How I create… with poet Anthony Anaxagorou

As a poet he has published three collections well worthy of shelf space on any self-respecting bookcase, including 2019’s TS Eliot Prize shortlisted After the Formalities, and 2022’s RSL Ondaatje Prize-winning Heritage Aesthetics.

Beyond his own poetry Anaxagorou is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, which features the work of poets yet to publish a first collection; the founder and curator of WriteBack, a quarterly literary series held at the British Library; and a host of mentoring sessions and workshops for aspiring poets.

If you’re a regular here at the Southbank Centre, you’ll most likely recognise Anaxagorou from his work with Out-Spoken, the monthly poetry and live music night held in our Purcell Room, which he founded back in 2012 and now serves as Artistic Director. In April this year Anaxagorou also features as part of a special collaboration between Out-Spoken and the London Sinfonietta for Multitudes, our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music.

And in between all this, he kindly found the time to give us a little insight into his creative process as a poet and writer.

​​When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

I tend to separate the idea of creativity from artmaking. Lots of what I do with Out-Spoken and Propel Magazine involves having to be creative – usually that means problem solving, or how best to approach new ideas or projects. I think creativity is far more common than art. Art is a different kind of endeavour. It’s working within a predetermined aesthetic or form where the task requires a different set of faculties. When writing poetry, I can be intuitive, I can look to trouble certain questions, I can be lateral, expansive and subjective. All of which I don’t feel I can do when I’m trying to think creatively – which feels more restricting because it has a set outcome. So being artful happens when I feel I have time, space, ideas and a container for my subject.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

If an idea has scope, or if it has several key elements to it which I don’t necessarily understand, then I find myself drawn to it, slowly writing into parts which seem layered or multidimensional. If I know too much about the thing I’m writing around, I find the poems become narrow or didactic or rhetorical. Discovery is a crucial part of poetry writing, so the less I know about where I’m going the more I want to stay developing it.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

Books. I try to read as much as I can and have my heroes all posing in one room, peering over my shoulders when I write. I like the idea of having the greats look over me – I can almost hear their scorn if I write a lazy line. Aside from that I need instrumental music to get the poem up in the air, then some sustained silence to fly it home. I would love more time to myself to write, but currently between the long list of projects and the amount of teaching and mentees I have, I find time to be the most precious and sacred resource.

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

I discuss this lots in lessons. I don’t subscribe to the idea of the reader – as in a singular, immutable entity that renders language and thought in a fixed way. What a lot of us do is conjure the worst reader imaginable then assume everyone who opens our books reads in that way. There are indeed readers (plural), and the individual reading mind is complex, intuitive, experienced and comprised largely of memory and unique sensory markers – like the symbol of an apple can mean three different things to three different people. Because of these facts I withdrew myself from being in service of the reader, because I had no idea who the reader is and I don’t think art is a service we provide to a perceived group or audience. I make the art I feel I need to make, or want to make, and hope that others share my curiosities or find my preoccupations as interesting as I do.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

Staying disciplined shouldn’t be something we feel we need to do, rather, I feel it should be something we are. Lots of poets I know think if they don’t write for a year or two or three, they’ll lose their readers, people will forget about them and work will stop coming in. If you can sustain yourself and allow for periods where you practice living by paying attention to the small and large rhythms of the world – its challenges and moments of beauty – I think you become a better writer. This factory approach to making art which is largely linked to class and capitalism, just means we end up repeating ourselves or rehashing books we’ve already written for the purpose of appearing prolific or dedicated. Better to take time, to think and push the work in a different direction.

What do you do when you hit a wall, when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

I accept that today isn’t a day for writing. Today the thing I want to do doesn’t want to reveal itself. Think of it like fishing – you sit around waiting all day for a bite and get nothing, then on other days you fill up three buckets by 2pm. There are other things we can do if we feel we’ve hit a wall. We can read the books which we love and bring us inspiration. Or we can do something totally separate from writing. Times where I sit to write and I physically feel unable to because I’m either too tired from having spent the whole week working on other people’s poems, or I feel restless in my body and I want to run, or ride my motorbike, or go push some weights. These are all legitimate feelings which I think if attended to properly will inevitably make the writing stronger.

Who do you look to for feedback?

I’m fortunate enough to have some great poets who I can call on to read over my early drafts. I thrive off feedback, I think it takes a certain kind of resilience to write something personal and have someone shoot holes in it. I lacked that maturity in my younger years but now I yearn for it. I want them to highlight my blind spots, my tics and where I drop the ball in a poem. It’s a relationship contingent on respect and trust more than anything else.

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

I have a much more robust understanding of the craft now. I think that’s the only learnable or teachable aspect of poetry – craft and technique. You can’t teach someone where they can go with their imagination, or how they might relate to words or language, but you can teach them how putting certain words in a certain order will constitute a certain kind of poem. In those formative years I had nobody to really point out what I was doing wrong as I’m largely self-taught. I spent years reading craft books, discussing the intricacies of poetry writing with other poets, until slowly I could feel my technique develop, along with the moves I was able to make on the page, and the voice I eventually felt was my own.

What does success feel like?

Seeing something through then moving on without the fanfare.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

For every set back there’s some nugget of advice out there to help ease the blow. What I tell myself often is to meet myself where I’m at. There’s little to no point in trying to imagine how people will respond to what you make, if anyone shares your interests or if they’re keen to study how you navigate and organise the world. Between the moment you have an idea until the moment the book goes to print, all you can do is serve who you feel you are. The rest is out of your control.

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work?

That I like to write sentences which start in the concrete and finish in the abstract.

How do you know when you’re done?

When it stops bothering me, says the poet Mary Ruefle.