Anthony Vahni Capildeo

the yale review How did this poetic sequence begin for you?

anthony vahni capildeo “Fighting Words,” like any poetry sequence, has multiple origins. It’s also still in progress. The “seed texts” for the sequence originated in one of my writing notebooks: size A4, with an emerald-green cover. These comprised creative responses composed and presented at Plants, Poetry, and Punchy Prose, a minisymposium held in May 2024 at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, where I am a writer in residence, in honor of Kasia Boddy, Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge. (I first encountered Kasia’s work more than ten years ago, when I was Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at the same university.) Her multidisciplinary engagement with American cultural history ranges from studies of plants to studies of pugilism. Inspired by Kasia’s botanical writings, I revisited the names of Chinese and Japanese tree peonies; then, setting my attention to shift repeatedly between her vegetal and human texts, I stole contemplative breathers, during which I “translated” the gorgeousness of the plants, and their names, into imaginary martial arts or dance moves, and snippets of florid prose that resembled sports commentary. I moved instinctively, letting dense clusters of words and images accrue on the page, then revising them into various poetic forms. This helped me gain fluency in a new kind of “kinetic syntax” that responded both to the body’s habit of movement and to the tricksiness of the mind.

tyr What do the poems in this series have in common?

avc The poems in “Fighting Words” draw their energy and shape from martial arts, dance, and other physical activities that I admire (especially as I’m quite uncoordinated). The emphasis is on the beauty of exchange rather than on struggle or agon: fighting as a kind of conversation between the body and what surrounds it, mesmerizing but not mindless, spectacular but innocent of “the spectacle.”

“Fighting Words” also extends the practice-based work on kinetic syntax that I developed collaboratively with Paige Smeaton and other theater-makers in the mid-2010s and have archived in my previous books. Kinetic syntax invites readers to inhabit and reinterpret existing literary texts, first identifying “skeletons and patterns” in them using close linguistic and literary analysis, and then reading them aloud and pairing recitation with physical actions (both spontaneous and stylized). For example, in the poem “I Am No Soldier,” by the Guyanese revolutionary poet Martin Carter, we mapped verb tenses, recurrent vowels and exclamations, and spiraling and tripartite syntactical structures. We then “translated” these linguistic features into movement and dance, using props ranging from glittery scarves to wire fencing.

In “Fighting Words,” the movement of language and thought, and the development of implied arguments or hinted stances, deliberately varies. Some poems are softer, others harder. Some are more straight-line, others more circular. While considering the apparent subject of the poem, my imagination also inhabits another arena: that of the dance or challenge.

tyr What is the link, in your mind, between the categories of “poetry” and of “fighting”?

avc It seems beyond me to grapple with the question What is poetry? But let’s think about what prepositions come after the word fighting. Are you fighting to do something—fighting to be heard, fighting to keep back tears? Fighting for your life? Are you fighting not to—not to fall over? Are you fighting with, that is, against, someone or something—fighting with yourself, fighting against the tide?

I believe that poetry is fighting for the right to remain silent while also not being spoken over or mistaken as lacking in agency. Silence can translate as both fullness and self-emptying. Refraining from definitive utterance may allow for transformation to take place in those who otherwise might be tempted to harden into their roles as interlocutors, victims, or even authorities. Silence can be a positive assertion that what matters is not sayable in the language on offer.

After all, there’s a fine line between self-declaration and self-incrimination. Why keep speaking if the listener’s focus is less on love, or spirit, and more on letter, or “law”? Poetry is fighting for inconvenient beings, the kind that it would upset a behemoth to digest. Poetry is fighting to be less than prose and more than information. Poetry asks you to stop. To sense the war within yourself. To love, strangely, the stranger.

tyr In what way is poetry less than prose?

avc Perhaps if prose is a merchant, poetry can be a fool. Ascetic, on fire, wasteful, lavish. Prose makes a good bargain with the page. It looks like real work to write a novel. Poetry is very bad value: always too many or too few words. You have to make up its volume with your own response. Poetry is less-than in the sense of embarrassing, hanging out on corners and in doorways, not needing to furnish itself respectably from a massive warehouse of words. Obviously, writing is labor, and poets should not starve; I am not saying that poetry should be free and pure or that nobody should sell a book. It’s more that the book of poetry isn’t guaranteed to behave like a book.

tyr Can you describe how it feels when a subject that’s preoccupying you demands to be worked out in the form of a poem?

avc At the moment, many of the subjects that preoccupy me aren’t the ones I’d ideally wish to write poetry about! There’s a shattering quality to the way humanitarian crises are manufactured in our times, and then the reporting of the crises and the reactions to the reporting all splinter and diverge from the events. Panic falls from the air and dusts our lungs so we breathe despair. I resist writing from, or of, that panic.

My writing process involves a shift in bodiliness, a change in my experience of embodiment. I become impatient with acting like a normal human being. I turn into a creature that has to curl and uncurl, whisper, nest, hide, and bounce, and definitely not engage in conversation. After enough canceled meetups with friends and burnt pots on the stove, enough ordinary questions answered with a blank stare or a squeak, I realize that poems are arriving; I need to “keep my tail quiet” and give myself over to them. Even now, I feel an alteration of state, a giddy high as well as great vulnerability, when the words finally come into an order that can be handed on to someone else, some reader.

tyr There are relatively few instances of the pronoun “I” in these poems; in fact, two poems don’t use it at all. In “Fighting Words: Tea Fever,” it appears only in the second half of the poem, and in the persona of an “economic migrant.” Can you speak a bit about the role of this pronoun in your work?

avc The “economic migrant” in “Fighting Words: Tea Fever” is the ghost of a British colonial boy who perished of fever in the forest, having gone to seek his fortune in the tea business in Assam. I’m surprised when migration is described as a recent phenomenon, or as something that the “Global South” inflicts on the “Global North.” The advent of colonialism brought about massive economic migrations of Europeans, many of whom wanted violently to move away from home and make a better life.

“I” in my poems is often a tool for displacing my singular lived experience. That “I” attempts to catch on to or channel the drama of how others might express or understand themselves. The poet and scholar Sandeep Parmar’s writing on the lyric “I” has considerable appeal; I’m drawn to her argument that the British lyric “I” that she encountered assumes a falsely universal shared experience, language, and tradition. Influenced by Rosi Braidotti, Parmar embraces constant restitching and the refusal of fixity: the acknowledgment of a nomadic “I” that operates in a creative, alternative state of becoming, neither nostalgic nor othered.

I’m also compelled by Martin Carter’s collective, transhistorical “I,” which includes the tongueless, the shadowy, the buried, the still-arriving. Lately, I’ve been dwelling in the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s diffraction of “I and I,” “I and Jah,” “I and Jamaica.” In my earlier work, “I” tended to be a persona; the persona poems of Robert Browning were hugely influential. Perhaps the changing role of “I” traces my sense of the responsibility of witness, and the desired dynamic of constant, loving relation. “I” leads immediately and more interestingly to “not-me.”

tyr Do you feel politically called to testify or respond to certain events or conditions of contemporary life in your poems?

avc Yes. A formation in prayer (Roman Catholic and formerly Hindu) as well as in philology has given me habits of attention, concentration, self-emptying, and openness. Imaginative literature taught me to cross distances. It’s impossible not to be moved by the world. Some poets, making patterns, use language as a sieve or stencil. I feel language and languages wash through me; I feel the current of events. Perhaps this is political; perhaps it is merely being alive.