Eve Esfandiari Denney on Poetry as Gathering Ephemera
British Iranian/Roma poet Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s debut publication My Bodies This Morning This Evening is out this year with Bad Betty Press, packed with acute and tender explorations of subjects ranging from a fragmentary documentation of Roma language to a portrait of Patty and Selma Bouvier. Fellow British-Iranian poet Hasti asks about her influences and journey into poetry, especially as a mixed heritage woman who has lived through chronic illness.
Firstly, congratulations on bringing your debut out into the world! The title of your pamphlet is My Bodies This Morning This Evening: can you speak more about how the physical, visceral body makes itself felt and seen in your writing?
I think My Bodies This Morning This Evening is describing the body as a multitude of things, but primarily as a place that is both brutal and magic. One that contains a history and an all-encompassing presence that, at some point, we have no choice but to not be at odds with.
Can you speak more about how your journey into poetry has been informed by your experience of chronic illness?
I had cancer for twelve years, so for some of my childhood, adolescence and early twenties I was unwell. I always wanted to make art, but attending art school during treatment was not feasible and I didn't have the space or physical strength to make the work I wanted to make. So, I started writing poems; poems, or my understanding of them, felt like a science of intuition, something closer to “feeling” than making visual work. I know a lot of people relate to Fine Art very differently, but in my opinion it has this huge capacity to be cool in a way poetry can’t. I think this is because poetry is just such an embarrassing art form. It’s something teenage girls do but some of us have carried on. I find it very hard to not speak close to honesty when I write poems because it’s already such a sacrifice of ego to admit I make them.
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“I believe language is a spiritual material to work with.”
Haha, relatable! I feel like for poets of colour, our bios can be strange places: on one hand, they can signpost marketability to a white middle-class audience, but they can also be a place to clearly establish a political context for your poetics. What do you think?
I agree with the marketability of the ‘Iranian poet’ and that is tricky. However, British poetry has always been about identity politics as it’s a white male tradition, and in my opinion, being explicit about your ethnicity in relation to your poetry is acknowledging a history of racialisation in literature that has always existed and still exists. It can inspire fetishization by publishers and magazines, or even self-mythologizing. No one should ever feel pressure to say where they are from for those reasons. But personally, what I feel overrides the negative political gesturing is when I consider the history and cultures of the women in my family, both Persian and Roma Gypsy, and how little permission they had or still have to speak, and even to live. I can't help but feel a sense of celebration for being a female British Roma/Iranian poet. It's a beautiful claim to make, it’s like saying all that history, all that silenced suffering later led to my existence, an existence that has the dignity to write and to be read. I’ve felt something of that in Iranian poet Kaveh Akbar’s work too, especially his most recent collection Pilgrim Bell. There’s a subversion of that historical silence: his silence is an invitation for the reader and the speaker to be acknowledged and heard in the quietness, which is resonant of his central symbol: the non-verbal but audible call of the bell.
That’s really beautiful. It reminds me of the line ‘annunciate you have permission to sing’ from the end of your poem Good and better lies, which also references some Persian motifs and translated idioms. Could you speak to those parts of Iranianness or Iranian literature that you draw from throughout My Bodies?
I think when I’m writing from the perspective of Iranian culture I’m very much feeling around in the dark with a British voice. I come from a very naive understanding of Iranian culture because my mum died when I was young, but I do still feel a very strong connection to Iran. My relationship to Iranian literature in the poems focus very specifically on early foundational Persian texts, like Attar’s The Canticle of the Birds. I try to interpret the foundational or beginning ideas of what it is to be Iranian in the hope it orientates me towards finding the root, or perhaps the heart of Iranian culture.
The title of the pamphlet suggests a multitude of selves brought together through time. When you bring in Roma words, and a bit of Farsi, is that a way of collecting different parts of yourself together in one place?
Maybe. There’s something quite radical about the gathering of ephemera; making something out of the residue of stuff, so that’s how I choose to work with poetry. I collect whatever parts of language or memory I can find and try to build something out of it. Building instead of mourning.
What do you think poetry offers us that maybe visual art doesn’t?
The opportunity to work exclusively with the futility and magnitude of language. I believe language is a spiritual material to work with. We have inherited it through ancient permutation, and because of this, language holds wisdom beyond and above our use; words and phrases have more knowledge than we do in applying them. Yet, as poets we try to manipulate language and master it to express what we mean when ultimately, by producing literature, what we offer the reader is a parcel of enigma for them to dive into and find the truths beyond whatever we intended to say.
Interview of Eve Esfandiari-Denney by Hasti
Eve Esfandiari-Denney is a South London poet and author of "My Bodies This Morning This Evening".
Eve’s writing centres on reflexive interrogations of the categories that constitute selfhood; nationhood, citizenship, gender and the material body. You can buy her book here.
