Glow Worm: Phoenix Yemi

Worms Issue 8 contributor Phoenix Yemi is this month’s Glow Worm. Online editor Arcadia Molinas speaks to the poet and artist about her poetry practice, where she draws inspiration from, and some of her earliest memories of poetry.

Phoenix’s Issue 8 contribution, ‘I Close my Eyes and Suck You in like a Fire’

What is being a poet to you?

It's a dedication to loving the world around me,  to loving words and feeling the beauty and the power of language. Then within that, in its seriousness, it's a commitment to bearing witness, to truth-telling, to sharing what you believe. It's important to be brave. I think about a poet like Giaconda Belli and how she's dedicated so much of her poetic landscape to fighting for the liberation of Nicaragua, only to be stripped of her citizenship. I think about June Jordan standing firm in her support of Palestinian rights in spite of its effect on her career. I think about Nikki Giovanni and her poem 'Foreword'. I think about Grace Nichols, about 'I Is A Long Memoried Woman', and I think about the last stanza of Audre Lorde's 'A Litany For Survival', "it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive." This is what it means to be a poet, this is what I'm striving for. 

Tell me about one of your earliest memories of poetry.

"As it has been said:

Love and a cough 

cannot be concealed.

Even a small cough.

Even a small love." 

It's Anne Sexton. My long term memory is awful so I can't date it, but I can tell you that I read it and it was like a door, wooden and painted a deep bright red like the colour of oxygenated blood. I was struck by it, by how true it was and how beautiful and simple the words were. I wasn't writing then or even thinking about poetry as something that mattered, but I knew I wanted to carry it with me and it's lived on my walls since that moment. 

You often draw inspiration from other poems and poets, taking lines from them and using them in your poetry - talk to me about your process. How do you start writing a poem?

I do! For me, it's like that James Baldwin quote, the one that says you think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented and then you read. So unless I'm doing a freewrite, I'm reading as I'm writing to anchor me to the feeling. If I'm freewriting then the poem begins as a stream of consciousness, and if I'm lucky then it flows like ribbon and all I'm doing is unravelling the spool. It feels like magic sometimes, or like a practice of faith, both in trusting myself as a poet and also like I'm allowing myself to be a vessel.  Then the moment ends and I start thinking about form, about what needs to be taken away and what's missing. That's how I prefer to start all my poems, letting the words flow with no thought to form or rhyme only feeling. It's only after that's finished that I begin to shape the poem. I love to respond to things as well. That's a good way to begin, imagining myself falling into a piece of art or music and letting it dictate the poem. 

How, or why, did you start writing poetry?

I came to poetry because I was very depressed and alone and writing gave me solace. If I think back, it wasn't my intention to write a poem but the words on the page were arranged like one. I think with prose, the way it runs on can feel overwhelming, and like you have to write everything but what I was looking for was moments of silence. My thoughts were scattered in a way that required pauses and with poetry, you imbed those moments, you break the flow. I think at the time it was like something inside me was also breaking and I liked that I could pour that into a poem. Then I found Mary Oliver, and all her birds and trees and wild animals, and slowly I started to see the world as a place that could be beautiful, and I could balance the dark and the light. 

This was the first poem I wrote: 

"A body equals 

the sum of all parts

My arms at odds

A face

Wild and a little terrified

Claw marks in places you

Felt your heart 

Beat 

The sum of broken parts

A body does not"

What other poets inspire you?

If you're familiar with my poetry then you know I always turn to June Jordan & Mary Oliver for inspiration. At the moment though it's Aja Monet, who I was blessed to see perform at a benefit concert in solidarity with DRC, Gaza and Sudan. She's a surrealist blues poet, and when I think about what it is to perform and to embody the poetry I think of her. The way she holds your attention, the cadence of her voice and what it carries as you listen, feeling - it's powerful. And her microphone stand! It looks like it's sprouted up from the earth with all the flowers. I've also been reading and listening to a lot of Jayne Cortez. For both of them poetry goes beyond the written and it's forged in relation to musicality, especially jazz and the blues. It's how it is with Amiri Baraka as well and this quote by him, that 'Poetry, first of all, was and still must be, a musical form. It, to be most powerful, must reach to where speech begins, as sound, and bring the sound into full focus as highly rhythmic communication'. That's what I'm working towards. Also I just want to shout out An Aviary of Common Birds by Lalah-Simone Springer. It's her first collection and it honestly has taken my breath away. 

What’s inspiring you at the moment outside of poetry? 

Leonora Carrington & Alice in Wonderland. There's a thread connecting the two, and though I'm not sure yet what its relation is to me, I'm curious. There's also this artist called Danielle Mckinney and I've fallen in love with her paintings of black women. One of my favourites is called 'Chrysalis'. It's a naked woman and I think she's sleeping or maybe just resting her eyes. She's holding a lit cigarette, her nails her painted red, and it's like she's almost about to fold into herself on a moss green couch. I see myself, and there's a poem I want to write. All of her women I want to imagine the lives they're living and write it into a poem. 

What are you working on lately - anything you can share with us?

I'm working on turning my poems into something tangible & cohesive. Overall I'm hoping for a collection, but within that I'm working on turning some of the poems into artist books that include my collages. The first thing I put out was a pamphlet as part of Reference Point's Poetry Pamphlet series, and I loved the design. A simple square; two poems; how it stretches out like an accordion; it's beautiful, and you have to pay attention. I think sometimes a collection feels like a sea of poetry, but what I also want is a river, or maybe it's closer to a puddle. That's what I like about doing the artist book. It allows me to create another layer of feeling with the imagery. I've made a couple already and I'm happy. My poems are precious and the books are like houses, and I want them to live in a space where they feel seen. The plan is to have an online shop so you can buy them from me directly, but with the collection, I'm working on some submissions and praying for an agent. 

Phoenix Yemi is a Nigerian-British poet and artist based in London. Her work is rooted in the beauty and the violence of the natural world as a means of interrogating broader themes of power and inequality in society. She is the founder of Black Geographies, a night of music and poetry dedicated to the power of language as a tool of resistance. Phoenix also writes 'A Worm Moon', a monthly poetry newsletter for Worms Magazine, and has had her work published in New Currency, Sweet Thang Zine, Mania, and Reference Press. She has performed in Tate Britain, Tate Modern and The Serpentine Pavillion. She is currently the poet in residence at Reference Point and is working on her first full-length collection.