Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe
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Sarah Howe: I thought a nice place to begin would be with the idea of transience, which felt like a keynote sounding through the collection. From the whiteboard, where we begin, with words that are content to disappear, to the cherry blossom, and the memory our love won’t remember in your lovely poem, ‘Modern ruin’. I liked this because, traditionally, writing a poem has been a bid for permanence, à la Shakespeare and ‘marble and gilded monuments’, but in this collection, you seem fascinated by the ephemeral in a charming, modest way.
Rishi Dastidar: Yes, and that’s consistent with the thought that, out of everything I’ve published, this is possibly the least sure I’ve been about a collection. I don’t know whether that marks a deepening of thought or deepening of style, but there’s definitely a comparison to be made between the very high concept certainty of Neptune’s Projects and Saffron Jack, and this book, which feels a lot more tentative. So, I don’t think it’s a particular accident that those motifs around transience came in. I was trying to find ways of saying all this stuff is just writ in water, really.
At the same time, I’m trying to play with the fact that, yes, I am saying that, but I’d also like you to remember I’m saying it. It’s semi-deliberate. I like that sense of paradox. When I teach, I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time. Up to this point, I have been absolutely powered by the notion of writing for permanence, and so I don’t think it’s an accident that what I’ve been writing has ended up being something that fundamentally acknowledges the fact that permanence is probably very unlikely [laughs].
Sarah: At the same time though, across all your books, you’ve been interested in history, in a variety of ways. And that’s true of this book, no less. There are numerous poems here that evoke and invoke poets of the past. There’s the poem ‘An argument for his City’ where we seem to walk among the ghosts in the City of London. Was there a slightly different edge to the historical encounters here?
Rishi: I think I was just trying not to be as bombastic. A lot of it comes back to trying not to be as high concept about things. Trying not to say, ‘here is a big idea’. It’s more of a gentle meander – this sense of things emerging, bubbling up, and then asking, ‘what’s going on there?’ And this dovetails with approaches to history. You can come at it from a very top-down school of thought, of being told how things are supposed to have happened. But I’m much more interested in, and drawn to, the things that happened away from the timeline. What happened that we don’t actually know about? That’s where the more interesting stories are. I love that sense of everyone having their own narrative, everyone playing their own role.
‘An argument for his City’ is a perfect example of that. How do you capture one thousand, two thousand years? Below the superficiality of trade and deals and exchange, there are actual lives there. People can be born into families that do the same thing over seven or eight generations, but each is its own life. When we think of a city, we think of finance and capital, but these are human inventions. Mad, crazy human inventions. Underlying every grand idea is a micro-story, or a micro-history. I’ve always found poetry to be a really interesting way of getting there, illuminating what’s bubbling underneath.
Sarah: I liked what you said about an apparent superficiality giving way to more depth than we might intuit. I feel as though that speaks to the book’s general interest in work, and the office in particular, which feels like underused terrain in contemporary poetry. You have an ability to find something rich in a world that others might think of as inherently shallow or superficial. I’m thinking of your ‘On bullshit jobs’, and the fun you have with that refrain, of just the word ‘office’ repeated seven times every two lines.
Rishi: [Laughs] yeah. So, this is actually a more longstanding idea. In my first collection, Ticker Tape, there was a poem called ‘Diversity Campaign’ which started from a client workshop I was in. It was around 2015, so there was a lot of talk about how we start to think, or talk about diversity in a marketing sort of way. You could sense, even then, that this was going to be a very shallow and naïve engagement with the subject, and that leached into the poem.
More broadly, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently after reading Matthew Rice’s plastic: A Poem. It’s a wonderful book, and every generation seems to throw up a couple of poets who are very good at writing from a blue-collar, manual labour perspective. But the wider ambience of white-collar work – the talking at screens, the sense of being in these clinical spaces we don’t want to acknowledge as being the place we spend most of our time – I find the omission of poetry on that slightly baffling. Why wouldn’t you engage with it? I also find it baffling because so much of that work is done through language. It’s a language that reveals a lot about implicit and explicit power structures, and about how we relate to each other in these interpersonal capacities. What is going on within ourselves while we are doing this work? Why has the language of modern capitalism borrowed so much from religious language, especially in the last twenty-five years or so, to try and give the work some sort of higher calling?
Sarah: I agree that there’s a deep discomfort around commerce and capital in the way that we often conceive of the high-minded pursuit of poetry. In a way, poets are more comfortable with the spade of Heaney’s father, and the heft of that. I’d like to press you further on that, and ask if satire is a part of this picture? You’re delineating the contours of culture and making them visible – the nowness of things. Were you conscious of doing this?
Rishi: The collection wasn’t conceived of as being obviously satirical, but because of my tone, I think there’s always this element of trying to poke and unpick at something, to reveal it. There’s an interesting tension also, in the sense that I’m well aware of the limits of satire to actually change anything, and so it’s another paradox when writing about it. It’s never going to be, ‘I’ve pricked some pomposity, revealed some hypocrisy and therefore an edifice crumbles’. Of course I find it interesting to reveal the hypocrisy from within, and want to be open about what I do as a day job, but I’m also aware that’s a betrayal of some things, of art and left-wing politics. But to put it crudely, we do need people on the inside of the system as well. You need people to at least be aware of how the system works. And then ask, what are the weak spots? What are the points that we can press upon it? What better is possible?
Sarah: It might not be clear to readers that Rishi and I have been laughing quite a lot already, and so I know that satire goes beyond humour, but I was wondering if I could invite you to reflect further on the role of humour in the collection, and the role of surprise.
Rishi: Never ask a clown how they’re funny, right? Rob Long, an executive producer for the TV show Cheers, has a couple of really wonderful books on comedy writing in the US studio system, and I think I read those at a young and impressionable enough age for certain things to sink in, like the rhythm of things. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago about screwball poetics, which was an attempt to bring notions of screwball comedy into contemporary poetry. I think that’s probably the closest I’ve got to trying to articulate both the need for and the role of humour in poetry. I personally like to get laughs from surprise; I like to get laughs from unexpected juxtapositions; I like rugs being pulled and that sense of slapstick. Coming back to screwball comedy, it works because you’ve got the verbal fireworks and wordplay twinned to the physical comedy. And if you can get both of those working at the same time in poetry, you can create something really powerful.
Sarah: You mention wordplay, and one of my favourite poems in the book is the tribute to a young Bruce Forsyth, which puns on ‘patter’ and ‘pattern’. And you do this in the delightful way that the best poets can, by revealing some sort of inner congruity that has been hidden between two concepts. It seems a nice continuation of the idea of the screwball and the slapstick and the physical dexterity of it all, because the poem is a tribute to the boy Bruce’s ‘mesmerising kineticism’, which feels like another ars poetica moment for you. This idea of sprezzatura: the skill that looks not only unlike a skill, but also completely unplanned.
Rishi: Totally. I played violin as a kid, very badly. I never got beyond grade one. But what stuck in my mind was that a tutor, at some point, did a lesson on improvisation, and I was so bad at it because I was one of those perfectionist kids who always wanted to know what they were doing. The guy said, look, just relax and you’ll be fine. And I suspect that ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the notion of trying to make something appear effortless. Of course, it’s actually the hours of work that’ve gone into it, the mastering of it, hidden away.
When I was writing that poem, I was also thinking about Forsyth as an avatar for an England that has basically disappeared. That was on my mind a lot throughout the collection. Forsyth came up through the music hall, and for our generation, we view him as just a light entertainment figure. But there was a moment in time when he was the future! Which is a lovely notion. He was one of the first faces that you saw on independent television in the late fifties and early sixties. You can trace his performances back to an Edwardian Britain, while also being current at the time of his arrival, and now being seen as a relic. He’s an amazing historical figure, and I feel I’ve made a case for him as being one of the most fundamentally important people of the twentieth century.
Sarah: I love the idea of him as an avatar. It also makes me think of the uniqueness of being a type of entertainer or a person who can coin a catchphrase and become synonymous with it, but it also takes on a life of its own, away from that person. Picking up on the idea of ‘pattern’ again, I’m sure there are all sorts of conversations we could have about the way the book is structured, but as we’re running out of time, let me just indulge in one. It’s noticeable around the middle of the book that there’s a long run of very short poems. They’re quite disparate, but it’s very striking. They’re not only short in line count but also short-lined to quite different effects. Could you reflect on the particular challenges and rewards of the very short poem?
Rishi: My editor at Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane, and I struggled with organising and patterning the book, and this part was one of the hardest to piece together, because it did feel so disparate. It was hard for me to see how things were hanging together. It wasn’t until Jane said that this was a book where I was moving from the exterior world to the interior world that it started to make sense. Suddenly a lot of placement decisions were easier to make because you could move from the ones that spoke more to the outer world, engaging with society, to the back half of the book, where the poems’ eye is very much internalised. The hinge in the middle, then, effectively becomes a bridge between what’s going on in the exterior and the interior.
Those poems also are partly that way because I had written them into a pamphlet around 2019, and so they’d been marinating for some time. The pamphlet itself was very square, and written to accompany photographs, so I wanted them to have the feel of captions, or labels, or filmic scenes. I wanted to take people into a scene and then out of it again very quickly. I didn’t want to give too much away – just enough for the reader to be intrigued. And that’s often the essence of a lot of my poetry.
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Rishi Dastidar’s third collection Neptune’s Projects was longlisted for the Laurel Prize, and a poem from it was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is the editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak, his fourth collection, is out now.
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto Poetry, 2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Foretokens (Chatto Poetry, 2025), her second collection, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Choice. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.
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