Roger Robinson and Malachi McIntosh, Oxford, 23 May 2024 (Photograph: Clara Park)

Clara Park interviews Roger Robinson

Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Following this, Clara Park held the following interview with the poet.

Clara Park (CP): You told us a lot about the repetition of the butterfly motif in your work. Could you speak more to specific ideas or objects that recur across and throughout your work and how you return (or do not return) to certain themes?

Roger Robinson (RR): Animals have entered my work in the strangest way, never planned it, but as I’m looking over my new and selected poems at the moment, I clearly take animals to be proxies of myself. I make them either angry, scared, or say weird things, or make them sympathetic. Somebody pointed it out to me, I didn’t know it myself, but there’s references to crazy crows, dogs, butterflies, horses, but I clearly have something with the animal kingdom. It wasn’t planned, but I dig it. 

CP: We got to speak a little at the end about your influences and inspirations. What are you reading now, and who were the greatest influences (literary or otherwise) that brought you into writing?

RR: Right now, I’m reading Rilke, selected poems of Rilke, translated, and Helen Vendler, a series of essays called The Given and the Made, that speaks in really interesting ways about lyric poetry. People who brought me into poetry… I would say between a writer called Kwame Dawes, who ended up being a mentor of mine, and a writer called Sharon Olds. They definitely had that voice, and saw the way I think in that voice, and it led me to get my voice. And that voice was very much simple but not simplistic, heavy on emotions and narrative and heavy on craft. 

Roger Robinson and Malachi McIntosh in Oxford (Photograph: Clara Park)

CP: Have you been able to find home in your writing? Or have you arrived at the way to create a portable paradise?

RR: When you say find home, I’m not sure if you meant find “tribe I belong” to or feel comfortable in when writing, but I most definitely mean both. Writing people are definitely my tribe and my home. Writing was something I always had as a gift, and it’s something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. And, on the subject of writing paradise: it was not so much a case of if I could write paradise in a new place, it’s more if I could make this new place into a paradise that I had once known. I needed to do it because I was putting down roots here and I was having a child, so I had to come to some conclusions about where I really live, and stop having the immigrant mind of living in two places but never belonging to either. And so it’s a conscious decision. And, to some extent, with A Portable Paradise, the original idea was to document how I could do it, or the process of doing it. 

CP: When your work is politicized, do you come to view what you’ve written in a new way? What is it like to see things that may have originally been written deeply personally and then reanimated in the public sphere in perhaps unexpected ways? Are there any instances that have particularly stuck with you?

RR: I think the personal is political, and everything is political, but there were a few poems that did surprise me when taken to the public sphere. Like there’s a poem I have called “Nurses,” [written when] I did not know that COVID would happen and everyone would be dependent on nurses. And nurses had a particular role to play in society at that point, and that particular poem became quite a chant for them. Along with a poem I wrote about my son being tended to by nurses. Also a lot of people quoted that poem when they were trying to raise the pay for nurses, cause they had worked so hard over COVID. It wasn’t surprising, I understand it, but I didn’t expect it.  


Cite this: Park, Clara. “Clara Park interviews Roger Robinson.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/clara-park-interviews-roger-robinson/. Accessed 8 November 2024.