Statement Magazine
The following interview was conducted in April 2005 by Kara Chang at California State University, Los Angeles for Statement Magazine
Kara Chang : You have a musical background, and your poems are very rhythmic. How does your background in music affect your poetry?
Anthony Joseph: Well firstly I think that poetry is essentially a form of music-a form of spoken music. For me I first was involved in music at a very early age. I loved music and I collected music. Coming from Trinidad it’s a big part of my culture: Calypso, Soca and things like that. I was very influenced by music from that aspect. Then later on I became involved in Jazz and used a lot of the Jazz concepts and techniques in my poetry.
Kara: Why do you believe that Jazz and Blues are such an integral aspect of Ethnic writers’ works?
Joseph: I think because it is a very empowering kind of music. It’s very cerebral; it’s very intellectual. I think that the same way a Jazz musician improvises, I find, I can do the same with words. I get a lot of inspiration from the way someone like Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane would improvise or play phrases. The ‘Beat writers’ as well they got a lot of inspiration from Bebop, from Charlie Parker and people like that. Jack Kerouac was a big Jazz fan. He got a lot of his rhythms and his lines from listening to Charlie Parker solo. I don’t know about Ethnic or Black writers. I don’t think music has a color. I think essentially Jazz has influenced all types of writers: Hawaiian writers, African writers Indian writers whoever. I think you can find traces of Jazz conceptualism in various forms, in all different types of writing across the globe.
Kara: Your first poetry collection is named "Desafinado." Can you talk about how you create a title for your poetry collection?
Joseph: Desafinado is Portuguese for 'slightly out of tune'. Around the time I was writing Desafinado, I was sort of experimenting with my own voice. A lot of times I would read stuff to people and they would say hmmm that’s really weird, that’s really strange, that’s different. I thought that was a good thing. Around that time I was listening to a lot of Bossa Nova, a lot of Samba, a lot of Brazilian music like Jorge Ben guitarist and singer composer of the classic “Mas Que Nadae"; Marcos Valle, another legend of Brazilian music; Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jobim has a song called “Desafinado” and that was a big inspiration for me. My work also seemed ‘slightly out of tune’ -. That is where I got the title from.
Kara: How did you "invent" a title for "Teragaton", your second collection of poetry? How did you come up with the word? It doesn’t exist in the dictionary.
Joseph: No it doesn’t exist in the dictionary. It’s a word that my mother gave me. My mom died a few years ago from Breast cancer. I would dream of my mother every night after she died-for weeks and weeks. It went into years of dreaming of her. Soon after she died I had a dream where she was whispering this word to me: teragaton teragaton teragaton. That’s where the word came from. I took that word from the dream and made it the title of the book. To me, the fact that it doesn’t have a meaning is essentially what the book is about. It’s a gap in language. It’s a word that sounds like it should be a word you can find. It’s constructed syntactically as a word, but it doesn’t have a meaning. It is a gap in the language.
Kara: When I first got the book I didn’t even know how to pronounce it.
Joseph: Teragaton. There is actually a piece in the book itself that’s called “Indian Red”, which uses it as a functional word.
Kara: Why do you want to bring the Funk spirit into your poems? How do you define "Funk spirit"?
Joseph: To me the Funk is the space between beats. James Brown talks about the “one”.The “one” is actually a gap in the rhythm, since we are talking about gaps. The funk is the hidden silent beat that catches you. If you listen to funk music, it’s not when the drum hits that moves you, it’s the space between the two beats. In terms of bringing it into writing I’m just conscious of it when I write. I can’t really explain how it works. It’s kind of mysterious. It’s a hidden beat - a hidden rhythm that moves you, a falling.
Kara: When a writer decides to work with more experimental methods should their audience be a concern?
Joseph: Yes I think you always have to be aware of your audience. The
problem is when writing poetry you become the audience; you become the testing
ground for your audience. So you have a lot of responsibility. That is why a big part of
being a writer, of being a poet is being a good listener, and being a good critic of your
own work. So I think often times you can write something and you can tell intimately
whether or not you are communicating something. If you feel that you are
communicating it, and you are communicating it to the best of your ability then
somewhere along the line somebody is going to get it. That’s the hope. I think if you
think too much though about the audience then you end up writing stuff that is a bit
clichéd
Kara: One of the criticisms of Performance poetry, particularly Spoken word, is that many of the pieces can not stand alone as written text. How can a writer have a strong piece that can be both performed and read, or is it necessary for a Performance piece to be able to stand as a written text?
Joseph: I would say yes. For me, the page is always the most important thing. Writing is about writing. I’m a writer, I’m a poet. So it’s about physically writing down the stuff and playing with it. I think you can perform on the page with the way you space things and the way you put words. Just to see words on the page and how we put them together, to me is performance. I really don’t think of the stage first. I think if you start to think of the stage first, you end up writing stuff that you hear in a lot of Slam poetry, which is performance based, but there is little substance. There is a lot of drama, a lot of how you say it, but it’s gone. You go to the Slam and you hear it, and it’s all great in that moment. You clap, then you go home and you forget it, cause it's not written down. I want something that stays on the page. I want something that stays-that’s important to me. I think there are some people who translate it from page to performance and it works both ways. I try to. I love to perform, but to me I work the page first. I spend a lot of time working on the page, and then I will present it live.
Kara: Have you ever faced a situation of Writer’s block, or a lack of creativity?
Joseph: Yes, yes I have. I think Writer’s block is essentially an imbalance in your brain. It is an imbalance between your creative side and your critical side. It occurs when you are thinking too much about the content of your work. You are thinking too much about the outcome: how it’s going to come out. You are critical about the outcome too soon after it’s created. I think you have to be able to separate the two processes between creating and editing. They are too separate parts but they are both important parts. I think sometimes when you try to create and edit at the same time you get this situation where you get stuck and you get ‘Writers Block’. But then as well there is something that happens when you write a lot. You’ve written a lot of stuff and you have to stop, you just have to stop. And I don’t think that’s essentially a Writer’s block, it’s more of a Writer’s break. You take a break for a couple of months or whatever and refill your well with images and ideas, and then do it again. It always comes back.
Kara: I think I am in that situation now.
Joseph: It always comes back. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to come back, but it does come back.
Kara: You mentioned that you can only go back to Trinidad as a tourist now. Since you do not live there now, you are almost a stranger. Does the life in London give you a new identity?
Joseph: Yes it gives me an identity, but it’s the same identity that a lot of people who have come before me had, as an explorer, a transient, someone that is there on a temporary basis. There is a feeling of temporality. There is a feeling that eventually I will go back home. I feel very much a Trinidadian. I’ve never felt British. I can’t feel British because I lived in Trinidad until I was about 21. I grew up there. That to me is my identity. So I really don’t have an identity crisis.
Kara: In your novel, you play with the idea of "being black." Do you ever encounter some racial discrimination? Or is it simply something interesting in sci-fi?
Joseph: If I do, I’m not aware of it because I don’t look for it. I would say no, because in Britain, racism is very much Establishment. It’s in the Establishment rather than in your face. I mean there is some racism that you encounter if you move to the North of England. There are some people there that are still a bit backward, still a bit naïve, still a bit ignorant. But Britain is very much a multicultural, multiracial place. So you don’t really, as a Black person, get it in your face. You might get it if you get caught by the police or something, and they throw you in prison for a while. You might face it there. But in your day to day living you would just go through life not knowing that its there.
As Franz Fanon said “Racism is not the whole but the most visible, and the crudest element of a given structure”. It’s like the tip of the iceberg that you see. Beneath the tip there is this whole mass of stuff underneath that you don’t see. Racism is just the bit that you see, the crudest element. So in the same way you mightn’t see the racism face to face, but its there. It’s under there. Its part of the structure-especially in Britain.
Kara: I guess the hierarchy of classes is still pretty obvious?
Joseph: Yes Britain is very much divided by Class rather than Color.
Kara: In your collection ‘Teragaton’, you state that "We are experiencing a crisis of representation", who is the 'we' that you are referring to?
Joseph: I was referring to writers and poets that now have to compete with a range of information sources and types of information that can be accessed. I was sort of referring to photography as well. When photography was invented it put a lot of painters out of work. Painters were like: “Well ok. How are we going to be able to represent reality now when we have these photographers?” Painting developed all sorts of methods of dealing with that. They created Surrealist painting, Cubist painting, Impressionist painting. They all came out of that crisis of representation where the camera took the entire image. And in the same way I think that writers now, we are experiencing that because we have things like the Internet, and people have access to any type of information they want, and any text they want. Any text you want you can get. You can read anything you like to read. Whereas, a few years ago, or before the Internet, certain text were only available to certain scholars and certain academics. You could only really get to that stuff if you were within that circle. Now anyone can get that stuff. So that is what I meant about poets and writers.
Kara: I Googled your name, and discovered that you have been involved in some very interesting projects. Can you tell me about some of them?
Joseph: I do a lot of workshops in schools where I go to a school for a day and work with kids on poetry. I’ve also done tours. I’ve done a few tours now. I’ve done a couple of tours in the UK: one with a company called Mannafest, actually two with Mannafest; and two with Renaissance One. I’ve also done work in Europe. I’ve done some workshops in Prague; I’ve toured Germany and Spain. When I say tour, I don’t mean like playing every night like a musician would-playing every night for two months or whatever. I mean like being there for ten days and traveling around the country, playing about four shows in different parts of that country. That has been really exciting and really interesting. I enjoy that. Some of the other things I’ve done are music based. I do a lot of work with my band, The Spasm Band. We do occasional gigs in London.
Kara: On your path of writing and creativity, what do you want to achieve next?
A: Ultimately I feel that one of the reasons why I write is so that I have left something, so that my life hasn’t been a waste, so that I’ve left something that maybe students in the future or writers in the future can get inspiration from. When I am dead, and am no longer on this planet, people can still look back and get a taste of my voice, and what I said, what I have felt and what my life was like. That to me is important. In the same way that now I look back when I’m doing my research, and I’m reading poetry, and I’m reading a lot of people that are gone now. I can still feel them through their work. That is what I want-for the work to last.
---
|
