WRITE-ON PAGES

Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version.
Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.
 Contents

FOREWORD BY CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS

1 THE EARLY YEARS

2 LEARNING FROM FAILURE
3 TECHNIQUE AND CRAFT
4 YOUR VOICE MATTERS
5 YOU HAVE A MANUSCRIPT, NOW WHAT?
6 MAKING A LIVING AS A WRITER
7 CONCLUSION

EVERYDAY RESOURCES
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 About the Author

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist,

publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The
Poetry Review, Granta and elsewhere. Anaxagorou’s second collection After the
Formalities was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, and selected as Book of
the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Guardian. Anthony is the artistic director of
Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music event, and is founder of Out-Spoken
Press, an independent publisher of poetry and critical writing that aims to
challenge the lack of diversity in British publishing.

Candice Carty-Williams is a journalist, screenwriter and author of the Sunday

Times bestselling Queenie. In 2016, Candice created and launched the Guardian
and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize.
This book is in memory of Ben ‘Ty’ Chijioke
There isn’t any perfect, good, best or even right way to write. When I started to
write Queenie, which went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller and was longlisted
for the Women’s Prize, I had an idea of a writer in my head. This idea of what a
writer was had been impressed upon me by mainstream media, and by the
publishing industry. To me, your average writer was middle class. If they didn’t
have a master’s degree from some sort of industry-endorsed creative writing
course, then at the very least they should have an English Literature degree.
Your average writer would have a proper desk, a trusty laptop, the best software
on which to write, and enough money and time to quit their job and go away to
various writing retreats. While there, they would write in silence, or with
classical music providing a calming auditory backdrop. This, to me, was the sort
of person who could write a novel. But, what I also understood was that this
wasn’t necessarily the sort of person who should always be writing a novel.

I wrote Queenie on a ten-year-old laptop that was on its very last legs after I’d
spilled herbal tea on it more than once. I had a bootlegged version of Microsoft
Word that kept switching the default language to ‘English (United States)’, and
my desk was my bed, in a mouldy studio flat with tiny windows that had been
painted shut years before. I didn’t have any time, and I was in thousands of
pounds of credit-card debt. And I can only write while listening to grime or UK
rap at the loudest possible volume. Bizarrely, it was only months after Queenie
came out that I came to understand that a) I was actually a writer, despite failing
to meet any of my imagined writer criteria, and b) being a writer is simply telling
a story.

How do you tell this story, you ask? Well, once you know that you have
something to say, there isn’t any correct formula when it comes to saying it.
Writing is effectively thinking, and putting that on paper. There are so many
different ways of thinking that there can be absolutely no ‘right’ way of writing.
You can only tell this story in a way that works for you. That’s probably the only
way to ensure that what comes out will be authentic and true to you.
I start with my character, or characters. Who are they? Where are they from?
What do they look like? How do people see them? What’s the world they’re in,
and how does it shape them? And for all you astrology heads, what’s their star
sign? I never think about plot in the first instance, or what’s going to happen. I
don’t think I could plan for the chaos I put my characters through, as I just let it
come as I go along. A few months before the publication of Queenie, I
interviewed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Of all the deeply profound things she
said to me as I hung on each and every one of her words, it was this that
resonated me with most: ‘I think there are two different kinds of writers. There
are writers who are interested in ideas primarily, and writers who are interested
in people primarily.’ I’m absolutely in the latter camp. Once I’ve understood my
characters inside and out, it’s only then that I think about what I’m going to say,
and how I’m going to use my characters to say it. And, I try not to think of my
characters as vehicles; I genuinely like to think of them as people. Living,
breathing people who chatter, argue and flirt with each other in my head. People
who have insecurities, who have worries, who have their own -isms, and who are
going to get themselves into all sorts of situations.

It’s through human nature, and experiences, that we learn. Sometimes it’s about
putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes in order to understand a life unlike
ours, and to see experiences unlike ours. And so, through the stories of other
people, we can learn about people. We can learn about politics. We can learn
about how the person becomes political. We learn that we do not and cannot see
things the same way. We learn that every person’s lens is different. I see the
world very differently to a white male author from a middle-class background,
even if we’re the same age, and had a similar educational trajectory.

Whenever I’m asked about writing, the thing I find myself telling people who
ask me ‘excuse me, but how do you do it?’ is that their story is valid. For so
many reasons, though mainly the insidious creeps that are structural racism,
sexism, classism and transphobia, a breadth of stories are not being told. Those
who have struggled to see themselves on the shelves don’t see how their stories
could be important. But they are. And so, I implore you, the writer who has
something to say, to go and write. I want you to understand that your story is
important, that your voice is valid, and that your life and your experiences are
the only tools you need to tell a story. And enjoy it! Only you can pen the story
you were destined to write, and you deserve to have fun while you do. Write in
silence, or with music blaring in your ears. Write on a laptop at your desk, or in
your favourite notepad in the park. Write while eating your favourite food, or
save your favourite treat until you’ve finished that chapter (or that sentence,
which is more my speed). It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a psychological
thriller, a collection of short stories about life on Mars, essays, whatever. If it’s
from your head, it’s your world. You deserve to write it, and we deserve to read
it.

Candice Carty-Williams,
2020
 ‘We write to narrate, not to prove.’
Ivan Turgenev

The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, ‘The roots of education are bitter, but the
fruit is sweet.’ I first came across this quote in an old book I’d dug out from my
local library, a few days after being told I’d failed my AS levels. I’d always been
curious as to how the world worked; who got to govern, how power was
acquired and preserved, and what led some people to have more than others.
Growing up in London, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world and
home to around 10 million people, it’s hard to begin experiencing society and
not take into account some of these larger questions. The city’s patchwork of
foods, languages, faiths and affluences, culminating around its imperialist past,
its poverty and prospects. Infrastructures ratified and underpinned by an
immense network of competing subcultures and principles.

As a teenager, I could be sensitive and considerate and then quickly turn

mercurial and bad tempered. Anxiety was always there, as was self-doubt and a
somewhat obsessive personality. I never regarded myself as a kid who might be
thought of as smart or creative – those were the preserves of the more fortunate.
I was your standard-issue Cypriot from North London with a knack for sports.
Like many working class people, our bodies and physicality were always the
first things to be remarked on by family, friends or teachers. Our intellectual
dexterity came later, if at all. The way I spoke, the words I used, my inability to
focus on anything for a sustained period of time, all led the adult world to
perceive me as a boy who was good for only one thing: sports. A field they
regarded as being inferior to academia. Running, football, athletics and cricket
were the only areas I received praise in, which was reflected in how I excelled in
them. With every other subject, including English, I struggled.

The inadequacies I brought into adulthood were partly inherited from my

upbringing as well as my experiences in secondary school. I was the eldest of
three children, born to immigrant parents, who subscribed to a traditional and
semi-parochial notion of how boys should develop and be perceived. My
parents, both born in Cyprus, moved to London when they were aged three and
five, respectively. My father was born in Famagusta, a relatively large town that
now falls within Northern Cyprus, and my mother was born in an impoverished
village seven miles east of the island’s capital, Nicosia. Both sets of grandparents
were illiterate, due to Cypriots at the time being prohibited from having any
formal means of education under British colonial rule. Unable to deal with such
harsh and oppressive conditions, they sought refuge in Britain. They arrived by
boat in the early fifties to settle among other members of the diaspora in and
around North London, home now to the majority of Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

My paternal grandparents spent their days working in clothing factories in

Haringey and Finsbury Park, while my mother’s father worked for British Rail
as a signalling guard. During the early years of my life, my parents, both being
poor, needed to return to work more or less immediately after my birth. So, each
morning, my mother would drop me at my grandmother Stella’s house in
Kentish Town, collecting me again after she finished work. They also signed me
up to nursery at the age of four, where I attended a few hours a week while my
grandmother ran her errands. A few weeks after I started there, the keyworkers
raised the issue of my hearing and attention with my grandmother. They believed
there was a strong possibility I might be deaf, and that she should take me to
have my hearing checked as soon as she could. Confused, she turned to ask me,
in thick Cypriot Greek, why I wasn’t listening to the teachers. I replied I had no
idea what anyone was saying. Realising what had happened, she laughed, then
attempted to explain that I couldn’t actually understand English. From then on,
my parents made a conscious effort to speak English with me at home, as well as
Cypriot Greek, fluctuating between the two.

My mother was incredibly supportive, and devoted to her children, which meant
she had an overprotective and sometimes overbearing side too. Married at the
age of eighteen, she had never really been given any autonomy by her family.
My father was a stern, laconic man, who saw his role chiefly as the family’s
provider: the alpha, head of the house, who would shun ideas or dissuade us
from pursuing anything that involved risk. They were good, honest parents,
doing what they thought to be best for their children, but danger and the threat of
violence, both domestic and otherwise, were never far off.

We spent a year in Algeria, where my father worked as an accountant for J&P, a

Cypriot construction firm. With the outbreak of the civil war in 1991, the
authorities advised it was no longer safe for us to be living there, even in an
enclosed camp. My father reluctantly acquiesced, following mounting pressure
from my mother. Three months later, we learned the entire camp had been
massacred. Some sixty people died, mostly families. From then on, my father
would travel for work alone. He spent years moving around the Middle East and
North Africa, working as an accountant for various companies for several
months at a time. My mother, meanwhile, was at home raising three kids while
also running a beauty salon. For much of the time, I remember her being irritable
and stressed. As the years dragged, she’d appear more and more overworked,
and alone, which inevitably impacted on her children. Looking back now, I often
feel her way of dealing with these anxieties was to drill into us – me all the more
so, being the eldest – an intense work ethic; she projected onto us her own fear
of failing, of not having sufficient qualifications. When we weren’t in school,
private tutors were brought into the home to help in the subjects we were weaker
in. It was relentless and expensive, but instilled in me a work ethic that enabled
me to apply myself when I needed to get something done.

BOOKS AND READING AT HOME

Books were never really a staple in the family home. My mother had a large
collection of cookbooks and my father, from the nine years he’d spent studying
accountancy at Tottenham Polytechnic, would clutter the shelves with textbooks.
Literature, however, never properly featured. The books we had were never on
display; instead they were packed in boxes or hidden in alcoves. Music played in
the kitchen – reggae, folk, Motown, traditional Greek songs, or seventies pop.
We would sing, perform songs; we’d dance, have BBQs with cousins, aunties
and uncles. Nobody mentioned reading. As far as my extended family were
concerned, books were anathema. The earliest memory I have of showing an
interest in reading letters was around 1993, at the age of ten. It’s on a family
video: we’re holidaying in Cyprus, my grandparents having recently sold their
house in Kentish Town to purchase a small flat in Limassol. I’m sitting on the
balcony in a striped vest and thin blue shorts, reading Enid Blyton’s The Famous
Five. My hair’s thick. My skin olive. Behind me, my grandfather sits cutting an
apple with his pocketknife. My mother brings the camera round. I look
engrossed in the book, oblivious to her filming. She calls my name in the way
mums do when they want to get their kid’s attention. Like calling a neighbour
from across the road. I lift my eyes up to look directly at her. She laughs heartily,
saying, ‘Oooh, look at Anthony, reading his big book, all grown up and serious.’
She was proud, but unsure how she should action praise. My face becomes red, I
feign a smile. The next shot, we’re back in the living room – my brother and I on
the floor wrestling, the book nowhere in sight.

Culturally, we were not ‘bookish’, but we valued knowledge. Nobody in the

family had been to university, aside from my mother’s brother, who saved
enough money to fund a physics degree. Still, we were engaged with the world,
only not through literature. Our outlook was immediate, rather than one steeped
in theory or higher thought. My father would watch the news, during dinner he’d
quote famous men, or he’d watch quiz shows, spouting out the answers before
the contestants. Intelligence and respect centred very much around him. A
condition my mother reluctantly helped consecrate. She was always in the
kitchen, surrounded by pots and pans, experimenting with new recipes. She
never felt it quite permissible to express or take interest in the ‘affairs of men’. If
ever we were discussing anything political, she’d retreat into herself, or concede
she was out of her depth. This dangerously oppressive and patriarchal template
would be one my siblings and I would inherit. One that would take years to
disentangle.

MY MISEDUCATION
You often hear writers and artists talking about their experiences at secondary
school. Those formative years, where we first begin to fully reckon with the
world. Where a burgeoning sense of personhood begins to form. Where we
become more acutely aware of our gender, race, class and sexuality, as well as
our socio-political relationship to others. I’ve always noticed a subtle undertone
that wants to say things could have gone better than they did. For a lot of us, the
impact secondary school can have on our confidence and self-esteem is
profound. It’s there where the first mirror is held up and we’re made to answer
questions we may have previously never considered. Looking back, secondary
school was a confusing and arduous period. I was unable to overcome the
chiding comments, poor results and general disinterest I had in my subjects, and
the psychological scarring of a three-tier education system got the better of me.
On the plus side, I was fortunate enough to attend Queen Elizabeth’s Boys’
School – an institution that was, and still is, one of the top state-funded grammar
schools in the country. For decades, it managed to achieve outstanding results at
both GCSE and A-level, partly due to its selective intake of boys, but also by
cultivating a highly competitive learning culture from within. Not only were
there top, middle and bottom sets, but, for some subjects, the tiering could
stretch from one to eight. Ducat cards (a bit like credit cards, which carried a
value: twenty ducats would result in a special mention in assembly), prefects,
head boys, and other old-world inducements were used to fuel competition and
hierarchies of worthiness among volatile boys. The culture would reward and
validate a very singular kind of academic ability. Those like me, who dwelled in
the lower echelons, were often made to feel small, ashamed or incapable of
achieving anything other than poor results. As I recall, inexperienced teachers,
fresh out of university, would take our classes, lacking the ability to control and
stimulate such an unruly group. The lessons would quickly spiral into mayhem,
detentions would be meted out, and little would be accomplished, other than
reinforcing the idea that the only thing we were capable of was misbehaving.

Most of my friends who now write for a living vividly remember one teacher
who refused to recognise their potential, or who wrote them off as being
inattentive, hyperactive, intellectually challenged or underachieving. Whenever
we get together and reminisce about our school days, there’s always anecdotes
about several good teachers, but also that one who tried so hard to make life as
miserable as possible. School is a difficult place, and the job of teachers is
irrefutably challenging. Even now, what with increased cuts to education and
youth services, an ongoing lack of resources and a myriad of other shortcomings,
the road we begin our academic journey on is fraught with potholes and
dwindling signposts. That’s not to suggest that in a country with a 99 per cent
literacy rate, which produces some of the strongest minds in the anglosphere, we
should want to sound unappreciative for having access to a whole heap of
privileges – free schooling, open access to the internet and public libraries (the
ones that still exist), plus an abundance of passionate and diligent teachers
working against the odds to ensure pupils leave school with sufficient grades.
But many of us learn and develop in different ways. We’d benefit greatly from
broadening our cultural perception of what constitutes intelligence, which is
impossible to quantify, and instead modify teaching approaches, as so many
educators and teachers already do, to accommodate those who otherwise fall by
the wayside.

As a student, I’d regularly be forced to leave lessons for being too disruptive or
disengaged. At primary school, I was made to stand in corners while the rest of
the class carried on as normal. Teachers assaulted me, swore at me, or
encouraged collective ridicule. The condition ADHD was not commonly spoken
about in the mid-nineties, although teachers would often float the vague idea that
I may have suffered from some sort of attention disorder. Still, I was a ‘bright
boy unable to concentrate’, according to many of my school report cards. My
parents didn’t know what to do with that information, other than to discipline
me, using threatening language or physical punishment. On the other hand, I also
had teachers who would say, ‘When he applies himself, he shows great promise.’
These words became the small hymns I sang to myself.
We received our mock GCSE results just after the Christmas break. I was sitting
in the English room with my tutor, a fresh-faced postgrad, who spoke in a calm
and earnest tone. I remember him saying: ‘You’re good when you want to be, but
that doesn’t happen very often, and it’s showing in your work. You scored Fs for
both English and the literature component. With a bit more effort, you could
score a D, but your coursework needs to improve dramatically. I think it’s best
we keep you in this set; that way you stand a better chance at getting a D grade.’
I stressed that, while I did enjoy English, I couldn’t get into some of the material
we had to study. I didn’t understand the poetry component (the war poets and
other mid-twentieth-century writers). Shakespeare was lost on me. I had little
interest in the plots and characters of nineteenth-century novels. All of which
were compulsory reads. Now I see this was not a failing on my teacher’s behalf,
but rather the way in which we’re made to think about poetry. My contention is
that the curriculum uses poetry to primarily introduce literary device to students,
which only really calls upon a small fraction of its power and potential. To use
poetry as a means of exploring the complexities of the human condition, the
ways it encourages us to think about loss, grief, love, or discrimination is so
more enjoyable and beneficial especially for young people, than keeping the
focus on similes, imagery and alliterations. By focusing on the technical merits
of a poem we jeopardise its humanity, whittling it down to an intellectual
exercise predicated on a uniformed analysis which, ironically, is the last thing
any poet wants when they sit down to write. Despite this, I made a point of
saying I could do better than a D, and I asked to be put in set seven, where I at
least stood a proper chance of being awarded a C grade. It was a game of
strategy – we both knew the intermediate paper would be more difficult and, if I
failed, I’d have forfeit the chances of attaining even a D. With the right amount
of focus and discipline, though, I’d be able to achieve at least a B. I assured him
I’d work harder, apply myself more and catch up on all the outstanding
coursework. Eventually he agreed, but before leaving, he told me again that
English was a subject he knew I struggled with, and that perhaps it wasn’t for
me. He proceeded to give me some career advice, mentioning a number of
respectable trade jobs that paid well, and which he felt I shouldn’t hesitate to
consider. By the summer of 1999, when the results were published, I ended up
with a C in history, a D or below in everything else, and a double B in English.

TRYING TO RHYME
I’d begun tinkering with words and formulating little raps at the age of thirteen. I
was influenced by all the great American rappers – Tupac, Biggie, Nas, Bone
Thugs-n-Harmony, LL Cool J, Wu-Tang Clan and more. With them as my
background and inspiration, I wrote horribly clichéd rhymes. I never thought
what I was writing furiously into notebooks was poetry. Poetry, to my mind, was
solely written by dead white men. I’d write my own raps in the privacy of my
bedroom, usually when bored or upset. After a year or so, my mother found one
of my notebooks and asked where I’d copied the poems from. My initial
response was annoyance with her for going through my personal things. Then I
insisted the poems were mine. Discarding my protestations, she took the book
down to my father, who, after reading a few of the pages, seemed relatively
impressed. As I matured, so did my writing, along with a slow appreciation of
the craft. I’d moved from long streams of disassociated consciousness to
thinking more closely about the subjects I was writing about – my friends,
poverty, fear and discrimination, all areas I’d been preoccupied by, despite not
having anyone to bounce ideas around with. The act of writing, specifically
poetry, opened me up to a space where I didn’t have to be so certain. It was a
space where anything could happen, where there was no one to judge or fail me.
It was my most private and solitary world. To paraphrase the late Australian poet
Les Murray, it was impossible to drain poetry’s reserve. Liberated from the
pressures and whims of the curriculum, it was as if creative writing had granted
me the extra permission I needed to be myself – playful, righteous, irreverent
and didactic. Writing was where I discovered I could be bad but never wrong. It
didn’t require the logical absoluteness of maths or science. Over the years,
however, my relationship to writing would grow ever more tenuous.
Nonetheless, it would become the only thing capable of guiding me through
some of the most challenging periods of my young adult life.

WRITING GRIEF
I left Queen Elizabeth’s Boys’ and headed for East Barnet Sixth Form, where I
was planning to study English, IT and Business Management, although I only
lasted a year, after not making the grades required to go on and complete my A-
levels. During this period, an event that would go on to alter the course of my
life was about to unfold. It occurred on 10 May 2001. I had just turned eighteen,
and had recently been dumped by the girl I was seeing by way of a flippant text,
I was beside myself with despair, so my father suggested I spend a weekend in
Kent with his sixty-two-year-old uncle Chris, a charismatic immigrant with a
heavy Cypriot accent and a penchant for literature. He lived as an unyielding
non-conformist, donning ridiculously tight shorts and leather sandals all year
round. His white diesel van contained an assortment of random utensils and junk
– a bed frame, clothes rails, broken china, garden snails left pickling in a jar and
moth-eaten dresses. His improvised sun visor for his van was the most
remarkable of his creations – a crude cardboard cut-out of an actual sun visor
with a wonky outline of a mirror he’d stenciled on.

My father drove me to his house on the evening of the 9th amidst a

thunderstorm. When we arrived, the weather was of little significance to my
uncle, who relayed with typical exuberance his plan to take me out on his newly
acquired boat, one he’d got from a guy who owed him some money. Once my
father left and the household had gone to bed, I stayed up writing for the first
time in months. At 2 a.m. with the storm in full swing, I went to bed, fatigued
and heavy-hearted. The next morning, my uncle burst into the room waving
around the essay I’d been writing the night before. Under his arm was a thick
volume of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, along with a slim collection of
Pablo Neruda’s love poems: ‘You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep
spring from coming,’ he orated. A line I knew to be among his favourite from the
Chilean maestro’s body of work. Outside, the morning was a contrast to the
night before – the day felt promising, the sun bold and alive, and, for the first
time in a while, I felt a sense of rejuvenation.

Over breakfast, he enquired about my writing, lifting the more lyrical phrases
from the essay to say the words out loud. ‘Poetry is partly language, but it’s
music too. Language is its own sound and the voice an instrument,’ he opined.
He believed I had a flair for English and should consider nurturing it. He
suggested I try to expand my reading if I wanted to be a writer. The books
around his house were piled in corners, balancing precariously on cheap MDF
shelving and old cabinets. An outsider would see it as chaotic, but it had a charm
– an eccentric grandeur. This was different to school. There was an appeal, an
edginess to how he had things. I imagined swallowing all the books and instantly
absorbing their wisdom and teachings. I felt connected to his small house, his
voracious appetite for the arts. He made a few notes in the margins of my essay,
corrected a handful of spelling mistakes, then put aside a small heap of books he
recommended I should read.

That afternoon, we ventured out on his sail boat along the Chatham sea front.
With the tide low, we made our way in a little rowboat to where he’d moored,
climbing aboard the unassuming new vessel. We sailed for a good hour. I sat up
close beside him as he steered the boat along the waters, quoting everything
from Rumi to Marx, to the Labour MP (at the time) Tony Benn. Uncle Chris was
an unparalleled autodidact, who had a bizarre way of synthesising and retaining
lumps of information. He would code-switch from Cypriot Greek to English,
quoting English poets and thinkers in Greek and, vice versa. I sat in that boat in
awe, mesmerised by the range of his referencing and passion for literature. This
was a man who grew up under British colonial rule. Who had never attended
school. Whose father, in the 1930s, was mayor of Ayia Napa, but who had
refused to acknowledge Chris and his siblings, as they’d been born out of
wedlock. He had such an impressive pool of comprehension, both muscular and
polymathic, for someone who had started life at such a disadvantage, that it
exemplified what could be achieved, regardless of status or exam results. All my
worries began to dissipate, leaving me feeling hopeful, with an alacrity I never
knew I had.

By 4 p.m. the tide was coming in. We dropped anchor, climbed down into the
small rowboat headed back to shore. Shortly after, I noticed his breathing had
begun to sound strange. A rasp, as though he was struggling to get enough air
into his lungs. The rowboat stopped. His body looked drained. I asked if he was
okay, if he needed me to take over rowing. He responded sharply with a no; he
was fine and just needed a few seconds to catch his breath. Then his eyes rolled
to the back of his head, his jaw dropped, and his body toppled overboard. I
plunged in after him: the image of his face sinking, being swallowed by the sea,
still haunts me to this day. I managed to haul him back up. All sixteen stone. I
lifted him onto the rowboat and tucked an arm under his head, all the while
trying to keep myself afloat. I yelled for help. Eventually the ambulance arrived
asking if I’d given him mouth to mouth. I said I hadn’t, so the paramedic asked
me to try. Tasting the bread in his mouth from our lunch a few hours before, I
took my mouth off his and heard a faint whisper of air. Incredulous, I turned to
the paramedic to say: ‘He’s breathing, he’s alive!’ Her face solemn. Her tone
final. She replied, ‘That’s the last of the air leaving his lungs. He’s gone.’
FROM FINGER SNAPS …
Having turned eighteen I found myself for the next few years to be heavily
traumatised from my uncle’s death. I was also jobless and without a second-year
college placement. I was in perfect limbo with both time and sadness on my
hands. It was five or so years before the advent of YouTube which would
drastically shift my perception of poetry. Back then poems were quiet, opaque
things living inside thin and musty books; ones I struggled to understand despite
my efforts to engage with certain canonical texts. I was writing incrementally but
nothing like poems we were given in school or sixth form. In 2001, my auntie, a
dance teacher at the Weekend Arts College in Camden, came across a flyer for a
slam poetry competition around the theme of respect where she suggested I
apply.

‘Slam’ is a performance-based style of poetry originating in Chicago in 1984. It’s

a hybrid artform that borrows elements from hip-hop, traditionalism, religious
sermonising and theatre. The acts and performances tend to be more animated,
energised and oratorical. Watching a good slam poet perform, you can’t help but
feel entranced by the sheer size of the show. It’s gladiatorial, physical, multi-
disciplinary. A typical slam performance is often comprised of strong punch
lines and intricate wordplay. The overall aim is to win your round by being
awarded the highest score from the judges or audience. This particular slam was
being organised by The Poetry Society, in conjunction with the then Mayor of
London, Ken Livingstone. The idea was to use slam as a means of engaging
disenfranchised youth, those who, like myself, struggled with English and
suffered from low self-esteem, performance anxiety and so on. For many of us, it
was the first time we’d ever been asked to share our thoughts and opinions about
the world we lived in. The entire thing was the brainchild of poet Joelle Taylor –
a British slam champion herself – who travelled around the country visiting
secondary schools, pupil referral units and prisons, facilitating workshops in the
hope of reintroducing poetry to children and young adults, but also in order to
discover new and exciting voices.

My mother entered my poem ‘Anthropos’ on my behalf. I spent weeks writing it,

but remember feeling constantly dissatisfied with every draft. With the deadline
approaching, she assured me it was fine and so, two days before the competition
closed, she sent it in via the post. It was received as an individual entry, as I was
not affiliated with a school or youth group. After a few weeks, I was invited to
read for Joelle at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. In a basement cluttered with
flyers for random gigs, poetry prizes and workshops, I stood there tentatively.
The paper shaking, my mouth arid. My mother sat poised towards the back of
the room, and Joelle stood in front of me, listening. If a line resonated, Joelle
would nod her head as if in agreeance, or snap her fingers, or stomp. The more
active she appeared during my performance, the more it spurred me on. A
strange but affirming synergy. At the end, she clapped and whooped and
stomped her feet. Smiling coyly, I folded the paper into my pocket and sat back
down.

Upstairs in the café, I waited while my mother and Joelle went to the office to
sign the consent forms. When they returned, Joelle sat beside me to say the poem
I’d written was the best she’d heard in the whole competition. That unofficially
I’d won but that I would still be required to take part in the slam rounds. Her
mouth kept moving, but I’d zoned out, overwhelmed. I’d never won anything in
my life and now, from out of nowhere, I had this compulsion to be vulnerable – I
wanted to tell her about my uncle. My fight with sadness. How much poetry
meant. The books I was discovering in my local library. How it seemed to be the
only thing giving me purpose. But, instead, I just toughened up my face,
clenched my jaw and nodded.

What I learnt that afternoon was the power of affirmation, of having an outsider
believe in you. As clichéd as it sounds, when the young and disfranchised are
able to refute the idea others have of them, their general outlook and self-regard
begin to shift. There is intelligence in rebellion after all. On the train back home
to North London, I felt rejuvenated, with a sense of purpose, walking through the
streets as a boy who was finally competent, no longer stained by his
inadequacies.

TIP

Now that I’m older, I find themes generally useful when writing towards a
full poetry collection. They allow for a more consolidated reading
experience, and act as primers, contextualising the worlds they embody,
offering readers a way in, helping publishers to market the book and
steering the way reviewers think about it. The disadvantage is that themes
have a tendency to narrow down the possibilities of a poem, where it can
go, how far it can reach. Personally, I gravitate towards books with a
broader, maybe more ambiguous remit. They still contain their central
 obsessions, yet the scope for invention and play expand, allowing more
room for surprise.

… TO DRY CLAPS
Some months later, in a stale, overcrowded room in a North London pub, I
waited anxiously to read my poems. Part of the prize for the respect-themed slam
I’d won was an invitation to perform at an established open mic night – a formal
induction into the world of live performance. The room held around sixty
people, most of whom were older white men, sipping on pints of beer before
being called up to read. I felt out of place – too ethnic, too young, too
inexperienced. And the venue wasn’t the kind of place that could possibly
assuage my unease. There was no safety net: if you messed up, everyone saw it.
My name was called. The host introduced me as the winner of the inaugural
Respect Slam. Nobody really knew what that meant, aside from the obvious.
Standing in front of the mic, I made an attempt at being funny and failed. I was
nervous, my throat dried up, my legs trembled. The papers with the poems on
them started to shake. Unimpressed faces gawked back at me. And on I went,
dragging myself through.

Joelle, there to support, yelled words of encouragement from the corner. Still I
mumbled, and stumbled over each piece, my voice hoarse and monotonous, my
writing earnest and inchoate. I remember introducing one of the poems as being
‘too deep for anyone to get’. One guy chuckled. Another knocked over a wine
glass. Someone cleared their throat. The bartender probably farted. I read a
second poem and received a dry clap. I read a third poem, the reception
increased slightly, but still nothing like at the slam competition where people
literally screamed with enthusiasm. At the end of the night, the host handed me
an envelope with £50 inside. He thanked me, noting that ‘I had something’,
leaving me with some sage advice: ‘Remember, there’s a thin line between
keeping people entertained with your poetry and losing them altogether. Keep
working on it, mate.’ He took a swig of his pint, slapped me on the back and
headed back into the room.

During the car ride home, I declared I wanted nothing more to do with poetry or
performance or the world of books. A small knock had deflated me. I knew that
feeling. The thing with criticism is that, when you’re that vulnerable, it’s
impossible to see any virtue. It only confirmed what I already knew. That night I
gathered all the poems I’d been working on over the last few months; my
notebooks, Word documents and bits of illustrations. Filling up an entire bin
liner, I headed outside to dump it with the rest of the rubbish. It was Wednesday.
I remember that because the refuse collectors came by every Thursday morning.
I woke up the following day, less aggrieved, less emotional, and rushed
downstairs to see if the bins had been emptied. They had. That was late autumn
2002. I didn’t attempt to write again until 2008.

After a long hiatus, I would rediscover spoken word through YouTube. I became
obsessed with its unfaltering energy, its conviction and rhetoric, and, like all
performance-based arts, its ephemerality. It fused conversation with more urbane
modes of language. High philosophical registers, slang, popular-culture
references, the body as subject, sexuality, race, gender, disability; all were there
for people to delve into. I noticed the influence music had on some of the
poetics; hip-hop, dub, punk and jazz. I could see myself as a member of that
community. Black, brown, mixed, immigrant, queer, working class. There was
no room for prejudice, misogyny or hate. And, yes, it was tribal and cliquey, but
it never punched down. And, yes, it may not have been a complete reflection of
society, but it was an ecosystem mediated by compassionate, principled artists.
Everyone, to a degree, was visible, and for those who weren’t constantly in the
limelight, they could set up YouTube channels and, later, Tumblr or Instagram
accounts, where they could upload work. It was poetry’s democracy. For those
like me, who were left aggrieved and damaged by years of criticism, spoken
word opened up a whole host of new opportunities.

TIP

Starting a poetry night is easier than sustaining one. Over the years, I’ve
seen hundreds of nights start up then fade away as promoters lose
motivation. Most rely on the open-mic section to pay the feature acts and
host/promoter. The key to having a lasting event is, really, how you curate
it. If your night is focused around spoken word, then you need to stay up to
date with emerging and established artists. The same applies to ‘page’
events. And for those that straddle both, such as Out-Spoken, the night I
co-run, the job becomes even more demanding. If you’re struggling to
make money, apply for a grant. If you need help writing one out, approach
a producer. A lot of nights start with promoters putting on poets in their
immediate circle, then they realise, after six months, that the talent pool
has dried up. Stay engaged. Strike a good deal with the venue and try not
to make your line-up too London-centric.
 ‘Only language can free us of language, in other words. Fresh
vocabularies are required, oddly angled adjectives and surprising
sentence arrangements to startle us out of complacency.’
Wayne Koestenbaum, American poet and cultural critic

In The Art and Craft of Poetry by Michael J. Bugeja, he states: ‘As a reader of
poetry, I knew that the best work of great writers was not based on mere
description or observation but on epiphany or peak experience.’ The latter part of
the statement was particularly pertinent to me as a budding writer. The poems I
was writing were laden with adjectives, compensating for my lack of poetic
thought. They had no real function, other than to describe, in an obvious
metaphorical sense, what the reader knew – I wasn’t adding anything, only
decorating what was already there. I now find poems need to be doing something
more than just describing or dressing up a familiar scene. If we think of
adjectives as colours, then consider what the painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote in
his text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art ‘In order for colour to have an effect, it
needs as such to be freed from real form.’ We know what colour a telephone box
is, so how else could we describe it or allude to it without using the known? Use
language to express an object’s symbolic value. What kept affecting my process
as a young poet was the need to be understood. To avoid abstraction altogether.

Seamus Heaney has an essay in the anthology Strong Words, edited by W. N.

Herbert and Matthew Hollis, where he writes: ‘I think technique is different from
craft. Craft is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making. It
wins competitions in the Irish Times or the New Statesman. It can be deployed
without reference to the feelings or the self’. Technique is what turns, in Yeats’s
phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into
‘an idea, something intended, complete’. At the start of our writing careers, we
may appear diffident, growing more assured with practice and praise. That
doesn’t always translate to having an awareness for the intricacies of a craft and
technique. Poetry is not something you need to learn from an expert who
suddenly opens up a way of seeing. It’s more to do with the permission you give
yourself to play and interpret. As with all beginners, I knew little about these two
distinctions – craft and technique. Later, I would taper my ideas, trying to
connect images to thoughts as I traversed the page. What I was unable to
appreciate was how poetry could be as small or as large as you made it. How
poems take time to realise and structure. The initial draft of anything is always
scaffolding, the blueprint; the skill is in what the poet does after.
Poems can be many things. I’d be suspicious of anyone who tries to offer a
definitive description of what a poem can be. There really is no fixed authority
on how they should function. However, there are key clauses and characteristics
that set it apart from prose or journalism or travel writing. With poetry, the
language becomes intensified, performing double duty, with enough going on
behind the scenes that readers are able to experience multiple things at once. We
have our predilections, our preferred ways of seeing the world broken down and
reflected. The main thing I try to focus on when writing is to push my ideas as
far as possible. To take risks and not try to second-guess the reader’s imaginative
capability. Resist compromising yourself and trust your reader.

USING THE ‘RIGHT’ WORDS

As a teenager, my vocabulary and appetite for ‘highbrow’ works of art was
negligible. These things fell outside my cultural remit, or so I believed. Thick
books were laborious and intimidating. I had no desire to familiarise myself with
polysyllabic words because nobody I knew spoke in that way. Famous paintings
would confound me even when I felt something in them. If ever I did use a
swanky word, family and friends would see it as pretentious or condescending.
That’s not to suggest everyone who begins life inauspiciously has little
appreciation for letters and works of fine art. Or the way we speak should come
to reflect the way we write or think. Quite the contrary: class protectionism has
instilled barriers that say unless you’ve been trained in how to think or engage
with this piece of art, then you’re wasting your time. My uncle, the only person I
knew who rebuked this myth, would always have something to say about
whatever he was reading or watching or listening to. Meanwhile, a boss once
gave me a backhanded compliment, saying, ‘You’re a smart guy – it’s just a
shame you talk like a plumber.’ Words alone mean very little, as does the way
we say them. Where those words lead and what they come to signify is what
proves to be important. Another issue that put me off building a more expansive
vocabulary was the fear of mispronouncing words. A common enough concern
for people who read the word on a page before hearing someone say it. It’s an
indication that learning has been done remotely rather than formally. Born and
raised in a working class family, to immigrant parents and with English as my
second language, I felt it was imperative that, when I spoke, I spoke to be clear.
We live in a culture predicated on shame, which prevents many people from
endeavouring to improve themselves. I avoided the heavy artillery deliberately,
as it didn’t serve the world I was from. Plus, if I failed or someone
misinterpreted what I was saying, it might well have given rise to altercations or
violence.

For years I bought into the idea that the working classes only had the capacity to
appreciate one common mode of art. There’s a grave flaw in that logic, which
wants to say working class people need a poetry that is simple and
straightforward, because they lack the acumen to comprehend trickier work.
That things must always be spelled out. That working class poetry for working
class people means meeting a literal, easy-to-comprehend standard. As if we
have no imaginative faculty or are allowed only one way to experience a poem.
That in itself is inverted classism, a projection, which becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Granted, some poems require readers to apply themselves in more
ambitious ways, while other poems do not. But we shouldn’t conflate a technical
feature with an entire class system, one that is undoubtably vast and varied.

My contention now is that if the current establishment offer space to working

class writers in journals and through publishing contracts, without being
tokenistic but on the sheer strength of the work, then gradually the way differing
poetries are read and received will shift to being accepted for what they are.
Currently in the UK there is a plethora of stellar PoC and working class voices
writing in captivating and wide-ranging ways. Some of those writers are indeed
exploring a poetic that may only appeal to certain readers, while others offer
something more reachable and encompassing. The point is that they all fall
under the rubric of working class voices. There is no singular way to write the
working class experience, just as there is no singular way to write the male or
female experience, or the black or white experience. There are intersections at
every point. Trying to uphold this false binary which intimates working class
writers need a poetry free from abstraction and subtlety, while the middle classes
commandeer the more refined plane, is not only tendentious but incredibly
restrictive.

TIP

Poets work to progress language. Poetry, as with other linguistic

disciplines, becomes a utility; a tool we might call upon to help traverse
and decipher this weird and multifarious human experience.

TAKE A RISK
Art, as a mode of expression, is one that’s acutely aware of itself, its function
and precincts. One inherently filled with nuances, unpredictability and
preoccupations. Poems unfold and present things to us in unusual ways. They
want to break free from the shackles of common meaning; they have a unique
ability to delight and confound in equal measure. They ask that we work for
them a little, to insert ourselves into the spaces, gaps and abstractions they
create. They push beyond the moorings of conventional language and thought to
delineate a zone only they have access to. They do this by using a finely
calibrated set of words and images, which, in turn, engender new perspectives
and possibilities.

TELL IT SLANT
Many poets begin their vocation intent on having obvious and intelligible ideas
in their poems. I mean, who exactly sets out to say something in a nebulous
way? That’s to go against the very purpose of language. But words and their
meanings are not set in stone. Linguists argue that all language is, in fact,
metaphorical, in that there’s nothing linking this laptop in front of me to the
word laptop. The association is a learned one. Poets work largely around pushing
and contorting the logic of definitions through connotations, allusions,
suggestions and metaphors. Readers also require some level of imagination if
they’re going to entertain some of the poem’s conceits. In his essay ‘On Poetry
and Uncertain Subjects’, poet Jack Underwood writes: ‘With poems, you never
get to settle on a final meaning for your work, just as you never get to feel
settled, finally, as yourself. So it seems entirely natural to me that poets,
exploring and nudging such unstable material, foregrounding connotation and
metaphor, and constantly dredging up the gunk of unconscious activity over
which they have no control, might start to doubt the confidence, finality, the
general big-bearded Victorian arrogance of certainty as it seems to appear in
other forms of language: mathematical, religious, political, legal or financial.’
Interestingly, the more ‘unclear’ you are in a poem, the more space you create
for the reader. Poet and editor Rachael Allen has said in an interview with
Mslexia magazine, ‘I am interested in poetry that creates a kind of associative
logic over a linear logic.’ I think of poets like Selima Hill, Elizabeth Bishop,
Terrance Hayes, or Frank O’Hara – all masters of the craft with immense and
unabashed associative power: they fill their poems with objects, images,
textures, sounds, hauling them in from the most random and unthinkable places.
And yet, somehow, the elements all manage to speak to one another so perfectly
– the snow, plaster, drill, pistachio nut and the wren. Poems in this sense look to
highlight the relationship between phenomena. When I first endeavoured to read
works that asked slightly more of me, I struggled to make sense of the
connections between objects and place. I wanted to know why a cup wasn’t
being described as a cup – the item used for holding liquid. Instead, poets such
as Federico García Lorca would associate a cup with a blue horse or a necktie.
Eventually, I grew so tired with it all that I asked myself why couldn’t it be
associated with a blue horse. When I let myself believe in Lorca’s spell of
language, I found myself running down the middle of his imagination. When we
give in to a poem we allow it to taxi us around. I would battle with stanzas,
trying to insert my own thinking into the gaps that were all arguing their own
system of logic. Stanzas that wanted to ask how else could this world look.

In the past, I’ve facilitated workshops where budding poets want to tell a
beautiful story but through the form of a poem. I question them on why it needs
to be a poem. Would it be better suited to a short story, or play, or scene in a
novel? Some things turn out to be more impactful when worked into a different
form. The Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky famously
quipped, ‘No poem is ever written for its story line’s sake only, just as no life is
lived for the sake of an obituary.’ Words in this context need to do more than
walk a reader straight through an event. There needs to be some kind of payoff at
the end. Some poets attempt to reconstruct an entire event episodically,
offloading chunks of unnecessary information simply to move the poem to the
next stage. How we make our way around a story or poem, and the lateral shifts
or turns it takes, determines its effect. In her poem ‘1129’, the nineteenth-century
American poet Emily Dickinson wrote: ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant.’ It’s a
quote I frequently use when introducing the mission of poetry to students or
workshop participants. Resist going straight down the middle; build a more
interesting route in.

Whatever style you’re writing in try not to limit yourself. Some assume that if a
poet gives themselves the title of ‘spoken word artist’, then it suggests they’re
unable to work in other genres, which, of course, is not true. You can write a
spoken word poem then a sonnet, then a six-part quatrain if you so want. I often
think of Danez Smith who typifies this point. A masterfully inventive and formal
poet, they prevaricate the fencing of labels and definitions to show what poets
can do with more porous approaches. As a result, their work reaches audiences
on a global scale while proving impossible to pin down.

BE EXPERIMENTAL
In her collection Fourth Person Singular, the poet Nuar Alsadir has a brilliantly
innovative arrangement that she calls ‘Night Fragments’. The central conceit is
that she sets her alarm each night for 3.15 a.m. On being woken, she
immediately jots down the first things that come to mind. The poems appear
sparse, soporific, with an added dreamlike quality to them. There’s one particular
fragment I often think about. Alsadir writes:

All messy may / All messy maybe. / So messy it can’t stay on the page. / A
plane flying too low. / An idea like a plane flying / too low. / A person.
Like a plane. / Too low flying. / too. loud and louder before / the crash. /
It is always Sept 11 in NY.

I’m fascinated by this suggestion that likens an aeroplane to an idea, and how
Alsadir manages to get them talking to each other. If a plane dips too low, it can
signal danger, but also, if an idea appears too low – meaning obvious or surface
– it can also create hazards. We’re rarely surprised by what we already know.
The poet Wallace Stevens says that all poems are experiments. Try to push your
writing as far as it can go, which requires time and patience. Allow yourself to
be strange and unusual. Take things from everyday life then turn them into
something special – the sound of a car indicator, an argument between two
people, the feeling of seeing your bank card declined in a supermarket. There’s
art in almost everything, and where you think there isn’t, there probably is.

EXERCISE: You’re going to write a poem or story about your hands, but
without using the word ‘hands’ at any point. Limit your adjectives to
around five for a poem, or fifteen for a story. Think what hands could
signify; make some notes. Now start, but not at the beginning – halfway is
often better. The hands could be working? Cuffed? In mud? Holding?
Swimming? Waving? Have a go and see how the writing takes on a life of
its own after a while.
 EXERCISE: Make a list of ten concrete/abstract nouns. Beside each one
give an adjective, but one that’s impossible, e.g. ‘bleeding – sky’. Once
you’ve got ten, muddle them up, so ‘thin – wish’ and ‘spitting – leaf’
become ‘spitting – wish’ or ‘thin – leaf’. See how many interesting
combinations you can make. Then write a poem or story using as many of
these constructions as possible. Remember to avoid clichéd lines, such as
‘hot – day’ or ‘hard – table’.

PAY ATTENTION
Writers spend the bulk of their lives mining and distilling experiences. It’s where
much of their material derives from. The American poet Ada Limón said, in an
interview with Rachel Zucker on the Commonplace podcast, that to live a life as
a writer is to live a life of paying attention. We’re constantly tuned in to both
past and present, scouring the wreck, the banalities and oddities, for what can be
upholstered and dispensed. From life and its overwhelming paradoxes will stem
a tapestry of events, feelings and philosophies, but how we process and present
those findings is what gives our art its edge. Capturing the ordinary in an
extraordinary way.

Take a global pandemic: coronavirus. A quotidian moment: a builder reaching

for his tools high up on scaffolding. An abstract feeling, such as a loss or bad
news, or you overhear a conversation: two people talking about nothing in
particular. Quite a few of the late John Ashbery’s poems found their genesis this
way. His poem ‘Late Echo’ starts: ‘Alone with our madness and favourite
flower’ – a thought I admire for its ability to be simultaneously nonsensical and
sensical. When asked about the poem in an interview, he said he’d overhead a
couple in a florist talking before appropriating the lines for their strangeness.
Removed from their context, they become an intriguing opening gambit. The
trick is to find interesting ways to get started, to keep excavating the grounds
until you land on something that can carry you across.

EXERCISE: Go into your phone (assuming you have one). Open

WhatsApp or texts and write down the last messages from at least five
different people. Now, see which one of those has an allure. A strangeness
and a pull. Could it be made into something? Begin writing from there.

PUT PEN TO PAPER

In Mark Oakley’s The Splash of Words, he writes, ‘Poetry allows a creative
freedom in terms of “constructing meaning” as opposed to be “being told
something.”’ With the exception of a few poems, I enjoy beginning my writing
from an unfamiliar place, where I’m not exactly sure what could happen next. A
good way to do this is by writing down a line that has nothing to do with
anything, such as ‘and this is how I become alone’ or ‘I’ve never liked hotel
rooms’. Where you go next is anybody’s guess, which increases the element of
surprise. Culturally, we hold onto the notion that there are several ways to read a
poem, but there are several ways to write one too. The American poet Jericho
Brown talks about letting a poem’s ambiguities guide you, so you’re able to
discover something new about yourself as you head deeper into the poem’s core.
We can work to formulate our writing around our experiences which emerge
from a place of truth, or fact, or certainty, but that doesn’t mean we need to
completely honour that trajectory. Turning real-life events into art is fine, so long
as that’s where you finish – with art. The truth can sometimes be stifling,
because it already knows where it ends, allowing little room for wonder. Poems
are allowed to embellish or heighten flashes around the events. This is
particularly relevant to more narrative-led writing, such as those with a
descriptive-meditative quality.

EXERCISE: Try thinking about the last big thing that happened to you.
Rather than starting at the beginning, find a way to launch the writing from
maybe the middle, e.g. you’ve heard the news, now what happens? Or
imagine something has happened and your speaker now finds themselves
on a train back from the scene of the accident, does the poem look forwards
or backwards or play with both? Play with timelines. It’s also fine to
fabricate parts of the writing. Make your poem or story surreal, ridiculous;
imagine alternative scenarios to the ones in real life.

TIP

Have a read of José Olivarez’s poem ‘Citizen Illegal’ or Paige Lewis’s ‘You
Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm’ to see how they both
use wonder and storytelling in their work.

When we put pen to paper, do we begin writing in the hope of reaching some
new and unexplored place, or do we work towards a language in an attempt to
help realise a preconceived idea? In other words, are we going to write and see
what happens, or do we arrive at the page with thoughts we need to explore? The
poet Denise Levertov reflects on how she gets going, saying, ‘It depends on
what is coming into my head. If it is a sort of vague feeling that somewhere in
the vicinity there is a poem, then no, I don’t do anything about it, I wait. If a
whole line or phrase comes into my head, I write it down, but without pushing it
unless it immediately leads to another one.’ Levertov’s approach is similar to
mine. Paying attention to various states of feeling. Learning what to trust and
pursue and also what to ignore. Most of my poems stem from a feeling that
arouses either a set of words or a phrase. If I’m not by a computer, I’ll jot it
down in one of my notebooks. There are times when a line arrives and I have no
idea what it means, but I feel it’s interesting enough to entertain. This is usually
followed by the sound of the word, which needs me to say it out loud. I may go
on to develop it or, after a few days, the lines may fizzle away into nothing.

TIP

Open the nearest book (not this one) and write down the first line you see.
Have a go at building a story or poem from that. When you finish, see how
it reads if you remove the opening line (you don’t want to get caught
plagiarising work). If it makes no sense whatsoever, tweak it so it at least
makes a good opening.

THINK LIKE A WRITER

When considering how a novel works, the writer and editor Nikesh Shukla once
told me, ‘A novel can be multiple things. It can have many themes and
obsessions, but they must all orbit around a big central question to hang together.
Everything: the characters, the setting, what they say, what goes unsaid, the time
and place, the questions they ask, what each of them is looking for orbits around
a central question you, the author, are asking of the world.’

If you’re thinking about writing a book – be it fiction or non-fiction – you’d be

right to take into account the different ways books set themselves out. As we’ve
said above, things don’t necessarily need to begin at the beginning. Some novels,
for instance, start halfway through a protagonist’s life, or fluctuate between
several events, while others have protagonists whose worlds intertwine and
collide. Time and place can be muddled. Stories can oscillate between past,
present and future. Then there are books that lean against the ‘fourth wall’ – the
space between the reader and author. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler is a book so meta I forgot where I was. However you decide to do it, be
sure to keep the reader invested in your narrative arc. I always assume they are
wanting to go do something else when presented with a chance to read my work
– reply to a text message, watch the next episode of Homeland, do some online
shopping – so write as if you need to keep them invested in your book.

Poems also work in similar ways. They have their questions, their tensions and
preoccupations. Some poems drive straight into the heart of their idea, others
circumnavigate or orbit. They want to gently point readers towards those worlds,
rather than shove them in. They want to evoke rather than instruct. When
reading through a poem, it’s important to keep in mind that ‘anything goes’.
There is no right or wrong way to think about a piece of poetry. One of the
reasons people find poetry so frustrating is because they read wanting to come
away with the ‘right’ answer, or be met by some kind of logic. The most
common objection you hear is when people say: ‘I just don’t get it’. But what
does ‘getting it’ actually mean? It’s like throwing a stone into the ocean and
expecting the ocean to throw it back. Or looking up at the sky and asking what it
means. Maybe some poems are not written to be intellectualised, maybe they are
pushing for something different. Ask a person how a certain poem makes them
feel and you’ll probably get a more extensive answer.

From the start of our lives, we’re taught to think of things as being either correct
or incorrect. Rarely do we get asked to expand upon our interpretative skills.
Instead, the legitimacy of our individual tastes and postulations becomes
thwarted by the uniformity of how we’re expected to respond to the world. We
need to give ourselves enough permission to read between the lines of a poem
and other kinds of literature, to let ourselves fall into its subtext, its peculiarity
and inferences. If we finish reading a piece of writing and come away feeling
frustrated, we start to think it’s failed us, or that we’re just not smart enough to
‘get it’, when, really, it may just be we’ve subscribed to the academic
assumption that there is only one right way to navigate the text. Or the
presumptions we took into the writing clashed with where it wanted to take us.
Work of this nature sometimes needs us to go to it – not fight or wrestle but defer
– the meaning is like a lantern waiting in a forest to be found, and all we’ve got
to guide us are distant stars.

TIP

Over the last six years, there’s been an increase in more conceptual books,
playing with hybrid and experimental forms. Certain books aim to invent
new ways of doing poetry they leave us thinking about them long after
we’ve put them back on the bookshelf. Their achievement is in their ability
 to give us poetry while disrupting or advancing old forms by incorporating
several other modes around what appears to be a linear narrative.

CONTROL THE ENDING

A significant amount of time is spent on organising and refining words.
Continuity in fiction is key, requiring fastidious plot structures and attention to
detail. Poems look for succinct, interesting constructions through use of a more
economical and/or unconventional language form. But how do you know when a
piece of work is finished? Again, every writer will have their own viewpoint on
this, so I don’t by any means intend to speak on behalf of everyone here. For me,
I think of poems as compartments or luggage holdalls. The word ‘poem’ derives
from the Greek word poiein, meaning ‘to make’. The Sanskrit word cinoti, for
poet, shares a similar, albeit gendered, sentiment, translated as ‘he gathers/heaps
up’. The word ‘stanza’, in Italian, means ‘room’. I’m not a major fan of sticking
to etymological definitions, but I think, here, we can allow ourselves an
exception. Each stanza becomes a room we arrange. We’re limited for space, so
can only keep the essentials. I centre my writing around thoughts, obsessions or
things I want to say. The art becomes evident when a distinct mode of language
heightens the perceived logic – or is made to riff around several themes while
still being anchored to those initial foundations. If I begin to feel I’m drifting off
into new territory, or another section of the house by way of the writing
becoming overly discursive or diluted, then I stop. A younger me would have
kept going until I ran out of steam. The late poet Matthew Sweeney suggests we
should ‘chop the poem off at the legs’, reminding us that we may be most
interesting three or four lines prior to where we think the writing should finish.
The short story works in a similar way. More glaring endings can come across
predictably or summarily. Let the reader continue thinking about the writing,
even after it’s finished – so keep your lines open, but not open to the point the
reader expects another turn or scene.
CREATE NEW TRADITIONS
Everything borrows from something. Romanticism gave way to nineteenth-
century poets: Pre-Raphaelites, the Decadent poets, and poets who produced epic
poems of mythic and historical proportions, such as those of Tennyson and
Browning. The high modernists were anti-lyric – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina
Loy, Hilda Doolittle and Wallace Stevens. Then after the Second World War,
there grew an even bigger divide between lyric and anti-lyric. The late fifties
saw the emergence of confessional poetry, which placed the speaker or ‘I’ at the
centre of the writing. Subject matters that had been avoided in earlier periods of
American poetry were now being addressed, ranging from death and mental
health to addiction and trauma. Around the same time, the first wave of poets
who lived and worked in downtown Manhattan aligned themselves with painters
and visual artists from the New York School. Inspired by painters such as
Jackson Pollock, they birthed a style of poetry that called upon a more casual
and conversational mode of address – Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery being
two of the most prominent. In this you also had the Beat poets, who, much like
today’s poets responded to the politics of self and society but with a different
level of irony and masking. In the 1970s, Dub poetry, a term coined by one of
the genre’s progenitors, Linton Kwesi Johnson, emerged out of Jamaica, where
poets would speak or ‘chant’ poetry over a reggae rhythm. This style of
performance would play a significant role in shaping the live literature and
spoken word scenes globally a decade later. Among academic enclaves, the
Language poets and those from more informal traditions, such as the Cambridge
School, appeared along with conceptual poets and other mainstream lyricists –
namely the New Formalists and the nineties New Generation era, which includes
the likes of John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy.
In this way, we arrive at our current period, one yet unnamed and undecided. As
with almost every tradition, the overarching state of the nation underpins the
kind of art we produce.

Poetries are enmeshed throughout the world’s histories, in constant dialogue

with the times. Past traditions and writings inform the present, utilising
literature’s intertextuality. These corollaries come to illustrate the age. Global
events, along with a string of other international and cultural nadirs have led to
many contemporary poets having their identities tarnished, vilified and abused
by mainstream media outlets and beyond. 9/11 saw the ‘war on terror’ implicate
Muslims. Racism and police brutality incidents in the US were caught on camera
phones and disseminated online, causing global outcry, proving what people of
colour have long known: white America’s nefarious and pathological history in
regards to the way it views African-American lives. The events which led to
Grenfell Tower burning down in 2017, costing seventy-two people their lives,
highlighted the negligence, racism and classism that is exists in London
boroughs. The #metoo movement has brought long overdue attention to the
predatory behaviours of men. The ongoing refugee crisis, exacerbated by British
and American foreign policy, has seen countless people make perilous journeys
in their attempts to enter Europe. And, of course, the effects of these events in
terms of shaping the body politic of a nation is why art becomes a necessary
expression of the quest for justice, awareness and equality.

Patterns of migration, displacement and advances in technology coupled with the

cross-pollination of literary styles, has led to the increased influence of some
books holding those in power to account. That’s not to say all art should
explicitly be trying to engage with domestic or international atrocities, but it
does have ample scope if it chooses to. Poets like myself, who find it
increasingly difficult to write without some kind of political undertone, will use
poetry and fiction as a way to harness empathy and understanding. This kind of
writing is concerned with rejecting and repositioning the narrative, admonishing
dominant paradigms that oversee the lives of many thousands of diasporic
people, and holding to account individuals who wish to bring harm to others.

POETRY IS MORE THAN AN OUTPOURING

In the months that followed my uncle’s death, my parents insisted I should see a
bereavement therapist. I managed one session then stopped. My days were filled
with dread. I started to smoke and drank worrying amounts each day. Silence
would trigger flashbacks. Within a year, I was an insomniac. I’d lie awake trying
to make sense of what had happened. I blamed myself for his death. My
inadequacies. Insecurities. Home was noisy, the parks were cold or dangerous. I
figured it was best to head to the library – a monastic hideout, private and musty
and scholastic. Being surrounded by so many books stirred up the desire to
write. Each time I opened my notebook, I was reminded of my uncle. What he’d
said on the morning of his death. His wish that I broaden my reading. I was back
to writing long streams of consciousness – messy, garrulous and unrefined. My
ideas had no real form or shape. They were tangential and superfluous. I started
to write about the way he died. People suffering from PTSD commonly write
direct descriptions of what they’ve seen, I realise now this was more about
catharsis than literary innovation. I wrote fanatically. Once I finished a poem, I’d
tear it up and start again.

The drawback to writing alone is you soon find yourself unable to take your
poems or stories any further. Nowadays, I send my writing to a select group of
friends, who offer feedback on ways it could be improved, what’s working and
what isn’t. Writing is hard. It takes time, but we do have to draw the line
somewhere otherwise we’ll never finish. Deadlines can be useful for a lot of us.
How we develop, how we edit, what we should look for comes with practice –
both from reading and writing. I constantly fenced in my ideas rather than letting
them move outwards. Sometimes my language was too straight, closing down a
poem’s potential. Another feature I noticed was that things I wrote had a
tendency to lean towards the sentimental. My language was maudlin, loaded
with unnecessary gush. If you’re familiar with poetry discourses, you’ll know
the subject of sentimentality is highly contested – the last vestiges of the
Romantic period. I think of the poet Mary Ruefle’s collection of lectures,
Madness, Rack, and Honey, where she writes: ‘We are human beings. Our
expressions are always inadequate, often pitiful. Poetry is sentimental to begin
with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.’ If we concede
Ruefle’s point, then how do we bypass the inherent sentimentality of a poem and
still find a way to connect with our reader? There are alternative conventions:
comedy, surrealism, absurdism, dramatic monologue, parody or satire – all of
which elicit different responses, but with less saccharinity. Raw sentiment, if
written badly, runs the risk of coming across as tacky or contrived. My favourite
poems manage to somehow repurpose my own notions and beliefs. Returning
them to me in a new light. I like the idea of being turned upside down after I’ve
finished reading. Poems that work around their own argument. Renewing and
adding greater meanings to subjects I may never have considered previously.

Poet Wayne Holloway-Smith told me that when he’s writing and begins to feel
himself grow bored, he goes the other way – a vital bit of advice I return to when
I find myself becoming stagnant. Poems can take a while to get going: getting in
the right head space, finding the time and the poem’s rhythm. You may start to
build lines or even have a rough draft, but don’t be surprised if things take until
the fifth draft to materialise. Allow the paint to dry before making any final
decisions. Don’t become overly invested in where you think the poem’s headed;
let it go where it wants, try to not force ideas into a narrow box. I find poems
work best when they can occupy several places at once, transforming
organically.
 TIP

If you’re a writer who frequently attends workshops, be mindful not to

overexpose the prompts you’re given. I’ve felt, as a reader, that if I’m able
to see or sense the prompts inside a poem, then it ruins something for me. I
know it’s highly unlikely many readers would pick up on it, but it’s still
worth bearing in mind. Think of it as concealing a poem’s engine room, as
otherwise it’s a bit like a painter who forgets to rub out their sketch lines
after they’ve finished.

WRITING YOUR LIVED EXPERIENCE

How we contract art to have it work for us is a matter of personal taste. Yet some
things do affect us all. Our existence, for instance, is a political one – who we
love, where we can go, if we have access to food and clean water, our ability to
walk down a street without fear of harassment or abuse. All these things, as
universal as they might be, are underpinned by political factors. Art can rattle the
senses, expose humanity’s reprehensible attitude towards others with such
nuance and emotionality that it reaches beyond the constraints of other forms of
communication.

There’s no apolitical position. Neutrality is an unambiguous stance. More often

than not it’s a sign of privilege too. Considering my past and adolescent years, it
made sense that my gateway into poetry was through rap, then slam, then
eventually spoken word. Nobody was on hand to explain the histories and
traditions of poetry to me. If they had been, maybe I would have felt differently
about the academic aspects, and been less intimidated by them. I, too,
internalised the idea my ethnicity and class precluded me from appreciating the
supposedly more cerebral works. As a result, I pursued politically charged
writing, direct and visceral. With age, I lost interest in rap’s increasing
commercialisation and became fascinated by other music genres. I needed
something additional. By my late teens, I’d woken up politically to the world.
The oral tradition, hip-hop, jazz, punk, reggae and spoken word, are traditionally
invested in fostering intersubjective frameworks, dismantling systems of
oppression, injustice and inequality. The more I took an interest in history and
current affairs, the more my curiosity grew. I needed to know I wasn’t alone with
my mounting grievances. That others shared my views and sentiments. My
friends had no real appetite for those things. My family’s sole concern was for
me to find a steady job, which would bring in enough money to provide for a
family one day. When I did eventually find my way into spoken word, I
discovered an ancient artform that could proselytise and galvanise, adopting, if it
wished, didatic modes of address, cajoling swathes of people by telling them
what they needed to hear. People from all walks of life – the broken, empty,
desperate and alone. People who had devoted their lives to activism, advocates
of progression and social change. It was a space where solidarity came before
criticism. Where people came before status. As utopic as it may sound, for many
including myself, the UK spoken word community stood as a panacea, a
lifeboat, one that not only entertained and informed but helped restore faith and
fortify my convictions.

THE LYRIC ‘I’

In his book On Poetry Glyn Maxwell tells us ‘A poem in a mask can be
wonderful. A poem that keeps putting it on and taking it off again could be
wonderful, I’m open to everything, but what matters is why.’ In my early poems,
I always positioned myself as the speaker, although, in hindsight, what I was
writing was perhaps more akin to dramatic monologue. Currently in poetry, we
are living through what some have called a lyric-‘I’ hegemony. The speakers in
many poems tend to be the poets themselves, writing around the reality of their
lives, their afflictions, beliefs and desires. Termed a ‘poetry of witness’, poets
call on the artform to almost report on what they see – be it a refugee crisis, a
civil war, climate disaster or civic unrest. As a fledgling writer, I assumed poets
had to write from personal experience, probably because, in my household, it
was never permissible to embellish or talk on another’s behalf. A perennial battle
for agency among the taut power structures of familial life.

TIP

If you’re interested in reading books that approach the lyric ‘I’ slightly
differently, I’d recommend J. O. Morgan’s Assurances or Jay Bernard’s
Surge, which uses voice and first-person narrative to recount the tragedies
of the 1981 New Cross fire. Ilya Kaminsky’s poetic parable Deaf Republic
takes inspiration from the fabulist tradition to comment on our current
political anxieties. A personal favourite is Terrance Hayes’ Wind in a Box,
published in 2006, which demonstrates how effective persona writing can
be when carried out well. It’s since inspired an entire generation of new
poets.
In Threads, poet and critic Sandeep Parmar writes: ‘To my mind, it is impossible
to consider the lyric without fully interrogating its inherent premise of
universality, its coded whiteness.’ The lived experience of many poets of colour
has come to play a pivotal role in how they see themselves in relation to the lyric
‘I’. William Wordsworth’s high romantic idea that ‘poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity’ still presides over much of British poetry. To be writing from within
a space outside of the default ‘I’ – which in British poetry has come to denote
white, straight, middle-class men – means to be automatically writing from a
position of otherness. In his essay ‘Myriad Minded’, poet and academic Vidyan
Ravinthiran argues: ‘The person of colour is under no obligation to annotate
their marginality – to explain themselves – it can be a pleasure to do so, but not
when harangued.’ The pressure put on writers of colour to compose work
primarily fixed around historical trauma, collective grief and marginalisation has
become a way of pigeon-holing and narrowing the sensibilities of a vast and
disparate group of people. Not only that, it’s implied there are no distinct
variations or intersections in the lives of people of colour – which, again, results
in the impression that for some, there can only be one way to live in the world. I
remember an interview with the poet Carl Phillips, where, after a long and
draining discussion about the black and queer experience, Phillips turned to his
interlocuter, saying, ‘You seem to be obsessed with only two things here; you’ve
never stopped to ask what brings me joy, or what foods I like to cook for my
friends.’

If we agree universality is a misnomer, then the universal ‘I’ is also inherently

flawed. Much has been written about Walt Whitman’s proclamation, ‘I am large,
I contain multitudes.’ Who was he speaking on behalf of and just how far could
his ‘I’ stretch? This proves to be a complicated and disputed field among poets
and scholars, even today. It is, however, worth considering the political space
your speakers occupy within a poem or story: the voice or world they embody,
how the relationship between them and their readers shifts, depending on how
the ‘I’ is deployed and imagined. Poetries are sometimes outlined as being
confessional or autobiographical when it’s assumed the speaker is the poet
writing from their own life. In this context, the poet of colour is seen as an
outlier who speaks from the confines of a racialised world, one who can never
leave their base and, historically, whose output has never been met with the same
level of deliberation as that of their white counterparts. If they were seen to
disrupt the conditions of the ‘I’, they were thought of as avant garde or
experimental. Poet Will Harris puts it like this in his essay, ‘The Ethics of
Perspective’: ‘The “I” through which we see the world is partial, violently
constricted by forces of race, class and history. But though none of us are
capable of fully construing the motive forces that impel us, we can acknowledge
their existence.’

INCLUSIVITY ON THE BOOKSHELF

Books in general have the capacity to introduce us to new worlds, propensities
and thoughts. They help widen perspectives and contest atavistic ideas. They are
tools for dissent, elucidation, enlightenment and reflection. But they also have
the ability to exclude and alienate, working as cultural signifiers with
independent currency. I used to find making my way through turgid academic
prose a slog. Why were scholars so circuitous? Why couldn’t they condense their
thinking into something more palatable? Make it accessible to people like me.
There’s always a more straightforward way to say something, after all. But then
writers, like everyone, have autonomy and jurisdiction over the work they make
and the words they decide on. Some subjects also rely on a calibration of
language, so as not to jettison any vital nuances. Similarly, readers should be
allowed to critique books as and how they wish. When certain titles are hailed as
the cornerstone of contemporary literature, we gravitate towards them, hoping to
discover something new and tantalising. I made an attempt at Tolstoy’s War and
Peace in my early twenties: I managed seven pages. Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil felt more like babble than it did a radical appraisal of
Western morality. Going back to these books now, with added maturity and a
relatively astute understanding of the world, feels invigorating. I think about the
titles lost on me when I was too desperate in my attempt to learn, arriving at
them at the wrong time.

The poetry section of my old library was full of names I’d heard of but never
read. Hughes, Larkin, Armitage, Hardy, Duffy, Thomas, Sexton, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Plath, Blake. One afternoon, during one of my many library stints, I
picked out a thin volume by a Merseyside poet, Brian Patten. The poems were
smart and neat, like ‘machines made out of words’, to borrow William Carlos
Williams’ phrase. Enclosed by white space, they were positioned in a way that
gave them a sense of urgency, a minimalism asking that I delve inside. The
words were straightforward but the ideas, the thoughts the language made, were
not. Some bits I understood or was at least able to get something from, other bits
less so. An early quote I came across was from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran,
a writer whose book The Prophet played a seminal role in helping to establish
my love for poetry. Gibran says, ‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it
so the other half may reach you.’ In the library, I looked at my notebook. I was
trying to make sense, not reach anyone. I wanted to say everything at once. To
get to my audience immediately with little confusion. My poems were supposed
to be read out loud. They only worked if I was there. They didn’t look like Brian
Patten’s poems, or Simon Armitage’s or Carol Ann Duffy’s or any of those
writers, but then again, neither did I.

There’s a legitimate grievance in poetry and wider literature circles around the
lack of inclusivity and representation in publishing. The composition and
multivalence of society looks very different to the one we’re presented with
through the interface of literature. The importance of feeling seen or having at
least an aspect of yourself or your life reflected in stories and poems has become
a salient issue in the battle to level out much of the bias that consumes the
publishing industry. To be white and secular, to be a middle-class cisgender
heterosexual man, comes with a litany of benefits of which your identity stands
as the default. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo writes that ‘whiteness is the
assumed universal reference point for humanity that goes unchecked. White
people are just people. Within this construction whites can represent humanity,
while people of colour, who are never just people but always black people, Asian
people, etc, can only represent their own racialised experiences.’ Those who
write from outside the dominant social group, firstly come to be defined by their
identity – black, Asian, Muslim, queer, disabled or working class – then only
secondly by the merits of their work.

In her soaring polemic We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths
Behind Our Age of Discontent, the journalist Nesrine Malik writes: ‘White
people have ideas; non-white people have experiences.’ In other words, you, as a
queer Muslim, tell the heteronormative world about what that experience is like.
If we consider the characters we encounter in books – the way they speak, their
lives, backgrounds and shortcomings – you can very quickly discern whether the
author or their characters has ever crossed into your world. If you come from a
PoC, working class queer or any other marginal community, then you probably
appreciate just how paramount it is to have a more inclusive literary milieu.
That’s not to say we only want or should be reading books that depict our own
realities, but having yourself or your culture acknowledged affirms your
relationship to humanity and literature, while also strengthening social cohesion.
Like I said, there is never a single way any group of people live their lives.
Having greater representation fortifies our trust in letters, the arts, the
humanities, and enhances our affiliation to reading. The writer and essayist
Rebecca Solnit writes in Whose Story Is This? : ‘We talk about empathy and
compassion as virtues, but they are also active practices of paying attention to
other people. In this way, we understand others and the world beyond our own
experience. I pay attention to you because you matter, and if you ignore me, it’s
because I don’t.’ As a young adult, I became accustomed to seeing myself and
my culture rendered insignificant by the narrow range of stories publishers kept
putting out. By my early twenties, I’d stopped looking for myself in books. I
failed to connect with so many renowned poems and novels because the
apparatus that should have been there to help me access them wasn’t.

WRITING FOR AN AUDIENCE

Poets such as the late Geoffrey Hill, who has written some of the most
impenetrable and obfuscating verse I’ve ever read, was asked during an
interview with the Paris Review: ‘What comes up often in reviews of your work
is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of
Love, often the word “difficult” comes up. People mention that it’s worth going
through or it isn’t worth going through?’ Hill’s response is characteristically
loquacious, but the opening paragraph is worth citing in its entirety. He says:

Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult.
We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are
mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in
any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most
‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose,
painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does
poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification
were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it
demeaning? I think art has a right – not an obligation – to be difficult if
it wishes.

As eloquent and unassailable as Hill sounds, this runs the risk of arbitrating
between a perceived difficulty and simplicity. What Hill, a privileged professor
emeritus of English literature and religion, regards as simple might be complex
to someone else. When we purposefully make things difficult, who exactly are
we making it difficult for? And the side effect of difficulty ends up being
exclusion or non-participation. Some argue it’s far more difficult to write a
simple (not simplistic) poem, than it is to write one that requires the best of
Western education to access, alongside a binding academic framework. For me, I
prefer to settle on the knowledge that language will forever be as broad and
expressive as people are. It’s perfectly fine to say ‘this is not for me’, just as we
do with every other aspect of our lives, from how we decorate our living rooms
to how we dress. The issues arise when we designate hierarchies around registers
and modes. One group of people who share a similar social status find
themselves in positions of power and influence, sanctifying a poetry or literature
which appeals exclusively to their cultural palate.

Publishers and other such gatekeepers are entitled to their proclivities, yet when
researchers crunch the numbers to reveal only a handful of poets of colour, or
those who identify as queer or working class, being published by reputable
presses and magazines, that in itself becomes a political statement. It implies one
set of poetics are not valued enough to warrant publication, exposing an
insidious prejudice. There’s never a shortage of mediocre white male poets, who
seem to regularly publish the minutiae of their lives. Those same names, year in
and year out, dominate bookshelves, broadsheet reviews and literary prize lists.
Thankfully, today, the attitude of many editors is far more ecumenical, resulting
in a richer poetic and literary tapestry.
PUBLISHING 101
There are a lot of terms used in the industry that could be daunting if not
explained properly. Here’s a glossary of the most common ones used at different
points of the publishing process, some of which I use in this chapter.

1. ACQUISITION – When a publisher ‘buys’ the right to publish a book

from an author. The key meeting where publishing teams decide which
books to buy is called ‘Acquisitions.’

2. ADVANCE – A sum of money paid to an author upfront when they sign

a contract with a publisher. This will need to be ‘earned out.’ An author’s
advance is usually paid in four instalments – after signing a contract,
after finishing their manuscript, after publishing in hardback and finally
in paperback.

3. AUCTION – Publishers sometimes bid for the acquisition of a book

manuscript that has excellent sales prospects. Auctions are conducted by
agents.

4. BLURB – The short quote or paragraph of text on the back of a book,

giving the reader a flavour of what the book is about. Blurbs can also be
used to pitch a book to a publisher and agent, or for publicity too.

5. COMPARABLE TITLES – Titles of books that are similar to yours in

either content or sales, or trends.

6. COPY EDITING – Checking a manuscript for spelling, grammar and

content errors.

7. DIVISION – Many publishers are made up of smaller companies which

operate independently – these are called ‘divisions.’ Each division is in
turn made up of several publishing imprints.

8. EARN OUT – As part of their contract most authors will need to ‘earn
out’ their advance before they start receiving royalties directly from book
 sales. This means that the payments they would have received from sales
of their book (royalties) are equal to their advance.

9. EDITOR – A term for a person who edits manuscripts for a publishing

house, and/or decides which manuscripts to acquire for that house.

10. FRONT LIST TITLE – Books published recently, usually in the current
year

11. GENRE – The ‘category’ that your book falls into.

12. IMPRINT – The name of the publishing unit under which a book is
published. Each division will be made up of several different imprints,
often specialising in particular genres or interest areas.

13. LITERARY AGENT – The individual responsible for managing an

author’s career, including helping them to develop their work and selling
their book to publishers by negotiating the best deal. Agents also
facilitate the relationship between an author and their editor. In return,
agents take a percentage of an author’s advance and royalties.

14. LIST – The books a specific publisher or imprint has available or

coming up.

15. PLATFORM – A writer’s quantifiable reach within their target

audience, which includes speaking experience, publishing history, social
media followers, and more.

16. PRE-EMPT – If a publishing house responds to a book on submission

with huge enthusiasm, they may make an offer designed to shut down
any other offers. It might be a large amount of money, a multiple-book
deal, or have other elements to sweeten the pot and tempt the writer. If a
writer accepts a pre-empt offer, there can be no auction.

17. PROOF – A mocked-up copy of a book which publishers use to get

people excited about a book before it’s been published. Proofs can be
very simple with blank covers but closer to publication they may look
more like a ‘real’ book. They are often sent to journalists and bloggers to
review, as well as to retailers.
18. PROOFREADING – Close reading and correction of a manuscript’s
typographical errors.

19. PUBLICATION DATE – Often referred to as ‘pub date’, this is the date
when a book can first be sold to the public. In reality often books will go
on sale in a bookshop as soon as they arrive which can be a couple of
days before pub date.

20. RIGHTS – This means the right to do something with intellectual

property, including publishing a book. As part of an acquisition the
publisher buys the ‘rights’ to publish that book.

21. ROYALTIES – This is the payment made by the publishing house to the
author in exchange for selling their book – it’s usually a percentage of
the profit made when the book sells.

22. SUBSIDIARY RIGHTS – In addition to the right to publish for the UK

market, publishers will often want to buy additional (subsidiary) rights.
This could include translation rights, world rights (the right to publish
the book in other markets around the world) or film and TV rights.

You’re attracted to the prospect of being a writer. Right now, you only manage to
write when you can – once the kids are asleep, before work begins or between
shifts. The very thought of doing this full-time fills you with delight. You are a
writer, but you also need your writing to support you. You wonder if all writers
receive some kind of advance from their publishers, affording them time to sit
and develop a book. You imagine how much less stressful it would be if
somebody paid you enough money to cover your bills while you worked on a
manuscript. You need a publisher. You need an agent. But you’re not sure how to
go about getting your work seen. On your desktop you have what you consider
to be a strong set of poems, or perhaps the more developed chapters to a novel.
You try doing a Google search for answers, but you’re overwhelmed by the
amount of competing opinions and advice. The UK market is not the US market.
So what do you do?

APPLYING FOR FUNDING

It took years before I realised just how many grant schemes were available for
aspiring writers like me. After the incident with the promoter at the poetry event,
I quit writing altogether. Even if I hadn’t acted so irrationally, I still would have
had no way of finding out just who the grant organisations were, what their
criteria was or whether I happened to be eligible. Nowadays, you’ll find most
book publishers, live nights and even bigger cultural institutions are all
supported in some way by organisations such as Arts Council England, the Paul
Hamlyn Foundation, Jerwood Arts Foundation or other local groups. Smaller
grants exist for individuals who need money to work on a project. That could be
anything from a novel, a script, a poetry collection or one-person show. My
latest poetry collection, After the Formalities, published in September 2019 by
Penned in the Margins, was written with the help of a Time to Write grant from
Arts Council England. It meant I could turn down work in schools to dedicate
whole days to writing the book. Without it, there was no way I could have
written it in under three years. If you’re thinking of applying for a grant, then
that’s the first step. The second thing to consider is what kind you’re applying
for and why.

Tom MacAndrew, one the UK’s most sought-after poetry producers, who works
with me on Out-Spoken, says:

‘Finding funding for literature projects can be an intimidating prospect,

but there is support available for writers. There are a number of regional
Literature Development Agencies and other national writing
organisations that can help support writers and provide advice and
guidance. A lot of them offer workshops and courses, which will include
sessions on professional development, how to apply for opportunities, or
find funding support. Whether you find support from an arts
organisation, a producer, or decide to go it alone, my advice is simply to
give it a go in the first place. Whilst you may think chances of getting
funding or getting a project started might be slim, the chances if you
don’t try are zero.’

If, like me, you’re someone who struggles with applications and needs guidance,
then I strongly echo Tom’s sentiments about finding the right producer, who will
take a small percentage only if the bid is successful. I’ve heard of producers who
offer their services but ask for a fee upfront, irrespective of whether the
application is accepted or not. I’d personally avoid this option and work with
someone who has a good history of producing successful shows and projects.
That way they, too, have a vested interest in your work. Your other option is, of
course, to write it out yourself and see if anyone at the arts organisation can help
refine the bid. There are a number of helpful people at Arts Council England, for
example, who will look over your application (only once), then feed back on
ways it can be improved. Either way, have a look at the different options
available to you and have a go at applying. They need to give the money away –
something a friend of mine told me years back, which I’ve always felt acts as a
good motivator if you’re worried you’ll get rejected or you feel your project isn’t
strong enough. Just go for it. If you do fail the first time round, it means you
know what not to do the second time.

TIP

The National Centre for Writing website has an extensive list of the
literature organisations across the country that offer funding and support
for writers.

FINDING AN AGENT
A question I’m often asked by aspiring writers is ‘how do I go about acquiring
an agent, and what do I need one for?’

Above all else, the role of a literary agent is to represent and support their
authors, but today’s agents can be responsible for an even wider range of things,
such as securing festival bookings and advising on new projects, alongside
reading over contracts, negotiating advances and chasing up outstanding
payments. Writers who are multidisciplinary might even have more than one
agent. For example, they might have a separate agent for theatre work, corporate
events and possibly even for public-speaking engagements. It all depends on the
writer’s individual output and prominence. While the role of an agent may vary,
most will have a firm understanding of the marketplace and know where
exactly/which publishing house to send your book. Having an agent means your
work is more likely to land on the desk of an editor and be considered within a
publishing house, as most of the big publishers do not accept unsolicited
manuscripts.

TIP
 An exception to the ‘no unsolicited manuscripts’ rule are the publishers
who have an open submission window for writers at certain times of the
year. This is where you can submit your manuscript for review, with or
without the input of an agent. Be aware that your manuscript is likely to be
one of many though.

Finding your agent can begin with a simple Google search – typing in your
preferred genre, or simply ‘I need an agent’ (other cue words, such as ‘UK’ etc,
will, of course, help narrow the search). Useful information can also be found in
The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook – a guide for writers and illustrators across all
genres, published annually, which includes a comprehensive list of agents and
agencies (as well as publishers and printers and much else besides) throughout
the UK and US, which gives details about the types of books and authors each
agent represents. The Society of Authors (SOA) – a trade union for all authors,
illustrators and literary translators – also has excellent resources for writers, both
published and unpublished, while the Association of Authors’ Agents (AAA), an
association for UK-based agents, has a membership list and Code of Practice
available for anyone to access – this shows you which agencies are members,
and therefore adhere to those codes. A potential red flag when looking for an
agent is if they aren’t a member of the AAA. Another is if they want to charge
you a fee to join their agency, as agents technically work for you, not the other
way around. On average, an agent’s commission percentage ranges from 12 per
cent to 15 per cent, exclusive of VAT. In most cases, however, agents deduct
their fees only after payment has been made and never before.

Once you’ve done your research and decided on the agencies you feel could
potentially best represent you, contact them via their submission portal online or
via the given contact email address. Send only what they ask for (there will be
instructions/FAQs on their website) – an example of your work, say, alongside a
CV, which may mention some of the places you’ve read at, and magazines or
journals you’ve previously been published in. If you work in theatre or the
performance industry, invite the agent along to a show to see your work live.
This all helps to strengthen your case. But try not to take things too personally if
you are rejected. Some agents stress they don’t have time to get back to you if
you’re unsuccessful; from others the rejection will be a simple ‘thanks but no
thanks’.

I’ve been represented by Claudia Young from Greene & Heaton since 2013. We
met after I’d been facilitating workshops at the University of Oxford for the
London-based charity First Story, who provide extra-curricular writing
programmes to under-resourced schools in low-income communities. Claudia
was doing some volunteering at their young writers’ festival, which is where she
heard me perform towards the end of the day. A week later I received an email
from her, asking if I had an agent and if not, she wondered if I would be
interested in joining her at Greene & Heaton. At our first meeting she outlined
her role and what she could offer, all of which was new to me, highlighting all
the things she would be involved in, if and when I began writing a new book.
The very next year, Jacaranda – an independent publishing house committed to
diverse writing – signed my first book of short stories, The Blink That Killed The
Eye, which Claudia oversaw. Since then, she’s been actively involved in my
career, managing to secure further book deals. Claudia has also been involved in
the corporate work I’ve undertaken, as well as numerous festival bookings, and
is generally on hand to offer advice if ever I find myself in need. Our
relationship has been one of trust so I asked her what writers should be mindful
of when looking for representation:

Sometimes an agent sees an author at an event or reads something

they’ve published in an anthology. They may see them at a writing course
showcase or similar event, and then approach them to ask if they have
representation, and so things progress from there. Using live events and
social media is a good way for some writers to become more visible and
shows agents that they would also be willing/able to utilise these
platforms around publication.
More often, it is an author seeking an agent via the submissions
process particular to their agency, then sending in their work. When
looking for an agent, it’s worth stressing the importance of following
submissions guidelines, checking that the agency being approached does
indeed represent the type of writing you’re doing – some agencies, for
example, don’t represent poetry or screenwriting. If they ask for the first
fifty pages along with a synopsis and a cover letter, then just give them
that. And always, always, tailor the covering letter (email) to the agent
you’d like to read it. Spell check and then check it again. There’s nothing
more charming than being addressed as Mr Young at Greebe & Heaton
… A good cover letter will get an agent more excited to read the
submission.

TIP
 — Do your research: Make sure the agencies you approach are, firstly,
AAA registered and secondly, that they cover the type of writing you do.
— Prepare your pitch: address your email to the agent you’d want to
represent you. Include a small list of your literary achievements.
Personalise the cover note and check to see what they require you to
send in.
— Approach a range of different agents, don’t just limit yourself to one.
— If you’re unsuccessful or don’t receive feedback, polish your writing,
work on your cover letter, widen the net – and try again.

APPROACHING A PUBLISHER
Maybe you haven’t found an agent who is right for you yet or maybe you prefer
to go it alone. With or without an agent smoothing your way, it’s a fraught
process, replete with anxiety, to have your work read by an editor – an industry
gatekeeper – and then be given a thumbs up or down. The first few rejections I
received for my manuscripts left me navel-gazing for days, weeks even.
Questioning what I was doing, if I was good enough, should I maybe think of
doing something else. The biggest tip I can give you is you need to be resilient,
but also acknowledge rejection hurts. After all, we’re writers and our ideas are
our livelihoods, our worlds, so to have them discarded is enough to deflate us for
a period of time. Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2019, the
writer Elif Shafak noted that writers are essentially driven by such large egos
because they spend so long entrenched in their heads building worlds. Writing is
far less collaborative than other mediums, meaning we need to maintain our
convictions through long and doubtful periods. Working in isolation could
explain why writers often don’t deal with rejection too well, as we equate it to
someone not being able to appreciate our vision, or at least recognise the
potential in what we’ve created. It can be a wretched business.

Publishers and agents, like anyone, are simply people with their own tastes and
inclinations. Some will sign books they are personally fond of; others will be
thinking of the cultural appetite in the industry for a certain type of literature or
writer. As with agents’ specialties, it’s important to have an idea of the books
already published by a specific imprint list. Most writers will, of course,
naturally gravitate towards the more established publishing groups, but it’s
important to remember that the bigger publishers can have their drawbacks as
well as their benefits.
Firstly, your book may be one of hundreds being published that year, which
means it could get eclipsed by the more celebrated writers. Secondly, some
editors will share and delight in your vision, others may not, which can lead to
awkward and difficult conversations – the bigger the publishing house, the more
people may weigh in on your book before it gets to publication. You could
potentially end up working with an editor who pushes your work in a direction
you’re not necessarily happy with (though this can happen at smaller publishers
too, of course). I’ve heard countless stories of publishers saying they’ll sign a
book on the condition that it’s set in a council estate, rather than a cul-de-sac, or
it’s made clear what race each character is.

The advantages of a big publishing house, are the budgets they have to invest in
your book, and their ability to get it into as many readers’ hands as possible as
they generally have better distribution. Plus, when you sign with an editor at a
major publishing house, you’re getting the support of an entire team behind the
scenes too. From publicity to marketing strategy, they have expertise in every
possible area, while smaller publishers might not, or be stretched more thinly.
Smaller presses, or small imprints within bigger commercial divisions may well
have less financial influence than their more heavy-weight competitors, but they
can often offer more in the way of editorial guidance and pay greater attention to
your book.

If you’re approaching a publisher directly, the principle is much the same as with
approaching an agent, guidelines for submissions and proposals are on the
publisher’s website. Be sure to read through their FAQs carefully before you
send your work in. Some, for example, may ask for specific formatting or
require you to include information about previous writing workshops,
competitions and magazine publications. Some may ask you to attach a cover
note along with your manuscript, whereas others may just want you to upload a
selection of your work in a specified format. Much like a CV, the cover note you
send a publisher introduces them to you and says a bit about your work. Keep
things brief, polite and professional. As with approaches to agents, if a publisher
feels you’ve copied and pasted their name into a generic letter, they’ll be less
likely to respond or take you seriously. Write a few honest lines introducing
yourself, then go on to explain briefly the idea behind the book you’re proposing
– themes and subject matter, if it’s poetry, or a mini synopsis if it’s fiction or
non-fiction. Try not to use language that comes across as ‘salesy’, and resist
hyperbolic phrasing, such as ‘in this intoxicating, stunning debut’ etc. Keep the
register clean and straightforward. Include relevant information about your
work: if you’ve been the beneficiary of any external funding, mention that too
along with other poets, writers or mentors who have worked on the book with
you.

At Out-Spoken Press, the publishing house I founded and set up in 2014, which
aims to platform and promote PoC, working class and LGTBQ+ poets, if we
receive an interesting proposal, I follow up by asking the writer to send over a
PDF with no more than five poems. I don’t have a specific thing I look for
although I find myself leaning towards writing that’s playful and different, but
also has a conceptual thread running through. If the five poems work, then I ask
to read the entire manuscript before reaching a decision. As we are a small press
with very limited resources, I’m not able to publish as much as I’d like.
Personally, I feel good curation in any capacity is about understanding what
needs to be part of the literary landscape, and less about what you, as an
individual, enjoy reading.

TIP

— Know which publishers you want to approach

— Know the genre of books they publish and if your writing will fit their list
— Make sure at least one other writer has looked over your manuscript
before submitting
— Keep your cover letter personable and professional
— Outline your vision for the work, along with other achievements,
including grants, magazine publications and/or competition successes
— Approach several publishers at once and wait to hear who gets back to
you

GETTING PAID
There’s almost always a story in The Bookseller – a weekly British trade
magazine that reports news related to the publishing industry – of a prized writer,
or hotly anticipated debut author, finding their book in a lucrative auction and
how the ensuing bidding war between the bigger publishing houses and imprints
rapidly reached six figures. What this is referring to is that, occasionally, a
manuscript will attract several publishers. In instances where more than one
publisher is interested, the agent may encourage them all to put an offer in –
usually in the form of an advance, a sum of money set against future royalties –
if you are lucky, this will turn into an auction, where the highest bidder wins, or
the author goes with their preferred choice of publisher who may not always be
the highest bidder, but will have had their bid pushed higher than it might have
been to begin with. Offers are based on a variety of things from the publisher’s
perspective.

With poetry, the money discussion is even more rare. Advances are practically
unheard of seeing as most small and medium-sized presses are heavily
subsidised by arts organisations, so budgets are extremely tight and returns are
minuscule.

If you’re thinking seriously about publishing for the first time, my advice would
be not to focus on advances too much, as you’re better off pursuing grants,
fellowships or other means of sponsorship.

SELF-PUBLISHING & INDEPENDENT PRESSES

The proliferation of social media has meant that writing is now being consumed
in a more democratic way. No longer are booksellers, critics or prize lists the
sole gateway to exposure and prominence – although they are still held in high
esteem. Poets now have the ability to reach their audiences through multiple
channels, with the added benefit of remaining in complete control of their work
and the money it generates. We can self-publish a book, or set up a Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram or Tumblr account to share our poems on. We can even set
up online events and workshops, a significant number emerging during the 2020
Covid-19 pandemic. We can publish zines, PDFs, e-books and other media from
the comfort of our living rooms. The need to have a publisher act as the go-
between for authors and readers is no longer seen as a defining factor. Yet there
are still a number of vital things a publisher offers that you won’t receive when
going it alone.

I began self-publishing in 2008, after being made redundant and after nearly a
decade of being absent from writing. I wrote Card Not Accepted during the
recession that began with the Credit Crunch of 2008, where for nearly two years
I was unable to find proper employment. I bounced between being a delivery
driver, working in warehouses and restaurant kitchens, on building sites, and as a
caretaker. On my desktop was a folder entitled ‘Escape Room’. In it was a
miscellaneous collection of poems, short stories and essays, all loosely themed
around the idea of rejection and joblessness. One afternoon, I decided to print
everything out. I looked at the small heap of paper on my desk and thought: I
think I have a book. The following day I began to search the internet for places
that would print it. I found two – Blurb and Lulu – print-on-demand companies
based in America. My flatmate, a part-time photographer who worked for
Ladbrokes betting shop, allowed me to use one of his images for the cover.
Another friend with an A-level in English Literature became my trusted
proofreader. Within a few weeks, I’d typeset the book using Blurb’s software,
uploaded the artwork, paid the £350 fee.

My girlfriend asked me how exactly I was planning on selling the books.

Slightly aggrieved by her lack of enthusiasm and support, I replied that I would
set up a website with an e-store. She then asked who exactly was going to buy
them, as nobody knew who I was or how to get to my website. She was, of
course, asking valid questions, but because of my general impulsive nature and
excitement about having an actual printed collection, I hadn’t thought through
the specifics. Of the 500 printed copies of Card Not Accepted, I sold 108, mainly
to family and friends who felt obliged to support me. The other 392 I managed to
sell once I worked up enough courage to start hitting London’s open mic nights.
Until then, I was, as my girlfriend was implying, ‘a small legend in my own
bedroom’.

WHICH ONE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

Self-publishing has its advantages. It gives authors agency over their work.
You’re able to retain all profit, write to your own deadlines, and maintain total
creative freedom. You avoid an editor’s deliberations, or the risk of signing with
a big publisher only to be overshadowed by more prominent writers. There’s
also something massively fulfilling in creating something totally of your own
accord. However, writing a book is very different from selling one. What you get
from a publishing deal is the backing and assistance of an editor and group of
industry professionals, alongside a sophisticated machine that’s able to maximise
your book’s reach. It also helps to alleviate much of the financial burden of
paying for the cost of production and subsequent reprints.

The main argument put forward by those in favour of self-publishing is the

benefit of social media. With a strong and dedicated following, an author can
arguably reach the same number of people if not more, than a small or medium-
sized publisher can. But selling books is not just about gaining followers or
receiving ‘likes’ – all of which has to translate to sales. Sure, it’s a democratic
space, in that anyone with an account can self-fashion themselves as a poet or
writer. And, yes, it feels great to write or record something, post it to your
account and count the ‘likes’ as they roll in. But there’s little longevity in that
approach. For one, peer review is important, irrespective of what some people
might say. Having other writers show an interest in or admiration for your work
will only stand to help further your development. By having your book signed to
a publisher, you’re receiving a stamp of approval. Not only can they create
greater and more respected exposure with their PR campaigns, literary reviews
and the prizes they can submit your book for, but a reader will be more inclined
to trust their judgement, especially if you’re unknown to them.

If I had had the opportunity to sign a publishing deal back then, I would have
taken it and I’d advise all writers to pursue a publishing deal if possible. Go for a
publisher who excites you, regardless of whether they’re part of a larger group or
strictly independent.

INSTA POETRY
Over the last decade, the ascent of the ‘Insta poet’ has radically changed the
grammar and perception of poetry in the UK and US. Sales grew significantly in
2018 for the second year in a row. In 2019, the Guardian newspaper reported
that ‘in total, 1.3million volumes of poetry were sold in 2018, adding up to
£12.3million in sales, a rise of £1.3million on 2017. Two-thirds of buyers were
younger than thirty-four and 41 per cent were aged thirteen to twenty-two, with
teenage girls and young women identified as the biggest consumers last year’.
Around £1million of those sales, it must be noted, came about as a result of the
successes of twenty-seven-year-old Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. Kaur began her
career posting digestible affirmation-like poems to her Instagram account. Bite-
sized, direct and uncomplicated, the result was an unprecedented popularity
surge that saw young millennials rush to imitate the form. The appetite for this
style of poetry, one that exploits the instantaneous and competing nature of
online content, gave impetus to hundreds of other users looking to pursue a
similar career path by growing their online brand in the hope of receiving a
lucrative book deal. Kaur, at the time of writing, has amassed a following of four
million people, has a major publishing deal with Simon & Schuster and is known
for selling out huge auditoriums around the world. What initially began as a self-
publishing project at university became one of the biggest-selling poetry marvels
of all time. Regardless of whether you feel she writes ‘fridge magnet’ poetry, or
Poetry with a capital P, there are elements worth considering when weighing up
the pros and cons of self-publishing. But, again, it’s worth reiterating that Rupi
Kaur is the exception, not the rule.

The Instagram debate is tired and contentious. Some argue vehemently that the
form devalues the craft, rewards rudimentary writing with sycophantic acolytes,
is antithetical to what constitutes engaging art, and encourages new writers to
see the purview of a poet as one associated primarily with follower numbers or
corporate sponsorships. Others take a less dogmatic approach, asking that we
allow people to make the poems they wish, to stop policing creativity and that, if
anything, Instagram will hopefully pique enough people’s interests that they go
on to further their exploration of contemporary poetry. We appreciate that mass
appeal and avant-garde art rarely occupy the same spaces. The frustration comes
when poets spend several years writing and refining a collection of poems that
only sell around 300 copies, compared to an Insta poet, who inundates their
timelines with what some might consider mawkish six-line poems, only to have
them become more widely celebrated. As an experiment, Vice journalist Andrew
Lloyd decided to try his hand at becoming an Insta poet. In his September 2019
article about the experience he writes: ‘I dived headfirst into the world of
Instagram poetry – not as a reader, but as a contender, aiming to write the worst
stuff possible. I’m no poet, but that was perfect for my plan: I would pack my
page with the most sickeningly trite, cliché and flowery words I could muster.
Would I be spotted for the talentless hack I am? Or would I become next best-
seller and prove quality doesn’t matter when it comes to Insta poetry?’ The result
was that, over the four weeks he was posting poems under the pseudonym Raven
S, he’d amassed 646 followers by his hundredth post. If he’d continued along
that trajectory, he could have potentially had 8,000 followers in the space of
year.

I have no real issue with Insta poetry and the purpose it serves. Poetry not to our
liking is still poetry. As with most art forms, key characteristics distinguish it
from other literary modes. How it engages with its subject, its originality, use of
imagery, diction and control. When they become apparent in the work, it shows
the artist to be in dialogue with the literary canon. If some of those features are
missing or are being used in some inane way, it starts to raise criticism. Poetry is
not alone in this. My friends who are jazz musicians debate and discuss popular
music albums, comparing them to the experimentalists, or jazz players thought
to be more cerebral, technical or advanced – these are great and valid debates.
However, it’s important to see a piece of art on its own terms. Who it’s trying to
appeal to and what it wants to do.
In the past, when poets have expressed dislike for Instagram poetry, they’ve
received quite a heavy backlash. They’ve been labelled snobs, cultural elitists, or
‘Boomers’ and Luddites who refuse to engage with the ways poetry and
technology have evolved. Criticism, so long as it’s not misdirected and abstains
from straying into diatribe, can greatly benefit an artform’s trajectory. The
British poet Rebecca Watts wrote an extremely critical article about Insta poetry
in 2018, which ended up being perceived largely as nothing more than a classist
character assassination of several prominent female poets. The opportunity to
assess the socio-cultural and intergenerational contexts along with advances in
technological developments and reader patterns were missed. Rather, what we
got was a cross-examination of their poetics, their private lives, and a general
undermining of their readers’ intelligence. The piece, published in PN Review,
entitled ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’ claimed that Insta poets display a
‘rejection of complexity, subtlety and eloquence’. There is, of course, an
argument to be brought forward here, but Watts’ tone, along with her general
disdain, hindered the making of a credible enough case.

REJECTION AND PRIZE CULTURE

The first few years of my writing career, from 2010 to 2014, were spent
immersed in spoken word poetry and facilitating workshops in schools. I’d
submitted two separate manuscripts to a number of independent publishers but to
little avail. In the end, I decided to continue self-publishing my books. Back
then, my reading of contemporary poetry was negligible. My main point of
reference was YouTube. I’d become enamoured with the American spoken word
stars – Saul Williams, Andrea Gibson, Shane Koyczan and Anis Mojgani. More
than likely, this was evident in my poetry, which explains the lack of response I
received from editors. An advantage of operating on the periphery of any
industry is you have no skin in the game. You’re exempt, you live outside the
circle where it’s safer. A friend of mine with aspirations to become a professional
boxer retired at the age of thirty-five. Mockingly, we’d refer to him as the
‘undefeated heavyweight of Tottenham’. When asked how many fights he’d had,
he’d awkwardly confess: none. Although I was a writer and he a boxer, both of
us feared losing to the point it prevented and impaired us from ever taking part.

A writer’s life is one stationed around the hum of rejection. I’ve lost more times
than I’ve gained. Each time it happens, I aim to see the upside when things fail
to go my way – what I could learn, what I could improve, or how I could work to
disassociate myself from the need to feel validated. I could fill a room with
emails that begin with ‘Dear Anthony, unfortunately …’, or ‘we’re sorry to
inform you …’ or ‘it’s with sincere regret that we …’ and so on. In the short time
I’ve had to write this book, I’ve received a rejection for a PhD funding
application that I’d spent three months putting together, and my latest poetry
collection failed to get shortlisted for two poetry prizes. The grip this can have
on an individual depends on the value they place on it. Some authors sell
thousands of books having never received a single accolade. Others sell
relatively few units until they win a prestigious award, then suddenly become
‘overnight success stories’. Aside from a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative
Arts (which, in itself, is a highly venerated achievement), the juggernaut of
twentieth-century literature, American novelist and essayist James Baldwin
received no other honours for his vast and unsurpassable body of work.

The writer Max Porter, whose two books, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and
Lanny, have both received numerous awards, along with wide critical acclaim,
says: ‘Prizes often highlight work being ignored, and they celebrate excellence,
which we must seek to do. But they also falsely elevate a small number of
writers, creating illusory hierarchies and obsessional or unhealthy fixations on
the individual rather than the collective. They preserve the damaging romantic
concept of genius writer on pedestal, they empower judges not readers and are
complicit in the industrial conception of the reader as slavish or obedient to
dominant tastes.’ Poet and academic Jack Underwood argues that ‘the primacy of
prizes as markers of critical worth should be robustly and actively challenged.
As a community we did not write our books in competition with one another, but
in communion. Readership and the marketplace are one thing, but what does this
additional arena of direct, single-winner competition mean for us? The anxiety,
the feelings of rejection, bitterness, worthlessness that comes with being
overlooked is publicly suppressed in favour of congratulation for the tiny
minority of winners.’

My 2019 collection, After the Formalities, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot that
same year. The prize is arguably the most prestigious prize in the UK for a single
collection of poetry. On hearing the news from my publisher, I was naturally
overcome with joy. My initial thought being that, for once, I’d written a worthy
enough thing. I felt fortified and validated. Later that night, I lay awake, mulling
through the day from the point I was given the news. Shock turned to delight,
turned to excitement, to anxiety, to doubt, to sadness. The following morning the
sadness lingered. I was telling myself that if my book was good enough for this
prize then maybe it would be good enough for another prize, or another prize,
and, before I knew it, I’d been caught in the capricious lottery that is prize
culture. I’d had a taste of what it felt like to receive a nomination for a big
award, and I was letting it dictate how I valued my own work. It felt as if I was
back at school, where everyone in the class needs the teacher’s nod of approval.
I was proud of the book I’d written and needed to remain so, irrespective of how
a few judges saw it.

Prizes, as we’ve seen, have their benefits. British-Jamaican poet Raymond

Antrobus, whose debut collection The Perseverance won multiple awards, says:
‘We need them, they’re necessary in order to spotlight poets’ collections,
particularly contemporary poetry. I’ve been writing and performing and had a
presence as a poet for over a decade. And I still hear people saying, “I didn’t
know contemporary poetry is a thing.” People are still saying, “I haven’t read a
poem since I left school.” I do think that, going forward, we’re going to see more
prizes, and we need more prizes – particularly prizes which uphold and
champion British poets.’ Trinidadian-Scottish writer Vahni Capildeo remarked:
‘Personally what I found heart-breaking were the few cases when books had
similar virtues but only one could be chosen rather than another.’ As much as
winning and prize culture in general is a thing to celebrate and take relatively
seriously, we as readers and writers also stand to lose a great deal if we
overinvest in them, relying solely on the proclivities of judges to do the heavy
lifting for us. Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong told The Creative
Independent that ‘competition, prizes and awards are part of a patriarchal
construct that destroys love and creativity. If you must use that construct, you
use it the way one uses public transport. Get on, then get off at your stop and
find your people. Don’t live on the bus, and most importantly, don’t get trapped
on it.’

In order for one person to win many need to lose. No matter how many times
your work is made to run the gauntlet, the feeling of disappointment never gets
easier to shift until you disassociate yourself from the nature of prizes altogether.
None of it is a reflection of you or your writing. Give the same book to a
completely different set of judges and you’ll get a different result. The same
rationale applies to manuscripts. The writer Eimear McBride, who penned the
multi-award winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, remarked how for nine
years, her book was turned away by publishers. At a talk a few years ago, she
said even though she was writing as someone unpublished and unknown, that
never once deterred her from thinking of herself as an author. This kind of
mindset becomes invaluable.
Australian film director Baz Luhrmann’s 1998 spoken word song, ‘Everybody’s
Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’, features a recital of the essay ‘Advice, like youth,
probably just wasted on the young’ written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary
Schmich. A line in particular which has always stayed with me is: ‘Remember
compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me
how.’ All you can ever control at any given time is the work you make, and how
true you are to your vision. How it’s received, or who sees the virtue in it, is
completely beyond you. Be about the work. That’s it, that’s your job.
 ‘The word “career” does not fit my whole way of thinking about poetry,
but the word “devotion” does.’
Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, songwriter and novelist

THE INTERNET
As with most things in modern society, literature has had to reconfigure itself
around the rapid changes brought by developments in human interaction and
technology. My entry into poetry was through rap music and spoken word – an
interest cultivated by the advent of the internet, YouTube in particular. In the
beginning, reading books was time-consuming, expensive and mentally draining.

In the years subsequent to the Respect Slam competition, I’d failed my AS levels
at college, meaning I either had to re-sit the entire year or leave. I decided on the
latter. Pizza Hut, where I’d previously worked part-time in the kitchen, offered
me a full-time job as a delivery driver. Two years of delivering on a moped took
me to breaking point. I learned about some access courses in the local area.
Signed up to a one-year BTEC course in music business at a community college
in Wood Green. A year later, I received a place at Westminster University where
I studied commercial music for a further three years. By 2005, I’d qualified with
a high 2:2, having realised early on how pointless the course was. After
graduating, industry professionals told me they’d never heard of my course. It
soon became apparent, after three unsuccessful interviews, that I was still as
unemployable as I had been after leaving college. My uncle’s passing by then
had ossified. I wasn’t struggling mentally in the way I was during the years
following his death, but aside from that, everything else was pretty bleak.

Eventually I found work for a new media company who bought licences to sell
music from record labels on to various mobile network providers. These were
the days when everyone had a phone that played a ring tone, usually a pop song
or anthem. I was the guy whose job it was to convert files from WAV to MP3 for
£16k a year. After eighteen months I was made redundant. During the weeks that
followed, it dawned on me how insignificant my job was, so much so that when
I went to an employment agency asking if they could help me find any additional
work, the recruiter took one look at my CV and said the job I was doing
technically didn’t exist in the industry. Months of unemployment followed,
which gave me time to read and think about if I wanted to try and make a career
out of writing. Card Not Accepted was the rubber ring keeping me afloat. It gave
me a sense of purpose throughout a period in which I had none. The
disenchantment from having no clear direction made the journey to being a
writer that much more arduous.

In May 2010, I decided to move to Thailand as my then girlfriend and I had split
up. Seeing as I had no real job and my general state of mind was in desperate
need of recalibration, a total change of scene seemed my only option. In the run
up to going, I worked several menial jobs, saving whatever money I could to
eventually book a one-way ticket to Bangkok. Within three months of being out
there, I was broke. To make enough money to get by, a friend suggested I set up
an account on Guru.com where I could write small bits of advertising copy for
online companies. I was making around $10 to $20 per day, rehashing articles
for small media outlets to cover my food and rent for the month.

In Thailand I was none the wiser about how hard it was to maintain momentum
around self-publishing. My first book received little attention, and was only sold
through my website. Every so often I’d get an email saying a copy had been
purchased. Whatever money I made from online sales went directly back into
funding new projects. The monastic nature of travelling alone somehow
managed to boost my productivity. I had no distractions. A few friends I’d see
maybe twice a week, but aside from that, I was left to write.

Sometime around June, I received an email from a guy named Ben, who worked
in design. A friend of his had recommended my poems to him, and after reading
bits online he wanted to see if I’d be interested in collaborating on a project. He
offered to design my next book free of charge, which was his way of offsetting
some of the guilt he harboured from working in the corporate sector. I
deliberated then finally sent him over some ideas for my next pamphlet,
‘Returning Stranger’ – the title poem made an attempt at riffing off Derek
Walcott’s ‘Love after Love’. True to his word, within two weeks he’d designed
the cover and typeset the book. I kept thinking of new ways to get my poems
read online. Being based abroad precluded me from attending open mic nights.
In addition, moving around South East Asia before Kindles took off limited the
number of books I was able to keep on me. YouTube had become an invaluable
resource for inspiration. Once the day was over, I’d stay awake reading,
watching performances and interviews with poets and musicians from the Black
Arts Movement to the Harlem Renaissance. This became my alma mater.

I’d written a poem called ‘This Is Us’, a piece that attempted to explore elements
of history, racism and the human condition by linking one associative thought to
the next. I made a recording of myself reading the poem then uploaded it on to
YouTube. I shared it on my Facebook and Twitter accounts to garner more
views. Then the emails started to come through from promoters inviting me to
perform at events across the UK – London to Leicester to Birmingham and
Leeds. Book sales from my website also increased. Ben and I had the new
pamphlet ready for release, but because I had no means of physically getting the
books printed, and with my mother posting any new sales herself, we thought it
best to release the pamphlet as an e-book on Amazon then maybe do a physical
print when I got back to the UK. We created a sellers account under Plastic Earth
Press, and within a month the download numbers had surpassed a thousand.
More people were subscribing to my YouTube channel. Social media followers
were increasing and my site seemed to be attracting more traffic. The internet
was working.

In August 2010, my friend Kingslee, better known as rapper and writer Akala,
called to say he was preparing to tour the UK in October and asked if I’d be
interested in supporting him. I hadn’t performed properly since 2001 so the
thought of getting up in front of strangers, to read poetry filled me with dread.
Not only that, but I was penniless. I just about had enough money to cover my
rent and food but nowhere near enough for a plane ticket back home. I thanked
him for thinking of me but turned down the offer. A week later I received a
message on Facebook from a woman saying she’d been reading my work online
and wanted to know if I was planning any live performances soon. I explained
my situation – both financial and circumstantial – and that I wouldn’t. Our
conversation continued, I mentioned Akala’s proposition, my lack of money and
general malaise for the situation I was in. On hearing his name she confessed
how much of a fan she was of his music along with The Hip-Hop Shakespeare
Company he’d set up the previous year. By the end of our chat she offered to
cover the entire cost of my plane ticket back to London, as well as fund the
printing of any books I needed to sell on tour. I declined the offer assuming she
meant it all in jest, but she insisted, assuring me I wouldn’t need to repay her and
to consider it as “a grant from a friend.” It all sounded highly suspicious, a
random woman from the internet wanted to give me £1500 to fund a tour she
had no way of knowing was even legitimate. I had £37 in my account.
Reluctantly I gave her my bank details knowing if the whole thing was a scam
she’d be somewhat disappointed with her winnings.

The next morning I checked my bank account to find a balance of £1537.

Bewildered, I logged into Facebook to message and thank her but her profile was
gone. She had either deactivated her account or blocked me. To this day, I’m still
not sure what happened. I messaged Akala to ask if the offer to support him was
still open, and booked my ticket home for the first week of September. I was
saying goodbye to friends I’d made and heading back to London at last. I left as
a labourer and was coming home as a poet. I made one last attempt to search for
my elusive sponsor but nothing came up. Every so often I wonder where I would
be if she hadn’t reached out. Probably still in Thailand writing copy for $15 a
day. Either way, if she’s reading this I’d like her to know I’m incredibly grateful.

ON TOUR & ON STAGE

Being on tour with Akala taught me about the importance of performance. My
first two shows were terrible. I was stiff, nervous and introverted. The audience,
primarily made up of students and hip-hop mavens in their early twenties,
wanted a strong, confident performer. There are many ways we can perform
ourselves. Most depend on the space our bodies are in, the kind of people
watching and what’s expected of us. Performances can be as small or as large as
we want them to be. I used to think if something lacked that thespian quality it
wasn’t really a performance, more a presentation. This, of course, is not true –
performances are as varied and as multifaceted as we are.

On the launch night of Card Not Accepted, I was so terrified of standing in front
of an audience that I asked my friends to read out poems on my behalf. Maybe
this was a hangover from my first pub gig back in 2001, or something more
profound – the fear of failure and ridicule, of being watched and judged. The
contract between artist and audience is a tenuous one. The space dictates what
people expect and if that expectation isn’t met there are consequences. For
instance, when we attend a comedy night we walk in prepared to laugh. If the
comedian fails at honouring that part of the contract then disappointment can
ensue. Every artform has its own precepts. The negotiation between the audience
and artist has to be met by some kind of compromise. Audiences want an
experience that scholars argue borders transcendence. Some of the most
memorable performances I’ve ever witnessed are those where the artist
spiritually leaves the space through their work. There were poems I knew
worked better when performed. Poems that had a physicality to them, a rhetoric
or conversational drive, infused with lyric, dialogue or anecdote. Not necessarily
slam poems, but poems that could live in the air. Other more concrete pieces that
relied on the page I’d leave for the book. Again, that’s not to say we all need to
perform like the musician Prince, but I feel there needs to be a semblance of that
component present.

After our third show, Lavar, Akala’s sound engineer, noticed how dispirited I
was becoming. Backstage, before our fourth show in Liverpool he saw me
pacing the floor, peeling mandarin after mandarin. I remember him saying
‘You’ve got a lot of personality but you’re not bringing it out. What you need to
do is have fun up there. The more relaxed you are, the more relaxed they are. Be
yourself. Go up with an apple and some green tea if it makes you feel more
comfortable. Read your poems with your body. See if that makes a difference.’
He was right. The audience were generous and effusive. At the end of my set the
applause was mightier than anything I’d ever heard before. There was still some
way to go in perfecting my set, but it felt as if I were among friends rather than
an audience of headmasters or bosses, By the end of the tour I’d sold out of all
the books and my imposter syndrome was truly dissipating.

WORKSHOPS
The bulk of my income is now made through teaching – both adults and
teenagers. I tailor workshops to meet the needs of particular cohorts. These can
take place in schools, community spaces, theatres, prisons, refuge centres and
online. I’ve been the writer in residence at several London schools for close to a
decade, as well as guest lecturing at universities both in the UK and abroad. I
don’t have any formal teaching experience or qualifications, no PGCE, but I do
have some insight into how poems work. What many students and participants
struggle with is how to think about poetry. As I’ve discussed in other sections of
the book, people fear ‘not making sense’ – either that or they’re too literal with
their words. Sometimes they repeat things, just in different ways. Other times
they use tropes or tautologies which do nothing for the writing. My job is to try
to equip them with enough know-how that they’re able to broaden the ambit of
their poetry. The thing with teaching is that you need to really enjoy the theory.
Some poets set exercises or give writing prompts or ask the group to respond to
poems with a distinct structure. All of which is perfectly fine. But I’ve found,
over the years, that once people get a handle on the different ways language can
work and start to take more risks, the more adventurous and interesting they
become. Being a good writer doesn’t always translate into being a good teacher,
and vice versa. They can be seen as two separate skill sets. My preferred method
is usually a mixture of theory and practical work. But, again, teaching should be
one of these things you do only if you really enjoy it. My work is freelance,
meaning I need a UTR (Unique Tax payer Reference) so I can invoice schools, a
system to keep tabs on what is paid and outstanding, along with a website where
people can read or learn about what I offer.

Pricing is tricky because everything depends on the level of experience you have
and the budgets in place. Most of the established poets living in London charge
approximately £350 a day. You’ll find outside of the capital institutions may
have less money to spend on arts and culture, so your fees should be sensitive to
that. All this is an accordance with what’s suggested by the Society of Authors,
but if you’re just starting off and want to get into working with schools, the best
thing is to contact a poet and ask to shadow them. Or sign up to some yourself to
see how it’s all put together.

INCREASING YOUR VISIBILITY

Living back home with my parents meant my outgoings were relatively low. If
there was ever a right time for me to take the leap it was in 2010 at the age of
twenty-seven. After the tour with Akala finished, I began to perform the pieces
I’d memorised at open-mic nights around London. In the beginning I went alone,
then I asked one of my friends to come along. Each of them would give me
something new and different to think about regarding my performance. The way
I enunciated certain words. What my hands were doing between or during
poems. The way my legs were positioned. There’s no other place where you
become so conscious of your body as you do when you’re on stage. You’re
incredibly aware of yourself, your limbs, your teeth, your hair.

Within six months my inbox was full of invites to feature at various poetry
events. Some were spoken word, while others were billed as ‘readings’. I got
back in contact with Joelle Taylor who was overjoyed to hear from me, and keen
to know why I suddenly went off grid back in 2002 and what I’d been doing
since. She was still working in schools, running the SLAMbassador project, then
in its eighth year. I told her I needed work but had no idea how to run workshops
or get bookings. She suggested I shadow her. However, schools were
understandably averse to having random guys sitting in the back of classrooms,
so nothing ever materialised. The shows I was doing back then paid me
somewhere between £40 to £70 for a 15-minute set. Performance fees have
mostly increased since I started out, with more established poets being able to
command higher fees, but like many events in the third sector everything is
dependent on budgets and funding.
Combining sales from my collections with my performance fee for a gig, I could
probably make around £150 to £200 a night. It was good money, considering I
had no other income apart from copywriting, but it wasn’t money I could depend
on. Gigs were coming in, yet, if I wanted to leave my parents’ home and start
renting I’d need regular income. A friend of mine suggested I send some poems
into literary magazines. I sent in a handful by post; but nothing got accepted. The
only thing I understood was YouTube. I went back to what worked for me –
slowly writing and adding more videos to my channel.

LITERARY JOURNALS
Aside from getting published, if you’ve written a short story or poem and are
wondering what else you could do next apart from sharing it online, you should
submit to a literary journal. Some of the big poetry magazines and publications
that feature new poetry are: Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Ambit,
Magma, New Statesman, the Guardian, The White Review, The Dark Horse, The
London Magazine, Granta and Oxford Poetry Review, some publications also
publish fiction. There are a tonne more in America too such as: Poetry, The
Rumpus, The New Yorker, Butcher’s Dog, Paris Review and Adroit.

A mistake a lot of writers make when submitting to magazines is they have never
read the journals they wish to be published in. Some editors have their preferred
styles, while others are more open and arbitrary. Either way, I always suggest
you read before you submit. I had to wait nine months before I received a reply
when I first submitted to Poetry magazine in the US – the English-speaking
world’s largest monthly poetry journal, which takes in around 150,000
submissions a year according to editor Don Share. My first submission was
rejected. I put another lot of poems in (the maximum is five), waited a further
nine months, only to get rejected again. My third submission ended up being
successful but I had to wait two years before that happened. The important thing
is to keep writing and sending stuff in to different magazines. Some poems were
rejected by one editor but accepted by another. It stings each time but as I said
earlier, try to learn from rejection, allow yourself to be hurt, think about what
could be improved, then go again.

Emily Berry, the editor of Poetry Review, which stands as the most respected
quarterly poetry journal in the UK, told me, ‘I’d much rather people sent and
wrote the things they want or need to write, rather than trying to fit into an idea
of what they think a given magazine would like to see.’ The key is not to
compromise yourself for the sake of an editor. The advantages of having your
work in magazines are that, first, people with an avid interest in writing will
learn about you, and it’s seen as an achievement, not only to have writing
approved by an editorial team, but to be selected among hundreds of other
submissions. It gives the writing gravitas, similar to how a positive peer-review
might affect a piece of academic writing.

EXERCISE: Make a list of five journals you want to submit your work to.
Give yourself a deadline, and ask yourself why you want to be published
there?

TIP

Be careful sharing and uploading your work to social media, as technically

it counts as a published piece of work. Therefore, you wouldn’t be able to
submit it into a poetry competition for unpublished work nor would literary
magazines be able to accept it.

VIRAL POEMS
Around the summer of 2011, the night’s stifling heat coupled with my worries
about money and the precarity of my life had me laying awake in bed until the
early hours. When I couldn’t sleep, I used to open old notebooks to skim through
notes I’d written. Then I had an idea. A poem that challenged the Eurocentrism
of education, of memory and collective consciousness. It would move through
time, starting with African history, then into neo-liberal economics, philosophy
and spirituality. It would offer up a supposition; caveating everything with a
What If, responding to and subverting Kipling’s infamous ‘If’ poem. Hurriedly, I
scrawled thoughts into my notebook until I got a clearer sense of where I was
going with it. It’s rare for me to write like that, as epiphany, but this happened to
be one of the few poems that came to me in that way. That night I stayed up
writing what would essentially be the poem to launch my career.

‘If I Told You’ was written and uploaded onto YouTube in the summer of 2011.
Currently it has 132,069 views. In 2014 I was touring Australia when someone
in America ripped the poem and uploaded it on to Facebook. Within three days,
it accumulated 4 million views. It’s a poem from my self-published debut
collection, A Difficult Place to Be Human, published in 2013, which is no longer
in print. With all the privilege and good fortune to come from that poem, I’ve
always maintained I’d never want to write something like that again. Sometimes
we arrive at something that has the capacity to make us ugly. To satisfy a
dangerous and narcissistic side. It’s easy to fall into the trap of a formula that has
the potential to make us complacent and dull. For me, working outside of the
known is where I believe the most interesting things materialise. Within a year of
that poem being in circulation, I was teaching as a resident writer in two London
schools, where I’d put programmes together for students who struggled with
English. At one point, I’d sent out close to seventy emails offering schools my
workshops, but never heard back from any of them. Now teachers were finding
me. By February 2013, I had left home and was making my living as a full-time
poet and teacher. Gigging, teaching and being invited to speak at panels and
festivals. For my workshops, I turned my own methods of writing into a lesson,
breaking down my thought pattern into a workshop plan that teachers seemed to
approve.
Since that summer of 2011, I’ve been fortunate enough to have my writing take
me all over the world. I’ve met some incredible people, had some heartfelt
conversations that I still think about, and seen a number of my friends grow to
become household names. In March 2012, I decided to start a poetry night
without an open mic. Three poets, two musicians. Mainly because there wasn’t a
space in London for people to just come and hear poets read. I called the series
Out-Spoken. The first event took place at the Proud Gallery in Camden. Hosted
by my friend, poet and unionist The Ruby Kid (who has subsequently retired
from poetry), the night saw 100 people cram into the venue to hear poems and
music until 10 p.m. The next month we did it again and the same thing
happened. Since then the night, which now has a residency at London’s
Southbank Centre, regularly sees 300 people a month fill the Purcell Room. It’s
hosted some of the most celebrated voices of contemporary poetry from around
the world and continues to quell the divide between ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poetry.
Not to mention the rappers and singers who’ve also graced us, including the late,
great Ty, who was both a dear friend to the night and to myself. Out-Spoken is
hosted by the inimitable Joelle Taylor, who’s played a pivotal role in helping
support so many of the poets we cherish in the UK today. And who is an
immensely gifted writer and performer, whose poems are loaded with rally,
intellect and fortitude. My friend and pianist Karim Kamar works on all things
digital, producer Tom MacAndrew makes sure there’s enough money to keep it
all ticking over, and DJ Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield plays the wickedest riddims
each and every month. Over the years, we’ve had our setbacks. In 2016, we lost
our venue at The Forge in Camden. We’ve had team members leave. Much of
the night’s success is how we work together, how we manage to bring parts of
ourselves to the project and stay connected with the literary landscape.

In 2014, I established a sister company called Out-Spoken Press – a publishing

house that looks to directly challenge the lack of diversity in British poetry
publishing. Since its inception, we’ve published over a dozen poets from PoC,
queer and/or working class backgrounds. We’ve been recognised as one of the
leading small presses for poetry in the UK, our authors have won prestigious
awards and been shortlisted for others. I see myself now as a friend of poetry and
literature. Where I am feels right. A student forever coming to terms with the
fact I know relatively little about this thing I enjoy and love so much. My life
wasn’t terrible prior to all this – many of the guys I grew up around had it far
worse, some are no longer here – but the longstanding effects these experiences
can have and how we see ourselves going forward can become impossible to
rectify. I still wrestle with my inadequacies. I’m still trying to learn to love the
work I make. When I was writing After the Formalities, a friend of mine asked
what I did to unwind. I said I read mostly, that I didn’t want to waste time
watching television or other such frivolities. I understood time was finite and
wasting it meant I couldn’t put it to any sort of use. I couldn’t convert it into
anything substantive. But then my friend said that, for him, wasting time was an
important part of the creative process. It allows for ideas to marinade and
foment. For the mind to expand and reflect. On days he wants to waste time, he
opens a Pot Noodle and watches repeats of Terminator. And the writing, he
argues, is all the better for it.

Wherever you are in your journey to becoming a writer, know you are doing
enough. Reading books like this, getting to the end, with hopefully some new
ideas and ways of thinking, is a massive part of what the job’s about. Weeks
before her death, it’s said the American poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her
friend, poet Robert Lowell, asking, ‘When do the real poems begin?’ This is a
poet who received two Guggenheim Fellowships, won the American Book
Award for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize and was made Poet Laureate between 1949
and 1950. And, sure, we know honours and accolades are never the best metric
when thinking about someone’s work, but the overall recognition she received
throughout the twentieth century was pretty remarkable. And to still feel such a
sense of failure towards the end, that’s upsetting. Capitalism, its obsession with
productivity and attendant anxieties, would have us believe that our worth as
individuals lies only in the sum of our output. What the market doesn’t reward or
doesn’t price has no significant value. It’s simply not true. Take your time, and
each day do something that adds to your writing. Read, write, draft and re-draft.
Make art. Enjoy the time spent doing so. And keep in mind that in and amongst
all of this, there’s that wonderful, unfathomable, overwhelming, absurd, weird,
confusing and rapturous thing which keeps happening all around.
Arvon Foundation – www.arvon.org
Commonword – www.cultureword.org.uk
Literary Friction – www.nts.live/shows/literaryfriction
Literature Wales – www.literaturewales.org/for-writers
Literature Works – www.literatureworks.org.uk
New Writing South (covers South East region, based in Brighton) –
www.newwritingsouth.com
New Writing North (covers North East region, based in Newcastle upon Tyne) –
www.newwritingnorth.com
Writing West Midlands (based in Birmingham) - www.writingwestmidlands.org
Society of Authors – www.societyofauthors.org
Spread the Word (based in London) – www.spreadtheword.org.uk
The Bookseller – www.thebookseller.com
The Literary Consultancy – www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk
The Riff Raff – www.the-riffraff.com
Writers & Artists – www.writersandartists.co.uk
Writing East Midlands (based in Derby) – www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk
Writers’ Centre Norwich (based in Norwich, covers Eastern region) –
www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk
Scottish Book Trust – www.scottishbooktrust.com
Poetry:
Allen, Rachael, Kingdomland (Faber & Faber, January 2019)
Alsadir, Nuar, Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017)
Antrobus, Raymond, The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, October 2018)
Ashbery, John, As We Know, (Penguin, November 1979)
Berry, Emily, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, February 2017)
Bernard, Jay, Surge (Chatto & Windus, 2019)
Brown, Jericho, The Tradition (Picador, August 2019)
Capildeo, Vahni, Venus as a Bear (Carcanet Press, April 2018)
García Lorca, Federico, Poet in New York (Penguin Classics, January 2002)
Gibran, Kahlil, The Prophet (Penguin Classics, April 2020)
Harris, Will, RENDANG (Granta, February 2020)
Hayes, Terrance, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin,
June 2018)
Hayes, Terrance, Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)
Holloway-Smith, Wayne, Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, September 2020)
Kaminsky, Ilya, Deaf Republic (Faber & Faber, June 2019)
Limón, Ada, Bright Dead Things (Corsair, February 2019)
Miller, Kei, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press, May
2014)
Neruda, Pablo, Canto General (University of California Press, October 2000)
Parmar, Sandeep, Eidolon (Shearsman Books, January 2015)
Parmar, Sandeep, Threads (Clinic Publishing Ltd, July 2018)
Patten, Brian, Love Poems (HarperCollins, September 1991)
Rankine, Claudia, Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, July 2015)
Rumi, trans. Barks, Coleman, The Soul of Rumi (HarperOne, September 2002)
Smith, Danez, Homie (Graywolf Press, January 2020)
Taylor, Joelle, Songs My Enemy Taught Me (Out-Spoken Press, July 2017)
Theune, Michael, Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers &
Writers Collaborative, June 2007)
Underwood, Jack, Happiness (Faber & Faber, July 2015)
Vuong, Ocean, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Jonathan Cape, April 2017)
Fiction:
Porter, Max, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber, August 2016)
Non-fiction:
Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (Two Roads, March
2018)
Bugeja, Michael J., The Art & Craft of Poetry (Writer’s Digest Books, 2001)
Davidson, Jonathan, On Poetry (Smith/Doorstop Books, March 2018)
DiAngelo, Robin, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People
About Racism (Penguin, 2019)
Harris, Will, Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, May 2018)
Herbert, W. N., and Hollis, Matthew, eds, Strong Words (Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
2000)
Koestenbaum, Wayne, Figure It Out (Basic Civitas Books, May 2020)
Li, Yiyun, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (Penguin,
February 2018)
Malik, Nesrine, We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our
Age of Discontent (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019)
Maxwell, Glyn, On Poetry (Oberon Books, March 2017)
Oakley, Mark, The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry (Canterbury Press,
August 2016)
Solnit, Rebecca, Whose Story Is This?: Old Conflicts, New Chapters: Essays at
the Intersection (Granta, 2019)
Ruefle, Mary, Madness, Rack and Honey (Wave Books, August 2012)
Interviews:
Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Art of Poetry’ – www.theparisreview.org
Raymond Antrobus, ‘“Every poem is a different species”: Raymond Antrobus
talks to Wasafiri’ – www.wasafiri.org
Ada Limón, ‘Episode 76’ – www.commonpodcast.com
My most heartfelt thanks and gratitude to those who contributed towards the
writing of this book – those who offered their time and guidance in developing
key sections, without which many would have been impossible to complete.
Thank you to Lemara Lindsay-Prince for having the vision for the series, one
which I believe will go on to become a vital resource for so many of us. To
Sandeep Parmar and the Ledbury Critics, for their fortitude and tireless work in
directly addressing the imbalances, biases and discrepancies within the British
poetry and publishing landscape. To Rachael Allen, for her perspicacious
reflections on class and gender. To Jack Underwood, for his many musings on
what makes poetry work, and for constantly putting forward a clear and
enriching argument. To Will Harris, a poet and thinker whose writing has
impacted me in multiple ways throughout the years, remedying some of my own
tribulations around race and its intersections. To Joelle Taylor, a poet, comrade
and a genuine believer in people. To my lifelong friend and poetry-brother
Raymond Antrobus, whose generosity and advice added greater depth and
nuance to parts of this text. To Patricia Ferguson, for all her instruction and
support across my literary projects. To my agent, Claudia Young, and the team at
Greene & Heaton, thank you for always making these books such a joy to write.
To #Merky Books and Penguin Random House, thank you for giving my
thoughts and ideas some space. Lastly, to my family, my son, my parents – I am
forever indebted.

I’ve laboured the point throughout this book that nothing is definitive. I would
never assume to speak on behalf of such a diverse and lively community of poets
and writers. There is also no single authority when it comes to the ways we can
mitigate and distil our experiences; how we foster a unique language of
expression. What I’ve collated in these pages are extracts from my life;
significant things which gave impetus to other things. My lack of formal training
in poetry and creative writing has always made me feel somewhat of a pariah,
which has meant, for most of my professional life, I’ve been playing catch-up.
When I decided I wanted to be a poet, it felt as if I were looking out of a window
onto a barren field. Thankfully, today, so much has changed. The opportunities
available to us make pursuing a career in letters worthwhile and allow us to learn
what’s needed for our writing to be recognised. This book responds to some of
the larger questions and anxieties concerning that ambition. It proposes ways we
can think about writing and poetry, but, ultimately, it’s designed to help make the
journey into literature slightly less daunting.

Anthony Anaxagorou,
2020
 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by #Merky Books in 2020

Copyright © Anthony Anaxagorou, 2020
Lines from ‘Night Fragments’ by Nuar Alsadir are reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Lines from ‘Threads’ by Sandeep Parmar are reprinted by kind permission of the author. Lines from ‘As We
Know’ by John Ashbery are reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright holders for permission, and
apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credit given. Corrections may be made in future
reprints.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design by Andreas Brooks
ISBN: 978-1-529-11916-9
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