“… there is real power in a poem that appears and makes you feel like someone has been there before, felt that before, made it out of that particular hole.”
Small Undetectable Thefts (Broken Sleep, 2024)
A question from Anna Laura Reeve: Do you understand your role in society—as a poet—to be influential, critical, observant, or something else?
How many things can you believe at the same time? On the one hand, I think a poet’s role is to look at the interior and exterior world and find a way to communicate the incommunicable. Of course, a lot of poets will admit they are terrible at communicating; maybe that’s why they’re so drawn to a medium where neither the writer nor the reader can, with certainty, say what a poem is “about.” I often think about that William Meredith quote: “Poets are professionally committed to telling the truth, and how do they tell the truth? They say something that isn’t true.” I believe poets are doing something fundamentally different with language than, say, journalists or historians who are simply chronicling. Poets are making truths out of untruths, or half-truths. Increasingly, I also think a poet’s role is to console. It’s so hard to be seen and heard these days. The WHO goes as far as to call loneliness a “global health threat.” So, if we’re all lonely, and we’re all bad at communicating, there is real power in a poem that appears and makes you feel like someone has been there before, felt that before, made it out of that particular hole.
How do you contend with saturation? The day’s news, the flagged articles, the flagged books, the poetry tweets, the data the data the data. What’s your strategy to navigate your way home?
My day job is in news, so I think about this all the time. Of course, I don’t have the answer, but one of the things I do in an attempt to deal with it is go back and reread Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman every few months or so. It’s a fantastic book that helps me remember that our time here is, in fact, very limited, and we will never be able to do, read, write, experience everything. Each thing we say yes to – give time to – is taking time away from something else we *could* be doing. That used to overwhelm me, but more recently, it’s been a great way to brush off a lot of things I feel I *should* be doing and, instead, thinking about what I *want* to be doing. It doesn’t always work, but I’m trying.
A question from Karisma Price: Do you have any self-care practices you include when writing about something heavy?
This isn’t a self-care practice, but I think a lot about the reader’s experience when reading about something heavy. How much is too much? Many first drafts will stay quite close to the heaviness, but both for the poem and the reader’s sake, it’s worth taking a few steps back. There’s also *how* you approach it. There’s a great episode of the podcast Poetry Off the Shelf with Natalie Shapero in which she talks about how she sees humour as a tool to help a story break through and land. You can see in her work, too; she will sometimes use it at the beginning of a poem to disarm the reader, set the mood, and then come out with the heaviness when they least expect it. That works in two ways. It makes the experience more palatable for the reader, but it also helps the poet communicate without losing the reader’s attention. It’s like the host tells Natalie: “Your poems do damage.” They prime you and then, when you’re nice and settled, they cut you open. That’s how, I think, heaviness is best experienced.
What obsessions led you to write your book?
Death! Woo-hoo. How we deal – or don’t deal – with grief. Memory. What actually happened and what our minds made up with distance and time. Language. Places we belong to and don’t belong to. Eggs? I don’t like them but I find myself writing about them a lot.
How did you decide on the title of your book?
There’s a lot of pressure for a book to be “about” something – and that can be helpful at a later stage in the editing process, but it can also feel very restricting when it comes to the actual writing. I made that mistake in earlier versions of the manuscripts; I was trying to tell the poems where to go instead of following where they were taking me. Then I went back and realised a lot of them dealing with theft of some sort. The title – “small undetectable thefts” – is a phrase from one of the earliest poems in the manuscript, “Think About It.” It just felt right.
A question from Noreen Ocampo: What is something that fuels you as a writer, your writing practice, or just you as a human being?
Moments of kindness in an unkind world.
What question would you like to ask the next author featured at Speaking of Marvels?
What’s one line you wish you had written?
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Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian poet and journalist. She was raised in Lebanon and currently lives in England. In 2022, she received the Out-Spoken Prize for Page Poetry and was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize. She is an alum of the Southbank New Poets Collective and a member of the London Library Emerging Writers Scheme. Her debut pamphlet, Small Undetectable Thefts, is out now with Broken Sleep. You can find more of her poetry in Waxwing, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, bath magg, and elsewhere.
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