Rishi Dastidar
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Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the BBC, Financial Times, New Scientist, Tate Modern and London’s Southbank Centre amongst many others. His debut collection Ticker-tape is published in the UK by Nine Arches Press, a poem from which was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018.
A fellow of The Complete Works, the Arts Council England funded programme for poets of colour, he is a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine, a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective, and won a Word Masala award in 2017. He serves as chair of the London-based writer development organization Spread The Word, and teaches for the Poetry School. |
Mini Interview (2019)
Your poetics?
You will forgive me struggling with this question, because I always do: but at root, what I really like doing is putting too much – subjects, phrases, energy – into traditional forms (mostly Western) and seeing what happens. I like the sense of the lyric poem almost breaking with the strain of trying to encompass the world in it. And this tallies with the subjects I seem to keep circling back to writing about: capitalism, economics, technology and politics. I do write about other subjects too, and sometimes in calmer tones too, but the poems that feel most like me are those which take on the wider world in a form that looks familiar at first glance, but perhaps isn’t.
Your influences?
I started with German poet Durs Grünbein, and so I retain a fondness for those poets who foreground the urban experience. Frank O’Hara, of course; also Vikram Seth, Daljit Nagra, Wendy Cope, August Kleinzahler, Michael Hofmann, Jo Shapcott, Maggie Nelson; and if it’s not too grand to claim them, the metaphysical poets, Auden, Pushkin too.
Why is the Matwaala fest and collective relevant and needed?
Because until that glorious day when people start to realise and accept that writers of colour are not one homogenous bloc, all pursuing the same concerns, it falls to bodies like Matwaala to remind the world that poetries from around the world are also diverse, full of their own traditions, and well worth hearing in all their multiplicity .
You will forgive me struggling with this question, because I always do: but at root, what I really like doing is putting too much – subjects, phrases, energy – into traditional forms (mostly Western) and seeing what happens. I like the sense of the lyric poem almost breaking with the strain of trying to encompass the world in it. And this tallies with the subjects I seem to keep circling back to writing about: capitalism, economics, technology and politics. I do write about other subjects too, and sometimes in calmer tones too, but the poems that feel most like me are those which take on the wider world in a form that looks familiar at first glance, but perhaps isn’t.
Your influences?
I started with German poet Durs Grünbein, and so I retain a fondness for those poets who foreground the urban experience. Frank O’Hara, of course; also Vikram Seth, Daljit Nagra, Wendy Cope, August Kleinzahler, Michael Hofmann, Jo Shapcott, Maggie Nelson; and if it’s not too grand to claim them, the metaphysical poets, Auden, Pushkin too.
Why is the Matwaala fest and collective relevant and needed?
Because until that glorious day when people start to realise and accept that writers of colour are not one homogenous bloc, all pursuing the same concerns, it falls to bodies like Matwaala to remind the world that poetries from around the world are also diverse, full of their own traditions, and well worth hearing in all their multiplicity .