Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer, and performer based in London. His poems have been published and anthologized in The Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, Tate, bath magg, Fourteen Poems, Re•creation, and Queerlings. As a Ledbury Poetry Critic, he’s written reviews for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, the Poetry School, Magma Poetry, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and the Poetry Book Society. His poetry has been commissioned by the Royal Society of Literature and Spread the Word.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m still waiting on it to be released (Jan 2025 in US and UK) so perhaps I don’t have yet the retrospective eye that I assure you I crave, and for some reason, thirst at the thought of being able to reflect on. I never really had the fear that I wouldn’t be able to do it. No, the fear was more would it be of quality, and this, is still to be decided and seen.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think dancing led me more neatly to poetry than to the others. I think I can say for years, I’d softly consumed poetry, usually used in voiceovers for dance music. Growing up in the Pentecostal tradition as well, listening to and reading the bible weekly, attending church, and being preached at––one could say there was also a poetic quality to those Sunday sermons. There were some feeble attempts at writing fan fiction where I was the main character, some guy (a peer, a choreographer, a teacher) was a pretend lover, but those, I know now, were just ways to express to myself a queerness that wasn’t being entirely nurtured, even accepted; a queerness that wasn’t being entirely given voice to. It’s no surprise my poems move along such desire lines––in equal amounts of repose, and ecstatic upwellings.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s really a mix of all. Some come quickly, urgently, and have remained mostly unchanged. But I would say that, as I look across my manuscript, many are often poems I wrote, I then forgot about, and then months later remembered because a similar theme or word came up in a new poem I was writing. What would happen then is the new poem would likely cannibalize the old one for its best parts, which is usually a line or two, sometimes just a situation. I do have a notes app that I’ve been keeping for more than 6 years that I call ‘Notes for Poetry’. Sometimes whole poems come from that, or just crucial lines that help a wilting poem revivify itself. Two years ago I started “Notes for Prose”, though this one is not nearly as helpful.
On starting a project: I’m able to have my finger in many different pies. This is how I am though I am not sure if it's conducive to my practice. I can often feel paralyzed trying to think across poetry and prose (I’m a critic as well).
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I remember there being a discourse on Twitter about the difference between a ‘book poet’ or ‘poem poet’, which are funny distinctions. I can’t speak to the validity of the binary, but I can say, I think as I began to see that these poems could be collected into a book, I slid towards being a ‘book poet’. Of course, it is always composed of individual poems, but I quite think I’m a tonal, musical thinker and as what was maybe 8-10 salvageable poems became 30, then 40, I found myself thinking more cosmically about the book, less about what it was saying, and more about how it was sounding itself.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Oh yeah, I love reading in public. I’m a dancer by training so I like lights on me. But, contrarily, I wouldn’t call myself a showy reader really. I actually tend be more or less still and try to channel the poetic energy through my voice, which has a resonance to it. I rarely gesture, and I think people have come to expect of me some more elaborate performance movements as I read, but that would feel to me a great disservice to the poems, which is the medium through which what I feel in the moment comes through. Also, it’s more easy to tell if a line is wrong (untruthful, clunky, out-of-place, too explanatory) when you’re reading it to others.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
What is intimacy? What does it take to really, really be with another human? Versus, what does it take to really be with another human?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Oh I don’t know. Writers and writings are so various. I think writers all do something fundamental though––they tell us who was alive, when, and, most importantly, how.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love it––I’m a high conceptualizer, an ENFP––I daydream, fantasize, theorize. And poems are one way in which I try to bring myself back to the ground, though one might find in my poems a interest, maybe desperation, for horizontal movement. Editors are people on the ground, who are trying to catch you. You know in movies when someone is jumping off a building, but there’s a group of people with a blanket below, trying to catch them like a hammock of sorts?
It's essential for me. I like making messes (but really like crisp finished products) and my editors at Soft Skull Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions, helped me clean up the work. I don’t mean in the language so much (though one can always be tighter) but conceptually, structurally. As someone who didn’t study English/creative writing in a normative way, it was also important for me to feel my editors were teaching me about craft, implicitly or explicitly. This was achieved.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t imitate. Steal.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I move quite fluidly, giving myself permission in critical prose to be as poetic as I need, understanding the conventions of lyric poetry as critical. It’s harder the other way around, but more worthwhile. How to make the rhetoric as interesting (musically or argumentatively) as the bombastic image flying off the handle. But sometimes it’s okay to just make the argument, lose the image, lose the prettiness, lose the glamour, and argue.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Writing this book, when my life was less structured, and I was more financially scant, I could wake up at 7 and write until ten, eleven. That’s when my brain starts to go. But if you do that, even for like two months, so much gets done. Now it’s all over the place. I lecture three days a week, with the other two days essentially for writing. Mondays are bad, I do scroll the most on Mondays! Why though?? I also believe protecting your writing time, as I take from Zadie Smith, is essential, but much more difficult the more responsibility you have to others, students, friends, colleagues. It really is a paradox, you need a life to write about and time away from that life to write about it.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I steal lines and reorganize them from other poets, randomly off my shelf. Though, there are some books that are ripe (and by that, I mean so masterful any line jolts you into saying something) for theft: anything by John Ashbery, lots of Jorie Graham. Louise Glück is harder to steal from materially, but her tone is so impressive (as in it impresses itself on you) that after a couple of poems, when I want to be, and see the value of being, less woo-woo. I am very suggestive person.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Aboniki Balm which is kind of menthol rub.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science, or visual art?
As a choreographer and dancer, dance definitely influences my work implicitly. Contemporary dance, I’d hazard, taught me to ngaf what I write, after having twisted my body into so many forms and shapes.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
SZA and Frank Ocean. Rita Dove –– I read one of her poems every couple of months and am just reminded of how limited my imagination is. And then work towards opening it. Jorie Graham who was recommended to me, Louise Glück who was recommended to me by Amazon, and more recently writers like Christina Sharpe and Carmen Maria Machado
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a book made of mostly sentences. Or entirely.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Definitely a model. I think I could still be one.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I danced first. Well, if I’m being accurate, I did music first, as a trombonist. And then danced. But both of these forms, I felt given to. Writing was the one I didn’t know if was innate in me. Music and Dance were. Writing was something I had to graduate into my life and I’m still figuring out how to do that––
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Like A Ghost I Leave You – Quotes By Edvard Munch
20 - What are you currently working on?
Poems and sentences––I don’t say that to be facetious. Writing a good sentence is so difficult! And I think I have to think of it as that small, the local, to keep the same intensity I’d like my work to have, the same force––Paragraphs, yikes!
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