So I would like to introduce our I to our conversation about Daljit Niekro, which must be quite an interesting experience for you as a poet.
Doubt it. In the context of all that you have read in the conversation everybody has been having for the last hour about downticks,
what he really needs, no introduction, but it does feel particularly auspicious to have him with us today when which is
the day of publication of his fourth collection with with Faber British Museum.
So it feels like the right day to be sitting and talking about its first collection from 2007.
Look, we have coming to Dover. I should also say that without its voice,
will probably be familiar to all of you from BBC Radio four at the moment because he is Radio Four's first poet in residence.
And every time you come on the radio, my mum rings me up.
So I've got a much more lively relationship on the phone with my mum than than I had this time last year.
I would like to start by inviting Daljit to read a couple of poems to get us started, I should say.
Some of us have been reading your poetry out loud over the last hour,
but now it's your turn and then lead us into a discussion with Alja of the poetry in the collection.
Okay. Thank you. Hello. Welcome. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for supporting poetry.
Very important. It's not about a roomful of people embracing poetry writing, so.
I'll read one of the last panels wrote for this collection, the book Enhancing Comar, and in a sense,
I guess it is a summing up of some of the things I've already been doing in the book, and it seems to generate one or two further poems for me.
So just so book in counting Khamal, must I wear only masks that don't sit for a bit?
Would you blush if I stripped from my native skin?
Should I be on my chest, I'm a ghetto poet who discovered it is kind.
They couldn't know it.
Should I put it physically as a Punjabi in Spanglish, sold on an island wrecked by the British, did you make me for the gap in the market?
Did I make me for the gap in the market? Does it feel good in the gap in the market?
Does it feel guilty in the gap in the market?
When my flame on the tree that your cannon has stoked, will I thisll at the bowl where a bulldog is cocked?
Should I talk with the chalk of my white inside on the board of my menstrual blacked outside?
Should I bleach my bile name or mash it to a stink, should I refuse straight or Gunga Din this gig?
Did you make me fill the gap in the market? Did I make me fill the gap in the market?
Do I need to be good in the gap in the market? Do I need to be guey in the gap in the market?
As I've worn a sorry bride and an English rose, can I cream off awards from your melting pot, Fais?
Do you metal yourselves when you meddle with my time? If I go up the spectrum, how far can you die?
More than your shell, like your KLAC applause what bothers me is whether your Boomi if I balls out of Indian.
OK, then I'll just read one, which is right at the end, but one of the last.
All right. For the collection and it probably shows a very different. Now, that was the last one on the early ones.
Yeah, the other way around. I do see the first one that went into this book is called Digging to Find It.
And and then I've written it and it felt so genius. And I didn't really relate to it after a while.
And I didn't really do anything with it. And I sort of you know, I sometimes get embarrassed by work.
And then it sort of surfaced later on, like a few years after. Yeah, I guess it's kind of is one Punjabi word, Nagamine, as in soil earth.
Yes, so that's kind of the idea of digging in,
I should be doing loads I was teaching in the school at the time and in those private lessons in the evenings,
you paid London rent and all that stuff.
And a certain time each year I'll just be teaching, digging kind of constantly for GCSE students or as a teacher at school.
I think you just got into my brain and this is what came out.
So digging. Squatted against the bedroom door with left leg stretched, wiping sweat from my thigh.
I shave hairs to the shape of a passport photo.
Into the skin, stealing along the top end of the picture, a straight incision until blob by seemless blob over the Stanley knife, a river of blood.
Once under the fold, down to the roots, NERV hand holds the slicing level,
the parallel lines of a photo leaning deeper, so the unconscious deeper, so the goal geometric be heaped up.
I drop the silvery half, the leg, the back, the flap.
I hear a cry from some of myself, so this is me, this jazmín this meat for which I wore myself, this.
I stopped stop there and went to. Thanks for that doubt it, will you, having started us off with these two such different poems,
the one with it's really kind of pronounced sense of address and the other feeling so much more intimate.
I wonder if I could start by asking you about your sense of a readership as you write,
because it seems to me that those are two such interestingly kind of poison appose poems to begin thinking about that.
Do you have a reader in mind as you write? Your poetry, perhaps those two poems in particular.
Yeah, I think that the answer to that has changed with each book or the last three and the first book and just thinking about this on the way over.
And I just remember expecting firstly not to get a book published, just didn't think that would be happening to me.
So I carried on writing great fun, which is currently has been that's been since I got in the archives and have a single draught of any of the poems.
First book, as you see right in the Bandon, just expecting it would be a fruitless adventure, but a happy one.
So in that sense, I've probably wrote very much in the ideal that I'm writing for me, I don't care.
And I'm going to publish a book and I'm going to use bad English and mess it up.
And I'm a try out things. So I felt very liberated. And then I think at some point long, I want to get poems published in magazines.
And I knew I had to kind of work for an audience much more than I was trying to write, I guess essentially for white middle class audience,
because they're the ones repertory and they were the ones even before the first book to readings.
If that was the audience, I just don't remember ever meeting someone from Asian background.
So it was making sure the kind of cultural aspects of my background that I brought into the
poems could be understood or I had the skills to facilitate a relationship with the audience.
So how has that changed over time then, so you have to I mean, I guess it's that's kind of a cheat.
I don't question given that look we have come over is what we're talking about today.
But given that you've suggested that that's changed over time, I wonder. Whether that white middle class audience is is the one which you feel is your
readership now and whether you have that kind of consciously in your mind. Yeah, I think I probably do, actually.
It still is very much that audience. And I think my approach has become clearer.
If I've sold out, as it were, you know, like you do your first album is there.
But at this late date, it feels very on the surface language. The grammar is very clear.
And I think that's because I was trying to write a much quieter poem, this latest book.
But I think the first three, there was a need to be loud as possible and see if the audience could stomach that.
And because of the success both, I'm going to get even louder. I don't care.
And I didn't expect to be successful. How dare I be successful? And the really fancy loud poems, so can.
And then I did the version of Minor and I tried to be even louder.
And then now that's sort of let's calm down. This is a career, you know, it's almost that kind of mentality.
I can you know, I am going to get published, frankly, I can start thinking about.
The ideas in a kind of in a different way and a more nuanced or a different type of nuance thing,
so everyone's got a boy's new book now so that we can read the quote, Daljit.
And can I ask you about the poetic monologue, which is the the the form in which I think every poem in look we have coming to Dover presents itself.
And I guess I wondered, what is it that attracted you in this collection about?
I mean, insofar as you conceived it as a collection, which I guess you've already suggested for a long time,
you didn't or only in a kind of the most intimate sense. What was it about writing the first person that appealed to you as a poet and
perhaps also thinking about in terms of a kind of address to a readership? I do remember sort of thinking about Shakespeare,
particularly in those sort of get those great soliloquies and they always contextualise on some of these instruments.
And I want to kind of capture that as much as I could get a kind of dramatic richness in it in a kind of poem.
And and I was also really into the idea of the oral and the written trying to find ways to mingle the two.
So in some sense, I think I saw some of these pieces, always dramatic moments where,
you know, lots of kind of things are implied or lots of things potentially happening.
And I've just caught a moment and then the reader can decide what I want to make of it and try and make
it as as complex as possible without trying to make the surface complex of these dramatic scenarios.
And the dramatic monologue really suited it. And I really like Robert Browning anyway.
And that's all that gave me licence, you know, the way he can be really crude and really say ordinary things in ordinary language.
So that gave me freedom. And I guess the Shakespeare stuff gave me freedom to just put words in these emails of these very ordinary Indians.
The ones I was after were essentially the uneducated ones wherever possible in that collection.
That's that's my kind of background. I don't want to write about those particular Indians specifically.
And I knew I can translate that. That's just felt that a folly to want to translate so far.
Create a fictional English, a fabricated English. I will ask one more question,
if I may have my kind of chair's licence to ask for more and then turn the conversation
over to the room and thinking perhaps specifically about this first collection.
Were there things about the ways in which it was taken up or represented or
worked with that particularly surprised you or delighted you or aggravated you?
What was your sense of its kind of life out in the world?
And did did any of that kind of provoke a particularly strong reaction or does it continue to?
I guess the one thing is a success there that was that was really genuinely unsettling for me.
It sounds really weird to say that, isn't it? I mean, first, I didn't expect to get published.
I certainly didn't expect a favour.
And, you know, and then when it came out, I was expecting it to be kind of torn apart, you know, and then it was very successful.
I mean, and I was getting loads of readings in the back of it. And I found that really unsettling.
So I think I and I kind of expected those sort of things where you get Smos and it's that it's more so, you know,
we get poetry events we invited to Reno might be you and maybe another Asian and maybe a small SANAYA.
So I think quite a few dozen or curry night. And I get a couple of Asian.
And that's not being offensive. I mean, that's just that's one way to get people in, I guess, in different regions.
So I was expecting that and I didn't mind actually get nice food, but but yeah.
The annoying annoying but yeah I was.
Yeah. But was taken seriously. I think that was really surprising.
I would expect the other stuff since then to be taken seriously.
But for me this was just, I was trying to not be clear, I want to be clear but not clear and I want to because I felt I was writing for me.
So I wanted to have these kind of weird words in the probably the wrong word, deliberately unsettling.
And, you know, the poems never sat down. They never settled down.
I want to have that nervous, kind of nervous, nervous working class energy that living on your wits kind of energy.
That's where I felt at the time. Anyway, I was writing and I remember it well.
I've got to say before I want to ask you about that, but that would be selfish and kind to everyone else in the room.
So maybe this time at the end or worse, we drink wine after our discussions.
And can I open conversation out to the floor?
Erica has a microphone, which she will hand to you for the recording.
Don't expect your voice to be amplified. The first question still is after that and the first question that you asked,
and I'm thinking about the audience that you have in mind, did you ever write for a non British audience?
And where this question is coming from is because when I when I first encountered your work as an English person reading it,
not in Britain, I could see that you were constantly trying to unsettle a British audience.
But then that unsettling effect was less unsettling.
I'm reading it from Singapore where I was and it seemed obvious to me that you were doing something different.
But that difference was very much situated in Britain and it wasn't necessarily a difference that was intended to speak to world literature as such.
So did you ever have a world audience in mind? And what did the world audience look like?
Was that also a middle class broad audience? Was that kind of different diasporic audience?
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. And we expanded my horizons in that sense.
It's a funny thing because on the one hand, you're aware you're you're ideally writing for an Indian audience.
I felt I was writing for an uneducated Indian audience, but I know they're not going to read the book like, say, my parents have never read my poems.
And, you know, my mum still can't read in English yet. Some of the poetry is about that community.
So on one hand, you where you're doing that, but on the other hand, you know, your audience is going to be somebody completely different.
So you play that kind of a sort of 50 game or you're where, you know, you're writing for them.
But, you know, you really write you really write for them, but you're actually writing for the audience.
But, yeah, I didn't think beyond Britain at all. But I mean, I guess it is that thing.
I mean, I sent the manuscript off to read back press and further than this tiny little press.
And the editor at time, David, tripped and he passed away a few years ago.
Some of these lovely letters saying, I think your work deserves a bigger publisher.
So I'm going to turn it down because I'd only be able to do 50 copies and I wouldn't be able to send any to press.
At the time, I felt insulted and I was aiming for this, you know, thought, wow, this is this is me.
This is my niche. And, you know, I was thinking, well, what's wrong with 50 copies?
What do they want? The 50 copies would be great.
So I guess I was thinking like that really that I think it's probably because that's maybe cynical, isn't it?
Because I imagined maybe a white middle class audience would want to read these four poems.
So I guess I was surprised about the reception, the audience question.
I didn't think anyone would be interested, but yeah. So that was a big kind of event.
Back to your question. Kind of big awakening, but.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it, and then I met one or two when I was in Canada, I met people I've been to India who've shown interest.
My work has been really surprising to me. And they've talked in the way you did, actually.
It's sort of much more in a global sense. They've they seem to connect up.
Oh, you're an Asian British. So we're thinking of you in the post-colonial sense and how you connect to other writers around the world.
And I actually thought of that kind of at that point anyway in that kind of grand way.
Do we have more questions? And so we were talking a lot and are reading your stuff about and the kind of glossary thing that you put at the back,
was that something you encouraged to do by your publisher or was it something
that you thought was necessary to kind of put in almost like another poem?
Is that obviously it's to do with the readership. So I was just wondering about that. Yeah, no, it was just me.
It was my editor. He was fine either way. And we did have a discussion about it.
And I think we're partly talking about, remember, vaguely now talking about Salman Rushdie and how he doesn't have a glossary.
And I guess my angle was, why would I expect a British audience to know the language of tiny little Sikh Punjabi community?
I wouldn't expect them to know those words in the way that, say, I don't know about other different communities live in Britain.
So I felt it was good to have a glossary and maybe play with it in a way, sort of Elliot plays Wasteland Minds a bit more pure,
although I think this is kind of a high art kind of play is all the better for it.
I can't resist interjecting,
saying that I have had students in the classroom where I've got them to sit down and read the glossary as another poem in the collection,
and it works really well. If anyone would like to steal a classroom, tip is effective.
Um, do we have any more questions? I think the first is a request they'll love you to read sing-song at least part of it.
We had great fun with it, you know, in the hour preceding your. You're right.
Then the second thing is, you know, so much of look we have coming to Dover is about, you know,
the migrant as they are seen and heard, you know, this sort of auditory and visual object, heard of the migrant.
And I wondered how, you know, what what was your gaze when you looked at India?
You know, I mean, in a way, do you think that sometimes you just said, you know,
in answer to the first question, that you didn't really think outside of Britain,
but, you know, how do you look at this English, your English, you know, do the other kinds of English that are being spoken in India?
You know, how do you kind of connect to that or is there no connexion?
Do you see your writing as a sort of variant of kind of, you know, literatures in English in Britain?
Or do you see I mean, what is the sort of, you know, Indian writing in English to sort of trot out a very old you know,
that's what it was called when I was at University Indian writing in English. We didn't have a name for it.
Definitely post-colonial literature wasn't used.
So I just wanted wanted to know about what your thoughts were about the Indian kind of poetry emerging out of India,
which is also doing stuff with voice and vernacular and,
you know, this kind of difficulty of writing in a language that's kind of not something your mother reads, you know?
Well, yeah. I mean, I think the thing you just touched on at the end is something your mother doesn't read.
And there's an angst, is there, in the of the Indian writers write in English that, you know, they're kind of excluded from the big dialogue in India.
And they kind of some of the some of the poems are about how we're writing in a language that isn't ours.
And and I could really relate to that and read some stuff before the first book came out by a few authors.
And since then, so I could I can relate to that kind of inevitable dialogue that takes place where you're an insider outsider.
The difference being, I guess I'm I'm writing in the host country whose language is so I feel much more confident
in writing those poems in English than somebody writing them in India whose audience is,
you know, is in the kind of native country of English.
So I think there's a difference, maybe more confidence, maybe more arrogance than someone like me that would probably take place.
I feel this is my country, the the language I speak and write in is the language of the country I was born in.
And that gives me a kind of authority. I can be right inside.
I can write about British identity and Britishness, but also then slip outside and be an outsider and do those two things very confidently.
So I think there's a slight different dialogue that takes place in India to, well,
someone some like me who is able to do or I know you had Bernadi and she has that,
I think in her work for me anyway, that inside or outside is there is not every line, every word.
I know I just like to apologise, first of all, that I missed the entire reading.
I'm really frustrated. I live in Oxford, but I could not find the way here.
And I went to a very good discussion at lunchtime where I was told where to come.
But there was also some discussion about walls in in Oxford and within the university.
And actually, I discovered that today coming here.
Where do you find this building within the complex anyway?
That's just a brief a preface. Sorry about that.
But I just had one little question and what a request.
But I think the speaker before asked the audience member before asked whether you might read one more poem.
Yeah. So I would be very grateful because I haven't heard any of your poems, but I just wanted to ask.
I sort of got upset when I came in shortly after I came in,
when you said that your parents or your mother in particular couldn't read your poems in English.
And I just wondered, have you ever translated them into her tongue, your mother tongue?
I can't I can't write in Punjabi. Right.
OK, yeah, sure. I don't think anyone in my family showed an interest right up there, just as they didn't read my relatives or read books.
That is isn't books at home. So no one's ever asked me about the poem.
So which actually is my strength. Fair enough.
I can write about them because, you know, I don't think they're going to read them because some of them would have challenged me by now.
I'm sure some of the things I've said about them in the poems. Thanks.
I was interested when you said that, especially for this collection,
but presumably for more recent as well, you kind of you like to be on their feet and sit down.
And one of the ways you pledge to do that is that you kind of conceal things within them, create layers, little codes for yourself maybe.
And you think about all these different layers going on.
But I wondered if when you come back to read a collection like this, you know,
10 years after you wrote it with you, ever they have a stand up and and surprise you.
As you know, you see things that you had not smuggled away in there and whether you have any examples of this.
I think one of the things I was thinking about and I just flicking through the last few days,
there's the far more formal word with a Punjabi inflexion to them than I remember.
So words seem to have double meanings that they could be read as an English word.
There's bits of Punjabi or Hindi creeping into the book much more.
And I think I was aware of in that sense, also probably livelier now with some stuff I've been writing last three or four years.
This feels really pacy, lively and loud compared to that stuff.
So that sort of surprised me that it still is fairly kind of rambunctious, shouty, that kind of thing.
On on the thing about Shouty Dalgaard, I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about the exclamation marks in
the titles of of the poems and in the in the title of the whole collection.
So everything about the exclamation marks, what you were thinking of doing with them,
whether Faber was OK with them, because you know, Faber's favour,
whether they have different kinds of meanings, maybe different colours, you know, are there black ones and red ones and green ones kind of thing?
Yeah, just about the exclamation marks, I think. Yeah. I guess is firstly a response to what you reading at the time.
And a lot of poetry being published then was fairly quiet and introspective.
And the way my poetry is going, I was probably thinking about way to people.
My relatives sit next to each other and be shouting and having a conversation.
I want to kind of recreate some of that and also music the way the kind of line just sort of, you know, just lifts the music of the exclamation.
You can't just come to kind of flat. You constantly stop.
It kind of is a big kind of lift off. And Ascencion and I want to write line some point, realise I like your exclamation.
I want to write lines which warranted the exclamation.
So this kind of phrasing had to be kind of sufficiently rich and sufficiently expressive,
emotive to warrant the exclamation just to kind of go over the top, just to push it towards a further kind of edge.
Complete surprise. When a book came out, so many people were talking about the exclamation and I realise it's such a big deal.
I didn't realise it seemed to me it seemed to be the main feature of the collection,
it seems, for for people to summarise what was going on in the work.
And and I guess our party wants to think, you know, the aural kind of quality you think the romantic poets, that kind of high end, emotive quality.
I want to get back to that. But I didn't think I was doing any sort of radical original.
I just think there'll be lots of other poets who are doing that. And I hadn't really spotted them.
So, yeah, it was a complete surprise. But yeah, I think it kind of to me varies quite a bit in the poems, depending on who's speaking.
It's an exclamation as exclamation despair, the exclamation of kind of confidence.
So to me it varies. It's never just one piece of punctuation.
I think the tone changes with the music, according to the speaker or the kind of moment.
So it does have a different weight.
I think there's some lines, some some lines are kind of the pitch goes up, whereas others it goes up just a little bit.
But it's slightly more explanatory there is to me in my head.
Anyway, I was writing them, um, I'm sure, you know, I have a child doing jokes at the moment,
writing them and for his English, he's he's been told not to use any exclamation marks at all.
So there's something about them that's that's obviously seen as dodgy or indulgent or.
Yeah. Yeah. One of my daughters and in year two they've been told they can use exclamation CommVault only two different ways.
And so they've been given very strict guidance for their SATs tests.
You know, this is kind of stuff that can go a few years ago, but it's still in place.
It's actually teaching at the moment. There's only two ways you can use them.
What we teach is primary school, teach them about our common, what they were.
There's two ways you can use exclamation. So, yeah, still terrifying.
Very pleased. Yeah.
It scares people is that it's a really interesting stripping out of voice, isn't it, the insistence on removal of exclamation marks.
It's like, you know, we have to, you know, we take it undergraduates and have to, you know,
gently coax them back into being able to write because they've been coached throughout the entirety of secondary school that,
you know, first person, which seems to me to, you know, have a kind of analogous question around it as the exclamation mark is,
you know, is it like stripping yourself out of your writing? And that's where writing becomes good writing.
And just whereas you this entire the entire force of this collection works to a works to turn all of those rules around.
We had a hand up over here and one over here.
I have an English teacher, I, I just coming back to something you said about that,
you weren't aware of some of the echoes of the language that you use in Punjabi.
Yeah, I just I'm just in.
SING-SONG We had a girl after I taught her several years, there was a Sikh girl who said, but this these words mean these other things.
And I just wanted to check with you whether it was deliberate.
So pinny, we thought it was pene being an apron, but actually she said it was a turban and.
Yeah. And certainly being the Punjabi wife.
Yes, that's right. And we suddenly always open this up. And it is also interesting.
Yeah. I think I've got more in. Then I realised I just got on what I was looking through and you know, it's quite a lot.
Yeah. And the other thing I would ask is, as you've mentioned already,
that several that you've been influenced by being an English teacher by things that you were reading or having to teach as an English teacher.
I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about that. Well, I mean, one of the things I think you learn as a teacher is about audience.
So, I mean, that really helped me, I think, with the book thinking about how you relate to the audience in the good classroom poem and some degree,
I was trying to write a good classroom poem, but also break out of that, you know, the good in the classroom where the line breaks and things perfect.
So often aware of that, that I think that sort of school being a team of teachers,
really good education for what makes a good classroom poem, then, you know, you've got that as a template.
Then you can break the rules as and when because it becomes so kind of and I'm sure you find that.
So, you know, there's certain poems go in anthologies and others will never be in that.
So that that was that was useful.
And just thinking about how to effect an audience is when you teach in the schools, you you're trying to get students to feel the emotions.
And I think that's really helpful for the monologues where you need to change the emotion all the time.
You can't just be to one track, especially the one sort of one's own typos.
Right. And I want that kind of moment of sort of joy in and undercut it.
A different emotion, maybe sarcasm, maybe irony, maybe anger.
So that was really useful, I think. Teach me how to think about an audience all the time, obsessively and monologue needs that doesn't matter.
Monologue and I don't come from an acting or theatre background.
So I think I picked up those skills from partly Karlstrom and partly watching people like Browning work the way he does it.
There was a hand up over this side. I was just going to say on that topic, so the fact that your poetry is now on school syllabuses, GCSE syllabus,
and that obviously means that it's far more accessible to the kind of non-white non middle class audience.
And I was wondering if you thought for the people who are reading your poetry in schools and perhaps thinking poetry isn't for me,
and that's kind of their mentality surrounding poetry. Do you think that your poetry sort of addresses that?
And how can we address that? How can we get people who are thinking poetry isn't for me, this doesn't relate to me.
This and none of this is for me. How can we get them to kind of read?
Well, I think maybe maybe the best way beyond anything else is the thought of a brown face, the brown name writing the poetry.
And it's in the classroom and it comes from my of my right writings from normally come from Normy background.
I think that's probably more liberal than anything I'll ever write in the poem.
So I probably write a really high art, obscure poem like maybe we have coming to terms with the poem is.
But the identity itself I think is really liberate people.
And just the normal person can write poetry because I think that hold me back writing poetry for a long time.
And I just thought you have to be a certain type of person that's really clever from a certain background to write poems.
And I wrote for you myself and of 1920 and then stopped and started writing when I was about 30.
But even then I just write as a hobby because I then sort of seen a real poet in the flesh,
the ones I sort of seen seem to be from a certain background for.
Yeah, that's what that just confirms my stereotype of poetry. So I think that's probably the best thing, actually.
Just having just ordinary people in state schools, ordinary poets in state schools, maybe should be a project for that.
I think there is a good idea is that they're pretty good about.
I have been talking about children and education, my daughter is ten and she writes poems,
you just spontaneously write them and they're OK and she plays with language and stuff.
And so given what we've said about how rigid the teaching can be, how do you how would you inspire a young person who's interested?
In fact, I think probably the same as saying if things any anything in education is not not to score it,
not to greedy primary schools, to do little grading of of creative writing.
And the other thing, I mean, my own daughter in year two and the others in four,
when they write poems, then they have to talk about what they've done in the poem and after then.
So they basically do analysis, not really to teach them the logical part.
The analysis is more important than the poem. So and that's been really drummed into their heads.
So I mean, that seems really fascistic to me. It's like we are here to teach you that creativity is bad.
The analysis is everything.
So maybe maybe not just not grading that stuff or not putting it alongside reasonable time and was taught in secondary school.
That used to happen a lot. And if students ever were encouraged to write a poem, there'll always be a commentary on the poem.
But the commentary was always assessed. It was never you weren't allowed to assess the poetry.
So probably take a massive shift in their thinking as it is as a country.
I don't really see disparaging things like.
Has anyone got a question or Cheerios up now? Well, that's not very cheerful, but might be interesting.
I was just wondering if you could see a bit more of a class.
I've noticed that each time you've spoken about it, you said white middle class readers and they said, I'm a normal person.
Are you going to say, yes, you stay together? Yeah, well, I just thought it was striking.
I just wonder if you could speak a bit more. And quite often it's perhaps Framestore identity of another kind.
But it seems to me that class is important to you. So if you could just at what has been.
Yeah, I think we talk in this book, it was really important because, you know, I just I mean, I went to university.
We didn't do GCSE levels with these cases.
And I think the shame and humiliation that for a long time where, you know,
from the age about 11 up to know in my 20s always felt like, you know, we were condemned.
We were we were condemned and went to school, didn't want to go to and we knew the bottom of the pile absolute bottom.
And our school was one of the first ones shut down when the academies came out.
And it just used really well.
Everybody else is where we were at the absolute worst school because, you know, there will always be somebody who had a relative who's,
you know, had in her cousin who went to a thing called a grammar school or a private school.
You heard or and you see these people and they spoke differently to you. And so you always wear that kind of inadequacy.
So I think it took me a long time to get through that kind of class.
Shame. I'd say literally shame of I'm not good enough.
I was and you know, when I was 15, where these interviews were all told to go work at the airport, you know that they live near Heathrow Airport.
Everyone's told to go and get a job at the airport. And you know that that condemnation, he felt he had to fight through that.
And if you were coming through, that felt quite perverse. My best friend, I think, very bright.
He just got a job at 16 because that's his family. Expect him to do that.
And they would have been appalled if he carried on beyond that. So that kind of, I guess, is coming through that world.
And I just think that goes on now. And I don't think it's really changed when I was working in school that semester that still seem to be there.
That feeling of you're not entitled, you're not entitled to do these things, you should go out and get a job.
That feeling, I think, is sort of still pervasive. I am so but for me, it took a while to get through that thing.
So I think that was there in that book in particular, that probably isn't there with the work now.
Yes, or picture for that. You talk about writing for white middle class audience, I'm wondering what do you think?
You said you didn't think that audience would be interested when you're writing. So why are they interested?
What do you think is going on in that kind of jumping, both the kind of racial or cultural grouping in a class grouping?
And what needs might that serve or what kind of politics happens in that gap between
the subjects of the poem and that the group who tends to read in the group,
who tends to review it and you know, Faber, who publishing in that gap, what kind of happens?
Yes, that's very interesting. Well, actually is tricky to know what it is exactly.
I always think it's sort of news that people like me bring news of a community.
And I'm probably quite simple in that sense when I see somebody from different background writing some part.
Me think you're going to learn about the community and how they function in Britain or America talking about Ocean One.
And so I went to see him last week, Vietnamese American poet, and he's doing a reading in London and he's,
I think in a few weeks and I bought the book and I partly read it partly because of his Vietnamese background.
So something you know, I was a voyeur into the news of what it must be to be Vietnamese, to go to America.
So I think maybe there's some part of that this in play as well,
just that curiosity and to see maybe also to see how the people form a minority community,
how they play with a kind of, you know, a certain art form, an exclusive art form.
You say rarefied of my poetry. What were they make of it says accuracy.
So, I mean, this amazing poet, by the way, ocean from massive paintings, no emotion, felt like the ocean.
But he I mean, it's just it's really, really exciting poetry, though.
And partly to see what they're going to make of that art form and what they what information
they bring in and the kind of information he's bringing in makes poetry feel fresh,
partly because the words the details he brings in, I think.
So in a sense, she's looking for something different and which is kind of makes it slightly more of a crisis, say,
for white heterosexual males who are writing poetry because there's been, you know,
several hundred years that what you do now to make your poetry sound fresh.
And that is hard, isn't it? I imagine the sense is that it's easy for people like me because I can just write that my community can sound quite fresh.
So, I mean, I became aware of that at some point that I've got a head start.
So it might come with background,
but in other ways you've got a head start because because what you're writing and where you're coming from in poetry gives you kind of an edge.
And that was a positive note we were looking for. And I think by my reckoning,
we've got time for maybe one more question and then we should we've had a request for
sing so and perhaps we can have requests for one more poem for Daljit to sing us out.
Oh, sorry. There was one other.
Um, I'm just wondering I was just wondering if it's too too much to say that you are striding two different worlds or two different communities.
And if that's the case, could you comment on that?
If that's not the case, then I would be interested to hear how that feels to you being a poet and as you said,
trying to connect different cultures or coming from one culture, writing for another one.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think one way I was trying to do that, if I talk about words, is just trying to position words from different fields together.
And sometimes words slangy say with very formal diction or Punjabi words with English.
So my my idea was to have this kind of merging of different cultures sitting together line by line in the kind of in love,
in harmony, as it were, in a kind of musical kind of, you know, enjoyment and a kind of frisson.
So I would think of it in those terms. And I was really where in that collection much more now because I was writing about that ordinary community,
ordinary Indians in Britain trying to marry the two together.
And I want one way was to the words themselves,
how they sat together in a line and sometimes in these collocations two words together, the combinations.
So that felt really exciting to match.
I think that's the main reason why I found poetry exciting because that immediate kind of collaboration and the immediate kind of,
um, kind of relationship you get with words you say like that.
Um, yeah, maybe that's that's one way to answer it isn't that thing.
Given that that was a beautifully crisp question and a beautifully responsive if you go time,
just for one very short question, ELAC is making a very, very small question mine.
Oh, even better. So we'd like sing-song from you.
I thought number forty nine. OK, I hope it's one of those that I have to read.
Are there any you can't read. There's two or three.
Each one of the boys is always smiley. Black's ok.
Oh thank you. That's for me as well. And a fun voice for between a streetcar wife and a couple others.
Yeah, some of the monologues. Oh, you kind of found the way to say it, but would you be willing to do all this?
Yes. OK, so and then sing song the play the last two in the book.
OK, so this came out of look, we have come in over that poem and had to come a whole set of images in there.
So I realise we split them into two poems. Very, very exciting to me.
My parents had a shop so it's like kind of a thing got to play on it.
Right. It's interesting thinking.
I think there's a park I remember in Bradford or some other a new park could opened up and use the metaphor for social harmony.
So it's fun to play around the tension of that. Can I just say it's interesting to have this poem after you've just spoken about the kind
of the ugliness of poetry in such kind of positive terms to have this year and also on.
Yes, on the relationship. Yes. If you add in a poem like which one are funny.
So all these smiley blacks.
The Orient Sun zaps us out of our suburban CPA for the revamped Brownfield, where the snipped red ribbon disarms are badly lumped.
Blacks gum shelter in here blooms the pakhi who salutes the mayor, then summons rockets of confetti parachuting on our regiments of speakers,
tricksters, clowns, crowds, drummers and Strummer's shows of us streaming through the gates and our native gaze.
Bullets of light phosphor the applauding leaves and inspect the plastic petticoat parade of the plastic petticoat parade
of saplings as the grass lets go with a to and fro of Mexican waves for masked children who kick from orange and cherry,
Swing's diving with some in the spongy sandpit for hide and seek.
All leaders improvise with a massive khaki ground sheet.
So we may feast on our picnic of chapattis and patties and ts.
A humble looking man splits a bomb shaped Chuncheon, leaking its syrup with a low cast, a smiling woman,
an ordinary, drowns his lover with almond puffs through dandelion clocks that fluff her thread of buttons.
The pakhi with his totem wand at the heavens puts up a stark of clouds.
They outlined nations of the globe so that sky is a screen on which the world is marked.
He's warned now joins each nation world,
a flown pink commingling of clouds on our patch in Slough whirling so we wage the growth of continents at once.
Svedberg dispersed the smithereens airshows platooning through the cumulous kissing continents as butterflies aspire to kaleidoscope the sky.
Gaping, we gasp on gases of air that blast, the darkest haunted reaches of our afeared hearts.
One of us juggling Skittles at the flush of this Oceanus borderless hugging a
tree is a stone's throw away from our ancestors every day just there in Africa.
One of us places where everywhere. Welcome to stay.
One of us suavely is that cloud for England and India.
Is the stamp of our arrival, our passport, this part, this hologram of home, we holer the flag of our dance.
And I'll finish with my poet. So, yes, I think it's quite tricky poem, actually, for students, because I'll probably write it differently now.
I'll probably make it much cleaner for first time now. But at that point, I want to make sure it wasn't clean.
It didn't quite make sense. So, yeah, so in the fourth verse, I do imagine what I in my head was.
I imagine she she runs an Internet arranged marriage company, the wife.
So she's got this kind of business, modern business upstairs and she runs a corner shop downstairs.
So sing-song. I am just one of my daddy shops from nine o'clock to nine o'clock, and he will be not to have a break,
but when nobody in I do the lock because up the stairs my newly arrived,
we shared each party we shared in the jitney after we have made love like running through Putney.
When I returned with my beanie untied, the shoppers always point to the crime scene where you pin your lemons, limes,
your bananas are planted in this dirty to the floor and a little bit of mob university Indian shop on the whole Indian road.
Above my head high here, the ground, as my wife on the Web is playing with the mouse,
when she netting to count on a sequel of a site, she took them for the meat added cheese price.
My bride, she met my mum in all the colours of Punjabi, then stumble like a drunk, making fun of my daddy, my bride, tiny eyes, a gun.
And he told me about daddy, my bride, she have a red crewcut.
And she went out and sorry,
a dumpy jacket and some bumps on the squeak of the girls are pinching my sweeties when I return from the tickle of my bride.
Shop always point and cry. Hey, where you been? The milk is out of date and the bread is always stale.
The things you have on offer, you have never got in stock in the first Indian shop on the whole India road.
Late in the midnight hour, when you shoppers are up quiet, when your precinct is concrete, cool,
they come down whispering stairs and sit on my silver stool from behind the chocolate bars.
We stare past the half price window signs at the beaches of the UK, many brightly moon.
From these to each night, she say, how much do you charge for the moon, baby?
From these to each night, I say, is half the cost of you, baby.
From his rule each night, she say, how much does that come to baby from this tool each night?
I say is priceless, baby. That was marvellous.
Thank you so much and thank you, everyone, for such a stimulating discussion.