Five Minutes With poetry tutor Roy Mcfarlane
Roy Mcfarlane FRSL is a poet, playwright and former youth and community worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage spending most of his years living in Wolverhampton and the Black Country, now residing in Brighton. He has published numerous poetry collections and teaches the Advanced Poetry course on Wednesday afternoons.
Tell us about your journey into writing and poetry in particular. One of my first major influences would have been my mother, reading Psalms every night to me as a young child instead of nursery rhymes before we went to sleep. She loved and was moved by the humanity and emotional contents in each of these psalms. I believe the language and lyrical beauty of the King James version provided the foundation to my poetical writing later in life.
It was several decades later when I began my journey as a poet in the early noughties working with excluded young people as a youth and community worker. I met Dr Roi Kwabena, the then Birmingham Poet Laureate, at an anti-racism conference who became my mentor and friend.
Roi Kwabena, the poet with a drum, would often be seen walking through Brum with a drum in a kente cloth bag, hanging off one shoulder. Every encounter with this man was full of tales, speaking of places he’d been, of meeting with high officials to the homeless. He always had praise for other poets, always linking poets together, always leaving you with a knowledge, or “you understand what I telling you eh.”
He looked at my early writings, encouraged me to write more and literally pushed me on to the stage performing my first poem ‘Are you looking at me?” The rest is history.
You’ve been Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Starbucks’ Poet in Residence, the Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence and are the current Canal Laureate. What do these roles involve and what’s been your experience?Residencies are wonderful opportunities for poets where institutions afford you time and space, giving you themes and subjects to write about. Most residencies expect poems, readings and engagement with employees, service users, communities or the general public but the best residencies are the ones that give you an empty canvass or carte blanche to write what you like.
Residencies often push you out of your comfort zones, taking you down new paths. The National Canal Laureateship certainly pushed me and challenged me to write about themes I wouldn’t have normally written. I engaged with beautiful communities from Men Sheds of South Wales to a community of writers in Littleborough inspired by the Rochdale Canal; I’ve been informed by many subjects from the ‘Idle Women’ women canal workers of World War II to buddleia plants along canal paths from the Caribbean seas; and visited feats of engineering from the Anderton boat lift to Bingley Five Rise Locks.
Your debut collection Beginning With Your Last Breath came out in 2016. Divided into four parts, the first and last section focuses on motherhood, perhaps a given for a book that is dedicated to your own mother. The collection goes on to explore adoption, music, home and love; of finding out more about yourself, your home and your mother, despite already seemingly knowing all three. How did this collection start? And how did you get a publishing deal with Nine Arches? Beginning With Your Last Breath was the book that carried my grief. In the writing my first book, my lifemother was passing away after enduring three bouts of cancer over a decade, and with the offer of another surgery aged 83, she had enough, she wanted to go home both earthly and heavenly. The hospital imagined she had a maximum of two months to live. My mum went home happy with the knowledge she was going to meet her maker and with me as her carer, family and friends, she lived an extra year.
When she passed away, I collated all our stories and wrote about the experience. I had to write, I couldn’t stop and in writing about my life mother, I had to write about my birth mother who brought me into this world and the moment I found out that I was adopted. And what followed was the boy and the man I became in between. One thing led to another which led to another thing, ending with a complete collection.
Interestingly, during my Birmingham Poet Laureateship (2010-2011) I knew Jane Commane (Nine Arches director) via the poetry performance scene. During 2012 I sent 20 poems to Nine Arches Press, unfortunately Jane rejected the poems, saying they’re lovely poems but needed more depth to transfer from the stage to the page. Jane picked one poem ‘My Father’s Love Letters’ as an example of what she was looking for and published it in Under the Radar (online poetry magazine), praising its beauty and encouraged me to keep writing.
After my mother passed away in 2014, I took six months off work to write in the dunde (heightened state of emotion), the darkness and the joy of my mother. I sent these new and revised poems off to Nine Arches Press and without hesitation Jane said they were perfect, she wanted more and would be happy to publish my collection.
Your second collection The Healing Next Time, tackles the thorny issue of racism in the UK. It begins with a narrative sequence covering the years 1999 to 2006, interrogating what it means to live as a black man in Britain, merging the personal and the public as it explores family, politics, love and hate. Can you tell us the story behind it? For my second collection I was inspired by Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, a long poem written in 24 parts where the author looks at his life and Britain during the onset of World War II. The Healing Next Timelooks at the UK after the Stephen Lawrence Report published in 1999 through the eyes of an individual as an activist, family man and a lover.
I wanted to look back at a time where there was a shift in the psyche of the UK regarding racism. The murder of Stephen Lawrence, the courage of Doreen and Neville Lawrence and the raw newspaper articles and footage of the suspected murders defiance at court trials touched the humanity of most souls. I wanted to capture the gestalt of the times, what it was like on the streets, in the institutions and how it affected a black man right at the centre of it all.
In writing The Healing the Next Time, the primary force behind my writing was anger, so many black bodies were dying in custody whether that be the police, prison or the mental health system and their voices were not being heard, I guess I’d been driven by the need for these voices to be heard, to bring back their humanity in a world hell bent on denying their humanity.
Another primary force was love; after writing about the love of my mother in my first collection it made me realize the most powerful force to make a difference in this world is love and I guess The Healing Next Timedeclares a need for love to be the guiding hand through this world of division of hurt of dismay, love will ultimately bring the healing.
These are themes you continue in your most recent collection Living by Troubled Waters. It’s an uncompromising collection of poetry exploring slavery, colonialism, and racism. Your poems ask us to think about the Black Mediterranean of today as much as we do about the Windrush scandal and trans-Atlantic slavery, where Black people are still imprisoned, enslaved and drowned as they flee persecution and poverty. Can you talk through the genesis for this collection? After the success of The Healing Next Time being shortlisted for Ted Hughes and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, I wanted to look at the legacy of racism, its continuing hold on our society and the continued tragedies visited upon Black bodies. Living by Troubled Waters is an album of thoughts, questions, celebration of survival, gospel and jazz. It’s a collection of rage as well as love.
I wanted to look at erasure poems (mining and undermining the text to make it yield alternative stories) as a way to interrogate the archives, create a space for activism and reclaiming voices from the margins. Spaces of sanctuary echo through the collection, whether these places are religious spaces or late-night blues, gospel or jazz, the home or nature, motherhood and fatherhood.
Which poets have inspired you? Langston Hughes, Gill Scott-Heron and June Jordan were my first introduction to poetry, they spoke to me as a black young man finding his way in the 90s and then by the noughties Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah and Jean Binta-Breeze. And as I read more, William Blake and the Romantic Poets inspired me as well as a group of female poets Jackie Kay, Imtiaz Dhaker, Gillian Clarke, and Carol Ann Duffy. Carol Ann Duffy opened me up, encouraged me to write about love and sensuality.
You’ve taught poetry and creativity for a number of years. How does this teaching impact your own creative process? It’s a two-way process. I love teaching poetry and I come with a vibrance and energy, bringing poetry alive and getting individuals excited about the possibilities of writing poetry. Each session is a new a session, however many times I might use the same prompts or poems, each encounter is finely tuned to the students, the moment, and/ or the energy in the room.
Teaching for me in itself is a creative process – to make things plain – and it’s my duty to be student-like (to be on the other side of my presentation), as I prepare the sessions. How can I make things exciting, accessible and fun. And as I look at innovative ways to approach a subject, poem or a poet, nine times out of ten, I’ll be inspired to write a rough draft of a poem.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about writing? Don’t be afraid of writing into the void, into those white spaces Glyn Maxwell, spoke of the terror of the unknown. Glynn Maxwell On Poetry “…think of the white turning to black, of the nib putting down on the paper, or the pixels going dark because of whatever gazillion signals you just cluelessly set in order – think of where person becomes poem. What do you want to send through that portal? Should it not sound like you, act like you, breathe like you? Or at the very least like a human.” And read, read, read poetry.
What’s your go-to book about the craft of poetry? Glynn Maxwell On Poetry but I also return and dip into one of my favourites Ruth Padel’s The Poem And The Journey. And of course, the essential writing-desk companion The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century Edited by Rishi Dastidar
You’re marooned on a desert island with the complete works of Shakespeare and a spiritual text of your choice. What fiction or poetry book do you want to have with you? And would you prefer a notebook and pen, or laptop to write with? The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics) I have a copy but I’ve never finished it and I would never tire of returning to it every day.
And it’s got to be notebook and pen, the feel of pen to paper, as the heel of your hand slides across the paper, the feel of the notebook cover has you’re about to sit and write, please, please, please may the notebook and pen never die.
What are you working on at the moment? I’m writing a series of essays, including conversations with poets alive and dead, journals and observation about being a poet and writing poetry. Making Zuihitsu Poetry by Cheryl Moskowitz captures it better where she says, “Zuhitsu is a Japanese literary form dating from around 1000 A.D when Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book, a collection of personal essays woven from fragments of texts, idea, thoughts, notes and observations.”
Roy teaches on the 20-week Advanced Poetry Workshops on Wednesday afternoons at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton. If you’re interested in finding out more about the course and booking a space, click here.