Award-winning spoken word poet, educator, and publisher Anthony Anaxagorou on his journaling practice, how he writes and edits poetry, moving past failure and self doubt, and the importance of developing our own value system to help us keep writing.
How does a poet see the world? How can we move past self doubt and keep writing after rejection? In this episode we talk to Anthony Anaxagorou about how his journaling practice helps him generate ideas for his work, what his editing process looks like, and why he might spend eight or nine hours working on a single poem. Anthony is candid about his experience of failure and rejection, shares why we should be wary of the temptations of ‘prize culture’ (always seeking validation through the next prize), and why it’s crucial to develop our own internal value system to sustain ourselves and our writing. He even reads us some of his poetry!
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ABOUT ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His second collection After the Formalities was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. He’s the founder of one of London's leading poetry nights, Out-Spoken, and the independent publisher Out-Spoken Press.
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SHOW NOTES
[03:22] The experience of writing a book during the pandemic
[04:41] Anthony talks about his uncle and how he influenced him as a writer
[08:07] On failures and why it's important to ask yourself searching questions and see rejection as part of your job
[11:48] What is prize culture and why does Anthony think it's dangerous?
[14:06] Measuring success and creating your own value system
[15:04] Anthony reads his poem, "Uber"
[18:31] On being dissatisfied with his own work
[21:53] On why he carrys a notebook with him all the time, and a writing habit he got from Lydia Davis
[22:34] Anthony’s morning writing exercise
[24:15] Anthony talks about his writing process, including 7-8 hours of focusing on one poem
[27:43] How do you stop feeling intimidated by the academic side of poetry?
[31:32] Anthony reflects on what "pushing your writing as far as it can go" means to him
[34:32] Anthony shares the exercises he gives to his students to help them in writing a poem
[36:38] What is the loaf of bread analogy, and why is playing with timelines when you write essential?
[37:40] Resolving the poem and the idea of leaving the reader with questions
[39:15] How do you know when a poem is done?
[43:33] On being in conversation with the reader and why the writer is only half the conversation
[46:13] Anthony shares how he started his London-based Out-Spoken open mic nights
[49:44] Anthony reads his poem, "After the Formalities"
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QUOTES BY ANTHONY:
“The more you read, the more you get a sense for how poems work. And it's literally just from reading and you get a sense of where things end and where is an interesting place to end. If you think along the lines of—if you think the word interesting as opposed to kind of definitive. Then it kind of—it swaps. I just want to be interesting on the page. I don't want to be correct. I don't want to be certain. I want to be interesting.”
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RESOURCES:
Connect with Anthony:
Twitter: @Anthony1983
Facebook: anthonyanax
Website: anthonyanaxagorou.com
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Links from the show:
After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou
How To Write It by Anthony Anaxagorou
Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
Uber by Anthony Anaxagorou
After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou
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Authors/Poets mentioned:
For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com
For free writing sessions, join free Writers’ Hours: writershour.com
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CREDITS
Production by Victoria Spooner. Artwork by Emma Winterschladen
Matt: Hello and welcome to season 2 of the London Writers’ Salon podcast. I’m Matt.
Parul: And I’m Parul, and each week we sit down with a writer that we admire to talk about the craft of writing and the art of building a successful and sustainable writing career.
Matt: These interviews are recorded live with our global writing community. If you would like to join us for the next recording, or write with us at our daily Writers’ Hour writing sessions, head to LondonWriterSalon.com for more information.
Parul: In this episode, we chat with the award-winning spoken word poet Anthony Anaxagorou. Anthony was born and raised in a working-class immigrant family with English as a second language, and faced an uphill battle to make it as a poet.
After failing to rouse a crowded North London pub at an open mic night, Anthony literally binned his poems and vowed to never write again. Six years later, after discovering spoken word through YouTube, Anthony picked himself and the pen back up and hasn't stopped since.
Today, Anthony has established himself as a sought after slam poet, poetry teacher, and YouTube performer; has signed with a major publisher, set up his own imprint, and created London’s leading poetry night, Out Spoken.
Matt: This conversation with Anthony is a deep dive into the mind of a poet. We learn how poets like Anthony see the world, and what it takes to move from a casual observation or everyday feeling to a powerful written, published or performed poem.
Specifically, Anthony shares how his journaling practice helps him generate ideas for his work, what his editing process looks like, and why he might spend eight or nine hours working on a single poem. Anthony is candid about his experience of failure and rejection, shares why we should be wary of the temptations of ‘prize culture’ (always seeking validation through the next prize), and why it’s crucial to develop our own internal value system to sustain ourselves and our writing. Anthony is so humble and generous in this conversation. It’s no wonder so many aspiring poets find inspiration in his work.
Parul: He also reads us some of his poetry - stick around to the end to hear it.
As always, this conversation was recorded live with our global writing community. Without further ado, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Anthony Anaxagorou.
Parul: Anthony, welcome to the stage.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Thank you very much.
Matt Trinetti: Imagine, so this is a question we've been asking a lot of our guests. If you could be, uh, being interviewed, holding this interview, anywhere, at any venue in London or elsewhere, where would we be right now?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Oh, you know, I think one of the places I'm most comfortable with is actually the South Bank. It's one of the places where I first started to do panels and I was mediating things and did readings and performances. I've got a lot of really good memories of the different spaces around the South Bank Centre so I'd probably say that would be my number one.
Matt Trinetti: That's great. All right. Well, we're right at home at South Bank Centre, uh, for this interview. Um, so, uh, Anthony, uh, we both read this book and it's, it's really lovely and it's generous. And I think I heard on one interview, you wrote this entirely during the pandemic, is that right?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, it's pretty nice but it was really, it was really nice. I didn't think I'd be able to do it. It was only cause so the book was a commission. Um, it was, I, they, they emailed my agent and asked me to write it. Um, and they had obviously like a deadline that they needed it for. And it was seven weeks and when I said, yes, there was no lockdown. Like the pandemic hadn't started. So by the time the contracts had come through and they'd sorted everything out, all the kind of legal side of things, they were always, my agent was like, right, you're good to go. And I think it was literally the first week of lockdown. So I was like, my whole head was just in another—it was, it was a real, it felt like climbing a mountain in a way because you have to block out all the noise, like social media at the time everyone was losing their minds on Twitter and on Facebook and the news of every two minutes, you know, more and more people were dying. So I had to block all that off and just immerse myself in this world that felt like a complete departure from real life, which was a pandemic and a lot of people dying and no one really know what was killing them. So, um, yeah, it was, it was just weird. It was really strange.
Matt Trinetti: Well, we're glad that you did it because it was such a joy to read and it was such a generous offering of you. Um, and there was a couple of stories in particular that it really struck me, struck us and, and they seem to be formative as you as a creative and as an artist. And one of the stories that you tell is the story of you losing your uncle. You're at sea, just the two of you, that he had a heart attack and he died right there. And, um, your uncle seemed to have this kind of wise mentor persona for you. Can you tell us a bit about your uncle and how he influenced you as a writer and, and to help you become the artist you are today?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. I mean, everything that you've just said is completely correct, but I had no language for any of these things. So there was no language, there was nothing for me to perceive him as being an autodidact, as being someone who was intellectually curious, who was a person of letters who was also from a kind of war-torn colonial country. Uh, and worked as a rag-and-bone man who was completely eccentric over here. So, you know, I, all the things that you've just described him is what he was, but I never saw him as that. For me, it was just my uncle, Chris, who was my dad's uncle. He was not my great uncle. Um, but he was also nuts. Like everyone knew him as completely eccentric and the non-conformist and I always felt that Shakespeare poetry, literature, and the ruder that he would quote were just part of his eccentricities. So I never had them down as anything else, but he's just a little bit out there. And I think going there and seeing someone who came from very inauspicious beginnings and to just have a natural curiosity about things and also an appetite and an ability to retain information and regurgitate things and perform language like someone who had that innate kind of ability really piqued my interest from a young age. Cause it made me realize I didn't need school and a formal kind of framework to be able to do that. And that was the first time I'd seen someone who was a rag-and-bone man like that was his job. Um, he would just collect people's crap and then try and sell it somewhere else, um, to try and do something like that, but also have loads of books and know what each book meant and what he, what, who the writers were. So I think having that as a kind of gave impetus to a lot of things for me, just gave me a bit of confidence and courage to kind of go forward and think I have that same pension. Like I feel that affinity to language and to literature and to ideas. Um, and so did he, and I think when he died, again, it's not, I don't want to get filmic, um, because it's very easy to turn that what happened. It's so surreal and weird that day. This Is the first time I've written about it since I was 18, actually. I've written two poems in my life about it, but I read, I've never spoken about it publicly. Um, but I, I, I've, I've always tried to work out symbolically what that day and just the speed in which he died and the randomness of it from him just being like, as we are. And I mean, he was 61, 62. Um, like he wasn't old, but it was just that it was one minute you're all right and then you're dead. And I think just that transition really, you know, I don't know. It, it did a lot to my, to my head.
Matt Trinetti: Well, that's powerful. Uh, the fact that you shared it, I didn't realize that, that it, you know, you hadn't really written about it and there definitely was a cinematic element to it. It was, I found myself gasping while I was reading it, and it was a short part of the book, but, um, anyway, it's it's uh, yeah, it was, it was powerful. It struck me. Um, there's another moment in the book. And this is if, if, uh, we're to look at like the hero's journey, this would almost be the refusal of the call moments. And there's a, you, you, you had gotten some accolades open, open, uh, at an open mic or spoken word, and you're asked to perform at a higher open mic. And you basically, you kind of flopped, whether you actually flopped, at least as a young poet, it felt like you flopped. And then you put down the pen, you literally binned your poems for about six years. Uh, and later picked it back up through YouTube and discovering spoken word. And I'm sure after you've picked it up, uh, you've hit some stumbling blocks along the way, you know, so many failures, but what I'm, what we're curious about is how did your self-talk change during inevitable, low moments between when you binned the poems, vowed never to write again, picked it back up. I'm sure you still felt some failures. How did that self-talk change that enabled you to persist that second time?
Anthony Anaxagorou: I, I never left it. I left it physically, but in my head, I was always living with it. I was always, and that's what really struck me after nearly a decade of turning, like literally being emotional and a bit emo and a bit sensitive and just kind of thinking, I don't want nothing to do with this, but my brain was always working in this way. I could feel it just doing this with language the whole time that I didn't write. And so it felt, and I didn't read a book. I literally just complete nothing. Um, and I played computer games. I was just doing other things to kind of like, you know, pass the time away. Um, and I think, you know, it was the, that it was the coming back when you sit and you ask yourself when you hit a particular juncture and you have to ask yourself, um, I'm 27, 28. I've literally got about 35 pounds in my bank. My girlfriend left me. What on earth am I doing here? And you have to ask yourself some very searching questions. And I think that was the, that was the reckoning. That was the moment that I just thought enough's enough. Like, I think you've proved your point, how to have a go properly now and, and just lifting myself up. But like you say, the drawbacks, I mean, even to this day, drawbacks are part of the business. Like you have to be able to see rejection and disappointment as being part of your job. Um, and I kind of feel that a lot of people don't mainly because we share the things that we're excited about, not the things that upset us. So for me, rejection now is part of the job in the way that, you know, having to get the train to go to your office is part of his job or her job. So I kind of feel that rejection is, you know, it's in the, it's in part, it's within our remit to get rejected as writers and to feel disappointed because we don't get shortlisted or we don't get the review that we wanted or whatever. So, you know, that's kind of how I see it now. And it's a lot easier to bear than what it was enough. I find not enough when I was 17, 18. I think the difference is, is that was the first time in my life I felt that I was achieving something. I felt positive and I felt inspired and enthusiastic about something that I was for my whole life had been told was not very good at. And when that all starts to turn around, you develop a kind of a propensity to want to preserve that thing. And when someone comes and knocks that wall down and they say to you, look, mate, you know, you're hurting yourself, don't get ideas above your station. Keep practising, see you down the road. That is enough to just like—
Parul Bavishi: Yeah, that makes sense. That's really interesting. This idea of firstly being comfortable with rejection, expecting it. In fact, almost like embracing it, but what you just said there about where something that means so much to you, that's when you are opening yourself up and allowing yourself to be even more vulnerable, and that takes me to a story where you talk about when you were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and you talk about how after the elation of that, you, you start then thinking about all the other prizes that you should potentially win. And you say I've got a quote that I, I really loved. It was, um, you said, "Before I knew I was caught in the capricious lottery, that is prize culture." And I'm curious about, cause that's almost like a different set of problems to have. It's going, I'm curious about what your self-talk looks like in that sort of space.
Anthony Anaxagorou: I think prize culture is dangerous. It's very precarious in that you're at the whim, you're at the whims of three people, two people, four people, and they're kind of the way that they'll have those discussions in those rooms go are anyone's guess. I've been a judge on quite prestigious prizes and I've also been in contention for quite prestigious prizes. I've kind of felt how it works in both ways. Um, I think with me and what I meant by that was it gives you a false sense of security in the, oh, if you're good for this prize, that means all prizes are yours and you feel this entitlement. And this is what I really hate is the fact that when you start to feel entitled, prize culture owes you something because of the fact that now you've got one stamp of validation, one stamp of approval, it must mean everyone now has to see your work in this way, in the way that these three judges saw it. And so you start to build up hopes. And obviously, as you know, the more you build up, the higher you go, the bigger the fall, and that's kind of how it was going. When you didn't get short—when I didn't get shortlisted for one prize, I got really upset. It was, oh, why not? My book was good. It was on the thing. And then I remembered what this guy had told me. And I remember what this poet had told me. And you start to kind of—it's really messy. Um, it's for an—for a person who this is your first run, it was my first proper run of the gone. I'd never been in that position before. So everything was pretty new. And seeing your friends, people who you're happy about, people who you write, you write together, you edit their work, they edit your work, seeing those guys go further and you still back there, you know, it, it does weird things to relationships as well.
Parul Bavishi: I can imagine. And so how, how do you now navigate that? Like, do you have any thoughts around how you measure success for yourself to try and push away from that?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Uh, prize culture is a circus. It's great if you win, but ultimately for one person to win, a hundred have to lose. That's how it goes. Um, and I kind of feel that you have to develop a different value system. Your value system has to be recalibrated in order to sustain yourself because it's not healthy to put all your eggs in the basket of prizes because if that's the case, you're not going anywhere. And also what happens is you start to taper your poems to kind of point toward prizes to, you know, um, that's equally as, as dangerous. Um, and so I, I just, I disassociated myself like, well, the next thing that I write, whatever happens, happens, and I'm cool. So as long as I have a career writing books, and so long as someone is on the other end to read them, that's it that's as far as my kind of want goes.
Parul Bavishi: I love that. Well, we're definitely on the end to read them. And I wonder if we could hear a piece by you. We would love to.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, I'll read—um, Uber was a poem that was, um, actually inspired by an, uh, an incident that took place on the day of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Um, and it's from after the formalities. Door shots wins, slap a magic tree around, a radio hums songs into us both. One of two phones rings, from an edge he tells her he'll call back in a language half-packed back when I assume things took a turn for the worse, a flag hanging from the rear view. I ask where he says Mauritius, returning my question, I say, Cyprus asking if he prefers it here. He says sleep is easier. The roads at night, less congested. At the lights, I ask about children from his pocket he pulls a photo of a girl. I note the way her smile matches her mother's in the picture. Everyone's together smiling. She turned nine last week, he said, it's been over five years. Now, rain. Wipers wave like a tired pair of arms. A car makes an emergency stop. A homeless man moves like a saw into traffic. When will you see her again? I ask. Soon. Soon. Now traffic builds the other way. Would have been quicker, he says. To our right, a van pulls up. Two men motion to lower windows in rain. He does. We do. Go home. Home. Go home. Home. Laughing up a storm front then speeding off. He tucks his daughter back in her mother, himself gripping the wheel, like a gun. How much can a pair of hands keep. One of two phones rings, declining the call, the song on the radio ends. An ad suggests a weekend break to Europe. Turning it off, bringing us right into where we were asking, what about you? Do you have children? Do you prefer it here?
Parul Bavishi: Wow. I love that.
Matt Trinetti: I imagine we're all—everyone's on mute, but I'm sure they're clapping, Anthony. Thank you.
Parul Bavishi: So there's something I've noticed about—I mean, I've listened to quite a few of your poems, reading your poems as well. Um, I always feel when I hear you read your poems, I want to almost like fold into the screen. There's this real intensity and focus like every word. I feel like I'm hanging on every word. Now, when we first put, um, so thank you very much for, for reading this out. But when we first, um, announced that we were interviewing, when I even just talked about it to our friends and to our community, there was a real reaction. Like people had very strong response, a very strong response to the fact that we were interviewing you because they admired your work. And I wondered if you had any thoughts and reflections about what is it about your work that creates such a reaction.
Anthony Anaxagorou: I have no idea. I couldn't tell you. I mean, I'm shocked. I went just, as you were talking, I thought you were going to go somewhere else with it. Like, I didn't think you were going to say because of you. I thought it was, I was trying to work out what could be the closing clause here? Like where could the, where could she go with it? And I, I, I literally, I don't know. Um, I'm obviously like massively grateful. Um, and I'm constantly, I think what frustrates me is I wish I could believe it. I wish I could believe what you tell me. Um, and I can't, and I don't know if that's because of my childhood, if it's because of—I'm constantly dissatisfied with every single thing I do. I never, and it pisses me off because I've written a lot and I work hard and I can never sit back and think, I did something, all right. It's not like it's costing me a lot of money having therapies.
Matt Trinetti: Counter thought is that might be a prerequisite for being a writer and an artist is you can never quite be satisfied.
Anthony Anaxagorou: No.
Matt Trinetti: Right.
Anthony Anaxagorou: And it is that, it's a constant dissatisfaction. And sometimes, obviously like I've stopped talking about it because some people think you're just trying to pander to get like oh, no, we really love you. We think you're great. It's genuinely not that. It's the fact that I go to bed every night and think, I could've, I could've done it better. I could have done it, but it's literally that every single. And so you just take that energy and you take that dissatisfaction and you make, and you make and you make, and you make, and I think that's it. I, I've accepted that that will probably be me until my dying days is just to keep taking that restlessness, taking that dissatisfaction, that malaise. It's a, it's a discomfort. There's something in it that isn't and just keep going and trying to find another way in, and another way out.
Matt Trinetti: Well, w well, we, we kind of hope you don't find it. Cause then we can keep hearing your poems, Anthony. Um, so we'd like to dig into your writing process. Uh, so what's a journey to write a poem like that. And maybe that one, as an example, you talked about what was happening in the world, but can you take us from the germ of an idea to finished poem and maybe that one in particular, what did it look like for you?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Um, it's very, is it, there's a lot of different stages if I'm honest. Um, I worked through several notebooks. I have lined notebooks. I have bigger notebooks like this and inside the notebooks, these are drafts and then there's right in here. Um, and then I have, uh, historical date. So I'll just find stuff.
And then I'll kind of have like, things like this are happening, but the idea of not having any lines indicate some, uh, freedom. Um, and then, over here, I'll just go and get them now. These are notebooks that I work across, but each one does a different thing. So this was actually the first notebook that I ever started to write in, um, this one here. And I think I've even got the date. The first, this is from the Card Not Accepted. Uh, so this was what they got. Yeah. S0 9th of the 2nd, 2009 was when I got this one. And like I say, it's just, there's loads of note-taking. And what I do a lot of the time is go through these and pull out lines that I really like. And then I put that line on a piece of paper and I just run. Um, and usually it goes through 7, 8, 9, 10 iterations before it reaches the final thing. And even the final thing is not the final thing, because then if a publisher takes it, you work with an editor and it's going through more than, um, so, yeah, it literally, it's literally that. Begins with little bits of language, just scattered around the notebook and then made into something as it goes from going.
Matt Trinetti: So do you carry these notebooks with you at all time? I mean, pre-COVID time when you're on the bus, when you're on the tube, when you're walking down the street?
Anthony Anaxagorou: I've got a little one in my pocket in my coat that I always take. I've got the notes on the phone and then I've got, oh yeah, here's the one from my pocket. So I got this one that I carry around. So yeah, there's something on me all the time. And I think my brain is just, I mean, that's just how it is. It's just nonstop. And it helps actually to distil the noise, but the best part of this is, this is, this is the daddy of daddy's is this one, and this is this, this I use for diary entry. So I do a lot of diary writing in here. Um, and with the diary stuff, what I can do is I can just go in, and so I got, I actually pinched this from Lydia Davis, but it's the idea of sitting down in the morning for like half an hour and listening to things that are going on around you and writing down exactly what you're hearing. So outside, a guy has just told his girlfriend to be quiet. The dog won't stop barking, blah, blah, blah. You keep going. And then you'll get to a piece of action that is really interesting. The guy from next door is moaning that someone nicked his cement mixer. What? Cool. That's where your poem starts, you know? And then you begin there. So yeah.
Parul Bavishi: That's really interesting. That's a really wonderful prompt and—
Matt Trinetti: And I just want to riff because these details are so great. These are, this is like, these are gems to us as, as writers in our community. Do you, so there's the morning exercise. Do you do that every morning? Is that—
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, I try. I mean, I'll have, I'm a big tea. I'm a lover of tea, uh, gone through brewing, uh, And part of the greatness of that is you can do half an hour, 45 minutes of just drinking tea in the morning. And if the phone makes me quite anxious, so I try and just go into a notebook. And just, even if I write six, seven lines, even if it's a free write, if it's something, if it's a bad dream that I had, if I'm feeling a particular way, I try and like, just pay attention to what I'm feeling. I'll write that in, like in a paragraph and that's it. And then, like I say, I can go back into these notebooks in about a year's time and just pull something out and I'll respond to that line very differently because I'll forget what I was even talking about. And that's the beauty of it is that you don't need to have any context behind these. These are just like moments that exist on their own and they have no up and no bottom. So you can do what you can go wherever you want with it.
Matt Trinetti: Hm, and so it was that the only structured time you have in the day that you said, okay, I'm sitting down to write and the rest of it's sporadic, or do you have any other times in the day that you sit down and say I'm writing right now?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. Saturday is, uh, during the week it's really hard. Cause I do, I work with several, um, poets so I made it in their work. And so four out of the week, I'm usually looking at other people's poetry and their manuscripts, but on Saturday is a day where there's no emails and I just try and do seven, eight hours to myself and I can spend seven, eight hours on like one poem just going over and over and over.
Parul Bavishi: Seven to eight hours on one poem. Wow. That's incredible—an incredible focus.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. And you feel, and it's not because it's, it becomes an obsession in that my brain gets tired around if I start at like half 9, 10, by around three, I feel my brain, my brain is tired, but I'm so addicted to this poem. Like I know it's so well now. I can't walk away from it. So I ended up staying, knowing that I might actually be messing the problem up because I'm not as concentrated as what I was three hours ago. So I have to literally pull myself away and say, come back tomorrow or come back on Monday and just comb through it again. Otherwise, I could literally make it worse because I've lost my grip. I've lost my focus.
Matt Trinetti: Um, yeah, I was just going to ask you when you're spending that much time on a poem, are you partially reading it out loud? What does that interaction look like with yourself? Is it just reading it or are you actually performing some of it to see how it sounds?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, I, I usually write the line. I think about the thought, I think about the dots. I think about the kind of layering of the poem. And then I look at the compression, so I kind of look at how it sounds am I, am I pushing the vowels together? I'll say it out if it feels clunky, if it feels too meaty, I try and comb it through to get the smoothest cleanest line that I can. And then when I get stuck, I usually go straight over to my bookshelf and I pull out a collection of poems and I open the poem and I loo off that and then I delete that line. And then I build, I kind of put some glue and merge the two, my line and that line together, and then I'm back in the poem again. Um, so yeah, I mean, there's so much that I think about from aesthetics to kind of the concreteness of a poem, how it kind of typographically, how it looks on the page to the music to its acoustics, um, and then also to the kind of composition, the texture of the language, uh, you know, when to jump off, you know, go into different registers, you want to keep the tone like even and balanced as well. So I'm thinking of so many different things. I feel myself thinking about so many different things when I'm writing.
Parul Bavishi: That's fascinating. I actually hadn't thought about, um, I hadn't even, had never occurred to me that, that you would need that much time to look and edit and compress and squash and perfect a poem, but it makes, it makes sense.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, it was literally the more, the more I started, the more I was, the more I was doing it, the harder I realized it was at the early days of why this is just, and I kind of make the point about, um, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, where he says that poetry isn't just an outpouring and he, and a lot of people assume that it comes out, burst of energy, you just sit down and then you're done, you walk away.
Parul Bavishi: Right. It's like with novel writing, it takes time. It takes, it's like building, building something from the ground up. I've got quite a few questions for you. Your book had so many interesting points on how you approach poetry and thoughts around it. One of the things you mentioned is academic, the academic side of poetry and how, um, you were intimidated by that side of it and how you thought that your class and ethnicity precluded you from being able to, um, really get into it, to appreciate, um, that side of things. When did that change for you?
Anthony Anaxagorou: When I realized it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, um, in that we assume that because we're working-class people that we're ethnic kids, that it means that we're only allowed to access a particular kind of poetry and this isn't for us. And I got to the point where it was always me accepting what the establishment had, had said. And then when I got to a point where I was like, I don't have to like Chaucer, it's not this binary thing. I can not like Chaucer, unlike, you know, Frank O'Hara, that's fine. But you can do that. You don't have, it's not that if you don't like, if you haven't read the Iliad, it doesn't mean that you're not allowed to ever read poetry again. So I kind of felt that once I broke the myth that my class made, or my class allocated a particular kind of poetics to me, once I got rid of that, then I felt I was a lot more liberated because really, it was, you can't teach someone how to think about poetry. I can give my mom a poem and my mom is not, you know, she's not learned in, in poetry, but she'll say to me, I don't know what the bloody hell I was talking about. And I'll just be like, all right, but how did it make you feel? And she can literally do a whole kind of disquisition on the way the poem made her feel. And I think that's it, you've engaged. You've participated with that poem. Like you've done it. Like that's basically it. And so I kind of feel that we put up these barriers where it's like, because I am a working-class kid, this kind of poetry is for me. And here's for me, this is the dangerous part is that working-class poetics are assumed to be accessible and that word accessible is incredibly loaded. Now we get into the politics of language where accessibility means simple, means less bane, means easier to understand. And I kind of feel that it's basically apart like you're basically as a subtle cost, saying your poetry is for the, for the plebs, basically. That's, you know, people who aren't very high-minded and that's bullshit. And I think that when you realize that's not the case and that what the working-class experience is so vast and people who have an affinity to books and to letters and to literature will appreciate it in all its guises, wherever they come from, a working-class, middle class or upper class, if you like language, you will gravitate towards different kinds of poetry. I think what gets conflated is this idea of the casual reader versus the efficient order, you know, and even that, there is poetry that is calibrated to the more casual reader. And that is absolutely fine, but that's not working-class poetry. It's just poetry. That's calibrated to a casual reader.
Parul Bavishi: I love that. I love the permission that you, I feel like you're giving us permission to trust our own opinions, to be okay with what we do enjoy. Um—
Anthony Anaxagorou: I don't know if class was a—what a class mean. What I mean, when we say working class, you've got cultural capital, you've got financial capital and you've got social capital. Now, there's a guy down there. He's a plumber. He makes, he does two grand a week cash. He's got a lot of money. He's a working-class man who makes two grand a week cash money. But then it depends on where you put the lens. And I think with class because it is so ambiguous and subjective, it all just depends on—and for me when we talk about class and poetry, it's cultural capital, which is what people use as the metric.
Matt Trinetti: That's really, really fascinating, really interesting topic. I'd like to move it to this, uh, the sentence you have about pushing your writing as far as it can go. Um, and I, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what that means to you and how you apply that to your writing.
Anthony Anaxagorou: I often, I often imagine that, you know, when you have an idea, it's usually a, in a formative place in a place that is quite safe, you know, you might be bordering a trope, you might be bordering some kind of familiar language. And I think for me, it's not settling at first base. It's about moving further and further out until you feel you're at the edge of the idea when you get to the precipice, that's when you've taken it. And if you literally jump, you're going to lose the reader, like one little step forward and the whole, and the reason will be like, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. So that's kind of how I try and engage. You know, like, especially when you're working around images and association, you have to really try and balance out how far you go before you lose someone and you might know what it means, but no one else does. So I kind of feel that there is, you have to have a level of imaginative participation that the reader is able to feel themselves involved and invited in. And if you don't have that calibration, that frequency of language, the reader sometimes just feels locked out of the poem. And I, you know, and then it becomes one of these things that gets kind of pushed over to the enclaves of academia, where you get the references and the dictionaries, and the thesauruses and the encyclopedia's out, and only six people in the world can actually accurately.
Parul Bavishi: It's like an interesting battle between trying to push yourself, but also understanding the boundaries for your readers, um, and finding your voice. Um, you have this really interesting phrase that you—I read that you tell your students, from Emily Dickinson, "tell the truth, but tell it slant." I love that idea. Could you, could you talk a little bit about it?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. I mean, it's quite a common, I mean, it's one of the first things I heard and I must've read it in one of these two books years ago. Um, but it was basically that. It's like tell the truth, but it, I think Ocean Vuong has a similar line where he says, um, begin with, uh, "begin with truth and end in art", which is kind of the same thing. You know, like you can begin in a, in a place of certainty, but where you go from there is that depends on, you know, the kind of vision or visionary that you are. Um, and so I kind of the, the thing with poetry and what you find the most is people want to be literal, um, let's do things. People either want to be literal or they conflate poetry for life writing. And that's the other thing is that you get a lot of people who write poets, it's literally a memoir. So I'm like, this is great, I love it, I'm really sorry this happened to you, or that's a really nice story, but there's no poetry here. And so what you have to do is go back into it and literally get a more of a lateral shift happening, like move the lines out more because at the moment it's all too rigid and narrow and straight so it needs to bend. It needs to have that push towards the left than the right, that movement that makes poetry, I guess, so compelling, you know.
Parul Bavishi: And now I see why, where, why you need all those hours to sit, get up and go to your bookshelf and push it, bend it.
Matt Trinetti: So, so if you're working with a student and you're giving them that feedback What do you then help them to get there? Is there any exercises? And I know there's a bunch that you share in the book. Um, how would you help someone make it slant? What w what, what you give them—workshop it?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, I usually ask students questions about their line. So if they've got a line that just says something like, as I was walking to the bus stop, I fell over. I'd be like, you got two options. You can either like, disrupt the syntax so that it's not so straight. You can have “at the bus stop I was running and then I fell over.” You can move things or reshuffle the language, which you get poets like Peter Gizzi who's fantastic at disrupting syntax in this kind of way. Um, and the other one is to look at things from a semiotic perspective and just ask them, what was the bus stop signify? What does you falling over present symbolically? And when you start looking at things as symbols, every event, and every image in a poem, every detail is symbolic. Then it starts to create a more three, four-dimensional layer. Whereas the bus stop is no longer just the bus stop and the bird is no longer just the bird. You know, everything takes on a kind of double life. And I think it's encouraging young people to think about language in that way, but what the pushback is, so it doesn't make any sense. So then I have to ask them what a sense mean. I put my grandmother in the ground last Monday, I looked down into her grave and I thought to myself, this makes absolutely no sense. So there are many things in life. You watch a child or you watch a baby be born. It makes absolutely no sense. And so I kind of feel that we have to reconfigure what we think, what we, when we think of sense, we think of logic. The cup, the water, the mouth, the drink quench my thirst, that sort of system of logic. How do you disrupt that logic and have other things in there that will still associate, but they won't be traditionally married to that linear journey, right, all of those things are associated.
Matt Trinetti: Hmm. Yeah. That's, that's great. And, and one of the things that it reminds me a little bit, there's an exercise here. You talk about, um, writing about your hands, but you're not allowed to use the word hands, and then you suggest now start not from the beginning, but halfway is often better.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah.
Matt Trinetti: So this idea of playing with timelines also seems to be one that you can jolt—
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah, because again, we learn language through storytelling, so everything has a start, a middle and an end, whereas poetry is a moment. And so it doesn't need those two bits there. It's the loaf of bread analogy, you know, you cut the top off, you cut the bottom and you've got your, you've got your poet. So what I often tell people to do is your poem starts three, four lines in and finishes three, four lines before you think it's finished. Because the idea is that everyone wants to conclude and resolve the poem because they think that's what the readers want. Start middle and end. But my thing is not like that. Let the poet, let the reader take the poem home with them. If you keep the last line open, the poem then travels. If you close the last line by resolving it, there's no way for it to go.
Parul Bavishi: I saw, I saw that thing about Matthew, Matthew Sweeney is chopping the poem and its legs. I love, I love that idea. I love that idea. It's brilliant. But I guess the question is like, how do you know? So it's a bit like, how do you know when, when is the, when is the paint dry enough?
Anthony Anaxagorou: I don't think you can teach that. I really don't. I think that's, you know, there are certain things that you, you just have to feel, you have to know that you have to have that feeling of I've been here so many times, I can sense where it is. And I think genuinely as I, I'm not into the kind of hippie thing, but there definitely is an element of the more you read, the more you get a sense for how poems work. And it's literally just from reading and you get a sense of where things end and where is an interesting place to end. If you think along the lines of—if you think the word interesting as opposed to kind of definitive. Then it kind of—it swaps. I just want to be interesting on the page. I don't want to be correct. I don't want to be certain. I want to be interesting.
Matt Trinetti: Wow.
Parul Bavishi: I love that idea of leaving, leaving the reader with questions and leaving it open to interpretation.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. I mean, if you end the poem with a question, which is what I've done on the Uber, you implicate the reader, right? Because now you're throwing the poem back onto them. And now you're literally—the reader is having an internal monologue with themselves where they're asking them that question. The same thing happens. If you do your poem in second person. You implicate the reader.
Parul Bavishi: I love that. It's like starting a conversation. You're starting, you're starting something rather than ending.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Absolutely, absolutely.
Matt Trinetti: So, uh, we'll probably have maybe a couple of questions and we're going to start opening it up to the group. Some of you have already started to put your questions in. Great. Now's the time to put your question in the chat. We will get to it. Um, there's a couple more. One, you talk about—so knowing when a poem's finished. You talk about the book you used to fence in your ideas, kind of keep them to yourself. How do other readers or friends, or kind of sparring partners, other poets, how do you use them to help you know when something's done? Do you use other people to help, you know, when something's done?
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. You know, I have my, uh, confidence who I share my work with, um, in its various stages. And I like, I love poets, I love poets who are brutal. I've really kind of got into that like sadomasochistic kind of like way of, of having my work dealt with, because I don't want all the, oh, this is lovely, you know, this is really beautiful. Just tell me where it's not working and let me go back and carry on. And so they would say stuff like, oh, it gets really baggy here or you could try pushing this a bit more, take this out further, you're too embed with yourself here, bring it up more to the—and so it's just those pointers. And then what I do is I then sit and go back over what they're saying to see if there's any truth in it, if there's any merit in what they're talking about, but also like my friends that are all kind of junior or senior lecturers at university level. And so they can kind of talk about the lines that are working. And sometimes it's the, the conceit of the poem. Like the general conceit is not very good, but the, the poet, the lines are good, but the kind of philosophy of the poem isn't. So you need to go back and try and put some intellect into the poem as well. So at the moment, there's too much show and I think with a lot of lyric problems, they're very performative and you can be kind of, you can be swept in by the poem's affectations. So what you want to try and do is give the poem a purpose, give it brains as well as like a good aesthetic. And I kind of feel that that's a lot harder to do. So I have to go back in and that's when I asked myself those questions, you know, what am I, what's the poem pointing towards? What questions am I asking? And what am I learning as I journey through the poem? Cause when I began, I didn't know what was going to happen next. And so, you know, Jericho Brown talks about this idea that you get to the end of the poem and you discover something that you didn't know before. And that's the beauty of it. If the reader has that revelation as well, you've both arrived there together.
Parul Bavishi: That's wonderful. It goes back to the topic, like the idea of having a conversation. You've really made me think about that idea about how you're in conversation with the reader.
Anthony Anaxagorou: And I think you only do half the work, you know, the writer is only half the conversation and then you give it to the reader to render it in a way that is private and personal to them. So it's a rendering versus—cause you render your experience through your lens and then they rerender it through their lens. So it's literally being distilled and distilled and distilled as it goes through different readerships, you know.
Parul Bavishi: I love that. It's really impactful what you're saying. I feel like I'm going to sit on this for a long—for days and days.
Matt Trinetti: Yeah, definitely. So kind of riffing on that is of interacting with readers, sharing it with readers, you know, a lot of writers, we can feel allergic to anything that feels like pushing your work out, selling it, marketing. When you want to post a new video or post a poem, the act of sharing it, how do you think about that? That act of sharing? How have you gotten past that if there was ever blocks for you?
Anthony Anaxagorou: I mean, I'll give you an example, man. Like last I had a poem published in an anthology. I put it up two weeks ago on my Twitter. It got like eight likes. I took it down and then I for the, for the next week and a half, I had to ask myself what just happened. Like, why did you do that? Why did you put something up and then take it down because it didn't get the likes that you wanted it to get? And so I had to have that whole conversation with myself and I'm still having, I mean, I know why. It's because we see these as value systems is the kind of as a sensible metric to gauge worth but Twitter is definitely not that—um, and so, yeah, I mean, I think now I have to get to a place that my next part of my journey and my understanding is getting to a place where I disassociate and detach from the writing once it's done. And I have no personal connection to it aside from the fact that, yeah, I, I wrote this and whatever people want to say about it, they can. Um, and that's it. And I think that you have to be that. Isn't, you know, you're in a conversation with someone, you, you don't, you don't have to justify it. You haven't got the time to argue with them. You just need to let them say, I don't really like this. I think it's actually quite crap. It's like okay, cool. Thanks very much. And that's it. It's part of the job. It's an occupational hazard. Um, and so I kind of feel that that's what, that's my next stage of my development is to just be cool with things getting two likes and other things get in 200 likes and not feeling away about either one, you know?
Parul Bavishi: Right. And that's where—this goes back to where we started this idea of rejection and accepting it, expecting it, embracing it.
Anthony Anaxagorou: And it's the hardest thing for me to—because of my upbringing, my early experiences in secondary school and throughout. Rejection is something that I'm constantly in my head I'm obsessed with the idea that I'm just not good enough. Um, and I think I'm not saying that I'm an overachiever, but the overachievers that I do know, that's what's happened to them and that's why they just keep going because no matter what they achieve, it's never enough. You get to the top of one mountain, you realize you're surrounded by a hundred or more mountains. And, and that's just it, you know, and I think that that's where I sit with it in the I'll keep making work, probably the speed that I've been working out in the last 10 years. Um, and just always think, nah, it's not very good. No, this isn't, uh, well, I can do better. And that's it.
Matt Trinetti: Uh, well, thank you for your honesty because I know there's about 60 people in the room here that are feeling something very similar. So we appreciate it. And, uh, thank you, Anthony, for, for that. Um, and we're all in this together, which is, uh, maybe it's, that's the good thing. Um—
Parul Bavishi: So, so it's also really interesting to just hear about trading our problems, the different problems that we face, the different stages of career.
Anthony Anaxagorou: I mean, I know people who have—they've written one thing, they've self-published two pamphlets and they are good. Like, they're good. Like they, in what they're proud of what they've done, they like what they've done. Um, they've got a good kind of baseline and they just worked from that. And I, and you look at that and I always probe into like, you know, their early years and they were in like, you know, the top sets at school, or they had a family who, uh, very encouraging. They were always told, You can do anything you want son, daughter, I love you, we love you, we've got you, like all that kind of stuff. Whereas mine was the complete, complete opposite. Any idea I had, I was just told I was an idiot and just stop being stupid and get a job. And so I kind of feel that, that has a lot of that was ingrained in, in my, in my work ethic, you know?
Parul Bavishi: No, that makes sense. Um, thank you for sharing that. Um, do we have time for one more question, Matt, before we open up?
Matt Trinetti: Sure.
Parul Bavishi: Um, just, just, uh, around the, uh, Out-Spoken open mic that you do, um, which is for those of you don't know, it's one of London's leading open mic nights and you, you've been running that at Southbank Centre.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. Yeah. We have, 2018, we've got the residency there, yeah.
Parul Bavishi: It's incredible. Um, we run a sort of slightly different, a lot more low-key open mic night. So it's something that we're very interested in. I'm curious to know what, if you could tell me a little bit about what you think the success of your open mic, um, what's behind it?
Anthony Anaxagorou: I think it wasn't having—yeah, I think it was the fact that, I mean, the idea of Out-Spoken was it came about when I was just, I went through a period of just gigging all the time and everything that I was going to consisted of an open mic. This was around 2012 and I was doing three, four gigs a week. I was completely exhausted and sometimes I'd have—I'd be on at like half 10 at night. And the open mic would begin and they'd have the feature act at the end. And by that point, everyone had gone home because it was late in buses and trains and whatever else. And so I thought, why don't I start a night that doesn't have an open mic. That you just have three feature act and two musicians, and that's it. None of this whole like, cause with open mic cause as well, they turn up, they pay their five pounds they read and then they go. And so the kind of, it was all just, it was annoying me if I'm going to be blunt. Um, and, and that's how Out-Spoken started, so I just thought, I just want to have a night and there wasn't anything like it. So I thought I'm not really being a prick because there's so many open, open mic nights. So having one that doesn't have an open mic is actually a bit of a break from the norm, you know? So that's how that came about. And then I did the first one in Camden, Proud Galleries. I think I'd already had a bit of a following from the YouTube videos. And so we got like 150 people through the door on the first night. Everyone was like, whoa, this is nuts for like poetry. And so, and then it was going to be bi-monthly. But then I was getting emails and messages from people saying, that was so good. Can you do another? So I felt all right, it was bi-monthly, but I'll just do it monthly. And then that was it. And then we just started, and then through the years, you know, we lost venues, people joined and then people left to do other things. We went for a whole load of different, um, you know, we were at The Forge in Camden, they went bankrupt. And then for a year, we were nomads. So we would literally didn't know where we were going to have the night. Should we keep doing it? Um, I don't know if we can get funding for this and a whole load of issues that we had trying to sustain it, but now there's seven, eight of us. There's a publishing house. There's a masterclass series. There's a whole load of different things. And the ideas were literally just all the things that I felt that I lacked when I first got into poetry. I—a publishing house, a master class, and a place to perform. Those are the three things I always felt I never had access to because of the place that I was coming from. I'm going to try and do what I can to make sure that people now don't have to face those same issues by just offering a master class at a very cheap price, offering a live night to watch professional poets come and read at affordable prices and also having a publishing house to create work by, you know, by brilliant poets. So that was it. That was the thinking.
Parul Bavishi: Hmm, I think it sounds, yeah, it sounds absolutely brilliant. Um—
Matt Trinetti: That's great, great ideas for us as we continue to grow this community and a lot of great stuff in there. Um, thank you.
Parul Bavishi: Maybe we can collaborate in the future.
Matt Trinetti: To wrap, we had an idea. Parul, I don't know if you want to—
Parul Bavishi: Uh, I would love. Yeah, well, I would just love to hear another poem from you. I wonder if you could lead us out.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Yeah. How, how long, how long have you got?
Matt Trinetti: Maybe a couple of minutes?
Anthony Anaxagorou: All right. I can read—it depends. I mean, there's still some people here. I can read the title poem. It's six and a half minutes long. I mean, I don't know. People have got trains to catch, um, or, um, or I can read something shorter. So it's up to you. It depends. I don't want to keep people here. I mean, if you want to do another six and a half minutes, I can just read the title poem.
Matt Trinetti: I think, yeah, let's, let's do it.
Parul Bavishi: He's gonna lead us into the night.
Anthony Anaxagorou: All right. So, um, this is called After the Formalities. It's the title poem from the book and it looks at the history of, of race as a, as a construct. Um, and it kind of interspersed with my own family's experience of migration coming from Cyprus.
In 1481 the word ‘race’ first appears in Jacques de Brézé’s
poem ‘The Hunt’. De Brézé uses the word to distinguish
between different groups of dogs.
In that hard year grandparents arrived on a boat
with a war behind them and a set of dog leads.
Bullet holes in the sofa. Burst pillows. Split rabbits.
Passports bound in fresh newspapers. Bomber planes.
A dissenting priest. A moneybag sucking worry.
On the boat grandmother anticipated England’s
winters with the others. Black snow on gold streets.
Grandfather grieved two dogs he’d left. Pedigrees.
Bluebottles decaying at the base of their bowls. The dogs
of England were different. The water though. Fine to drink.
In 1606 French diplomat Jean Nicot added the word ‘race’
to the dictionary drawing distinctions between different
groups of people. Nicotine is named after him.
In London grandparents lived with only a radio.
A lamp favouring the wall’s best side. Curtains drawn
round. Byzantine icons placed on paraffin heaters.
Arguing through whispers. Not wanting to expose tongues.
Stories circulating. What neighbours do if they catch you saying
“I’m afraid” in a language that sounds like charred furniture
being dragged across a copper floor. Grandfather. Always.
Blew smoke out the lip of his window. So too did his neighbour.
Colourless plumes merging amorphous. The way it’s impossible
to discern the brand of cigarette a single pile of ash derives from.
In his 1684 essay ‘A New Division of the Earth’ French physician
François Bernier became the first popular classifier to put
all humans into races using phenotypic characteristics.
Mother’s skin is the colour of vacations.
Her hair bare-foot black. An island’s only runway.
Reports of racist attacks. Father turns up the volume.
Turns us down. Chews his pork. Stings the taste with beer.
Tells mother to pass the pepper. There is never a please.
He asks if she remembers the attack. The hospital. His nose.
A Coca-Cola bottle picked from his skull. Yes. She mutters.
The chase. Dirty bitch. How we’ll make you White.
Aphrodite hard. Dirty dog trembling with the street light.
Please God. Not tonight. The kids.
In 1775 J.F. Blumenbach claimed in his seminal essay
‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ that it was environment,
not separate creations, which caused the variety in humans.
In the bathroom mirror I spat blood from my mouth.
Quaver breath and suburban. My brother desperate to piss.
Pulled the door open. Asking. What happened?
I tried to fight and lost? Why? Because the island
we come from is smaller than this. Their names are shorter.
Pronounceable so they exist. Even after their noses break
they still don’t hook like ours. Their sun is only half peeled.
He lifted his top to show me two bruises. To remind me
of something. How history found its own way of surviving.
A dark wash mixed with the whites spinning round and around.
In the bathroom mirror my brother spat blood
from his mouth. Souvla breath and home. Me.
Desperate to piss. Pulling the door open. Asking.
What happened? He tried to fight and lost? Why?
Because the island we come from is larger than this.
Here. We chew up too much of their language.
Leave behind an alphabet of bones. We will never exist
in their love songs. How many bruises does it take
to make a single body? I left him. Surviving history.
A dark wash mixed with the whites spinning round and around.
In 1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin wrote
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
If the house phone rings after midnight someone
you know is dying. Breathing in ten black moons
under a siren or belfry. From the wound in my uncle’s
back leaked the first atlas. Blood escaping him
like a phantom vaulting over the spiked gates of heaven.
The knife. Half steel half drunk. The motive. Skin or prayer.
We went to visit. In the window’s condensation his daughter
wrote Daddy Don’t Die. On the water of her breath.
That evening my father came home. One hand trumpet.
The other wreath. All his fists the law.
In 1911 eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote in his seminal book,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, “Two imbecile parents,
whether related or not, have only imbecile offspring”.
She had the same colour hair as Jesus. Most boys smile
after. When we were done I moved a blonde streak
from my arm wondering how much of my body
was still mine. I smelt of rain atop an old umbrella.
My fingers a burnt factory. She asked if I was her first
and when I said yes she smiled. Pulling the covers up
whispering not to get too comfortable. How her father
would be back. The bed now a continent. The duvet
locking me to its borders. On the shelf a gollywog
above her family portrait. Poised like a saint.
The 1943 famine of Bengal killed 4 million people. Churchill
ordered food to be sent directly to British soldiers in Europe. On hearing
the number of Bengalis who’d perished he asked, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”
Outside the KFC racists have always looked
so sure to me. Like weathermen. Like fact.
Driving his skull into mine like a belief. I saw
how even evil can feel warm and smell good
when close enough. A crowbar. Wedged against
my throat. Slowly the lights began to wave. Chips
by my feet. Black iron warming my skin so silently
I could hear how suffering learns to soothe the jaws
of antiquity. These men. Irrational as any God. And me.
Emptying inside the promise of my oxygen tank.
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting
the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are
for the most part the material of the future growth
of the immigrant-descended population.” – Enoch Powell, 1968.
After the formalities of course I said London
and of course he asked again. When I said Cyprus
he leaned into his chair recalling a family holiday.
The weather sublime. The people accommodating.
Particularly towards the English. How it was a shame
about the Turkish thing. And your parents. When did they enter
here? In the late ’50s I replied. So before the Immigrants Act?
Yes I said. Before. Well good for them. He said.
Putting the lid on his pen. Closing his pad.
Asking me to talk a bit more about my previous roles.
In 2001 philosopher Robert Bernasconi wrote
“The construct of race was a way for white people to define
those who they regarded as other.”
In those days I was required to fill out forms
with multiple boxes. Some I left blank. My father
would notice my omission. Filling in the white
option with his black biro. I crossed it out.
Telling him I’m going with ‘other’. My mother
wearing the same sad skin as before said we are not
White. The look he gave her was. Snatching the form
from me. The same X dominating so much White.
Let me tell you. Nobody in their right mind need
make themselves such an obvious target. He affirmed.
“It’s amazing how ideas start out, isn’t it?” – Nigel Farage, 2016.
My grandmother will die. Somewhere in her skeleton.
White sheeted. Iodoform thick. Her mouth all beetle.
My family will gather round her body. All fig. My mother
will look for coins. Despite there being nothing for money
to save. Another lady. Dying the same. Will goad our kind.
Through thick tubes she’ll scorn. Her voice. A bluebottle’s
hot wings. You’re all dogs. Foreigners. And dirty. Outnumber us
even in dying. The nurse will apologise for the whole of history.
Drawing the curtain. Mud is always the last thing to be thrown.
A prayer reaching for the pride of an olive. Like a hint. To hold.
Thanks very much.
Matt Trinetti: Wow. Let's I think it's time to unmute ourselves. Everyone, round of applause.
Parul Bavishi: That was fabulous. That was beyond. That was just everything. That was wonderful.
Matt Trinetti: Well, Anthony, this has been such a treat. Thank you for your time, your generosity, your wisdom, your poems, everything you do. Again, we are a little happy and satisfied that you're not quite satisfied, so you can keep writing for us, Anthony and we'll, we'll be cheering beside you and behind you. So thank you so much.
Anthony Anaxagorou: Thank you very much.
*
Parul Bavishi: Thank you for tuning into the London Writers’ Salon podcast.
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Until we write again.