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Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Patience Agbabi

Interviewed by Kate Clanchy

North(west)ern

I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick
for the South-East, marooned on the North Wales coast.
A crotchet, my tongue craving the music
of Welsh, Scouse, or Mancs. Entering the outpost
of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,
nightclub for those of us with the deep ache
of adolescence, when I heard that tune,
named it in one. Soul. My heart was brake

dancing on the road to Wigan Casino,
northern soul mecca, where transatlantic bass
beat blacker than blue in glittering mono.

Then back via Southport, Rhyl, to the time, place,
I bit the Big Apple. Black, impatient, young.
A string of pips exploding on my tongue.

This poem was commissioned for…

…a BBC Radio 4 celebration of National Poetry Day called ‘The Wind-Rose’ which is an old-fashioned name for a compass. I’d been wanting to write about the North West for some time. I went to live there with my foster family when I was about twelve and stayed through my adolescence – I was a Sussex girl before that and my accent still confuses people. So I picked that point of the compass.

I was working in Edinburgh…

…when I got the commission and planning a journey to see my foster parents. I started to write on the train and the place names of the journey – Wigan, Rhyl – are in the poem . It was perfect – the perfect commission at the perfect time. And they paid me. Very unusual.

The ‘Northern’ outside the North(west)ern…

…brackets is the ‘Northern’ of Northern Soul. The scene was very vibrant when I moved to the area – Wigan Casino was open for about 12 years, and it was huge, just major – and as soon as I saw it and heard it I knew it had something for me. It’s Black American Motown and Soul reinterpreted by white working-class Northerners. Rough, but very powerful. I loved it. It woke me up. The Big Apple reference in the poem is about that : it’s the romantic idea of New York of course, but really I was thinking about losing virginity – all sorts of virginity, I mean, not just sexual. About tasting the outside world.

This poem announced itself as a sonnet…

…very early on. There was the loose iambic beat, the lengths of the line, and as soon as I had written just a few lines I realised I wanted the rhymes to be perfect, not the half-rhymes I so often use. Not only that, but the rhymes were there, in the drafts in front of me – ‘blues, sick/music’ ‘outpost/coast’. The form was right for the poem, and for once, it was easy and quick to write.

The stanza break on ‘brake’ and ‘dancing’…

…was there from the start too. I’d been writing Petrarchan sonnets: the ‘caesura,’ the gap between the octet and the sestet when the sonnet turns, is very important. This is a Shakespearean sonnet with a couplet at the end, but it’s still got a caesura. A lot of things happen in that turn: the moody adolescent starts dancing, starts moving towards finding her identity – blue to black. Have you ever seen Northern Soul dancers? The moves! They’re amazing, like break-dancing. I like using the caesura, such a classic poetic device, on a word like ‘break’ and a subject like this.

I think the use of form in poetry…

…can help with writer’s block. It can diminish the fear of the blank page. Write a sestina! Go on – the line-ends will help you. I get writer’s block alright. I hate it. The best thing I’ve found is The Artists’ Way by Julia Cameron. I follow a lot of her recommendations – I write my daily pages, take myself for ‘Artist Dates’ in other artistic forms. A film, a gallery. It does help.

PATIENCE AGBABI lives in London. Her debut collection, R.A.W, was published in 1995 and won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Transformatrix followed in 2000. She was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets in 2004.

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