Martha Sprackland: Congratulations, first of all – you have been chosen as the winner of this year’s White Review Poet’s Prize, for a portfolio of poems I’ve been lucky enough to read, and was very impressed by. Readers of the magazine will find that full portfolio in a forthcoming issue of the White Review, but one poem, ‘The Old Justice’, has been selected for early publication on the website already. This poem, like others in your winning portfolio, is interested in storytelling, in a sort of myth or legend, in what the judges called ‘fabulation’. Are you drawn to the telling or retelling of collective motifs, to legends, the old songs and stories?
 
Fahad Al-Amoudi: Yes, I’ve always been drawn to myth, folklore and gaps in history. There are a few narrative poems in the portfolio that mythologise family histories and legends, sometimes with a moralistic leaning. Some of that comes from my childhood obsessions with Egyptian and Greek myths and my admiration for writers such as Calvino and Márquez whose fabulations influence how I write. I’m also influenced by the Ethiopian poetic tradition that comes before me, which often re-configures idiomatic phrases, folklore, biblical stories and proverbs with playful and expansive uses of language. Solomon Deressa said ‘you can’t divorce the poem from the land’, and I take that approach to my writing. Some poems in the portfolio mythologise ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘London’ as places, hopefully complicating the narrative around them. Maybe they come across a bit melodramatic. I’m not sure.
 
MS: I’m interested in that approach to myth, that use of it. Do you think that poetry has some sort of ‘responsibility’ to maintain or tend to those old stories, somehow? It does seem that we’re drawn to myth, to unpicking it, rewriting it, modernising, blending, adding, subtracting, retelling. Is that the work of poetry, in part? A sort of archivist–curator–up-cycler of our collective stories?
 
FAA: I think all cultural work is engaged with some aspect of archiving and curating but yes, some of my favourite poetry and fiction re-configures and questions inherited knowledge and stories. As with all curatorial work, it’s important to be aware of which stories are being maintained, mutated, marginalised or erased. Poetry has that memorial and elegiac quality to it, which can be a little romantic or sentimental, but I think it helps us not to lose the old stories and make new ones. I think there are also many opportunities for poetry to intervene in places where there is a dearth in the archive. There’s definitely a wider conversation to be had over the relationship between fact, truth and history, but I do really believe that poetry has a place in telling narratives marginalised by colonialism.
 
MS: You must often find in doing that work, that filling of gaps in the record, your work comes into context with, or exists in dialogue with, the work of others. Are there poets you go back to again and again, either for pleasure or in the context of your writing? I ask that question in two parts, but of course those two things often aren’t separate, are they.
 
FAA: Yes, they are definitely linked. The first poets who I felt gave me permission to write in the way I do are Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Rachel Long and Kayo Chingonyi. I also think my work is in dialogue with poets such as Ishion Hutchinson, Lynda Hull, Stephen Sexton, Nick Makoha. I’m a fan of anyone who bends genre. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a hugely important book for me. Anne Carson is someone who I go back to again and again. Dambudzo Marechera does crazy things with time. Anyone who knows me will also say that I don’t shut up about billy woods, a US based Hip Hop artist who has Jamaican and Zimbabwean heritage. Rapping to an instrumental can sometimes look like someone dancing in a straitjacket. woods does so much with the form you forget that he’s contending with structural constraints. 
 
MS: I’ll look him up! I like that description of Marechera as someone who ‘does crazy things with time’. I’m always drawn to anything that plays with timeslip, communication across time, messages from the past and future, and so on. And I suppose part of what we’re talking about is the act of doing that, isn’t it – speaking back from the present to fill that gap in the record, as you say, or speaking forward in time to deliver a message to the future, or to preserve something in readiness for it.
 
You’ve mentioned a fascination with the ancient Egyptian and Greek stories; are there points of time ahead of us, as well as behind us, that interest you? We’re all anxiously peering into the light, aren’t we, when it comes to things like climate change, the aggressive growth of pernicious capitalism, space colonisation, forest loss, etc. How much do you find yourself, and your poetry, imagining the – or rather a – future?
 
FAA: I think history has two faces, the one that looks back and the one that looks to the future. Sometimes it’s unclear whether a story exists in one plane or another. If I described to you a port town on the edge of a desert, its derelict buildings shelled by rain, vast age gaps between generations of its inhabitants, are you imagining something historical, a dystopian future or an image from the news in our present? It’s all about contexts and technologies. I think that our poems and our fiction can comfortably or uncomfortably inhabit all these different eras at once. I’m not saying that I look to the past to get a glimpse at the future, but my work tends just to reimagine the past. The future does interest me but I don’t know how to write it without despair.
 
MS: It’s not easy to think of a substantial body of contemporary work that could reasonably be called ‘utopian poetry’, isn’t it. There are imagined futures, certainly; sci-fi poems, spec-fic poems, posthuman ones. Certainly there are dystopias – I’m thinking of J. O. Morgan’s newish book The Martian’s Regress among others. But I feel instinctively that truly utopian poetry must tend to fall flat. You’ve got the poem sections in More’s Utopia . . . but that’s a while ago! Walcott’s ‘New World’, perhaps – but I wouldn’t say that’s an entirely optimistic vision, or one without cynicism. Are we bad, as poets, at imagining an optimistic future, an eutopia? Or is it that poetry requires dissent, friction, conflict, the worm in the apple, in order to function as poetry?
 
FAA: More’s Utopia was on my mind as well. I’m currently reading Walcott’s collected works so I’m looking forward to ‘New World’! I don’t think poetry requires conflict. There are literary structures that don’t rely on Aristotelian and other Western traditional narrative formulas. Kishōtenketsu is one structure that I’m really interested in at the moment. That being said, the factors you mentioned before of late-stage capitalism, environmental decay and democratic erosion, make it quite difficult to imagine a future where there isn’t serious upheaval. I think what poetry requires most is desire. Whether you’re writing the past or the future, desire seems to me the furnace of a poem.
 
MS: How would you define Kishōtenketsu, for someone – like me – who is coming to it for the first time?
 
FAA: There are some variations of the traditional Japanese Kishōtenketsu but the one that I’m most interested in is the narrative you see often in four-panel comics – introduction, development, turn, conclusion. It pivots around that third-act turn or twist that recontextualises the first two acts. Fans of the Mario franchise will notice this structure in some of the games, and I think it is also used in some forms of four-line Chinese poetry. There is no conflict like you see in most three- and five-act structures and you don’t even have to show that your characters ‘grow’ or change if you don’t want them to. 
 
MS: You mentioned desire, desire as ‘the furnace of a poem’. how do you find poems come to you? This is such a tired old question, isn’t it, for which I can only apologise . . . but I still do find it interesting to know how a poet sits down to write (computer or pencil? Morning or midnight?), and to begin to imagine them in the process of composing the poems I’ve read and enjoyed. I used to find, for a time, that I could only reach that exciting, fluid plane of writing and writing well when I was very hungry, or hadn’t slept particularly well, or was otherwise exhausted. Do you carve out dedicated writing time in the day, in the week?
 
FAA: No need to apologise. It’s definitely the opposite for me. When I’m hungry or tired you can barely get a sentence out of me. I like to carve out time to write, and ideally I like to put myself under time-pressure so that I don’t get stuck in the YouTube vortex. I can’t write unless I’m reading. Reading, listening to music and walking tend to dislodge something in my mind and get the ideas rolling. I’ve got a long list of poem ideas that I’d like to tackle, or poems that I know I need to write. It’s always pen in the notebook first and if I’m outside then I write on my hand. I can’t type the first draft. I associate my laptop with editing so I’ll only open up a Word doc when the poem is ready to be redrafted, etc. Editing in the day, writing at night. I can get in my own way a lot so it helps to separate the two modes.
 
MS: Are you writing in other modes, as well as poetry? And do you find they require a different approach, a different set of tools, a different state of being?
 
FAA: I write short fiction as well and it definitely demands a different approach. In poetry, I like to give myself restraints and structure but with prose that just doesn’t work. If I’m not in the mindset to permit myself to be messy then it becomes difficult. But my prose is just for me. I won’t be inflicting it on anyone.
 
MS: It can be liberating to write – in whatever genre – without the obligation to publish, that’s true. And it opens up a whole new set of questions about writing, doesn’t it: who is it for? Why am I doing it? What does it feel like to write? What is writing? More questions that we have the time or inclination to answer here and today, I’m sure. I’ll ask you this, instead. You’re the Reviews Editor for Magma – tell us a bit about that work. We’ve spoken about gaps, historical gaps, but are there gaps in our reviewing culture, too? In what/who gets reviewed, but also in how we review? Do other places and disciplines do it better?
 
FAA: I feel very lucky to be Magma Reviews Editor, and it’s a cliché but I do really have big shoes to fill taking over from Rob Mackenzie, who has headed up reviews at Magma for a while now. There are definitely gaps in our reviewing culture regarding what gets reviewed, who reviews books and how they are reviewed. Whether other disciplines do it better I can’t say for sure. Poetry is unique as an art in that its practitioners are the critics. A little like in academia. This has an impact on the type of criticism we tend to get in poetry magazines. I’ve had a lot of conversations recently with people about whether more non-poets should be writing reviews and whether the creation of a ‘critic class’ is helpful or not. There’s also the question of how a magazine curates the field of work. The fun of being the Reviews Editor is reading all the pamphlets and collections from the smaller presses. Similarly, I’ve enjoyed reaching out to people who are just starting to develop their critical practice. Magma have supported my new ideas and you’ll start to see the beginnings of a new strategy from the November issue onwards. There’s so much more I’d like to say but maybe this deserves its own discussion.
 
MS: That’s one I’d be very keen to have. Finally, or perhaps almost-finally – is there a pamphlet of yours on the horizon, a collection; or another project coming soon to fruition?
 
FAA: No pamphlet or collection on the horizon. I’m still doing my MA so my focus is on that for now. I just did a project with a couple of brilliant writers, Prerana Kumar and Lydia Hounat, where we wrote poems in response to archive collections in museums. We’re considering collating all the work into a collaborative pamphlet but for now a selection of the poems is up on the Writing Squad website, which is a writing development organisation that works across the North of England.
 
MS: For our eager readers, here’s a link to that project. Finally-finally, before I let you go: do you have a book recommendation for us? Whether it’s new or just new-to-you – something that’s caught you or impressed you recently.
 
FAA: It’s not that recent but I have to shout out The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser and Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort. Currently reading Saba Sams’ Send Nudes which I’m really enjoying as well as Carl Phillips’ new and collected works, Then the War. 
 
I really enjoyed this discussion and I hope we get to meet in person one day to continue it!
 
MS: Yes, let’s – in some optimistic poetry-future! Thanks for chatting with me, Fahad. And congratulations, again, on your win.