Joana Urtasun

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The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan, Carcanet, pp. 96, £12.99.
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The Ink Cloud Reader is brimming with literary references, from Oribasius to Coleridge to Ocean Vuong to Xi Xi, and a palpable reverence for many art forms but particularly the art of reading.  So I have to ask, what book(s) are on your bedside table right now?
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Your question is pertinent as I’ve got a new bedside table. I’m a promiscuous and fickle reader who’s happy to start and abandon books half-way. At the moment, in exact order, my pile includes: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Borges’s The Book of Sand, Tu Fu’s poems (in Chinese), Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming, and Saskia Hamilton’s All Souls.
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You open this collection with Derek Mahon’s words“ ‘if a thing happens once/it happens once for ever’ and in your concluding poem Hokkaido you say:
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‘Butt-naked I sat halfway
through my life measuring
this, that.”
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Chronology or should I say non-linear chronologies, are very precisely mapped in this collection. There are many political markers, types of calendars, references to the persona’s “memory files”, as well as possible future scenarios. Could you speak a little about your relationship to measurement and time? For you is the poetic space and line a momentary suspension?
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You read my mind: I’m obsessed with time, the measurement and mal-measurement of it. Wallace Stevens wrote ‘Death is the mother of beauty’ and I think he means Time, that is, ‘Time is the mother of beauty’ or perhaps more truthfully, ‘Time is the mother of Time’.
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Time etches in my early consciousness, as one of Hong Kong citizens orphaned by Britain in 1997.  I just turned 18 then, when my city was handed over to China; overnight I transitioned from a British National (Overseas) to a Chinese National.  The principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ invented by Deng Xiaoping and endorsed by Margaret Thatcher is supposed to last for 50 years until 2047 through our mini-constitution The Basic Law.  Life is full of deadlines.
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I love your expression that the poetic space and line is a momentary suspension.  ‘Suspension’ suggests an act of withholding, and ‘momentary’ points towards a process of ending, which is the story of living organisms.  When combined, it makes me think of breath, how a poem insists on being inhaled and exhaled, and how a line teaches us to breathe in the way that it starts in a unique place and always has to end.
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In 2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey there is a mention of surveillance and censorship, but interestingly the sister talks about the policing of nostalgia. Do you think it is dangerous for poets to be nostalgic? I guess there is a strong argument for saying that it is worse to self-censor or to forget the past altogether…
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Nostalgia is one of the core ingredients of sci-fi (see Westworld, for example). We don’t know whether it’s the Future devouring the Past, or vice versa.  My poem observes a surveillance future where remembering has become an act of courage.
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These days, a heavy sentimental atmosphere hangs over nostalgia, though an earlier meaning of the word includes homesickness.  I don’t think it’s dangerous for anyone to be nostalgic in the broadest sense of the word. (Nostalgia is not to be confused with nationalism.) Without the Republic of the Past (yes, I do see it as a republic, not a tyranny), art and consciousness would have lost one of their key habitats.
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In the book there’s a thematic return to illness, ageing bodies, the failures of love, of government, cities and  language. I wanted to ask you about your relationship with elegy (as a tradition, as an abstraction, as a rite…). One of my favourite lines by Robert Hass is “ a word is elegy to what it signifies”. You write, “Time never/ elegises. We keep waiting”. How has your relationship with elegy moulded the way you write loss, particularly if/when language feels inadequate?
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Thank you for asking this generous question about loss. I had the planet Earth in mind when I wrote “Time never/ elegises.” It’s hard to imagine our planet no longer welcomes us as a species.  Our past has undone so much of our future, and yet undoing what we’re used to doing seems always easier said than done.
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To answer your question head-on: I don’t seek to write elegy but simultaneously I don’t stop tradition haunting a poem.
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There is such rich formal variation in this collection.  We have monosyllabic lines, we have longer-lined tercets, single stanzas, sonnets, prose fragments, scripts… The book is at times experimental and at times anchored in tradition. How do you approach form? Does the line/music lead, does the image lead, or does the narrative lead in your composition?
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For me, form is oxygen.  We don’t think of oxygen being experimental or traditional.  We take it for granted and just breathe.  That said, we see or hear form, though air is only feelable.  I try to combine form’s solidity and air’s invisibility when I approach a poem.  I know form has its limit and can only hold our feelings in place if we disturb it, blow air and life into it.  I’m also interested in risks, in not holding things in place too tightly. I am very much prone to boredom in life, so I seek unpredictability in poetry.
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I would like to say I’m music-driven but honestly I can’t stop myself being lured by narratives and images.  I often think that Orpheus is most remembered by his journey to the underworld, the story of a failed rescue, of mistrust, of looking back, rather than the music that was lost.  Perhaps if a poem has wrestled long enough with the story and feeling it contains, the music will just flow unconsciously without the fingers pressing on the keys.
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Your diction and image-field is unique, (“the eyes of oak beams / stared at me like bullet holes”), and often hyper specialised with intricate references to botany, meteorology and medicine. I enjoyed looking terms up. Is this an invitation you welcome in your own reading?
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Thank you for your lovely observations.  I do like looking things up when I read.  That’s one of the perks of reading, to learn new things or be challenged by what I thought I knew.  Recently when I read Teju Cole’s astonishing second novel Tremor in which paintings, songs and historical references are interwoven with the characters’ lives, I found myself obsessively checking things up and ordering a new CD (I do downloads too but the record is too good and I need the physical object). I felt my horizon widen under my feet as I discovered new territories.
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I was really captivated by your more fragmentary, prose-like poems like Suddenly and The Art of Reading which have auto fictional elements, fleshing out the poet-persona with references to dates and names and places. They remind me of Montaigne or even Sei Shonagon in how wonderfully diaristic they feel. Since you’re a poet and a novelist, I have to ask you, what is your relationship with the prose fragment and with prosaic language in poetry?
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I’m blushing after reading your question, as not everyday one is compared with Montaigne and Sei Shonagon.  Thank you.  It’s really lovely and generous of you.
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To be completely candid with you, I think prose and poetry are pieces of the same jigsaw; they are conjoined as one entity yet also a fragment of a whole picture. Prose thrives on the illusion of continuity, whereas poetry plays up the card of fragmentation.  When I write novels, I start with a fragment of a person, a thought, a conversation, or a place, and rebuild them bit by bit into a world.  When I write poems, I break a world into pieces and glue them back together into a memory.  Both are violent acts.  AS Byatt once said that “writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.”  She is right.  Without chaos, where is the universe, let alone paradise or hell, or as I most prefer, this earth?
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The winner of the TS Eliot Prize will be announced on Monday 15 Jan. The 10 shortlisted writers will read at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall at 7pm on Sunday 14 Jan and Live Streamed across the UK; tickets from £7.50: southbankcentre.co.uk.
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Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic. He was born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at 21. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). His first book of poems, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the inaugural HKU International Poetry Prize. As Slow As Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. His third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
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Joana Urtasun is a poet and translator who grew up between the Basque Country and the UK. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University. Her work has been published in Anthropocene, Some Kind of Opening and No, Dear Magazine, among others. She is currently based in New York.