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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric focuses on the twin topics of microaggressions and racism. In one of her prose poems, her narrator asks, ‘Will you write about [Mark] Duggan?’ Roy MacFarlane met this challenge before me. In The Healing Next Time, a sequence of modern sonnets tracks the wrongful deaths in custody of Black and Mixed Race people from 1969 to 2017. Focused on Mark Duggan, MacFarlane writes, ‘two shots in the arm & chest/a plume of feathers filling the air/He was no angel.’ Similarly, ‘Whilst Searching for Anansi…’ features Mark Duggan and is also consumed with death: a fox, a relationship, sailors. However, where MacFarlane takes on the tone of reportage, I have filled my narrative with dreams, ghosts, conversations and song: Crouched by the fox’s nose, I listen to placate my son. The fox is breathing. Should I leave it here to die? Its fur glistens with drizzle – each breath makes my eyes moisten as though a gospel singer’s voice is rising from the fox’s lungs. Derys blurts, ‘Dad, listen… As you can see, the rhymes loosely follow the villanelle scheme. However, there is no refrain as I felt repeated lines would impede the narrative’s forward momentum. Cwmcarn With ‘Cwmcarn,’ I returned to the poetic form I had used to write ‘The Many Reincarnations…’ whilst also continuing to explore the themes of race, identity and parenthood. Early versions of ‘Cwmcarn’ lacked thematic focus. Reading ‘Mistaken’ by Kwame Dawes, I discovered my missing ingredient: truth. When I first read about Dawes’ brother who ‘stumbled from the cage/they kept him in for a night and a day,’ I came close to crying. Such a troubling confession (fictional or otherwise) spurred me to reveal more of myself on the page. The North London secondary school I attended was full of racist, National Front graffiti. How could I read ‘NF’ on school walls and feel proud to be English? ‘Did my parents//make me Jamaican?/Or was I//by ancestry/African?’ When composing this poem, I found myself trying to emulate the American poet, Carrie Etter. In The Weather in Normal, many of her verses contain short or broken lines that add tension and gloom. I find similar music in the poems of H.D. For example, in ‘Magician,’ we are asked to ‘take colour;/break white into red/into blue/into violet/into green.’ What does it mean? On a semantic level, I’m not sure. The true delight in reading the poem is the stark music. The Baboon Chronicles Whilst painting my bathroom in the spring of 2018, I indulged in my passion for audiobooks. Listening to Richard Matheson’s vampire classic, I Am Legend, gave me the desire to write a piece of speculative fiction about creatures roaming the streets of South Wales. Vampires were replaced with primates and ‘The Baboon Chronicles’ was born. At first, the story was written as a prose poem. I used the form to vent about the racism that 1 7 P O E T R Y W A L E S
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had surfaced with Brexit and the Windrush scandal. As is often the case, it took a magazine rejection for me to recognise the lacklustre nature of this prose poem’s language. Pastor, the chemo isn’t working and I can feel the cancer eating my bones. That’s why I want to ask you about my husband, Sam. You won’t know him because he’s dead. On the night of August 15th, 2002, he did something so full of sin it still haunts me. When he was in hospital afterwards, he told me everything. Below is my final sestina version. The challenge was to keep the conversational tone whilst sticking to most of the sestina’s strictures. I achieved this by using long lines in which I had room to make the line endings read like parts of natural speech. Also, the sestina form invited me to build characters and atmosphere through imagery and anecdote. Pastor, the chemo isn’t working and I’m so tired all the time; it’s as if I’m drunk. At night, I can’t sleep. I feel the cancer eating my bowels and the white of my bones. Sometimes I listen to my husband’s records, especially the blues he recorded with BB King. When I’m woken by the howling baboons, I watch them from my bedroom window. Some look as scrawny as roadkill and I long for my husband, my dear dead Sam. I long for the morning when I am with him again. During the editing of ’The Baboon Chronicles,’ I revisited Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water. This book-length sequence depicts scenes from the lives of victims of the Chernobyl disaster. In ‘Nana,’ a child asks her grandmother, ‘what is radiation?’ There is horror in this simple question. I used a similar tone to lace my narrative with a sense of the macabre. The Weight of the Night The idea for this prose poem came from a BBC Scotland radio play. In this drama, a woman meets her ex-partner in a train station. In the station, she tells him that when they were dating, he raped her during a sex game that went wrong. The play haunted me for years. I have Patience Agbabi and her collection, Transformatrix, to thank for my experiments in narrative sestinas. However, Peter Stavrou (my writing mentor) was right – the sestina was the wrong form for this story. For such a sensitive topic, the flexibility of the prose poem form was ideal. I again found myself drawn to poets who use plain speaking language with devastating effect. In Sixty Sonnets, Ernest Hilbert, under the constraint of 14 rhymed lines, somehow conjures the very tone I was searching for: ‘The past does not fade, nor does it decline;/It merely grows louder, slightly, tone by tone’. I managed to capture some of Hilbert’s music in ‘The Weight of the Night’: You’re sent back to that night – light from her landing crawling over her sheets, the blunt scent of your sweat. There is nothing ostentatious about these words. However, the monosyllabic, halfrhymed ‘blunt,’ ‘scent,’ ‘sweat,’ create the sound of violence: three heavy punches. I have 1 8 P O E T R Y W A L E S

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric focuses on the twin topics of microaggressions and racism. In one of her prose poems, her narrator asks, ‘Will you write about [Mark] Duggan?’

Roy MacFarlane met this challenge before me. In The Healing Next Time, a sequence of modern sonnets tracks the wrongful deaths in custody of Black and Mixed Race people from 1969 to 2017. Focused on Mark Duggan, MacFarlane writes, ‘two shots in the arm & chest/a plume of feathers filling the air/He was no angel.’

Similarly, ‘Whilst Searching for Anansi…’ features Mark Duggan and is also consumed with death: a fox, a relationship, sailors. However, where MacFarlane takes on the tone of reportage, I have filled my narrative with dreams, ghosts, conversations and song:

Crouched by the fox’s nose, I listen to placate my son. The fox is breathing. Should I leave it here to die? Its fur glistens with drizzle – each breath makes my eyes moisten as though a gospel singer’s voice is rising from the fox’s lungs. Derys blurts, ‘Dad, listen…

As you can see, the rhymes loosely follow the villanelle scheme. However, there is no refrain as I felt repeated lines would impede the narrative’s forward momentum.

Cwmcarn

With ‘Cwmcarn,’ I returned to the poetic form I had used to write ‘The Many Reincarnations…’ whilst also continuing to explore the themes of race, identity and parenthood.

Early versions of ‘Cwmcarn’ lacked thematic focus. Reading ‘Mistaken’ by Kwame Dawes, I discovered my missing ingredient: truth. When I first read about Dawes’ brother who ‘stumbled from the cage/they kept him in for a night and a day,’ I came close to crying. Such a troubling confession (fictional or otherwise) spurred me to reveal more of myself on the page.

The North London secondary school I attended was full of racist, National Front graffiti. How could I read ‘NF’ on school walls and feel proud to be English? ‘Did my parents//make me Jamaican?/Or was I//by ancestry/African?’ When composing this poem, I found myself trying to emulate the American poet, Carrie Etter. In The Weather in Normal, many of her verses contain short or broken lines that add tension and gloom. I find similar music in the poems of H.D. For example, in ‘Magician,’ we are asked to ‘take colour;/break white into red/into blue/into violet/into green.’ What does it mean? On a semantic level, I’m not sure. The true delight in reading the poem is the stark music.

The Baboon Chronicles

Whilst painting my bathroom in the spring of 2018, I indulged in my passion for audiobooks. Listening to Richard Matheson’s vampire classic, I Am Legend, gave me the desire to write a piece of speculative fiction about creatures roaming the streets of South Wales. Vampires were replaced with primates and ‘The Baboon Chronicles’ was born. At first, the story was written as a prose poem. I used the form to vent about the racism that

1 7 P O E T R Y W A L E S

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