Left: Rishi Dastidar’s Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak.
Right: Gita Ralleigh’s empirical.
Back in March, 26er Gita Ralleigh got in touch with us to share that her new poetry pamphlet, empirical, was being published at the end of the month by Braag Press. The pamphlet explores immigrant life, domesticity and motherhood through a series of lyric poems and narrative fragments, including several ghazals, and has already received glowing reviews.
When we spoke, Gita mentioned how much she was enjoying reading fellow 26er Rishi Dastidar’s warm and witty new collection Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak. On a whim, I asked how well she knew Rishi, and whether the two might meet and chat about their new publications.
Just 2 weeks later, I opened my inbox to this…
GR: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak feels infused with lightness – your trademark wit of course, but also a new tenderness and a playful approach. Were you having as much fun writing as we are reading?
RD: It’s funny that this book is perceived as lighter than previous ones. I’ve always had gags, though I appreciate that setting poems in war zones, and talking about the end of the world might not scream levity. The earliest poem emerged around 2016/17, so this book is a gathering around a set of moods. I thought the poems were more despairing than a first read might suggest, but through editing with Jane Commane at Nine Arches Press, I was persuaded that the book is more optimistic than I initially imagined. I dodged the question. I’m always having fun when writing poems, even the bleak ones!
GR: Yes, writing about the climate crisis (Neptune’s Projects) or colonialism (Saffron Jack) makes it difficult for some to appreciate your excellent gags! I find it hard to keep joy on the page through the graft of rewriting – how do you do it?
RD: I don’t think of writing and redrafting poems as ‘graft’, in the sense of what grafting is, a.k.a. the day job. However frustrating the process of wrestling poems into shape might feel, it’s nothing compared to rewriting a slide deck for a board presentation the next morning. When you have that experience, mucking around with a stanza break or moving a bit of punctuation around is gravy. I know as a writer that if a poem is going through 17 to a gazillion drafts, I’ve probably killed it. Move on, attack the next poem. This stuff should be play. If it’s not fun at some level, why bother?
GR: Your opening poem,‘Whiteboard’ as well as the book’s title, makes me wonder if there is joy in embracing transience?
RD: I’ve always leaned into the idea of trying to write into posterity, to leave a little dent in the face of the world. Turns out, letting that go means you get somewhere more interesting. Transience is an essential feature of our times as well. How much can you worry about the permanent in the age of the infinite scroll? To an extent, everything is writ in water.
GR: Does copywriting allow you to approach poems without an overly precious attitude? Are you lightly tethered to your idea – a balloon, bobbing at the string?
RD: I’ll quote Steve Stretton, the most inspirational creative director I ever had the pleasure to work for: “Take the work seriously; don’t take yourselves seriously,” was his mantra, and if I have anything close to an artistic credo, it’s that. I take my role as a fool in poetry seriously, which means holding things lightly. But I am a child of capitalism. Don’t like this ware I have to offer? Another one will be along in a minute! Once you’re trained to come up with new ideas, it gets addictive. Magpie eyes are suited to poetry, let’s embrace that.
To those eyes, a number of poems in empirical have a slyly political bent – in the Churchill poem, stronger than sly. How important is it that politics comes through in your poems?
GR: To misquote Terry Eagleton, ideology is most effective when invisible. All poems are political in their own way, including personal/ domestic poems. I think of Solmaz Sharif’s essay, ‘The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure’:
A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.
He added: What is political about this moment?
I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.
The Churchill poem began as an erasure of Hansard. I like the poem as a container to place what troubles us, including history, giving it shape or form. Can we talk about form? Ghazals, reverse ghazals, an abecedarian, triolets – what do they add to your poetics? Is there a form you’ve yet to master?
RD: Last one first: loads! I’ve only done one standalone sestina, and I struggle to make villanelles come to life. If you have a form, you aren’t faced with a completely blank page – you know to get from A to B. The magic is to be diverted via Z, an umlaut and five semi-colons. By using something that’s been around ‘forever” what new thing can I make? Can it be both of now and timeless? There are practical considerations too. I’m lazy, but with five lines, thanks to the magic of a triolet, I have an eight-line poem. Who doesn’t enjoy that sleight of hand?
Can I throw the form one back? There’s many delicious ghazals in empirical. What do they do that free verse doesn’t?
GR: The Hindi/Urdu ghazal is a poetic form I heard often growing up, both spoken and sung. When I discovered the English ghazal, it felt familiar, in its songlike refrain and expansiveness. A ghazal’s couplets wander, like the Japanese zuhitsu, or list poem. I loved your poignant ‘Reverse Ghazal Daguerreotype’ and want to steal it.
RD: Absolutely, go ahead! Relatedly, in a number of your poems a striking form of ‘blockiness’ recurs, say in ‘Manhattan’ and the title poem? What are you showing us with these arrangements?
GR: You’ve said that poets are list-makers. ‘Manhattan (2001)’ is made up of fragmented memories of 9/11, when I lived in New York. ‘empirical’ is inspired by the film Dahomey , on repatriation of historic artefacts. Perhaps the blocks are Post-it notes, another form of list-making?
RD: The magic of Post-its strikes again. Another observation I had was that your poems have a warmth and tenderness towards the culture of ‘inbetweenness’ we both grew up within. Was it a conscious process to access that?
GR: ‘Inbetweenness’ is definitely a thread in my work. I’m conscious that the intergenerational moments I archive may become relics of the past, given prevailing political currents.
Also on the archive, I note that digital afterlives, ghosts and selfhood, recur in Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak. Is there a contradiction in that the digital world feels ephemeral, and yet ghosts of digital presence persist beyond our real lives? Are we all immortal now?
RD: Ha! Not yet, despite tech bro fever dreams. That contradiction is more a truth we’re beginning to collectively grasp. Things that seem throwaway are not; platforms meant to be insignificant and trivial are not; metaphors that suggest lightness (clouds are heavy, all that water vapour!) are not. So, it’s unsurprising that the digital ‘others’ we’ve been building for the last 25 years or so might come back to, bluntly, bite us.
That is not to lose sight of the fact that the internet has been a liberating place, where you can shed the limitations of the physical world. But making that demarcation now feels passé. The internet used to be a separate space, then a layer on top of reality. We shouldn’t be surprised that it would become reality. And yet here we are.
– Gita Ralleigh and Rishi Dastidar
The Observer’s Poetry Book of the Month, Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak is available from Nine Arches Press.
You can find Gita’s “rich and rousing” empirical at The Braag Press.