SHANNAN

First, it is astounding that these are your first published poems. You have a deeply inventive grip on blending the absurd with a simple, sincere story. I love how you constantly play with many degrees of separation in the surreal and mesmerizing language here. There is the separation of vision and object. “A Stenographer Tries to Finish a Sentence” (brilliant title!) begins by asking us to “look, the tree outside is / just a tree….” Distance is established between the self and what is perceived. Later on, you write, “when you were looking for / syllable, I was a whole chord….” The distance between reality and perception becomes romantic, perhaps capital-R Romantic, and the poem flourishes into a love poem without one even realizing it. In “The Choosing / Luthier”, we read:

That I could find myself at the end of the driveway, half-nude and giggling

That the darkness in the yard spoke by its own accord

That indeed, between me and the world, there was a horizon

AAAAAgain, the distance and the tension between how one sees oneself in the world and how one might be observed in return (even by your own self later, separated by time). My favorite, perhaps, is the opening of “From top to bottom”, wherein you compare the speaker’s legs to “digits in a typewriter” and then immediately frame that comparison as “so unlike the roots of a tree.” Here, there is tangible (body),  the abstract (typewriter, writing, creativity, poetry) and then the weird but natural (the tree, the world as it is without us).

AAAAI’d love you to speak on anything I’ve noted here, and especially want to know how you frame and write this sense of distance so well.

FRANCIS

It’s super interesting that you pick up on that distancing that’s going on in “Stenographer”. You’re absolutely right, a similar thing is going on in many of the other poems here too. It’s not only a distancing of the vision from the image, or reality from perception as you brilliantly put it, but I’m also really interested in the gap between the sign and the signified, so the word and the thing it represents. Not only the fact that the tree outside, and the word tree, be it the written word as pixels, or graphite on paper, are not the same thing, and not even really representations of each other. Some signifiers seem to have a close relationship to their signified, like say we begin with ‘tree’ which is quite close to its signified. ‘Oak’ might be even closer. ‘The oak in my backyard’ might be closer still. What happens when we get to concepts like ‘language’, ‘dialect’ or ‘communism’? The signifier starts to float, not entirely moored to its own signified. I’m trying to say that there is really no difference between ‘tree’ and ‘dialect’, except maybe qualitative degrees of separation. For example, “Stenographer” starts with ‘look’, when the speaker actually means ‘listen’. And one is likely to encounter both meanings out there in the wild.

AAAAThe stenographer is a deliberate choice for the speaker of this poem, as someone who knows so much about language and who’s very concerned with recording it. Fun fact: a stenographer’s typewriter has functions where you can press several keys at the same time and produce commonly used phrases. These combinations are called ‘chords’ so here again, the word is revealed as a floating signifier, being musical, linguistic, and juridical, all at the same time.

​AAAASo, in that way the poem becomes a frustration between the speaker having this wealth of language that falls short of getting at the world, and because I don’t always want to be depressing, here the thing they’re trying to express is love. I’m going to vaguely gesture at Wittgenstein here, but actually a more important reference point for me would be Ben Lerner (which Karan picked up on in another question), particularly his book The Hatred of Poetry where he outlines this idea that poetry is always going to fail because it’s always going to promise something that can’t be achieved, the inexpressible. I would make the argument that that failure is built into language, and that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It allows for the elasticity of thought and the constant growth of conceptions. To follow Maggie Nelson, the idea of the inexpressible shouldn’t detract us from expression, the opposite.

​AAAAWhile “Stenographer” is concerned with distancing on this level, “Luthier” and that line you mention from “Top to bottom” are concerned with expanding that more towards the particularities of our age, digitalization, and atomization. Really the question one might ask is, are the digits of a typewriter unlike the roots of a tree? Or is there a similarity there? Why do we think they’re different?

​AAAA“Luthier” is kind of my take on a modernist poem in a non-modernist era. I’m no longer concerned with the potential death of God and birth of the machine, but rather concerned with the porous edges between human, digital, and non-human. So much of the maintenance and upkeep of systems has been shunted on to the user, while simultaneously our selfhood has extended beyond the ‘horizon’ of the body (to borrow from Phenomenology, but above all my brilliant friend Grix) into the digital space, into our phones, our selves out there in the world. The freedom that this technology promised has, in many ways, failed us. I’m not even going to get to the social dimensions of this failure, even from a practical point of view, we maintain ‘the superstructure’. How many hours do we spend updating apps, setting up passwords, creating accounts? The maintenance of our selfhoods has become atomized, work estranged, us both isolated and intertwined, enmeshed with digitality. I was here particularly thinking about issues raised in Klaus Maunuksela’s book Manuaali (which currently only exists in Finnish and which I’d love to translate, if there are any publishers reading this, please get in touch!)

​AAAAI’m not only interested in the negative connotations of this enmeshment. You make this brilliant observation of the poem flirting with capital-R Romanticism. It is, but I think it’s doing that in an irreverent fashion – much of my work, and particularly my academic interests have recently been focused towards ecopoetics, after the likes of poets Juliana Spahr, Briony Hughes, and Redell Olsen or philosophers like Timothy Morton. I am also interested in how we are simultaneously enmeshed and distanced from the non-human-non-digital, what a Romantic might call natural. Interestingly, the digital might also be called non-human, and our enmeshment with these two worlds might not be as dissimilar as we think, which I kind of alluded earlier with the typewriter and roots. I see them as foils and mirrors of each other, though in very meaningful ways different. We’re all mixed in, we’re all sticking to each other in a complicated dance, a circle of prayer with conflicting desires. Particularly ‘From top to bottom’ and ‘100 ways to say apocalypse’ try to speak into this enmeshment. I think poetry is particularly great at highlighting the sticky and complex relationships in the world by allowing for gaps and silences, inviting the reader to become aware of the jumps of thought they might be performing while reading.

​AAAAFinally, I’m so excited to be published in this space! The way you’ve set up the magazine makes for a great introduction to any poet as we get to spend a bit more time with them (beyond one or two poems), and it makes for a particularly exciting debut, because I get to talk a little bit about the poems! It’s a wonderful platform you’ve set up, and it’s quite different from anything I’ve come across before.

SHANNAN

Thank you so very much, Francis! I love how much thought is put into these poems. Let’s talk about love poems and moons. You playfully mock both. Though, “mock” might be the wrong word. The way you weave language, it feels more like sitting for dinner with old friends after a long time. Inside jokes, warmth, a sense of fleeting time mixed with memory. And love, moons, trees, children, paper, the sky, flying, flames. I’m thinking first of “A poet tries to find a metaphor or the distance of the moon” which has one of the funniest and also sweetest lines I’ve read opening a prose poem. And then, line after line, you flow from “bulletproof vest(s)”, “luxury developments”,  “italo calvino”, all the way to “cancer”, and then “mercy”. Each jump feels deliberate and surprisingly slow despite each shift, and even more so with each one as you begin to settle into the rhythm you are creating here for the reader. The other prose poems here, “Reading” and “100 ways to say apocalypse” cast a similar spell. As with the moon prose poem, “Reading” features many gems like, “you might be the worst person to start a cult, or the best, because you wouldn’t start a cult” wherein the reasoning is circular, and the narration feels especially direct, as though the speaker of the poem is speaking right out of the parameters of the poem itself.  Would you try to delineate for us your writing process? How do you begin, write, and finish a poem?

FRANCIS

What a brilliant question. I very rarely set out to write a love poem, I usually find myself accidentally having drifted towards love. It seems to be a sort of background hum in everything I do, and the relationship of the speaker to love is very rarely straightforward, but it often ends up being a really powerful central element.

AAAA​There’s sort of two reasons for this. One is that very often the poems I write are started by conversations I have with people, usually people I love, or if not, I often end up loving the people as a result of the conversation. Hence the feeling of inside jokes. The reader is a friend I’m trying to have a conversation with, sometimes quite literally, like in the case of “Reading” which started out as an incredibly long conversation with my wonderful friend, a physicist and visual artist Anna, with whom I’ve collaborated before, on an art book called Entropy published while we were both still living in Finland.

AAAAThe other reason is that I like to come at things pretty slant. I think you’re not wrong in using the word ‘mock’ though weirdly, what you’re describing is a pretty integral part of my perception of the world. Often times, I see the world as a ridiculous place. A lot of this has to do with having been working class/a part of the precariat for practically all of my life, having worked several different professions and interacted pretty broadly with different class experiences as well, all while being interested in how these things operate or what makes them tick. It’s also disappointment in capitalism, in the way we organize leadership and community. We have to laugh so we don’t cry. Love becomes a kind of antidote to despair, so it keeps appearing in the poems, even when I don’t mean for it to, often in funny ways, since it keeps me sane in my life. It’s the most serious thing, but I never take it seriously.

AAAABy which I mean serious things don’t always have to be taken seriously, and often times funny things are indeed very serious. The poem never really makes the joke, the joke is already there, the poem just manages to reveal it, pry it out of the world into language, and open it up further still to find the profoundness in its center. I’m tempted to paraphrase Brennan Lee Mulligan, a comedian and actor: Death is never the punchline but it’s a great setup because it renders everything around itself absurd. Hence there’s an irreverence, even and especially in the seriousness.

AAAATo shift gears and talk about practical process, like I mentioned, a lot of these poems started out as conversations, but even more practically than that, most of the poems here were written during quite a short window of time. I was doing a project for Lauri Supponen, where I tried to send them a poem every day for the duration of December last year. I didn’t manage every day, but I did manage to produce a pile of new poems during the month, many of which were not winners, but some of which were. It was an interesting exercise, and I recommend trying it. The poems didn’t have to be polished, just something that had a time-limit, very low-bar to be considered complete, and that ended up being an excellent rehearsal in letting go of control and perfectionism. And since I was sending them only to a few people whom I love and who love me, I didn’t worry too much about audience reception, I was just trying to have a conversation. Hence, again, the inside-jokes.

AAAALike I said many of these poems were produced during a very short time frame. That’s a pretty good example of how I work in general – I can write very fast. This doesn’t mean the poems start at the point of writing. Very often I’ll be turning around an idea, a line, a set of themes, hell even sometimes a form that I want to try out, in my head for several weeks or months before I actually put anything down to paper. I notice that when I have a line or an idea, I often have to wait for something to happen, for the world to offer me the next piece until I feel like I have enough to start.

SHANNAN

Let’s return to “100 ways to say apocalypse” again. Herein, you connect existential pain with the environmental crisis. There is also the circling terror of the loss of friends and family, of the life we know, memory parting and reforming. Often, the poem feels like small waves. Or a chrysalis breaking apart. Yet there is always an anchor, or a butterfly. So much is carried by lines like: “I would say I’ll come back, but I can’t promise that anymore than I can promise rain.” Despite the desolation inherent here, there is also truth, honesty, and vulnerability. Do you write outwards from memory — say, as a documentary filmmaker might go about capturing a story — or do the poems arise from a desire to mythologize memory?

FRANCIS

What an interesting way to put it! You’re absolutely on the dot in identifying these themes. I was (and am constantly) thinking about the ecocide we’re living through, which has led me to get interested in different kinds of ecopoetics that I alluded to previously. Also, I definitely think something like documentation is going on in a lot of my work, in fact, at some point in my life I considered poetry very much a type of lateral recording, complimentary to other more traditional ways of recording, where I thought it able to put down parallel things to these other forms. To quote Kae Tempest, ‘there are some things I must record, must praise’. I guess here I come back to the love I was talking about earlier.

AAAA​However, I think I’ve recently complicated that to myself. I’ve started to think of the poem less as an encapsulation of something, and more as a temporal locust which functions, yes, in some sense towards the past, but it doesn’t only record it, it also (like you very astutely picked up) mythologizes it. It changes the past. Or rather, perhaps it reveals the inherent instability of the idea of the past. It affects the past is what I’m trying to say. And it affects the future – it, much like many kinds of language can and do, directs and drives perception and thinking. So, to me, the poem is memory, but not so much a mythologization as something to be set in stone, but rather mythologization like oral history might be. Elastic and changing. It’s also speaking into a kind of future. What might be apocalyptic? Maybe not what we expect?

AAAA​The small, and the big. These different levels are all intertwined. Again, I’m bumping up against this idea of enmeshment (thanks Morton). In “100 ways” we also get this enmeshment of languages, dips into Finnish and Portuguese. I think the poem feels deeply nostalgic, though the narrative is fragmented to hell, if there is any narrative at all. I started this poem from its title actually, and I can’t take full credit for it, I think the title was said to me by my friend Sophia Golan, a brilliant playwright and director, in a conversation between me, her, and Sydney Falle, another person who I love very much, who is also a poet, writer, and playwright. We started playing around with the idea of the list. I knew I had a theme with this title, and I knew what I wanted to touch on in terms of texture. I wanted to do something which is almost an anti-list, a list that complicates and resists the form of a list, as the ongoing ecocide is going to complicate our relationship to the world, shake-up conceptions, fracture understood forms. A list that modifies itself. Apocalypse destitutes in more ways than one, to follow Agamben, it makes structures empty of power, instead of just destroying them.

AAAA​Following through with the theme, material starts to emerge from memory, rumour, story, imagination etc. but it’s all treated with the same value. When I start to organize this material, I try to do it along a series of deep-aesthetic observations. What I mean by that is that poetry is very good at making things feel very meaningful. It does that by recognizing that there’s a difference between swimming in the swimming pool and in the ocean. And more importantly it recognizes why: the minutiae of the ocean, the spray, salt, sand, wind, and gulls are all aesthetic components of the experience of the ocean. Once you push this thought to its limits you end up with something that’s not ‘surface’ level at all, which aesthetics often gets accused of being, but something that recognizes and notices the critical mass of when a moment becomes meaningful, when a thing becomes a thing. This is not a rational realization, instead it’s a kind of intuitive knowledge or feeling.

AAAA​And sometimes the moment is the poem and you don’t write it. And that’s enough. As much as I’m happy writing a poem I’m also happy in just letting the moment pass, to paraphrase Tom Snarsky, to shepherd the poem into oblivion. In this way poetry, to me, has moved from a mode of recording almost entirely to a way of seeing. Poetry as an ontology, almost as a theology, if that doesn’t sound too scary.

KARAN

You capture wonderful portraits of people (really, I think you’re a brilliant photographer!). This sense of imagery translates into the way you weave images into poetry. In “The Choosing / Luthier”, you write, “for a sky full of paper, a scratching-blue with the sound of bells….” Many times these images return to “my body, my solitude”. You scale from large to small, from vast to precise. Is there a way that the different artists in you intersect or influence each other? How does your experience with photography inform your approach to crafting poetry, and vice versa, if at all?

FRANCIS

The photographer in me thanks for the compliments. Honestly, I picked up film-photography during the pandemic when there was, for the first time in my working-class life, a little bit of time to do things that weren’t work. Poetry is great, and as Robert Graves said: “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” Beyond the obvious, I also take this to mean the fact that poetry can be produced quite fast and pretty inexpensively, though this is not always the case. But for photography, it really took for me to have spare time. I drifted towards film, my grandfather gave me his old Minolta, and I started figuring it out, like a puzzle. Really enjoyed the waiting, the tactile nature of film. The fact that the image is physically imprinted, a chemical reaction creates a little painting with light. At some point me and a few of my colleagues at a workspace I had at the time, Ateljee10 in Helsinki, started building a darkroom because we wanted to take that tactile relationship further.

AAAA​All this is to say, photography came years and lifetimes later than poetry. And I think my photography was immediately informed by my poetry – I found myself really rarely taking pictures of anything but people, my friends. In some sense my poetry is the same. The portrait is more obtuse and harder to connect to the person/people, but I think they exist there in the poem, at least for them, certainly for me.

AAAA​There’s also a similar chance-encounter with a moment, a kind of procedural relationship to time in both of these arts. You might not catch the whole thing, there’s a lot of variables. The film might be overexposed, underexposed, ripped, light-leaked. So might the poem. I am not trying to document, with either art, any facts. Like I mentioned before, the idea is to capture something that is parallel knowledge to those facts.

KARAN

The philosophical ruminations in these poems appeal greatly to me. How you delve deep into the complexities of existence, identity, and human connection, weaving together the thread of thought and emotion. In “A Stenographer Tries to Finish a Sentence,” you grapple with the limitations of language and the elusive nature of communication, juxtaposing mundane observations with profound insights into the nature of being. The lines “to be drowned is just / another form of feeling the rain” kill me! I feel that you’re reaching for a higher truth in these poems. I guess this is another craft question — do you think you write to write poetry as an exercise in philosophical thought?

FRANCIS

Yes, definitely. And more! I think you’re right to pick up on that. A good friend, Izzy Masters, a poet and someone who has actually studied philosophy, unlike me, was recently throwing around the idea of writing poems just to bridge different parts of essays together, or to illustrate a point in an essay-text, etc. I think that’s such a wonderful idea. Already here, answering your questions, I notice myself talking about the bigger things, my philosophical and political concerns, via the poems.

AAAA​Because I’m not an essayist, I like to pack the things I’ve been thinking about for a longer period of time into the poems. Having said that, I am a very active person politically and philosophically, I’m interested in different conceptions, different ways of organization and notation. In a really meaningful way, I think poetry is a force that operates very much on the same playing field as philosophy and political theory, from a slant angle. I think poetry can mock these other arts, while understanding them. I think poetry can make them in itself and then unmake them. I don’t think poetry could sustain them, but that’s another conversation.

AAAA​And, as I’ve kind of previously alluded to, I don’t think my poems are just exercises in philosophical thought, though they are that as well. In fact, I think for me it extends somewhere much larger, where poetry becomes a thing that’s complicated enough, irreverent enough, and nebulous enough to become a philosophy in itself. Really, philosophy is framework, isn’t it? It’s a system of understanding something. Like I’ve previously mentioned, I think poetry, as a way of seeing, is also a system of understanding something. That ‘something’ might resist being articulated as clearly (or obscurely) as philosophy would, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Poetry as a kind of phenomenology.

AAAA​I think how you write it matters so much. I’ve been talking with someone I love very much, the composer Lauri Supponen, about the power of notation. They say this wonderful thing about composing being ‘dreaming of alternative forms of organization’. I also think that phrase makes a lot of sense in terms of poetry. Definitely with philosophy. And it should with politics. The work of the poet, or of the composer, or indeed of the philosopher, lives so much in how does one say it. How does one choose to organize it? These are not neutral decisions.

KARAN

I can trace Ben Lerner’s influence in all of these poems (not just the one that is written after him). I recently read and loved (read: was blown away) The Lights. How he so skilfully traverses the human psyche (especially in the labyrinthine prose poems), probing the intricacies of language, memory, and identity. I love how seamlessly he is able to blend autobiography, political context, and philosophical inquiry. I feel like you’re doing something very similar in these poems — attempting to excavate the porous boundaries between self and other, truth and fiction, past and present. You have other poems here that are “after poems” — what is it that appeals to you about this tradition of writing poems after other poets/poems? Is it because you often find inspiration as you read other poems? Do you tussle with anxiety of influence? If so, how do you deal with it? And finally, where else do you find inspiration?

FRANCIS 

I really need to ask you to write a blurb for whatever I publish next, that’s brilliantly put. And I’m really happy you asked this question, because this is something I want to talk about. I think we’re always engaged in conversation with multiple styles of poetry, multiple people. We’re so entirely shaped by conversations we have, both with people, texts, poems, films, experiences. Some people think of writing as a solitary act, yet it’s also called a conversation, ongoing, that began thousands of years ago. I don’t think of it as a solitary act at all. It’s a way of engaging with both an immediate community, as well as wider community of people and non-humas that we don’t ever meet.

AAAA​My attempt, when dedicating these poems to someone, or when I write them after someone, is to make that conversation explicit and visible. It’s to dispel the myth of the lonely writer, as someone who only works in their imagination. No, I’m trying to say, look here’s one thing you can clearly tell I’m in conversation with, here you go, I’m not alone in this. I’m not ‘self-made’ whatever that means, I’m made by so many people. And you’ll notice that yes, I’m inspired by these fantastic and established poets like Ben Lerner, but I’m also inspired by my friends and peers, people who are writing next to me in the library like Sydney who I already mentioned, or Ramsey Tawfick, who “Luthier” is written after, a brilliant poet who is in a very similar position to me. I’m also writing these to my friends, many of whom are not poets at all, but interested in other things. You can probably tell this from my previous answers to these questions, where I’m mentioning known names, but also unknown names. I don’t think this is an exceptional way of working, I actually think this is a very common way of working. I’m just trying to make it clear, make it accessible, understandable that I’m operating in a multitude of different communities of people who I owe everything to and who I love.

AAAA​I’ve been in this fortunate position for a long time in my life, something that I consider very important to me, and lucky, something that I take very seriously and with care, where many of my friends and acquaintances send me their texts or poems to read through and comment. And I’ve learned at least as much from reading non-published work than I have from work that I find on the shelves at a bookshop or a library. This is work that might never be published because that’s not what it’s intended for, work that has a different, not lesser value. Poetry is pretty resistant (not immune) to many of the processes of extreme commodification that has a chokehold on some other forms of cultural capital. I really think that poetry that gets read once at an open mic, poetry that gets sent to someone you love on a Valentine’s Day, poetry that is on a birthday card, is only different than published poetry, not lesser. I think of a story I heard of Frank O’hara, that he wrote many of his poems just to his friends and gave them away on pieces of paper. There’s an immediacy in that community. I’m doing the same thing. I think to an extent everyone is doing the same thing. And it’s beautiful. I come back to this love.

KARAN 

This has been so wonderful, Francis. Thank you! Finally, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most.

FRANCIS

Brilliant. When I first got interested in poetry, it was through watching spoken word. Poets like Neil Hilbron, Joelle Taylor, and Kae Tempest were really influential to me. Simultaneously I was reading Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Ocean Vuong, and Khalil Gibran to mention a few. That’s really what got me started writing more intentionally, this combination. When I moved to London, I started going to more poetry things, becoming acquainted with the works of Jay Bernard, Anthony Anaxagorou, CAConrad, and Gboyega Odubanjo, to name a few.

​Then I’ve also had the pleasure of engaging with the work of some poets who have taught me at university like Redell Olsen, Briony Hughes, and Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, and then some poets I’ve had the pleasure to meet and talk to like Verity Spott, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, S.J. Fowler, J.D. Howse, and Callie Michail.

AAAAIn addition I want to mention Karenjit Sandhu (check out Fragments from the Irritating Archive it’s an incredible piece of work), Camille T. Dunghy, Sean Bonney, Wendell Berry, and Juliana Spahr, who has been hugely influential to my work, though I don’t always agree with her on everything. Also, poets Regina Avendaño and Rosie Hart, who’ve got really interesting and engaging projects going on in London on a more grassroots level (literally in the case of Rosie).

AAAAFinally, and maybe most importantly, the poets who are my peers, working with me actively, every day, sharing work and talking. These are people like Sydney Falle, Maddy Pope, Ramsey Tawfick, Zaki Chan, Varya, Grix, Caiti Luckhurst, Grace Power, Cecilia Muñoz, Sav Hamid, and Izzy Masters. You may not have heard of them but you will.