Q&A with Raymond Antrobus
M: The book centers on language spoken and signed. Can you talk a bit about how this theme and tension is enacted in these poems? And indeed, how it might relate to the epigraph, "There is no telling what language is inside the body"?
R: That epigraph is a mishearing of a Robin Coste Lewis line, "there is no telling what languishes inside the body". It wasn't even intentional and I hadn't known I had heard it wrong until I did a reading with Lewis and was told I'd heard it wrong. I really wasn't trying to be clever! Still, it captures perfectly what it is like to have spoken, signed and written language available to you. My entry into being a (public) poet was Slams, open mics and the London Spoken Word in the mid-2000's. I'd noticed the hierarchy there between "stage" and "page" poets, which reminded me of the world I was navigating at school (the Deaf and hearing school). In the hearing school I once had an English teacher accuse me of plagiarism because she couldn't believe that I was capable of writing well, given my background and how academically disengaged I must have seemed to her. I think ableism, race and class played into her assumptions, so this misheard quote perfectly encapsulates the assumptions that one can make from language, how it's used and how different it can be experienced internally (thought) outwardly (speech) and physically (body language / sign). In terms of themes and tensions in the book, following the epigraph, the first poem in 'The Perseverance' is called 'Echo' which sets up the reader to think about sound, but it also sets up the idea of repetition. Yes, repetition is a poetic device used in a lot of the poems but it is also something true to the experience of being D/deaf or hard of hearing in a hearing world. You're often asking people to repeat themselves. Growing up I've had numerous people tell me "I don't look deaf", as many people tell me "I don't look Black", as many people tell me I don't look like a "poet" etc, but that epigraph is the sentiment I want to respond with to all of those people now and I want to keep saying it and showing it in as many ways as I can. M: "The Perseverance" is the name of a bar in the title poem (which I loved). And, of course, it serves the book on multiple figurative levels. Was it intuitive choosing the title, or did you play around with others before you arrived at it? R: I had actually finished the book with a different title. Live readings are a big part of my process and 'The Perseverance' as a poem seemed to resonate with people, so I recognized the power of the poem when I saw and felt it connect with audiences at readings. The more I thought about the word "Perseverance", its etymology as well as its dictionary meanings, it just worked on every level and felt immediately like the right title for the book, so I ditched the other title, which I can't even remember now what it was...
M: This is the book's American debut with Tin House. It was released in 2018 with Penned in the Margins. You've lived with it out in the world for a few years now--what is it like seeing it released anew stateside? And are you at work on the next book?
R: The world was very different in 2018 and 2019. I was touring the book around the UK and Europe for most the year after it was published as well as visiting schools and universities. I had been dreaming about publishing 'The Perseverance' years before it finally happened, but I do feel like a different person and poet now. I'm still proud of 'The Perseverance', I was in my late twenties when the book was finished, I'm 34 now, so I'm also quite removed from it and I like to think that my work has matured more now. I'm married to a US citizen now and I'm living in the US, which is a foreign country to me, and I have been writing all the way through that transition. My next book will be out with Tin House in November this year; it's called 'All The Names Given' and rehashes a bit of ground that was explored in The Perseverance, but focuses more on my mother, Englishness and what intimacy looks and feels like through that lens.
M: Are there any works of art or texts with which you feel The Perseverance is in conversation?
R: Great question! Yes, have you seen Christine Sun Kim's work? She's a sound artist as well as a visual artist, but so much of her work has been equally cathartic as it has been intellectual to me. That is something explored more in my next book too, as she inspired a form that I use throughout that book. I saw a Frank Bowling exhibition at the Tate and that shifted something in my language. I wrote the poem 'I want the confidence of' that same week as I was inspired by the boldness and the energy in the colours that Bowling got out of London, which is often seen as a gloomy landscape. In terms of text, too many to mention them all, but poetically James Berry's 'Hot Earth Cold Earth' and Grace Nichols 'The Fat Black Woman's Poems', academically, 'What The Mind Hears' by Harlan Lane and 'Reading Victorian Deafness' by Jennifer Esmail.
