Anthony Joseph
Trinidadian born poet, author, lecturer and musician, Anthony Joseph, sat down with bookseller Chloe Blades from his London home to talk about his poetry collection Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury). Have a read of their conversation below where they discuss his autobiographical poems that immortalised the life of his absent father and documented their troubled relationship, the relevance of a sonnet, and the power in sharing the personal. Then, book your tickets to hear Anthony Joseph speak at the upcoming Auckland Writers Festival.
CB: What does a day in the life of Anthony Joseph look like?
AJ: Generally, I wake up relatively early at the moment. I had this habit for many years where I would stay up til 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning writing and working, but at the moment I’m in between books I’m not actually working on anything right now I’m just just clearing my head a bit. So I get up early and go to bed early. In the mornings I have a coffee, go running, come back and have breakfast. Usually, I have a lot of emails from university where I teach at Kings so wading through student emails and then in the afternoon if I’m lucky I’ll go to a record shop.
CB: Where’s your favourite record store?
AJ: There’s a chain of shops called Flashback that I like, they’ve just got really good, honest prices. I go there, not as regular as I used to, but that’s my meditation.
CB: Who’s that on your shelf behind you?
AJ: This is a really interesting one, this is an African pianist - amazing spiritual jazz musician. It’s called the Spirit of Ntu by Nduduzo Makhathini. I’ve been in contact with him recently too to see if he’d work with me on my next album.
CB: How do you stay awake til 4 or 5 in the morning? I don’t know how you do that!
AJ: That’s when I like to write, it depends what I’m working on - I do most of my creative work in that time. If I’m writing poetry that’s the time where everything is quiet and I can listen to some music and just get into it and work and work and work. I enjoy the process. I enjoy the quietness, the stillness and sort of melancholy tiredness, it helps me. But if I’m editing essays or poems I do it during the day. I like to seperate the process between creating and editing. I find that I need a more steady logical hand in the day to do the editing.
CB: How do you set yourself up to get into a creative headspace?
AJ: It depends, if I’m working on a book which invariably I am then I kind of know what I want the outcome to be, so I work towards the outcome, if that makes sense. I know that if I’m writing a novel it’s going to take me about 4 years, if I’m writing a collection of poetry it probably takes the same amount of time. So it starts with an idea and I always think in terms of collections and objects rather than one poem here, one poem there, I’m always thinking of the broader picture. I kind of fall in love with what I’m doing. It’s about love, it really is - if you love what you do you can’t wait to get to it. I guess that’s how I set myself up, I fall in love with the process and the thing that I want to do. It calls me and draws me to it. I’m eager to get to it and get back to it.
CB: Is that how you felt for Sonnets for Albert? Were you in love with the idea of going back on the memories to create this collection?
AJ: I love my Dad, you know, that was part of it. I love my Dad regardless of the fact that he wasn’t a great father, but there was something loveable about him. So I wanted to do this for him. For years I’ve been thinking about the lives of people like him, the lives of Caribbean people who live a whole life and we never hear about them.
No one knows what these lives are like, everything is so Eurocentric. Biographies are about famous middle-age rich white dudes, a lot of biographies are about that.But never about the life of an ordinary man in Trinidad, who’s a bit of a bad father. I felt it was important for me as a Caribbean writer to document that kind of life and to be a historian and biographer - to fill the gaps of what was missing because there’s not a lot of it out there.
CB: What was the catalyst for composing Sonnets for Albert?
AJ: The catalyst - the actual point when I decided I was going to write - was when I’d come back from Trinidad from his funeral to London and I was just compelled to write, not about the funeral per se but the act of going there. It was something about making that journey to go to Trinidad and the moment of arriving, that’s the first poem in the book. I started writing about leaving London. It was a strange thing that I’d gone to the funeral, come back home, and then started writing about leaving home to go to Trinidad. It was a bit strange, but I started writing and that became the catalyst; the memories of going back to the funeral and then I tried to sort of ride the wave of memories that came and I just remembered fragments and wrote them down.
So the order of the poems in the book is the order in which the memories that I had with him came back to me. I think around that time too I went to China to do a residency and I was working with an American /Mexican poet and she’d just written a crown of sonnets for her late-grandfather and I thought, yes, that’s what I want to do - write sonnets for my father as an attempt at writing a crown of sonnets.
CB: Why sonnets?
AJ: The sonnet is the perfect poem. It’s short enough that you can memorise it but long enough to be substantial and to really have an impact on you emotionally. It’s a powerful form, it’s resilient, it resists, it’s malleable and you can shape it and take risks with it in ways you can’t take with other forms like sestinas or villanelles.
But with the sonnet, if you understand what the basic components are, you can work with them and make them malleable to fit you. The sonnet also suits experiences that are high in emotional content, it suits really emotional things like love and death. It suits these big ideas and it allows you to argue with the ideas or argue with the subject. It allows you to put forward an idea, reject the idea, and come to a new conclusion. And my father, because he was such a complex character, and my relationship with him was so complex, it was a good form because I could argue with him and my memory of him.
CB: How does it feel having poems that are as private and vulnerable as these published for the world to read?
AJ: I think the personal is the universal and I learned that many years ago, that the things we tried to hide and the things we would rather keep private are the things that make great literature. I found that out in LA. I was doing another residency and the professor that invited me brought me to her class and she invited me to read a poem to her class, and I said I don’t have any of my books or poems with me I only have my journal. She said just open the journal and read something from it and I said no, this is my private thoughts and ideas that aren’t even poems yet. She said no, just read it, the personal is universal. I read it and it was profound just bearing your soul letting people access a sort of raw part of you and I realised then that the best work is really honest.
That’s why you’re affected, you know, you maybe haven’t had the experience of having a Caribbean father but you can get into it because it’s honest. The only thing that I’m reluctant to do is put anything in there would hurt anybody in my family.
CB: Your poem Breath reads, “When I hear my father dead I flew ten hours into the sun” and in Shame II you say “Everything is symbolic in literature” - did it feel like you were flying out of darkness when he died?
AJ: All literature is symbolic and in dialogue with other literature. When my father died though it was November, so England was getting dark and grey, and so I really was flying into the sun. But there’s something in there that reminds me of the myth of Icarus, there’s something in that, but it’s also in correspondence with a poem by Linton Kwesi Johnson who begins a poem with his father in a similar way - he says something like when I hear my Daddy dead… I just loved the rhythm of that so I used the form.
CB: Of the poems you’ve written about your father which one’s the most revealing?
AJ: I think, one of the more difficult poems to write and still read is called El Socorro. That’s revealing in a way because it’s a memory I have of visiting my Dad in the last months of his life. He’s living as a bachelor and what was revealing about that was he was dying at that point, but I don’t know if he knew. Or maybe he knew and didn’t say. But there’s something in that poem about that and also the fact that after he died my step mother asked me to come and help clear out his apartment and I couldn’t do. It captures his character in a very clear way and my feelings about him.
CB:What was life like in Trinidad compared to how it is when you go back now?
AJ: I grew up quite comfortably in Trinidad , I grew up with my Grandparents. My Dad’s mum and her husband raised me, so I always saw him as my Grandad. We grew up in a middle-class neighbourhood, but when I left a lot of other people were also trying to leave, it was the late 80s and there was a recession so things weren’t great economically.
As a Caribbean person, I don’t know if it’s the same for people in New Zealand, there’s a need to leave. If you’re from a small island or city you feel compelled to leave and go to a big city. Because of colonialism that was double in Trinidad, everyone was feeling that and wanting to go to America or Europe. I got caught up in that but when I go back now people are trying to get back in and stay there, it’s a big change. The other changes of course are that my Mum is gone, my Dad is gone, my Grandmother’s gone, and my Grandfather’s gone, so I have a new engagement with the space. Although it’s home it’s not where I live. It’s home but it’s not home.
CB: What’s your proudest achievement?
AJ: I don’t know if you can say having children is a proud achievement, but having children? I have two daughters that I am proud of and I love but I don't know if I can call them achievements…
CB: I think you can, they’re a product of you and their Mum… you’ve raised them…
AJ: They’re healthy and clever and intelligent and beautiful, I guess it would be them. As a writer, it’s winning this prize, the T. S. Eliot - yes, it’s interesting.
CB: Has it sent you on a trajectory towards more recognition?
AJ: It’s kind of life changing in a good way. It changes the way people perceive you, it’s something you have forever. I had a similar feeling when I got my PhD when I thought wow, I’m a Dr now - this is for life. It’s like a stamp that no one can take away, but also it made me feel like my work here is done. It’s like winning an Oscar for best poem.