’s Dame Eugenia to Jamaica’s Portia Simpson-Miller, who served for two terms. Dominica led the way by electing its female Prime Minister in 1980. Since then, Haiti, Bermuda, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have followed suit by electing women as prime ministers.

As Barbados’s intrepid and outspoken prime minister, Mia Mottley, said, women have had to work twice as hard to be half as noticed as men, and that obstacle has produced greater competence. The examples set by women now have set the stage to remove this burden for the next generation. Perhaps the defection of men in family life – absent fathers created out of slavery and perpetuated through that same trauma – has led to matriarchy in Trinidad and the Caribbean.

Roffey: 

Trinidad is a diverse country, and yet in the UK, there’s an expectation that ‘true’ or ‘real’ Caribbean stories are African Caribbean. Does it feel frustrating that the UK and the outside world have such limited ideas?

Mathur:

It’s strange – but we Trinidadians don’t define ourselves according to what the UK thinks of us. This could come from the confidence of being an oil-rich country in the Caribbean or one that inaugurated its freedom with the iconic declaration by our first prime minister, Dr Eric Williams: ‘Massa Day Done’ [LINK: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3299402].

Perhaps that’s why two books, both entirely written in Trinidadian dialect, have recently done so well in the UK (Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds).

Our identity has evolved from the percolation of having people from four continents concentrated in a tiny city, Port of Spain. We are a nation of former slaves from Africa, former indentured labourers from India, several generations of immigrants from Venezuela, planters and their descendants from Europe, traders from Syria, Lebanon and China, and professionals from Africa and India. Given this mix, it is not surprising that we demonstrate a disproportionate brilliance in every profession, in the arts, sports and literature. Trinidad has produced two Nobel Laureates in the last century, V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott (who moved to Trinidad from Saint Lucia aged twenty-three).

Because Trinidad is such a complex and talented society in the exciting phase of creating its own identity, we don’t rely on the UK and the outside world for approbation. So, no, it’s not frustrating. If anything, Trinidadians need to be less insular and care more about the world.

Roffey: 

The outside world often reduces the Caribbean to a ‘paradise’ holiday destination. And yet child marriage was only outlawed in 2017; we are only just striking homophobic laws from the colonial statute books; Trinidad has 500 murders a year, and one in three women suffer domestic abuse. What would you say to anyone who wants to visit Trinidad?

Mathur:

Yes, this is all correct. Taken out of context, imperialists may say we are unfit to govern ourselves. Yet all the problems you state are born of empire. Many of our issues come out of the traumas of slavery and indentureship. Families were broken up, and institutions of power were built on violence. Up to sixty years ago, non-Christians had no access to education. It wasn’t until the 1970 Black Power Revolution that social movements started to address fundamental issues like the skewered power structure, where the people with money were white and Christian and had access to education and steady employment.

The murder numbers are frightening. They occur in specific neighbourhoods between gangs fighting for the spoils from the transhipment of illegal drugs destined for Europe and the US. The drugs originate in South America and are shipped through Central America and the Caribbean. Young unemployed men are paid in guns and drugs in exchange for transhipping services, driven by demand from Europe and the US. We realise that to stop these murders, the demand needs to be stopped, either through policing operations within countries that receive drugs or legalising those drugs, which would eradicate the illegal trade. All countries along these transhipment routes – Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras and our neighbouring Venezuela – have the same problem. So crime is not a daily experience of all people, although people in Trinidad tend to be cautious after dark, and like all countries, there have been incidences of horrific crimes.

The new colonialism is financial exploitation. Small island states are still affected by decisions made in capitals out of our control. Whether it’s this financial exploitation, internalised trauma of racial and physical abuse, destroyed family structures, or the cumulative mental trauma of all these things – people internalise this.

Where Trinidad falls down is the accessibility of guns and the endlessly slow justice system that leaves many perpetrators unchecked. Remember, we are a young country. This year we will be sixty. We are still recovering. Until Independence, there was no system of formal secondary education for the majority of the population; that only came in the seventies with the oil money and with Dr Eric Williams’s declaration that the future of our nation was in the book bags of our children. It’s a process. Racism was baked into our psyche and culture.

Any psychiatrist will tell you individuals who suffer trauma individualise and perpetuate it. Like individuals, societies do the same, but we continue to heal, process, celebrate and survive. In terms of visiting Trinidad, it’s a phenomenon that many people, from diplomats to personal trainers, never want to leave.

I think the overwhelming impression of Trinidad is its multicultural, endlessly unravelling historical complexity and the astonishing loveliness of its landscape. I notice that it rouses extreme emotion, not dissimilar to the reaction of many who visit India. You either hate or love Trinidad, but you are never indifferent and always leave changed.

 Roffey: 

Which Caribbean writers do you read and most admire and why? Do you feel truly Caribbean? 

Mathur:

The obvious ones. Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul. Sam Selvon, Earl Lovelace, C. L. R. James. Guerrillas by Naipaul is possibly the best novel I’ve ever read. Then there’s Jamaica Kincaid, Frantz Fanon, Jean Rhys, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Jacob Ross and Merle Hodge.

Roffey:

The last ten years have seen a renaissance in terms of literary talent. Why do you think we produce so many fine writers? What’s going on and why? And the current crop is 99% female. Is this some kind of feminist uprising?

Mathur:

I wrote about this in The Irish Times and described it like this: ‘If James Joyce thought the “cracked looking glass of a servant” was the symbol of Irish art, then Derek Walcott thought the reassembling of the shards of a vase was the remit of the New World. That’s what colonised people do.’

Just as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Bernard Shaw. ‘wrote back’ paving the way for Anne Enright and Sally Rooney, I think Derek Walcott, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Earl Lovelace and Jean Rhys wrote back. Michael Anthony, Olive Senior, and Jacob Ross write back. Claire Adam, Amanda Smyth, Alake Pilgrim, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Breanne Mc Ivor, Caroline Mackenzie, Celeste Mohammed, Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, Barbara Jenkins, and myself, among other writers, currently subvert entrenched colonial ideas, and question the status quo. This comes at a time when women have access to education as never before.

Marina Salandy-Brown, the founder of the Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad, said of the phenomenon of women writers coming out of Trinidad: ‘The writing has been happening quietly all along. We’ve let people out of their writing closets. Bocas gave them access to the publishing world, brought in writers, agents, and publishers, and created workshops and competitions for Caribbean writers. We pushed at a door that was ajar. Our stories are unique, and world readers are avid for more.’ I predict the deluge of women writing out of the Caribbean will no longer be a ‘phenomenon’. It will become commonplace.

The post In Conversation appeared first on Granta.

as big as you can

as small as you can

make it the same thing

seagull on the roof

common snipe in the yard

24/7 birdsound

wet feather

white flutter

floodwater

volcano blackout

volcano privilege

volcano print

distant volcano

extinct volcano

volcano voile

paper recycling

fly away Peter

fly away Paul

suffer

sulphur

soufflé

snowflakes syringes

bananas oranges

statisticians foragers

mask no mask

nose mask mask

ventilator ventilation

dense lesbian trees

marriageable parasol geraniums

abandoned lighthouse

dense lesbian trees

people fall on their faces

things are looking up

dense lesbian trees

sweet singing in the choir

sweet singing in the choir

‘Doon Yer Tea, Eat Yer Bread’

A faint resentment paints

the spiral staircase walls

blue all over again,

unheimlich as a school

bazaar, as gilded eggs,

as rebonding plaster.

Footsteps. Stop one floor down.

Is that too soon. Or not.

They aren’t yours? Colour this

now, collect it like likes,

call it no name, no name.

I have seen the best minds

of my generation

turned into deer. About

time, too. Fuck resonance.

Streetside, virus baubles

the heatstroke jetty air.

Lyric! Cannae come in.

Vampiric lyric, you’re

banished. O my threshold,

my threshold, threshing floor

and sea floor, loud as foil.

O my deer, my hamlet,

my flowering wall, O

ladder to breakages,

nightmare’s gown, summoning

moonvowels. Exeunt.

I will go out. I will

Breathe. Breath is the spirit.

When’s a door not a door?

Too many empty rooms.

Image © Rawpixel Ltd

The post Two Poems appeared first on Granta.

Carcanet published your Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems this past February, before Covid-19 changed the world dramatically. From your first book to your most recent, I read you as speaking to the contemporary condition in deliberately timeless ways. How do you hear your voice as evolving over the past thirty years? Can you speak to the arc?

Peter Gizzi:

It is certainly a strange moment to have a book come out. One hopes that poetry can address all sorts of weathers. This epidemic is one of many epidemics that have occurred in recent history – including the ongoing epidemics of world-wide poverty, of racism, of pointless war, of the refugee crisis, of climate change, of commercial governing.

Regarding my own work, the biggest part of the arc I can speak to is just how much the mystery of it keeps deepening from spending a life at this art. When I write I am always aware that language is bigger than me, older than me, that it doesn’t live in me, I live in it. We all do. Language is an ancient medium we all negotiate every day in the world and in our heads, or better said, the world in our heads; it is archival, hence why and how we (think we) understand one another (or ourselves).

So, over these many years I feel more and more that my job as a poet is simply to listen and receive. And what I have learned is that one of the greatest gifts of being a writer, particularly a poet, is learning how to listen. When I was in my twenties and thirties I wanted to be heard and seen and was unduly loud I imagine. But now in the past decade or two, the world has gotten much louder, it’s like someone keeps turning the volume up; it has been an ongoing privilege and hardship to learn how to listen to the world.

This new Carcanet edition comes after my 2014 US Selected, In Defense of Nothing, and includes poems from my 2016 book Archeophonics and also about thirty pages of new poems. I have always hoped to have a proper book in the UK so I am delighted about it.

Let me ask you about your new book, A Dynamic Exchange Between Us. Does this title come from somewhere, as it has a scientific feel to it and has been morphed into something intimate? The book deploys a vital linguistic surface while maintaining a human core and differs from your previous books as it is less narrative driven.

Caleshu:

I went back and forth with the word ‘dynamic’. Though I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular when I settled on it, I have a note at the back of the book which cites Albert Einstein, a nod to him as philosopher more than scientist. I might have first read this particular quote thirty or so years ago, on one of those posters he appears in with the crazy hair which used to be ubiquitous in US college dorm rooms. Einstein aligns the ‘beautiful’ to the ‘mysterious’ to a ‘knowledge’ which we can only comprehend in ‘primitive forms’ . . . ‘this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness’. Everything implicit in these words interests me. I gave a reading recently and was asked if I felt closer to God after writing the book and have been thinking about that ever since. For sure, I feel closer to the language of God (there are allusions throughout the book to The Bible, The Qur’an, the Buddhist Sutras etc.), closer to the language of life and death, the above and beyond, as well as the contemporary here and now. But in all these respects, the ‘dynamic exchange’ for me is a philosophical one, partial to the meta-language of assertions, propositions, semantics, performative grammars etc., and yet at the same time distrustful of them. It allows me to tread the line between a philosophical and counter (or mock) philosophical patter. If I come down on the right chord (the right collection of words), the poem performs an ontological swerve, both towards and away from expressions of being and meaning, a deferral of expectation, deeper into the multiplicity of experience and imagination, an exposure of a human condition which is wild and other-worldly. The goal is a poetry that evolves with each sentence, which is both expressive and disruptive of our ‘impenetrable’ (to use Einstein’s word) pasts, presents and futures.

We’ve spoken in the past about your love of tradition – Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens. But let me ask you here about the contemporary? What’s happening now that interests you?

Gizzi:

There is so much happening in poetry now that it’s hard to know how to begin to answer this question. Last November, we lost the remarkable and original Sean Bonney. It still opens up a huge sadness and absence. His work is just great, real, and uncompromising. In this era of renewed social justice in the arts, all his career, Bonney’s voice always spoke to power with such original wild ungoverned invective. And yet, through all the piss and vinegar in his voice, the act of the imagination is towering. He can get at the heart of abjection by matching psychotic political atrocity with a seemingly psychotic response but it is much more than that, it is the result of sheer poetic skill as he turned phrases, made lists, and built an address to keep the energy moving outward so as to unflinchingly look the monster in the eye. I truly hope that a proper collected volume of his work comes out sooner than later. His poems will keep him alive and that’s not nothing, in fact, it is everything.

To further speak to your question regarding the ‘contemporary’, I’ve always believed that good writing from every period is always contemporary, it is still in our immediate surround and informing us, we get to discover it, like friendship, one poem at a time. If a poem is any good it is always good. I love that. And this is how I truly embrace the present, call it deep time. A perpetual song. As one example, think of Bonney’s use and repurposing of Arthur Rimbaud in his excellent book, Happiness. They, Bonney and Rimbaud, are now forever alive and singing together. Just like Jack Spicer and Federico Garcia Lorca in Spicer’s After Lorca with its ghostly frame and real and fake translations. Another way to get at it, I work in Amherst, Massachusetts which is where Emily Dickinson lived and wrote. I continually read her work and her voice just cuts deeper and deeper and is as new and exploratory and politically awake and ‘sexy’ as anything happening now in this moment. If her ‘Master Letters’, for instance, where to appear today, in Granta say, it would blow everyone away. Whenever I share them with my students they are simply floored and inspired with awe. Speaking of students, over many years now, I have had the deep pleasure of working with some of the most remarkable writers. They keep the machine humming and expanding.

We share that interest in tradition but what about your interest in the contemporary?

Caleshu:

The most inviting aspect of contemporary writing is that we’re living in such plural times, in theme and aesthetics. That said, the contemporary (as a condition) can’t just be documented to be interesting, it has to be affected beyond the norms of what a given medium has come to mean and be. The danger of writing the contemporary is that when you’re living in a world which is as messed-up as ours (politically, environmentally, socio-culturally, economically, and now Covid-19), a lesser poetry can reduce itself to ‘singularities’, deferring to its subject positions, its stances, its experience until the writing starts sounding the same, less testing of possibilities, less challenging of the norm than it might be. I love Gertrude Stein’s line: ‘Poetry is concerned with using, with abusing, with losing and wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun.’ There’s something fun, tongue-in-cheek, as well as something disturbing and distorting of the norm (or her own sense of the norm) as it comes to us (and as we make it) through language. It’s exactly what Bonney taps into when he writes in Happiness of a ‘supernatural sobriety of discontinued nouns’ (he also, of course, challenges our grammar with explicit reference to ‘verbs’, our ‘alphabet’, and how ‘when a specific distortion in the vowels is achieved/ we can hear heaven’ . . . even against a backdrop of dystopian capitalism where people are ‘eating stones’). The best contemporary writing for me ‘refracts’ in this way just about everything – experience, the imagination, language, defamiliarizing our positions in the world, until the very thinking and feeling being done becomes something new, something strange. Some of my own students amaze me with their willingness to experiment, to write the ‘strange’ – my workshop mantra is that the best writing often starts as an ambitious failure rather than an easy success. To rewrite and repurpose R.D. Laing, I’m of the mind that a strange response is required by a strange world.

Your own work has navigated through political spaces over the years. Do you think of your poetry as political?

Gizzi:

Do we need to distinguish, it’s all there in the language, just as the beloved is there. Syntax in a lyric utterance connects me to the glories of the world and also to its ongoing ever-expanding atrocities. I always think of Samuel Beckett’s: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.’ And Emily Dickinson’s: ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun.’ I have always found the old linguist’s joke to be of use to me: ‘What is the difference between a language and a dialect? A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.’ So that world is in our heads too, always. Words are haunted. Think of it: as long as there have been soldiers there have been poets. I have often felt that being a poet is a form of civil disobedience.

I choose the lyric over narrative because I am ultimately interested in mystery, presence, intimacy . . . (mystery not as mystical but as unfathomable, a not knowing) and I often reflect, with awe, at the plain fact that an intimacy has been passed from poet to poet for millennia through one rotten kingdom after another. The power of the lyric is that it is already working in a language that is used to create damage but equally finds an opening to a human’s emancipatory interiority, singing the changes of light in a damaged world. It is like a miracle to me when that light comes back into my room in the form of shaped sound, and I can feel its ray.

You also favor the lyric. When I chose your Victor Poems for the Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2010, I was taken with the energy and purposeful address in this series. The sheer inventiveness. I love this book. There was also the additional factor that reading through numerous submissions your poems instantly rose to the top of the pile and happily made my choice easy and definitive. I still feel good about it. In this serial poem, I am also struck by the use of ‘Victor’ as the protagonist. How it can be read as a proper name but also unmistakably the noun of a seeming champion. How does that name, Victor, perform for you?

Caleshu:

The ‘victors’ of one particular line and time are the losers of another – too often such times and peoples coincide (meaning we’re all losers, or, we’re all winners). The pyrrhic victory is the saddest example of an unwelcome achievement, and the group of men who set off in search of Victor are as unstable and as pyrrhic as they come. I wanted the sequence to have both lyric and narrative drive. ‘Victor’ was set up as a paradoxical cypher, a long-lost friend and a person never known; both a prayed-for Godhead and a mystery un-solved. For the narrators, pursuit of Victor means leaving the ‘real’ world behind – to venture through an Arctic which is both Stevenseque in its sublimity and also a frozen/melting wasteland. What might have begun as a noble adventure for the narrators (towards friendship, towards revelation, classically inspired by the philosophers I was reading at the time: Aristotle and Epicurus, Michel de Montaigne and Ralph Waldo Emerson) is recognized as a misguided retreating in the very first poem, a walking in the ‘wrong’ direction, away from the world of family and work. It’s a malalignment of perspective and seeking: an ironic and failed attempt at enlightenment which swerves into a place of acknowledged loss at their own hands (or feet, since the whole book has the narrators walking, misstep after misstep).

And so to swerve: Let me ask you about place – in terms of the real, non-metaphysical world. We’re both from Massachusetts. Some reviews of your work, including the New Yorker review of Threshold Songs, make a lot about your being a New England poet; and in some of your own book bios you’ve simply stated, ‘Peter Gizzi is from the Pioneer Valley’. How important is place to you as a writer – not just as subject, but as influence?

Gizzi:

I can say that I am definitely a New Englander and in particular from western Massachusetts which, as you know, is much different than the eastern part of the state. It’s just a place I like to live. I grew up here and then eventually after university and various jobs and living in other places, I came back here to settle and work and live. It is quiet, and mostly rural, beautiful, and close enough to New York City where I spent my twenties and continue to visit and explore.

I grew up in the western most part of Massachusetts in Berkshire County. I like to say I came from ‘The Berkshire School’. There are the abiding predecessors like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, W.E.B Du Bois and Edith Wharton, who always felt present informing that landscape. But when I was in my twenties, the writers I knew who were a part of that place, or came through often and spent time there, were Clark Coolidge, my brothers: Tom and Michael Gizzi, John Ashbery, Paul Metcalf, Bernadette Mayer, the Howe sisters, Bill Corbett, and Geoffrey Young, to mention some dear old friends of my youth there. Also, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were most essential to me.

I left New York City in 1987 to return to the Berkshires and edited my little magazine o·blēk. I was twenty-six when I began work on it. It was everything to me at that time in my life.

At that time, and this isn’t a story I often tell in print, simply because I am not interested in being ‘sensational,’ I was recovering from narcotics addictions, I had become a street junkie on the Lower East Side of NYC in the early to mid eighties and was dying of malnutrition. I mean to say, I was ‘Punk’, that was the period. I was also, gratefully, befriended by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. It was several lifetimes ago but how I left that abject habit and got to change my life is still a miracle to me. My run of using substances which began with weed, ran from age thirteen to twenty-six. I started getting high a year after I saw my father’s plane crash when I was twelve, which was a foundational marking and irrevocable experience of my early life. I went to five high schools, worked in a factory before I eventually went to college in NYC and studied classics (though I must confess I wasn’t the best student). Through all those lost years I was a deep reader of poetry. What did happen when I got clear of heroin, was that I took a vow and I doubled down with poetry as my single true life-force, as a means to recover reality in a broken world; it taught me that I could transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world. Poetry can do this. How does New England affect you after all these years living in the UK?

Caleshu:

I’ve now lived almost half my life on this other side of the Atlantic – moving to Ireland in the mid-1990s, and since the early 2000s living in south-west England (with frequent trips back to Ireland). When I first moved across the ocean from the US, I was twenty-seven and blown away by the linguistic verve, wit, and story-telling that was everywhere in Ireland. I tried, briefly, as an amateur will do, to emulate it in my writing. But as Patrick Kavanagh wrote, ‘the standing army of Irish poets seldom falls below 10,000’. It took me awhile to figure out that if I wanted to be associated with the country and its scene – to be poet number 10,001 – it would have to come from my bringing something else to the table, to widening the idea of what might constitute poetry in Ireland. Over time, living and working for almost twenty years in England now, I think I’ve clung to a greater dependency on my American voice; it’s the voice I hear when I teach, when I dream, when I love, when I parent, when I write. Being married to an Irish woman, and having two British kids, I’ve become uber-aware of my Americanisms, my accent, experience, existence. I hope my distance from America has allowed me to hone my own particular rendition of the language/the people/the country/the imagined space that it’s become for me.

I first met you when you were on a Judith E. Wilson Fellowship at Cambridge, in 2011 I think. When did you first come to the UK?

Gizzi:

I have been coming to England since ’94 when J.H. Prynne kindly invited me to visit for a week in Cambridge. He was and remains one of the most remarkable instances of personhood I have encountered in this life (I have found that true poets share this quality of exceptional personhood). It was a real pleasure to recently bring out and introduce a reprint of his masterful early book, The White Stones, for the NYRB Books poetry series. That book opened my head when I was twenty-five or twenty-six. Over the years spending time deep into the night conversing with Jeremey is just fun and always illuminating, he can discourse with such precision and grace, and unpretentiously, on so many topics. On that first trip in ’94, I got to spend time with Tom Raworth, who I knew from his many trips to the states, and met the lovely Val Raworth, Peter Riley (they were all still living in Cam then) and Rod Mengham. Over time and with many trips back I have now met and respect and have great friendships with so many gifted poets there. I find it a vital and exploding scene.

You are now adding to that story with the new Periplum series at Plymouth. How long has it been running and what are its plans going forward?

Caleshu:

I’ve been publishing and editing for as long as I’ve been teaching and writing. I think of it as another way of getting in on the conversation around the making of contemporary literature. I started Periplum in 2016 (after ten years of running Short Fiction: The Visual Literary Journal), as a way to publish a selectively slim sample of contemporary poets in pamphlet format. I love the idea of the pamphlet, the size of it, like poetry is something you can always have on your person, hidden in a pocket, just out of sight. In addition to publishing your work, we’ve been gifted with poetry by some amazing writers from the UK (most recently David Herd), America (Rae Armantrout) and Ireland (John McAuliffe), and will soon publish the ‘expanded translations’ of writers from the non-English world (by Vahni Capildeo). Going forward, I want to make more digital interviews with poets, make more broadsides, find new ways to conceive of the interrelationship between poetry and the other arts (visual, sonic etc.), not to mention the wider disciplines out there (the hard and social sciences, for example); there’s so much scope for poetry to be interconnected with the world. I’ve recently received the good news that a project I’m doing with Rory Waterman is being funded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council: to look at how poetry is working as a mode of discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic (part of this includes publishing a new anthology in 2021, dedicated to the collaborations of fifteen poets from the UK paired with fifteen poets from around the world).

You mentioned o·blēk, which you started up and edited for its run from 1987–1993. It was one of the journals I wanted to publish in most when I was just starting out. I remember getting a note back with some encouraging words, and though I never made it into the journal, it meant the world to me to get that note! You became part of the very scene you were publishing (John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Kamau Braithwaite, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, etc.), and thirty years on, one of the coolest readings I’ve ever been to was when you blew away a totally packed and utterly invested bar of university students at an off-site event at AWP in Chicago. I hear you when I read lots of contemporary poetry: the use of infinitives, the aborted sentences, an ‘I’ which refracts personal experience, claiming a poetic space of thinking and feeling which is entirely distinct from anecdote – do you hear yourself in the more recent generation of poets? Do you think of yourself as writing for new audiences with each book?

Gizzi:

Not really, and as I go on I realize I am often conversing with the dead, call it the undying, or I imagine my voice in my poetry to be already posthumous. Call it the other world in this world, it’s like breath on a mirror, it’s there and then it’s gone. My voice somehow now exists beside me. Again, I dwell fully in this extremely haunted medium, poetry. To embrace the amplification of voice (self) by standing next to oneself, outside of one’s life, to look at one’s self in and through the world – a form of discovery within the baffles of pronominal reality.

In my work I’m interested in this form of ‘vamping,’ or ‘throwing’ of the voice and placing it beside the speaker, or even pitched (this is so effective in Whitman and Dickinson) on the ‘other side of the river’, speaking – or singing – back to me in time, to the beloved, to the reader, to imagine the pronouns speaking back to me when I am no longer here to read it. As I wrote in the title poem of my last book Archeophonics: ‘I’m just visiting this voice / I’m just visiting the molecular structures that say what I am saying / I am just visiting the world at this moment and it’s on fire / It’s always been on fire.’

For me though, the location of the voices of the ‘dead’ or ‘undying’ are not behind me but ahead of me. I think of tradition as ahead of us, not behind us shoring us up. What I mean to say is that the enduring writers that inform us were all writing just ahead of themselves, ahead of their period, of period style, and even ahead of what they could manage, all in the service of discovery. So, the action is dynamic and forward thinking. Tradition is an occasion we rise to.

You write fiction as well as poetry, maybe even fiction as poetry at times. I know we share a love of Melville. You even wrote an obsessive book-length sequence coming from Moby-Dick. How does fiction and character work for you in poems?

Caleshu:

I love story and, I think it’s pretty inevitable that everything I write has a hybrid hope to collapse the boundaries between fiction and poetry. If I’m being generous with myself, I’ll also acknowledge a wish to push into a non-poserly, palatable mode of philosophical enquiry – characters and narrators who put forward mock aphorisms and the like. Poetry (and fiction, and any art, I think) offer unique ways to formulate and express thinking/feeling/wonder. I love how this is handled by Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Anne Carson, Nathanial Mackey. In my third book of poems, Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins, the conceit was to put myself into Melville’s space (and him into mine, a palimpsestic existence), to let myself exist as a character/writer in the compositional space of reading and writing Moby-Dick whilst at the same time being a parent living a twenty-first-century existence. The sentence as a unit, and how one sentence can jettison another has become more central to me than the line as a mode of conjunction in recent years. I’ve a few prose poems in Of Whales, and it’s the form I’ve used exclusively in my last two books (my next book is shaping up in that direction too). It also coincides with my writing a novel (alas unpublishable thus far) and a collection of short stories – neither of which have much poetry to them, but which do their best with a more perfunctory sentence.

We’re nearing the limits of our allotted conversational space, so, a last question: one of the great risks and successes of your work is the way you insist on a feeling intellect. In each book (sometimes each poem), your work can range from melancholic to ecstatic. Are you conscious of this when you’re writing, I mean when you’re in the flow of it?

Gizzi:

I am interested in the fierceness of elegy. I guess it could be a form of mindful sadness (I mean look what we have done to this world). I call it consciousness. Or maybe I suffer from something more like a deep melancholy which I find to be generative but maybe it is closer to a form of doubt, an insistence on not knowing and a kind of questioning (and questing) the real, pushing back at the sensory data I receive to test what is in fact real, the thing itself or my perception of it, or maybe it is the fragility of reception itself and what can be known.

As I have said elsewhere, I occasionally have difficulty separating my work from the world, it is a private homespun experience with both style and form. For instance, the negotiations of loneliness and vulnerability are formal concerns. The need to connect the inner life with the social is a formal concern, or the invisible with the material, or the staging of private life within a broken political reality. None of these are new conditions of poetry, but still they exist as formal problems, as in how to address the momentary and time itself. Maybe it is simply a form of being awake to the polyphony of worlds, or words. Or, maybe just being awake.

Photograph of Anthony Caleshu (left) © Alastair Coomer

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