For me there are at least four different levels in which sleep invades the text. One is that when I was very little I had an experience of lucid dreaming, which I still can really do. I dreamt that I was in a hotel we often went to in Tobago, with an open balcony, and that there was an earthquake – which does happen – but that I was shaken off the balcony. And in the dream I suddenly thought, ‘This is a dream, if I choose to I can float,’ and I floated down onto the marble-tiled open ballroom, and I looked around and I felt things were wrong, I felt within the narrative I didn’t deserve to have survived. And I continued the dream for a little while, in this lucid way, and then woke up with a vague sense of trouble. But ever since then, and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve always practised meditation, I’ve been able to have a very rich dream life, or very dreamless sleep.

Yes, a real level of control and also a level of reality. Father Lai Fook, my maths teacher in Sixth Form, told me one of the things he did was to look at Pure Maths problems before he fell asleep, and not try to solve them, just look at them as beautiful objects. And then when he woke up, the solutions would start working themselves out. So sleep came to seem like either something quite active or something you could plunge into.

The second notion of levels of sleep can be related to when I started reading for the DPhil in Old Norse and translation theory. I looked at ideas to do with, for example, retiring into sleep as a deep mode of accessing bits of your brain that the conscious clattering day wouldn’t allow. For example, when early Iceland held a sort of referendum on whether to be Christian or Pagan at the law meeting, according to the Íslendingabók, the Book of Icelanders, the lawspeaker, Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, retired under his cloak for three days, and then emerged with the solution. There is a fascination in the thought that you can actually zone into rather than zoning out of…

The third aspect of sleep would be as a literary device which allows some of the oblique or non-explicit meaningfulness of modes such as fantasy, which can deal vividly but indirectly with the urgent, mixed, weird world. I would wish to use this device – or rather, could not escape its deploying itself – to conveying a more ‘post-colonial’ layered awareness (cf. Ursula Le Guin or Nalo Hopkinson). I’m fascinated by how it’s possible to read one city through another. So, if I did something that would be illegitimate, like reading Florence through Port of Spain, and I didn’t want to make a big political or cultural point, simply show the mixing – which happened just because I was bodily and mentally in one, and bodily and mentally in the other – dreaming becomes a useful language. It saves me from having to politicise that moment of mixing in the text. I can speak from the sheer experiential reality of having mixed instances of memory-and-place, memory-in-place.

Yes… Now the fourth thing about writing with or from sleep or dreams is that in terms of the bargain with the reader (not that I totally believe in ‘the reader’): we know we are both let off the hook, and that the text can go anywhere.

There may be two levels of lack of control, and one of them is related to the ‘absolutely no change’ refrain. I wrote this poem when I’d just moved to Cambridge, and the year seemed to open for me as a glorious prospect of writing. And so I sat down with my back against some packing boxes – the kitchen was all packing boxes and I couldn’t get to the cooker – I was extremely physically tired, and also disorientated, as it was the first time since I was 18 that I hadn’t had a base in Oxford. I let my mind do what it wanted and wrote the results, rather than having any sort of editorial control. That is how I got the main body of the poem. It was watching how the mind was trying to place itself in that moment of physical disorientation.

Perhaps; but the ‘absolutely no change’ was the secretly political bit. I had in mind how people can be constructed by gender, class, race, age, ability, et cetera: I sometimes feel, when entering a space or conversation, that I’ve already been constructed as something. Then, no matter what I say, or how I feel the situation could evolve, I’m imprisoned in supposedly speaking ‘as a’ medievalist, or Trinidadian, or woman. The ‘absolutely no change’ was partly about that: it doesn’t matter how much you can shift from city to city, there are these frames which are placed upon you as an interlocutor.

The other thing was that ‘absolutely no change’ recalls street interactions with beggars. In the south of England, I’ve several times been mistaken for a beggar; once when I was wearing a purple silk top and floral circular skirt for a garden party at Christ Church, and I was waiting for my mother outside Marks & Spencers. Perhaps it’s to do with South Asian people turning up on Oxfam posters and so on – you don’t see a whole lot of them heading up a football team.

Relentless prophecy is a beautiful phrase, and that’s an excellent linkage. The dreaming mind does tell people things they would rather not hear sometimes. But there is also ‘currency’ in terms of fluency, of couramment or corriente, in French and Spanish, which would be used to mean fluency in a language. So crying out would be a linguistic and primal sign which people are fluent in: there’s a strange way in which, when you are too much or falsely constructed in instants of encounter, what remains or occurs is effectively the pure shrieking of ‘I am here’, or ‘I suffer’, or ‘I love’, or ‘love moves me’, or ‘suffering happens’.

A missing word for change could be ‘exchange’ or ‘interchange’, because the other thing of course with dreams is that they are monologues.

Yes, within a single (not singular) dream or poem, there may be smaller dramas with differently refracted ‘I’s. In point of fact, this piece contains more autobiographical material than my poems usually do. That was a real encounter in a sunglasses shop in St Ebbe’s Street in Oxford, where I had come in and was looking around for quite a few minutes, and then someone younger than me, looking as described in the poem, and visibly not with me, came in after me. When I asked the shop assistant, who had been ignoring me, basically, ‘Please may I spend some money buying your sunglasses which appear to be for sale’, she said that she thought I was with that other person. Which was curious, because there was no reason to assume that he would be the person that had to do the asking.

And also who the ‘you’ is.

That’s rather beautiful, I hadn’t thought of that in terms of individual people. Here again I was trying to be a little tricky, putting in a large idea as if it were quite small. I remember reading William Carlos Williams’s Paterson when I was younger, and being annoyed by a couple of lines in there: ‘a man like a city and a woman like a flower…’ (though I do like flowers). Paterson is a text I continue to think with and through, so in daily life I sometimes relate my feelings about it to what it’s like being in a city. I read Paterson through from beginning to end. I now can sit and stare at the poem, whether in the book or in my head: it is city-like, in that there are places you can hurry through and places you can linger. I started thinking not of the poem, but of sentences as being city-like in those ways.

When I was teaching creative writing and one of my fellow teachers kept telling people to write short sentences like Raymond Carver, I contradicted him in my alternate sessions: a sentence could be something to wander around, like a park that might have benches in it, where you sit down and admire the wrought ironwork. Then the woman as a flower floats back into my mind’s eye, individual, a character within the story of a civilization, yet not (allowed to be) representative either of civilization or a civilization. And I started thinking of the lyric form as being associated with the cry: how the famous lyricists like Sappho are associated with being female… People do talk nowadays about women poets who write long poems: Alice Oswald, or Alice Notley, or Dionne Brand – of course, previously H.D. or earlier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; nonetheless, wanting to produce the great big poem remains quite masculine. So the crying… the girl aren’t always or necessarily desirable in my poem; hardly what the poem even pretends to want to be. Again, it’s partly about ‘no change’, because if you are the girl, what access do you have to the city? Or have you been creating the city? And are you crying or are you building?

I think you’re perfectly right, and I think it’s partly to do with the way the poem was placed in my mind during composition. I dedicated it to the Weyward Sisters… some women I met at the University of Glasgow who aren’t all in Glasgow any longer; we try to read difficult books in our own time and have a loose sort of reading group – we might get through two books a year. We have had messed-up lives in various ways, so we quest for non-silly ways of paying attention or valuing everyday kindness; the Weywards are incredibly strong and creative women, and move between at least two different cities, or three different cities, or a couple of countries, or two or three countries… The Weywards got the dedication because we have been able to reclaim a complex ‘I’, which is implied by the ‘you’: not the ‘I’ as representative or singular, but as somehow intersubjective or shared, in a Woolfian way. That friends treasure or preserve or have custody of bits of each of their ‘you’s – sometimes a good or interesting bit, that ‘you’ wouldn’t be the keyholder of when being ‘I’. A Weyward Sisters city becomes a collective dreaming intervention.

And it’s also quite tiring in another sense, because there’s a strange way in which it’s a fake… not exactly fake. But the steps in the poem were a way of trying to fold one place over another; that’s another way that the poem was being quietly political, whilst hiding it in the dream mode. I believe certain people do need continuity in life. I do need more continuity than I used to think I did. There’s simply a process by which the mind starts to produce images more freely or fluently if it has a reasonable guarantee that the mind’s owner will return to the same place for X number of days, or see a plant grow for X months, even if this is not directly represented in any writing. You are within time and in a different relation to the things of this world if you’re always saying, ‘Oh I’ve planted the seed, I’ll go back and see the tree’.

So there was the politics of resisting the easily migratory stance and aesthetic that is so marketable for ‘international’ authors, resisting saying, ‘Oh it’s the best of all possible worlds, so when the migratory mind flickers I’m going to make a huge virtuoso flicker’. I was attempting a little quiet folding – a desperate stitching-up of what was continuous. And then, more politically, I was resisting saying things like, ‘When you are in the sunglasses shop in Oxford, it doesn’t even occur to you that in pristine-looking beaches in Trinidad, oil has been discovered, and those will be ruined in order to fuel the wasteful economy, in order that sunglasses are produced for sale elsewhere.’ I didn’t want to do a finger-pointing essay poem, but rather quietly bring things near that are geographically far, but have become causally near, to show the way our world is now manufactured.

I didn’t want to be political at all. I thought when I was younger that political poetry necessarily involved overt ideology, surface engagement and/or documentary realism. These didn’t drive me creatively. So I thought I could only pretend to be a political writer in the sense that someone like Merle Hodge is a political prose writer in Trinidad. You can absolutely see what community issues are animating her novels, which are also very beautifully written, but you could strip out of that a documentary and go and make it if you wanted to. And then I started thinking, in a more nuanced way – after I had travelled a little bit more to places like Delhi and the Almost Island Dialogues, an international writers’ meeting held there every year – of the ineffable value of happening as doing, of letting the imagination work as intensely as it does. I don’t mean in a lazy and wallowing way, but to live quite fully, and to go into these zonal dream states, like the Icelandic lawmaker going under his cloak, and to let the imagination, like with a pure maths problem, produce a solution in the form of a poem. A solution to what would essentially be irresolvable if you tried to do it politically, whether in terms of stylized, disruptive surface or documentary realism.

Well, it can help having it. I had in mind how more strongly imaginative poems can be more political. For example, when I was doing Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness with a class of students (the book is set during the 1982 bombings of Beirut, but the narrator’s obsessed with making the perfect cup of black coffee in a white cup – that becomes a kind of refrain, even while the book’s texture and direction go through both lateral and vertical histories of the region), I remember one student being infuriated and thinking that Darwish trivialized war; as though in places of war, all the literature should be about war. It’s incredibly political to refuse to be reduced by the contingency of war, to being the object of war. There’s a kind of liberation of the subject if the imagination is so engaged.

It appears. Other people have asked if I was synæsthetic; I now wonder if I am for colour with touch, since last Christmas when I had acupuncture and different needles provoked specific colourbursts. I’d always thought it was migraine when overwhelmed by imagined colour presenting itself; for example if somebody hugged me at the end of the evening to say goodbye and that was ‘yellow’ or ‘galaxy’, I would dismiss it as fatigue. But with the acupuncture colours, I realised this was something.

Possibly I do have a hypersensitivity to colour in some way I don’t understand, but with poems it’s more that I get a 4D vision of worlds in which the poem takes place, and even if it were something quite stripped down – I mean no trees or beaches or buildings or whatever – I would still have a complete mental world over which to float the four or five words. I had a very strong sense of colour palette with Cities in Step – including lustre and grain: the rainbow oil black, and a grainy gold, which could either be sand or building mortar. I let those guide me; I recognise what is given, what turns up strongly from the imagination, and then I do not necessarily resist it. I could obviously have built a slightly politically oppressive encounter in lots of ways, but because I was going with the black and gold, this is where the sunglasses episode came up.

…Exactly, yes! It’s also to do with my mother telling me (though I’m not sure if it’s scripturally attested) that the Hindu goddess Kali, whose name means ‘black’, is a goddess of joy if you’re truthful and she doesn’t need to destroy you, and that black contains all the colours. Of course, in terms of physics it’s white that can be refracted into all the colours, but my mother told me to think of black as the deepest blend of every possible colour, rather than absence.

Returning to the autobiographical elements in the poem: on the east coast of Trinidad, I was digging a sandcastle and the sand suddenly ran like rope through my fingers, since the beach contained oil in its very substance. There were flares of an oil processing plant about half a mile down from us, but this particular section hadn’t been tapped. The sandcastle was all gold, except for my tower and bridge with these ropes of black sand in them – it was bizarre.

That’s incredibly perceptive. It’s those extra levels that I’m trying both to work from and convey in poems, rather than a surface level of critical rationality, which assembles a poem and can then deconstruct it.

I did grow up with fireflies, the tiny fireflies that crawled along the white walls of the corridor, and I was the strange child who liked insects to crawl all over her hand, and imagine that they were her friends. And the fireflies’ fiery bit just looks pale yellow: it doesn’t look anything particular until you switch the light off or have a power cut. Then I went to a performance by Aaron Williamson, and he was doing something with matches, looking at them, and then the match would go out. I thought it was to do with Scott of the Antarctic and getting from one point of dark to another, with small illuminations of hope and effort, but it turned out that Aaron was trying to depict the process… the thinking of thinking, and its synaptic flares, as you say.

When I arrived in Cambridge for the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship, Preti Taneja welcomed me and invited me to a screening of O Brother Where Art Thou? outdoors at the Jesus lido, and there were lots and lots of fireflies, and I thought, as I sometimes do with poems, somehow there’s been an accumulation of real occurrence and thinking – a kind of serendipitous gravity – and then I knew, ‘Oh, now this is going to go into the poem.’ I hadn’t unpacked or anything. I was feeling very disorientated, which helped to hook the fireflies into the ‘Cities’ poem, because that night the lido was one of these utterly welcoming yet utterly temporary places. The large screen was temporary, and also everyone else there was deeply embedded in Cambridge, and I had just arrived for a transient fellowship.

It might be the other way round, that I was drawn to the dictionary because of a sense of being inside the whale but not dark, or maybe inside a large, serpentine river – inside coruscating language with lots of different parts. People joke about the dictionary being toil or drudgery – and a lot of it is almost mind-numbingly, breakingly routine. But then there are – or at least there were for me and for some of the other lexicographers – incredible immediate beauties, and also an excitement that no matter how hard you try, language is essentially enormous and untamable, and the minute you refer to a ‘live dictionary’, even with all the software, the record remains behind what’s happening in that huge river-serpent of language. I may have been drawn to that work because I knew it would be given to me in alphabetical batches: you’d have purple and pyramid, and pyrite, and all these things.

Yes, and it’s also a bit like walking out through a city, because you might say I know perfectly well I’m going to the railway station or the park or whatever: at the railway station there’ll be a timetable and at the park there’ll be flowers; but then someone has thrown flowers on the street on the way to the railway station, and there’ll be a noticeboard at the park. There’s this curious serendipity that you impose this dutiful trajectory, and it works, and yet it’s full of all these little bits of things that yet aren’t chaos.

It’s what keeps you going in what would otherwise be unbearable long term. The sense that you are clipping the ocelot’s nails.

Yes, it’s that idea of gentle interdependency that most interests me in living and working, the idea of the solitudinous, where people have space around them, but not a space of delusional individualism or terminal exceptionalism where they think that they can make their own way. Returning again to the Weyward Sisters, there’s this way that people’s best selves are interlocked, or their idea of themselves at any given moment might not in fact be adequate to themselves, and the only really adequate idea comes through this very gentle interdependency with others. As for the sources of the image: my mind puts things together that are similar, and the way that sunlight dappling through the sea in St Lucia or Tobago or Trinidad, in the shallows, makes an extraordinary sort of giraffe pattern. I had read a curious statistic, a kind that sticks in the mind, that giraffes are sociable approximately 15% of the time. What that means, or how it could be measured, I have no idea, but then I suddenly thought, that’s very lenient, and if people could be allowed that absurd leniency, that would be rather beautiful.

¹ Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004), pp. 28-29.

²  Anne Carson, Decreation (Vintage, 2006) p. 22.