12 or 20 (second series) questions with Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer,and performer based in London. His poems have been published and anthologizedin The Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, OxfordPoetry, Tate, bath magg, Fourteen Poems, Re•creation,and Queerlings. As a Ledbury Poetry Critic, he’s written reviews for TheGuardian, The Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, the PoetrySchool, Magma Poetry, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, andthe Poetry Book Society. His poetry has been commissioned by the RoyalSociety of Literature and Spread the Word.
1 - How did your first book changeyour life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does itfeel different?
I’m still waiting on it to be released (Jan 2025 in US andUK) so perhaps I don’t have yet the retrospective eye that I assure you Icrave, and for some reason, thirst at the thought of being able to reflect on.I never really had the fear that I wouldn’t be able to do it. No, the fear wasmore would it be of quality, and this, is still to be decided and seen.
2 - How did you come to poetryfirst, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think dancing led me more neatly to poetry than to theothers. I think I can say for years, I’d softly consumed poetry, usually usedin voiceovers for dance music. Growing up in the Pentecostal tradition as well,listening to and reading the bible weekly, attending church, and being preachedat––one could say there was also a poetic quality to those Sunday sermons.There were some feeble attempts at writing fan fiction where I was the maincharacter, some guy (a peer, a choreographer, a teacher) was a pretend lover,but those, I know now, were just ways to express to myself a queerness thatwasn’t being entirely nurtured, even accepted; a queerness that wasn’t beingentirely given voice to. It’s no surprise my poems move along such desirelines––in equal amounts of repose, and ecstatic upwellings.
3 - How long does it take to startany particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or isit a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape,or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s really a mix of all. Some come quickly, urgently, andhave remained mostly unchanged. But I would say that, as I look across mymanuscript, many are often poems I wrote, I then forgot about, and then months later remembered because a similartheme or word came up in a new poem I was writing. What would happen then isthe new poem would likely cannibalize the old one for its best parts, which isusually a line or two, sometimes just a situation. I do have a notes app thatI’ve been keeping for more than 6 years that I call ‘Notes for Poetry’.Sometimes whole poems come from that, or just crucial lines that help a wiltingpoem revivify itself. Two years ago I started “Notes for Prose”, though thisone is not nearly as helpful.
On starting a project: I’m able to have my finger in manydifferent pies. This is how I am though I am not sure if it's conducive to mypractice. I can often feel paralyzed trying to think across poetry and prose(I’m a critic as well).
4 - Where does a poem usually beginfor you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a largerproject, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I remember there being a discourse on Twitter about thedifference between a ‘book poet’ or ‘poem poet’, which are funny distinctions.I can’t speak to the validity of the binary, but I can say, I think as I beganto see that these poems could be collected into a book, I slid towards being a‘book poet’. Of course, it is always composed of individual poems, but I quitethink I’m a tonal, musical thinker and as what was maybe 8-10 salvageable poemsbecame 30, then 40, I found myself thinking more cosmically about the book,less about what it was saying, and more about how it was sounding itself.
5 - Are public readings part of orcounter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doingreadings?
Oh yeah, I love reading in public. I’m a dancer by trainingso I like lights on me. But, contrarily, I wouldn’t call myself a showy readerreally. I actually tend be more or less still and try to channel the poeticenergy through my voice, which has a resonance to it. I rarely gesture, and Ithink people have come to expect of me some more elaborate performancemovements as I read, but that would feel to me a great disservice to the poems,which is the medium through which what I feel in the moment comes through.Also, it’s more easy to tell if a line is wrong (untruthful, clunky,out-of-place, too explanatory) when you’re reading it to others.
6 - Do you have any theoreticalconcerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answerwith your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
What is intimacy? What does it take to really, really bewith another human? Versus, what does it take to really be with another human?
7 – What do you see the current roleof the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you thinkthe role of the writer should be?
Oh I don’t know. Writers and writings are so various. Ithink writers all do something fundamental though––they tell us who was alive,when, and, most importantly, how.
8 - Do you find the process ofworking with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love it––I’m a high conceptualizer, an ENFP––I daydream,fantasize, theorize. And poems are one way in which I try to bring myself backto the ground, though one might find in my poems a interest, maybe desperation,for horizontal movement. Editors are people on the ground, who are trying tocatch you. You know in movies when someone is jumping off a building, butthere’s a group of people with a blanket below, trying to catch them like ahammock of sorts?
It's essential for me. I like making messes (but really likecrisp finished products) and my editors at Soft Skull Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions, helped me clean up the work. I don’t mean in the language so much(though one can always be tighter) but conceptually, structurally. As someonewho didn’t study English/creative writing in a normative way, it was alsoimportant for me to feel my editors were teaching me about craft, implicitly orexplicitly. This was achieved.
9 - What is the best piece of adviceyou've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t imitate. Steal.
10 - How easy has it been for you tomove between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I move quite fluidly, giving myself permission in criticalprose to be as poetic as I need, understanding the conventions of lyric poetryas critical. It’s harder the other way around, but more worthwhile. How to makethe rhetoric as interesting (musically or argumentatively) as the bombasticimage flying off the handle. But sometimes it’s okay to just make the argument,lose the image, lose the prettiness, lose the glamour, and argue.
11 - What kind of writing routine doyou tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you)begin?
Writing this book, when my life was less structured, and Iwas more financially scant, I could wake up at 7 and write until ten, eleven.That’s when my brain starts to go. But if you do that, even for like twomonths, so much gets done. Now it’s all over the place. I lecture three days aweek, with the other two days essentially for writing. Mondays are bad, I doscroll the most on Mondays! Why though?? I also believe protecting your writingtime, as I take from Zadie Smith, is essential, but much more difficult themore responsibility you have to others, students, friends, colleagues. Itreally is a paradox, you need a life to write about and time away from thatlife to write about it.
12 - When your writing gets stalled,where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I steal lines and reorganize them from other poets, randomlyoff my shelf. Though, there are some books that are ripe (and by that, I meanso masterful any line jolts you into saying something) for theft: anything byJohn Ashbery, lots of Jorie Graham. Louise Glück is harder to steal frommaterially, but her tone is so impressive (as in it impresses itself on you)that after a couple of poems, when I want to be, and see the value of being,less woo-woo. I am very suggestive person.
13 - What fragrance reminds you ofhome?
Aboniki Balm which is kind of menthol rub.
14 - David W. McFadden once saidthat books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence yourwork, whether nature, music, science, or visual art?
As a choreographer and dancer, dance definitely influencesmy work implicitly. Contemporary dance, I’d hazard, taught me to ngaf what Iwrite, after having twisted my body into so many forms and shapes.
15 - What other writers or writingsare important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
SZA and Frank Ocean. Rita Dove –– I read one of her poemsevery couple of months and am just reminded of how limited my imagination is.And then work towards opening it. Jorie Graham who was recommended to me,Louise Glück who was recommended to me by Amazon, and more recently writerslike Christina Sharpe and Carmen Maria Machado
16 - What would you like to do thatyou haven't yet done?
Write a book made of mostly sentences. Or entirely.
17 - If you could pick any otheroccupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think youwould have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Definitely a model. I think I could still be one.
18 - What made you write, as opposedto doing something else?
I danced first. Well, if I’m being accurate, I did musicfirst, as a trombonist. And then danced. But both of these forms, I felt givento. Writing was the one I didn’t know if was innate in me. Music and Dancewere. Writing was something I had to graduate into my life and I’m stillfiguring out how to do that––
19 - What was the last great bookyou read? What was the last great film?
Like A Ghost I Leave You – Quotes By Edvard Munch
20 - What are you currently workingon?
Poems and sentences––I don’t say that to be facetious.Writing a good sentence is so difficult! And I think I have to think of it asthat small, the local, to keep the same intensity I’d like my work to have, thesame force––Paragraphs, yikes!
