Pushkin. Now I like the different seasons – especially spring, a season filled with hope. As a marginalised community, it’s about supporting each other to develop craft and be raw and vulnerable. Her awards include a Cholmondeley award and the Guyana poetry prize. (“Outdooring”, Bloom, 62-63, 2004). Poem of Shape and Motion #1 by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter, one of my favourite ever poets. It’s combative in tone, and revels in its language. She was born in London to Guyanese and Grenadian parents, grew up in Guyana and currently lives in Leeds. There needs to be data – how are writers reviewed? February is Black History Month, and to celebrate the contributions black poets have made, and continue to make, to the richness of American poetry, we asked twelve contemporary black poets from across the country to choose one poem that should be read this month and to tell us a bit about why. I think this introduces teenagers here to a diversity of modern voices such as Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Carol Ann Duffy, Daljit Nagra, John Agard, Simon Armitage. Apart from diversity in terms of theme and readership, West Indian poetry for children is characterized by its high variety of genres. Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo set up the the Brunel international African poetry prize in 2012 for emerging African poets, because she felt they were absent from contemporary literature. How did you start out in poetry?I’ve always been fascinated by language. That was quite profound, knowing that these poems now exist without me, and are part of a dialogue. The whole object of making albums for me was to get my poetry out to people, which worked. It’s for the ordinary, the unspoken for, the undocumented. It felt illuminating that poetry could be colloquial and dynamic and engaging. Wicked World! Roger Robinson’s success as the first black British poet to win the TS Eliot prize in 2020 is something that should be both applauded and interrogated. That’s smaller. Have you felt compelled to write anything about our current chaotic times?In terms of the current politics of race, I’ve been writing about that already, so I don’t feel a need to create new work as such. I come from a rebel generation of activists who wanted to change the country, and it feels like this new generation are going in again. But in response to current moments I’ve been mostly reading, watching documentary films, trying to learn as much as I can. Who are the poets you turn to?I’ve been looking to poets coming up behind me, like Gboyega Odubanjo and Belinda Zhawi, and poets ahead of me, like James Berry, who was the first black poet to anthologise black British voices. Quote a line from a poem of yours that you think best reflects our times.One line couldn’t do it, but my poem Liesense Fi Kill comes to mind, which I recorded on my More Time album [released in 1999]. Why do we turn to poetry in challenging times?The rhythm and musicality of poetry is more direct in its appeal to the human heart and spirit. What kinds of challenges have you faced as a black poet in the UK publishing industry?When I first started, it was a closed shop. The lecture was on “ethnic literature in the UK and the USA” and one of the poets that Prof. Přibylová introduced to us was Benjamin Zephaniah. After further analysis of poems by James Berry, John Agard, Grace Nichols, Valerie Bloom and Benjamin Zephaniah, I concluded that by mixing Standard English with Creole, the authors broadened their choice of literary devices, created special rhythmic schemes, imitated the speech of Caribbean people, saved Creole from obsolescence and promoted West Indian heritage: “Done baby, done cry, yuh madda gone a fountain Literature’s a tapestry which has been a white cotton cloth bleached of other narratives. Chingonyi is poetry editor for The White Review and an assistant professor at Durham University. Which poets do you turn to?Elizabeth Jennings for wisdom and humanity. Malika Booker’s poetry collections include Pepper Seed and Breadfruit, and she is featured in Penguin Modern Poets 3. I wasn’t allowed that complexity, just given this unimaginative pathology. In 2017, Peepal Tree won the Clarissa Luard Award for Independent Publishers, which recognizes excellence and creativity in literary publishing. I’d go so far as to say that racism is part of the cultural DNA of Britain. They turned to the book for solace.

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