Interview by Zoë Brigley
Content warning: mentions/implications of domestic or intimate partner abuse
“I love how agile and stripped back [duplex] is as a form. It doesn’t allow you to dwell, chewing away unnecessary information and only leaving the reader with the heart of the idea“
Duplex
The streets are unsafe, full of strange people.
I know because I have been waiting for hours.
Because I have been waiting for hours, I know
An angry man walked into my mother’s house.
Every mother houses an angry man.
Bins are full of cheap bubble wrap.
I jump in the bin full of bubble wrap.
Grab fistfuls to cover my mother’s shoulders.
My mother’s fists corner my shoulders.
No one taught her to protect the right way.
There is no right way to protect
Someone with a war raging inside.
A war is raging inside home and
The streets are unsafe for strange people.
So I see the duplex being used more these days. Could you say a bit about it for people who may not know the form, and what made you decide to use it for this poem?
I learnt about the duplex through one of the sessions at the Roundhouse. It’s a form created by Jericho Brown – a poem of seven couplets where the second line of the couplet is repeated and starts the next one.
I love how agile and stripped back it is as a form. It doesn’t allow you to dwell, chewing away unnecessary information and only leaving the reader with the heart of the idea. Since I was tackling a complex relationship between a mother and daughter with traces of abuse, the form’s constraints helped me get to the soul of the poem quickly and in a more interesting manner.
At the heart of this poem, there is the instinct to protect a mother. Often mothers are the ones who might protect us, but the poem creates a sense of an unsafe society where the mother might be vulnerable to attack. Could you say a bit more about that?
Mothers are also doing life for the first time, but they aren’t given the grace of being a beginner. We brand mothers as superhumans and applaud them for raising children and managing the transition from womanhood to motherhood alone. I think at a certain age daughters recognize that. They see the woman behind their mother, and this poem was a nod to that. It was an acceptance of the mistakes mothers make and an acknowledgement of the difficulties they go through.
The play of language is wonderful in this poem, how you vary the repeated phrases and make them new. Are there any particular poets who inspire you in how they use language?
Recently the work of Kaveh Akbar and Fiona Benson has been very inspiring. I also think ghazals have had a huge impact on the way I approach poetry in general. Growing up my dad always played ghazals in Urdu and Hindi round the house. The way writers like Ghalib and Shahid play with simple words and sentence construction is magic.
