This week, poet and Editorial Raab Fellow at Poets & Writers, Maya Catherine Popa, interviews award-winning Carcanet poet Kei Miller about his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which has just been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2014 and is currently shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, has a very particular form. Can you tell us a bit about the process of writing this collection? Did the form reveal itself during revision or did you set out to write it this way?
My process is probably a slightly strange one. Unlike other poets I’ve spoken to, I seem to suffer a unique disadvantage: I’m almost never able to write an ‘occasional’ poem. After a book is out, I stop writing poetry completely. This break can last a year at least – sometimes two or more. When I’m ready to write poetry again I begin looking for the large theme to gather or shape the poems. Several of these attempts don’t go anywhere. They are false starts. The poems peter out after a short while. This collection comes out of a false start.
I’d begun writing poems with ‘Nyabinghi’ as a working title. That’s a RastafarI concept. I was immersing myself in RastafarI language and philosophy. But the poems just weren’t working. And then a close friend at the time, James Bridle, infected me with his own fascination with maps. So somewhere along the way, Cartography and RastafarI were swirling around in head at the same time, and inevitably that interaction sparked something. I woke up one morning with the title in my head – The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion – and with the title, the meeting of this two concepts, the basic structure of the book had also revealed itself to me.
How would you describe the evolution (thematic, linguistic, musical) from There is Anger That Moves and A Light Song of Light to The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion?
I’m not sure that there is a clear line of evolution. Or maybe it would take a more perceptive critic to see that line and point it out to me. There was a first book by the way – Kingdom of Empty Bellies. From Kingdom to There is an Anger That Moves, to A Light Song of Light, there might have been a more obvious kind of evolution. To use a cliché I don’t fully believe in – I think with A Light Song of Light, I had found my voice. Or perhaps, the voice I had been developing from the first book had become its most confident self. It felt to me the poems in A Light Song were less narrative than anything I had written before – sometimes more abstract – and yet they definitely weren’t holding themselves back from the reader. So I think I’d achieved a certain kind of balance.
With two characters having a conversation, the new book seems to return to a kind of narrative mode. Of course no story really grows out of their interactions. There is no plot. The poems, individually, are lyrical meditations on a theme. But still, on the surface the book might at first seem to be more narrative which disturbs that clear line of evolution.
But The Cartographer Tries To Map A Way To Zion is also a much more political book. I think. And it doesn’t apologize for its politics or try to make those politics too subtle. I think a lot of writing by black post colonial subjects – in order to be taken seriously – have to hide their politics under subtlety. It makes us seem more savvy and rational and nuanced. But this book isn’t so much interested in burying. Instead it bears witness. Sometimes it bares its teeth and its claws.
As in your previous collection, your most recent collection is concerned with place, as well as lack of place. How did the idea of cartography work as a vehicle for this exploration?
It seemed like a perfect vehicle – cartography being such a complex thing, so fascinating and beautiful and necessary. And yet, a map is such a problematic thing. History implicates it in all manner of colonial wrong doings. And while cartography is itself an exploration of place, the product of cartography – the map – isn’t. As they say – the map is not the territory. So the idea of place and lack of place is always there when we begin to think of cartography as a complicated and essentially political act. Maps are where places are invented and sometimes erased. It’s where countries and territories are established and de-established, expanded or divided up.
Though your work undeniably evokes a Caribbean landscape, you've spoken about wishing to be welcoming to those who are from other places, and perhaps to those who feel otherwise excluded from the societies in which they currently reside. How does this concern enter your poetic practice?
Perhaps Walcott gives the best answer to this question. “The West Indian poet is faced with a language he hears but cannot write because there are no symbols for such a language and because the closer he brings hand and word to the precise inflections of the inner language and to the subtlest accuracies of his ear the more chaotic his symbols will appear on the page […] so his function remains the old one of being filter and purifier, never losing the tone and strength of the common speech as he uses the hieroglyphs, symbols or alphabet of the official one.”
So it affects your poetic practice in terms of how you choose to represent creole words – how you might make them seem more English on the page just so a foreign audience might understand. For instance, it might be more accurate to write ‘Mi case!’ in Jamaican creole, but written like that, a foreign audience might not be able to see that it is a form of ‘Make haste!’
But you know, your poetics and your politics can sometimes argue with each other – and those arguments are fruitful. Recently I’ve been more concerned that this sort of poetic embrace which I’m committed to, this attempt to welcome other audiences, should never lead to a sort of pandering. And also, sometimes the way that language alienates is part of the poetic effect you want to achieve and obviously there are so many times in this book where I want to play with this effect of alienation by language. This might be another way in which this book is a little different. RastafarI communities are often in disputes over land with governments have appropriated from them; what I don’t want to do is to appropriate their language which is one of the last things they have.
Who are some writers who have influenced your recent work?
Denis Wood’s book The Power of Maps was extremely influential, and to a lesser extent, Judith Schlansky’s – An Atlas of Remote Islands. The books I teach of course affect what I write and how I write, because I have to explain to a class how they work. And thinking through books in that way always influences you. So books by Eliot Weinberger and Jamaica Kincaid and Claudia Rankine – all of these have been influencing my recent work.
More Prize News...
Tara Bergin and Sinead Morrissey are on the Irish Times Poetry Now shortlist for This is Yarrow and Parallax. The announcement of the winning collection will be made at the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival on Sunday September 14th in the dlr LexIcon building (new Central Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire).
Gathering Evidence by Caoilinn Hughes is a finalist in the NZ Post Book Awards for Poetry - the only national book awards in New Zealand. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony on
August 27th.
Congrats to our shortlisted poets!
The Carcanet Blog SaleWith every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
All books come with 10% off and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!