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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.

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Doubt it. In the context of all that you have read in the conversation everybody has been having for the last hour about downticks,

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what he really needs, no introduction, but it does feel particularly auspicious to have him with us today when which is

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the day of publication of his fourth collection with with Faber British Museum.

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So it feels like the right day to be sitting and talking about its first collection from 2007.

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Look, we have coming to Dover. I should also say that without its voice,

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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.

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And every time you come on the radio, my mum rings me up.

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So I've got a much more lively relationship on the phone with my mum than than I had this time last year.

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I would like to start by inviting Daljit to read a couple of poems to get us started, I should say.

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Some of us have been reading your poetry out loud over the last hour,

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but now it's your turn and then lead us into a discussion with Alja of the poetry in the collection.

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Okay. Thank you. Hello. Welcome. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for supporting poetry.

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Very important. It's not about a roomful of people embracing poetry writing, so.

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I'll read one of the last panels wrote for this collection, the book Enhancing Comar, and in a sense,

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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.

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So just so book in counting Khamal, must I wear only masks that don't sit for a bit?

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Would you blush if I stripped from my native skin?

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Should I be on my chest, I'm a ghetto poet who discovered it is kind.

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They couldn't know it.

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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?

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Did I make me for the gap in the market? Does it feel good in the gap in the market?

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Does it feel guilty in the gap in the market?

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When my flame on the tree that your cannon has stoked, will I thisll at the bowl where a bulldog is cocked?

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Should I talk with the chalk of my white inside on the board of my menstrual blacked outside?

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Should I bleach my bile name or mash it to a stink, should I refuse straight or Gunga Din this gig?

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Did you make me fill the gap in the market? Did I make me fill the gap in the market?

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Do I need to be good in the gap in the market? Do I need to be guey in the gap in the market?

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As I've worn a sorry bride and an English rose, can I cream off awards from your melting pot, Fais?

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Do you metal yourselves when you meddle with my time? If I go up the spectrum, how far can you die?

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More than your shell, like your KLAC applause what bothers me is whether your Boomi if I balls out of Indian.

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OK, then I'll just read one, which is right at the end, but one of the last.

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All right. For the collection and it probably shows a very different. Now, that was the last one on the early ones.

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Yeah, the other way around. I do see the first one that went into this book is called Digging to Find It.

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And and then I've written it and it felt so genius. And I didn't really relate to it after a while.

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And I didn't really do anything with it. And I sort of you know, I sometimes get embarrassed by work.

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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.

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Yes, so that's kind of the idea of digging in,

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I should be doing loads I was teaching in the school at the time and in those private lessons in the evenings,

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you paid London rent and all that stuff.

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And a certain time each year I'll just be teaching, digging kind of constantly for GCSE students or as a teacher at school.

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I think you just got into my brain and this is what came out.

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So digging. Squatted against the bedroom door with left leg stretched, wiping sweat from my thigh.

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I shave hairs to the shape of a passport photo.

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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.

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Once under the fold, down to the roots, NERV hand holds the slicing level,

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the parallel lines of a photo leaning deeper, so the unconscious deeper, so the goal geometric be heaped up.

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I drop the silvery half, the leg, the back, the flap.

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I hear a cry from some of myself, so this is me, this jazmín this meat for which I wore myself, this.

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I stopped stop there and went to. Thanks for that doubt it, will you, having started us off with these two such different poems,

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the one with it's really kind of pronounced sense of address and the other feeling so much more intimate.

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I wonder if I could start by asking you about your sense of a readership as you write,

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because it seems to me that those are two such interestingly kind of poison appose poems to begin thinking about that.

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Do you have a reader in mind as you write? Your poetry, perhaps those two poems in particular.

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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.

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And I just remember expecting firstly not to get a book published, just didn't think that would be happening to me.

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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.

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First book, as you see right in the Bandon, just expecting it would be a fruitless adventure, but a happy one.

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So in that sense, I've probably wrote very much in the ideal that I'm writing for me, I don't care.

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And I'm going to publish a book and I'm going to use bad English and mess it up.

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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.

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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,

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because they're the ones repertory and they were the ones even before the first book to readings.

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If that was the audience, I just don't remember ever meeting someone from Asian background.

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So it was making sure the kind of cultural aspects of my background that I brought into the

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poems could be understood or I had the skills to facilitate a relationship with the audience.

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So how has that changed over time then, so you have to I mean, I guess it's that's kind of a cheat.

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I don't question given that look we have come over is what we're talking about today.

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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

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readership now and whether you have that kind of consciously in your mind. Yeah, I think I probably do, actually.

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It still is very much that audience. And I think my approach has become clearer.

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If I've sold out, as it were, you know, like you do your first album is there.

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But at this late date, it feels very on the surface language. The grammar is very clear.

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And I think that's because I was trying to write a much quieter poem, this latest book.

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But I think the first three, there was a need to be loud as possible and see if the audience could stomach that.

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And because of the success both, I'm going to get even louder. I don't care.

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And I didn't expect to be successful. How dare I be successful? And the really fancy loud poems, so can.

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And then I did the version of Minor and I tried to be even louder.

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And then now that's sort of let's calm down. This is a career, you know, it's almost that kind of mentality.

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I can you know, I am going to get published, frankly, I can start thinking about.

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The ideas in a kind of in a different way and a more nuanced or a different type of nuance thing,

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so everyone's got a boy's new book now so that we can read the quote, Daljit.

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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.

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And I guess I wondered, what is it that attracted you in this collection about?

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I mean, insofar as you conceived it as a collection, which I guess you've already suggested for a long time,

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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

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perhaps also thinking about in terms of a kind of address to a readership? I do remember sort of thinking about Shakespeare,

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particularly in those sort of get those great soliloquies and they always contextualise on some of these instruments.

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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.

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And and I was also really into the idea of the oral and the written trying to find ways to mingle the two.

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So in some sense, I think I saw some of these pieces, always dramatic moments where,

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you know, lots of kind of things are implied or lots of things potentially happening.

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And I've just caught a moment and then the reader can decide what I want to make of it and try and make

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it as as complex as possible without trying to make the surface complex of these dramatic scenarios.

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And the dramatic monologue really suited it. And I really like Robert Browning anyway.

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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.

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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.

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The ones I was after were essentially the uneducated ones wherever possible in that collection.

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That's that's my kind of background. I don't want to write about those particular Indians specifically.

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And I knew I can translate that. That's just felt that a folly to want to translate so far.

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Create a fictional English, a fabricated English. I will ask one more question,

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if I may have my kind of chair's licence to ask for more and then turn the conversation

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over to the room and thinking perhaps specifically about this first collection.

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Were there things about the ways in which it was taken up or represented or

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worked with that particularly surprised you or delighted you or aggravated you?

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What was your sense of its kind of life out in the world?

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And did did any of that kind of provoke a particularly strong reaction or does it continue to?

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I guess the one thing is a success there that was that was really genuinely unsettling for me.

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It sounds really weird to say that, isn't it? I mean, first, I didn't expect to get published.

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I certainly didn't expect a favour.

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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.

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I mean, and I was getting loads of readings in the back of it. And I found that really unsettling.

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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,

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we get poetry events we invited to Reno might be you and maybe another Asian and maybe a small SANAYA.

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So I think quite a few dozen or curry night. And I get a couple of Asian.

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And that's not being offensive. I mean, that's just that's one way to get people in, I guess, in different regions.

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So I was expecting that and I didn't mind actually get nice food, but but yeah.

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The annoying annoying but yeah I was.

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Yeah. But was taken seriously. I think that was really surprising.

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I would expect the other stuff since then to be taken seriously.

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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.

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So I wanted to have these kind of weird words in the probably the wrong word, deliberately unsettling.

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And, you know, the poems never sat down. They never settled down.

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I want to have that nervous, kind of nervous, nervous working class energy that living on your wits kind of energy.

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That's where I felt at the time. Anyway, I was writing and I remember it well.

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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.

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So maybe this time at the end or worse, we drink wine after our discussions.

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And can I open conversation out to the floor?

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Erica has a microphone, which she will hand to you for the recording.

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Don't expect your voice to be amplified. The first question still is after that and the first question that you asked,

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and I'm thinking about the audience that you have in mind, did you ever write for a non British audience?

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And where this question is coming from is because when I when I first encountered your work as an English person reading it,

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not in Britain, I could see that you were constantly trying to unsettle a British audience.

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But then that unsettling effect was less unsettling.

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I'm reading it from Singapore where I was and it seemed obvious to me that you were doing something different.

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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.

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So did you ever have a world audience in mind? And what did the world audience look like?

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Was that also a middle class broad audience? Was that kind of different diasporic audience?

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Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. And we expanded my horizons in that sense.

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It's a funny thing because on the one hand, you're aware you're you're ideally writing for an Indian audience.

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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.

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And, you know, my mum still can't read in English yet. Some of the poetry is about that community.

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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.

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So you play that kind of a sort of 50 game or you're where, you know, you're writing for them.

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But, you know, you really write you really write for them, but you're actually writing for the audience.

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But, yeah, I didn't think beyond Britain at all. But I mean, I guess it is that thing.

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I mean, I sent the manuscript off to read back press and further than this tiny little press.

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And the editor at time, David, tripped and he passed away a few years ago.

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Some of these lovely letters saying, I think your work deserves a bigger publisher.

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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.

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At the time, I felt insulted and I was aiming for this, you know, thought, wow, this is this is me.

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This is my niche. And, you know, I was thinking, well, what's wrong with 50 copies?

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What do they want? The 50 copies would be great.

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So I guess I was thinking like that really that I think it's probably because that's maybe cynical, isn't it?

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Because I imagined maybe a white middle class audience would want to read these four poems.

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So I guess I was surprised about the reception, the audience question.

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I didn't think anyone would be interested, but yeah. So that was a big kind of event.

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Back to your question. Kind of big awakening, but.

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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.

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My work has been really surprising to me. And they've talked in the way you did, actually.

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It's sort of much more in a global sense. They've they seem to connect up.

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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.

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And I actually thought of that kind of at that point anyway in that kind of grand way.

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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,

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was that something you encouraged to do by your publisher or was it something

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that you thought was necessary to kind of put in almost like another poem?

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Is that obviously it's to do with the readership. So I was just wondering about that. Yeah, no, it was just me.

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It was my editor. He was fine either way. And we did have a discussion about it.

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And I think we're partly talking about, remember, vaguely now talking about Salman Rushdie and how he doesn't have a glossary.

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And I guess my angle was, why would I expect a British audience to know the language of tiny little Sikh Punjabi community?

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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.

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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,

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although I think this is kind of a high art kind of play is all the better for it.

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I can't resist interjecting,

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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,

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and it works really well. If anyone would like to steal a classroom, tip is effective.

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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.

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We had great fun with it, you know, in the hour preceding your. You're right.

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Then the second thing is, you know, so much of look we have coming to Dover is about, you know,

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the migrant as they are seen and heard, you know, this sort of auditory and visual object, heard of the migrant.

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And I wondered how, you know, what what was your gaze when you looked at India?

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You know, I mean, in a way, do you think that sometimes you just said, you know,

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in answer to the first question, that you didn't really think outside of Britain,

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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?

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You know, how do you kind of connect to that or is there no connexion?

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Do you see your writing as a sort of variant of kind of, you know, literatures in English in Britain?

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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,

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that's what it was called when I was at University Indian writing in English. We didn't have a name for it.

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Definitely post-colonial literature wasn't used.

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So I just wanted wanted to know about what your thoughts were about the Indian kind of poetry emerging out of India,

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which is also doing stuff with voice and vernacular and,

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you know, this kind of difficulty of writing in a language that's kind of not something your mother reads, you know?

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Well, yeah. I mean, I think the thing you just touched on at the end is something your mother doesn't read.

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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.

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And they kind of some of the some of the poems are about how we're writing in a language that isn't ours.

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And and I could really relate to that and read some stuff before the first book came out by a few authors.

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And since then, so I could I can relate to that kind of inevitable dialogue that takes place where you're an insider outsider.

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The difference being, I guess I'm I'm writing in the host country whose language is so I feel much more confident

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in writing those poems in English than somebody writing them in India whose audience is,

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you know, is in the kind of native country of English.

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So I think there's a difference, maybe more confidence, maybe more arrogance than someone like me that would probably take place.

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I feel this is my country, the the language I speak and write in is the language of the country I was born in.

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And that gives me a kind of authority. I can be right inside.

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I can write about British identity and Britishness, but also then slip outside and be an outsider and do those two things very confidently.

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So I think there's a slight different dialogue that takes place in India to, well,

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someone some like me who is able to do or I know you had Bernadi and she has that,

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I think in her work for me anyway, that inside or outside is there is not every line, every word.

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I know I just like to apologise, first of all, that I missed the entire reading.

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I'm really frustrated. I live in Oxford, but I could not find the way here.

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And I went to a very good discussion at lunchtime where I was told where to come.

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But there was also some discussion about walls in in Oxford and within the university.

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And actually, I discovered that today coming here.

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Where do you find this building within the complex anyway?

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That's just a brief a preface. Sorry about that.

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But I just had one little question and what a request.

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But I think the speaker before asked the audience member before asked whether you might read one more poem.

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Yeah. So I would be very grateful because I haven't heard any of your poems, but I just wanted to ask.

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I sort of got upset when I came in shortly after I came in,

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when you said that your parents or your mother in particular couldn't read your poems in English.

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And I just wondered, have you ever translated them into her tongue, your mother tongue?

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I can't I can't write in Punjabi. Right.

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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.

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That is isn't books at home. So no one's ever asked me about the poem.

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So which actually is my strength. Fair enough.

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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.

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I'm sure some of the things I've said about them in the poems. Thanks.

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I was interested when you said that, especially for this collection,

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but presumably for more recent as well, you kind of you like to be on their feet and sit down.

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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.

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And you think about all these different layers going on.

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But I wondered if when you come back to read a collection like this, you know,

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10 years after you wrote it with you, ever they have a stand up and and surprise you.

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As you know, you see things that you had not smuggled away in there and whether you have any examples of this.

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I think one of the things I was thinking about and I just flicking through the last few days,

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there's the far more formal word with a Punjabi inflexion to them than I remember.

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So words seem to have double meanings that they could be read as an English word.

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There's bits of Punjabi or Hindi creeping into the book much more.

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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.

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This feels really pacy, lively and loud compared to that stuff.

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So that sort of surprised me that it still is fairly kind of rambunctious, shouty, that kind of thing.

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On on the thing about Shouty Dalgaard, I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about the exclamation marks in

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the titles of of the poems and in the in the title of the whole collection.

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So everything about the exclamation marks, what you were thinking of doing with them,

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whether Faber was OK with them, because you know, Faber's favour,

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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?

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Yeah, just about the exclamation marks, I think. Yeah. I guess is firstly a response to what you reading at the time.

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And a lot of poetry being published then was fairly quiet and introspective.

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And the way my poetry is going, I was probably thinking about way to people.

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My relatives sit next to each other and be shouting and having a conversation.

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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.

251
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You can't just come to kind of flat. You constantly stop.

252
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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.

253
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I want to write lines which warranted the exclamation.

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So this kind of phrasing had to be kind of sufficiently rich and sufficiently expressive,

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emotive to warrant the exclamation just to kind of go over the top, just to push it towards a further kind of edge.

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Complete surprise. When a book came out, so many people were talking about the exclamation and I realise it's such a big deal.

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I didn't realise it seemed to me it seemed to be the main feature of the collection,

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it seems, for for people to summarise what was going on in the work.

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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.

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I want to get back to that. But I didn't think I was doing any sort of radical original.

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I just think there'll be lots of other poets who are doing that. And I hadn't really spotted them.

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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.

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It's an exclamation as exclamation despair, the exclamation of kind of confidence.

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So to me it varies. It's never just one piece of punctuation.

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I think the tone changes with the music, according to the speaker or the kind of moment.

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So it does have a different weight.

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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.

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But it's slightly more explanatory there is to me in my head.

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Anyway, I was writing them, um, I'm sure, you know, I have a child doing jokes at the moment,

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writing them and for his English, he's he's been told not to use any exclamation marks at all.

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So there's something about them that's that's obviously seen as dodgy or indulgent or.

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Yeah. Yeah. One of my daughters and in year two they've been told they can use exclamation CommVault only two different ways.

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And so they've been given very strict guidance for their SATs tests.

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You know, this is kind of stuff that can go a few years ago, but it's still in place.

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It's actually teaching at the moment. There's only two ways you can use them.

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What we teach is primary school, teach them about our common, what they were.

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There's two ways you can use exclamation. So, yeah, still terrifying.

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Very pleased. Yeah.

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It scares people is that it's a really interesting stripping out of voice, isn't it, the insistence on removal of exclamation marks.

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It's like, you know, we have to, you know, we take it undergraduates and have to, you know,

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gently coax them back into being able to write because they've been coached throughout the entirety of secondary school that,

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you know, first person, which seems to me to, you know, have a kind of analogous question around it as the exclamation mark is,

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you know, is it like stripping yourself out of your writing? And that's where writing becomes good writing.

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And just whereas you this entire the entire force of this collection works to a works to turn all of those rules around.

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We had a hand up over here and one over here.

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I have an English teacher, I, I just coming back to something you said about that,

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you weren't aware of some of the echoes of the language that you use in Punjabi.

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Yeah, I just I'm just in.

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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.

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And I just wanted to check with you whether it was deliberate.

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So pinny, we thought it was pene being an apron, but actually she said it was a turban and.

292
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Yeah. And certainly being the Punjabi wife.

293
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Yes, that's right. And we suddenly always open this up. And it is also interesting.

294
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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.

295
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Yeah. And the other thing I would ask is, as you've mentioned already,

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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So often aware of that, that I think that sort of school being a team of teachers,

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really good education for what makes a good classroom poem, then, you know, you've got that as a template.

302
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Then you can break the rules as and when because it becomes so kind of and I'm sure you find that.

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So, you know, there's certain poems go in anthologies and others will never be in that.

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So that that was that was useful.

305
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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.

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And I think that's really helpful for the monologues where you need to change the emotion all the time.

307
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You can't just be to one track, especially the one sort of one's own typos.

308
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Right. And I want that kind of moment of sort of joy in and undercut it.

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A different emotion, maybe sarcasm, maybe irony, maybe anger.

310
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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.

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Monologue and I don't come from an acting or theatre background.

312
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So I think I picked up those skills from partly Karlstrom and partly watching people like Browning work the way he does it.

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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,

314
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and that obviously means that it's far more accessible to the kind of non-white non middle class audience.

315
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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,

316
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and that's kind of their mentality surrounding poetry. Do you think that your poetry sort of addresses that?

317
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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.

318
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This and none of this is for me. How can we get them to kind of read?

319
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Well, I think maybe maybe the best way beyond anything else is the thought of a brown face, the brown name writing the poetry.

320
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And it's in the classroom and it comes from my of my right writings from normally come from Normy background.

321
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I think that's probably more liberal than anything I'll ever write in the poem.

322
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So I probably write a really high art, obscure poem like maybe we have coming to terms with the poem is.

323
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But the identity itself I think is really liberate people.

324
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And just the normal person can write poetry because I think that hold me back writing poetry for a long time.

325
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And I just thought you have to be a certain type of person that's really clever from a certain background to write poems.

326
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And I wrote for you myself and of 1920 and then stopped and started writing when I was about 30.

327
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But even then I just write as a hobby because I then sort of seen a real poet in the flesh,

328
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the ones I sort of seen seem to be from a certain background for.

329
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Yeah, that's what that just confirms my stereotype of poetry. So I think that's probably the best thing, actually.

330
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Just having just ordinary people in state schools, ordinary poets in state schools, maybe should be a project for that.

331
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I think there is a good idea is that they're pretty good about.

332
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I have been talking about children and education, my daughter is ten and she writes poems,

333
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you just spontaneously write them and they're OK and she plays with language and stuff.

334
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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?

335
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In fact, I think probably the same as saying if things any anything in education is not not to score it,

336
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not to greedy primary schools, to do little grading of of creative writing.

337
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And the other thing, I mean, my own daughter in year two and the others in four,

338
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when they write poems, then they have to talk about what they've done in the poem and after then.

339
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So they basically do analysis, not really to teach them the logical part.

340
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The analysis is more important than the poem. So and that's been really drummed into their heads.

341
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So I mean, that seems really fascistic to me. It's like we are here to teach you that creativity is bad.

342
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The analysis is everything.

343
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So maybe maybe not just not grading that stuff or not putting it alongside reasonable time and was taught in secondary school.

344
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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.

345
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But the commentary was always assessed. It was never you weren't allowed to assess the poetry.

346
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So probably take a massive shift in their thinking as it is as a country.

347
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I don't really see disparaging things like.

348
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Has anyone got a question or Cheerios up now? Well, that's not very cheerful, but might be interesting.

349
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I was just wondering if you could see a bit more of a class.

350
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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.

351
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Are you going to say, yes, you stay together? Yeah, well, I just thought it was striking.

352
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I just wonder if you could speak a bit more. And quite often it's perhaps Framestore identity of another kind.

353
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But it seems to me that class is important to you. So if you could just at what has been.

354
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Yeah, I think we talk in this book, it was really important because, you know, I just I mean, I went to university.

355
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We didn't do GCSE levels with these cases.

356
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And I think the shame and humiliation that for a long time where, you know,

357
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from the age about 11 up to know in my 20s always felt like, you know, we were condemned.

358
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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.

359
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And our school was one of the first ones shut down when the academies came out.

360
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And it just used really well.

361
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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,

362
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you know, had in her cousin who went to a thing called a grammar school or a private school.

363
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You heard or and you see these people and they spoke differently to you. And so you always wear that kind of inadequacy.

364
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So I think it took me a long time to get through that kind of class.

365
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Shame. I'd say literally shame of I'm not good enough.

366
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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.

367
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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.

368
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And if you were coming through, that felt quite perverse. My best friend, I think, very bright.

369
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He just got a job at 16 because that's his family. Expect him to do that.

370
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And they would have been appalled if he carried on beyond that. So that kind of, I guess, is coming through that world.

371
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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.

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That feeling of you're not entitled, you're not entitled to do these things, you should go out and get a job.

373
00:38:39,670 --> 00:38:47,170
That feeling, I think, is sort of still pervasive. I am so but for me, it took a while to get through that thing.

374
00:38:47,170 --> 00:38:59,440
So I think that was there in that book in particular, that probably isn't there with the work now.

375
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:06,790
Yes, or picture for that. You talk about writing for white middle class audience, I'm wondering what do you think?

376
00:39:06,790 --> 00:39:10,600
You said you didn't think that audience would be interested when you're writing. So why are they interested?

377
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:17,380
What do you think is going on in that kind of jumping, both the kind of racial or cultural grouping in a class grouping?

378
00:39:17,380 --> 00:39:23,740
And what needs might that serve or what kind of politics happens in that gap between

379
00:39:23,740 --> 00:39:27,950
the subjects of the poem and that the group who tends to read in the group,

380
00:39:27,950 --> 00:39:33,880
who tends to review it and you know, Faber, who publishing in that gap, what kind of happens?

381
00:39:33,880 --> 00:39:39,310
Yes, that's very interesting. Well, actually is tricky to know what it is exactly.

382
00:39:39,310 --> 00:39:45,430
I always think it's sort of news that people like me bring news of a community.

383
00:39:45,430 --> 00:39:51,100
And I'm probably quite simple in that sense when I see somebody from different background writing some part.

384
00:39:51,100 --> 00:39:58,510
Me think you're going to learn about the community and how they function in Britain or America talking about Ocean One.

385
00:39:58,510 --> 00:40:04,690
And so I went to see him last week, Vietnamese American poet, and he's doing a reading in London and he's,

386
00:40:04,690 --> 00:40:10,490
I think in a few weeks and I bought the book and I partly read it partly because of his Vietnamese background.

387
00:40:10,490 --> 00:40:16,660
So something you know, I was a voyeur into the news of what it must be to be Vietnamese, to go to America.

388
00:40:16,660 --> 00:40:20,020
So I think maybe there's some part of that this in play as well,

389
00:40:20,020 --> 00:40:27,520
just that curiosity and to see maybe also to see how the people form a minority community,

390
00:40:27,520 --> 00:40:33,010
how they play with a kind of, you know, a certain art form, an exclusive art form.

391
00:40:33,010 --> 00:40:37,950
You say rarefied of my poetry. What were they make of it says accuracy.

392
00:40:37,950 --> 00:40:45,520
So, I mean, this amazing poet, by the way, ocean from massive paintings, no emotion, felt like the ocean.

393
00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:49,480
But he I mean, it's just it's really, really exciting poetry, though.

394
00:40:49,480 --> 00:40:56,020
And partly to see what they're going to make of that art form and what they what information

395
00:40:56,020 --> 00:41:00,610
they bring in and the kind of information he's bringing in makes poetry feel fresh,

396
00:41:00,610 --> 00:41:05,000
partly because the words the details he brings in, I think.

397
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:10,100
So in a sense, she's looking for something different and which is kind of makes it slightly more of a crisis, say,

398
00:41:10,100 --> 00:41:15,080
for white heterosexual males who are writing poetry because there's been, you know,

399
00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:18,830
several hundred years that what you do now to make your poetry sound fresh.

400
00:41:18,830 --> 00:41:29,120
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.

401
00:41:29,120 --> 00:41:33,140
So, I mean, I became aware of that at some point that I've got a head start.

402
00:41:33,140 --> 00:41:34,400
So it might come with background,

403
00:41:34,400 --> 00:41:45,290
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.

404
00:41:45,290 --> 00:41:49,940
And that was a positive note we were looking for. And I think by my reckoning,

405
00:41:49,940 --> 00:41:55,400
we've got time for maybe one more question and then we should we've had a request for

406
00:41:55,400 --> 00:42:02,120
sing so and perhaps we can have requests for one more poem for Daljit to sing us out.

407
00:42:02,120 --> 00:42:11,760
Oh, sorry. There was one other.

408
00:42:11,760 --> 00:42:21,300
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.

409
00:42:21,300 --> 00:42:25,680
And if that's the case, could you comment on that?

410
00:42:25,680 --> 00:42:32,040
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,

411
00:42:32,040 --> 00:42:38,430
trying to connect different cultures or coming from one culture, writing for another one.

412
00:42:38,430 --> 00:42:39,490
Yeah, that's a good question.

413
00:42:39,490 --> 00:42:46,350
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.

414
00:42:46,350 --> 00:42:52,650
And sometimes words slangy say with very formal diction or Punjabi words with English.

415
00:42:52,650 --> 00:43:00,150
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,

416
00:43:00,150 --> 00:43:07,140
in harmony, as it were, in a kind of musical kind of, you know, enjoyment and a kind of frisson.

417
00:43:07,140 --> 00:43:14,280
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,

418
00:43:14,280 --> 00:43:17,680
ordinary Indians in Britain trying to marry the two together.

419
00:43:17,680 --> 00:43:20,670
And I want one way was to the words themselves,

420
00:43:20,670 --> 00:43:27,780
how they sat together in a line and sometimes in these collocations two words together, the combinations.

421
00:43:27,780 --> 00:43:30,150
So that felt really exciting to match.

422
00:43:30,150 --> 00:43:38,490
I think that's the main reason why I found poetry exciting because that immediate kind of collaboration and the immediate kind of,

423
00:43:38,490 --> 00:43:43,950
um, kind of relationship you get with words you say like that.

424
00:43:43,950 --> 00:43:51,850
Um, yeah, maybe that's that's one way to answer it isn't that thing.

425
00:43:51,850 --> 00:43:56,830
Given that that was a beautifully crisp question and a beautifully responsive if you go time,

426
00:43:56,830 --> 00:44:03,220
just for one very short question, ELAC is making a very, very small question mine.

427
00:44:03,220 --> 00:44:07,630
Oh, even better. So we'd like sing-song from you.

428
00:44:07,630 --> 00:44:13,090
I thought number forty nine. OK, I hope it's one of those that I have to read.

429
00:44:13,090 --> 00:44:17,200
Are there any you can't read. There's two or three.

430
00:44:17,200 --> 00:44:21,190
Each one of the boys is always smiley. Black's ok.

431
00:44:21,190 --> 00:44:27,480
Oh thank you. That's for me as well. And a fun voice for between a streetcar wife and a couple others.

432
00:44:27,480 --> 00:44:33,500
Yeah, some of the monologues. Oh, you kind of found the way to say it, but would you be willing to do all this?

433
00:44:33,500 --> 00:44:40,090
Yes. OK, so and then sing song the play the last two in the book.

434
00:44:40,090 --> 00:44:46,060
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.

435
00:44:46,060 --> 00:44:51,400
So I realise we split them into two poems. Very, very exciting to me.

436
00:44:51,400 --> 00:44:56,440
My parents had a shop so it's like kind of a thing got to play on it.

437
00:44:56,440 --> 00:44:57,820
Right. It's interesting thinking.

438
00:44:57,820 --> 00:45:04,360
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.

439
00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:11,410
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

440
00:45:11,410 --> 00:45:18,760
of the ugliness of poetry in such kind of positive terms to have this year and also on.

441
00:45:18,760 --> 00:45:26,620
Yes, on the relationship. Yes. If you add in a poem like which one are funny.

442
00:45:26,620 --> 00:45:29,340
So all these smiley blacks.

443
00:45:29,340 --> 00:45:40,830
The Orient Sun zaps us out of our suburban CPA for the revamped Brownfield, where the snipped red ribbon disarms are badly lumped.

444
00:45:40,830 --> 00:45:53,730
Blacks gum shelter in here blooms the pakhi who salutes the mayor, then summons rockets of confetti parachuting on our regiments of speakers,

445
00:45:53,730 --> 00:46:05,390
tricksters, clowns, crowds, drummers and Strummer's shows of us streaming through the gates and our native gaze.

446
00:46:05,390 --> 00:46:15,380
Bullets of light phosphor the applauding leaves and inspect the plastic petticoat parade of the plastic petticoat parade

447
00:46:15,380 --> 00:46:25,340
of saplings as the grass lets go with a to and fro of Mexican waves for masked children who kick from orange and cherry,

448
00:46:25,340 --> 00:46:31,850
Swing's diving with some in the spongy sandpit for hide and seek.

449
00:46:31,850 --> 00:46:36,260
All leaders improvise with a massive khaki ground sheet.

450
00:46:36,260 --> 00:46:43,120
So we may feast on our picnic of chapattis and patties and ts.

451
00:46:43,120 --> 00:46:51,970
A humble looking man splits a bomb shaped Chuncheon, leaking its syrup with a low cast, a smiling woman,

452
00:46:51,970 --> 00:47:01,020
an ordinary, drowns his lover with almond puffs through dandelion clocks that fluff her thread of buttons.

453
00:47:01,020 --> 00:47:08,760
The pakhi with his totem wand at the heavens puts up a stark of clouds.

454
00:47:08,760 --> 00:47:17,780
They outlined nations of the globe so that sky is a screen on which the world is marked.

455
00:47:17,780 --> 00:47:21,860
He's warned now joins each nation world,

456
00:47:21,860 --> 00:47:33,020
a flown pink commingling of clouds on our patch in Slough whirling so we wage the growth of continents at once.

457
00:47:33,020 --> 00:47:45,960
Svedberg dispersed the smithereens airshows platooning through the cumulous kissing continents as butterflies aspire to kaleidoscope the sky.

458
00:47:45,960 --> 00:47:55,260
Gaping, we gasp on gases of air that blast, the darkest haunted reaches of our afeared hearts.

459
00:47:55,260 --> 00:48:01,860
One of us juggling Skittles at the flush of this Oceanus borderless hugging a

460
00:48:01,860 --> 00:48:09,360
tree is a stone's throw away from our ancestors every day just there in Africa.

461
00:48:09,360 --> 00:48:14,700
One of us places where everywhere. Welcome to stay.

462
00:48:14,700 --> 00:48:20,660
One of us suavely is that cloud for England and India.

463
00:48:20,660 --> 00:48:32,900
Is the stamp of our arrival, our passport, this part, this hologram of home, we holer the flag of our dance.

464
00:48:32,900 --> 00:48:45,050
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.

465
00:48:45,050 --> 00:48:50,490
I'll probably make it much cleaner for first time now. But at that point, I want to make sure it wasn't clean.

466
00:48:50,490 --> 00:48:57,870
It didn't quite make sense. So, yeah, so in the fourth verse, I do imagine what I in my head was.

467
00:48:57,870 --> 00:49:02,520
I imagine she she runs an Internet arranged marriage company, the wife.

468
00:49:02,520 --> 00:49:08,740
So she's got this kind of business, modern business upstairs and she runs a corner shop downstairs.

469
00:49:08,740 --> 00:49:17,620
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,

470
00:49:17,620 --> 00:49:23,020
but when nobody in I do the lock because up the stairs my newly arrived,

471
00:49:23,020 --> 00:49:29,920
we shared each party we shared in the jitney after we have made love like running through Putney.

472
00:49:29,920 --> 00:49:37,960
When I returned with my beanie untied, the shoppers always point to the crime scene where you pin your lemons, limes,

473
00:49:37,960 --> 00:49:46,490
your bananas are planted in this dirty to the floor and a little bit of mob university Indian shop on the whole Indian road.

474
00:49:46,490 --> 00:49:52,580
Above my head high here, the ground, as my wife on the Web is playing with the mouse,

475
00:49:52,580 --> 00:49:59,130
when she netting to count on a sequel of a site, she took them for the meat added cheese price.

476
00:49:59,130 --> 00:50:10,860
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.

477
00:50:10,860 --> 00:50:14,790
And he told me about daddy, my bride, she have a red crewcut.

478
00:50:14,790 --> 00:50:16,710
And she went out and sorry,

479
00:50:16,710 --> 00:50:24,630
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.

480
00:50:24,630 --> 00:50:31,440
Shop always point and cry. Hey, where you been? The milk is out of date and the bread is always stale.

481
00:50:31,440 --> 00:50:38,340
The things you have on offer, you have never got in stock in the first Indian shop on the whole India road.

482
00:50:38,340 --> 00:50:45,380
Late in the midnight hour, when you shoppers are up quiet, when your precinct is concrete, cool,

483
00:50:45,380 --> 00:50:52,080
they come down whispering stairs and sit on my silver stool from behind the chocolate bars.

484
00:50:52,080 --> 00:50:58,730
We stare past the half price window signs at the beaches of the UK, many brightly moon.

485
00:50:58,730 --> 00:51:06,430
From these to each night, she say, how much do you charge for the moon, baby?

486
00:51:06,430 --> 00:51:12,460
From these to each night, I say, is half the cost of you, baby.

487
00:51:12,460 --> 00:51:19,150
From his rule each night, she say, how much does that come to baby from this tool each night?

488
00:51:19,150 --> 00:51:37,950
I say is priceless, baby. That was marvellous.

489
00:51:37,950 --> 00:51:44,576
Thank you so much and thank you, everyone, for such a stimulating discussion.