Chelsea Haith

Patience Agbabi’s reading from her work at a Writers Make Worlds event in the Oxford English Faculty on 5 December 2019 shook audience preconceptions of what poetry can do and the boundaries it can cross. The Canterbury Poet Laureate’s grime-inspired remixes of medieval poetry shaped by Chaucer’s legacy boldly confronted the realities of cross-border and transnational movement in the twenty-first century.

In the discussion with Elleke Boehmer and Marion Turner that followed the reading, Agbabi explored how she revises the medieval poet’s work through mixing it with the grime, sex, and identity politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s as well as elements of poetry performance. Throughout her student and graduate days, she had performed her work across London literary and poetry circuits, and the experience has animated her work ever since.

As Agbabi told the audience, the first origin of the Telling Tales project was an assignment she completed on Chaucer during her A-levels. She then went on to read English at Oxford as a young woman, and so became even more familiar with Chaucerian form and content. Yet the medieval poet’s work, rather than removing her from difficult contemporary realities, in fact allowed her to confront them and to mould her poetry to reflect dilemmas of identity and belonging.

Agbabi’s attention to form is paramount in her creative process, as she outlined, underlining her attraction to forms such as the sonnet. ‘I like form, so I didn’t run away from that. I felt qualified to take the verse forms by the horns and play around them,’ Agbabi explained, describing her attention to rhyme and the choice of diction. Yet her forms like her subject matter do not falsely impose measure or pattern. As she said in response to a question from Elleke Boehmer, ‘I can’t write beautiful poems about violence’.

To illustrate, in the poem, ‘The Wife of Bafa’, Agbabi reworks Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’ in such a way as to explore aspects of Agbabi’s own Nigerian heritage, which she is proud to insert into this modern version of the medieval tale, with contemporary and colloquial touches.

As we see cuttingly demonstrated here, Agbabi’s poems also frequently voice the experiences of other people; she draws on her heritage as well as the stories of others to give voice to the core ideas conveyed in the poems.

In the discussion Marion Turner remarked on the formal innovation of Agbabi’s contribution to the first Refugee Tales collection (2016), an anthology born of the desire to counteract prevailing narratives about refugees being held in detention in the UK. Writers including Ali Smith and Abdulrazak Gurnah as well as Agbabi contributed to the collection following walks and conversation with refugees, and articulated their experiences through semi-fictionalised creative outputs. How was Agbabi’s poetic contribution an attempt to articulate experience through form? Turner wondered. ‘There is something particular that poetry can do – the distillation of language, the form, the poetry that takes us back to the oral tradition, it stays most in people’s minds,’ Agbabi responded. As this suggests, the poet draws on original narrative traditions to hone her impact on the reader.

Having made the transition from poetry to prose in the last two years, Agbabi ended by speaking about her upcoming first novel, The Infinite, which will be the first in a series for secondary school-age readers about an autistic girl of colour. True to form, while articulating various experiences through different voices in her poetic work, she had worked hard to find and faithfully represent the voice of a young autistic person. ‘As a writer you cease to be yourself. You have to surrender yourself to the character,’ she said.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “No Beautiful Poems about Violence.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

The post No Beautiful Poems about Violence appeared first on writers make worlds.

In this podcast the dynamic poet Patience Agbabi is in conversation about her Ted Hughes short-listed collection Telling Tales (2015), a rebellious reworking of Chaucer, and her contribution to the 2016 Refugee Tales project.

After reading from both works Agbabi discusses with Professor Elleke Boehmer, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and medievalist Professor Marion Turner, the key themes that animate her work: her efforts to give voice to the marginalised, the influence of Chaucer upon her writing and practice, and her interests in grime music as well as poetic form, not least the sonnet.

The recording was made on 5 December 2019 at a Writers Make Worlds event in the English Faculty, University of Oxford.

Read an account of the event: ‘No Beautiful Poems about Violence’.

The post Great Writers Inspire at Home: Patience Agbabi reading and conversation appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Patience Agbabi (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Patience Agbabi came to prominence in the spoken word scene in the late 1990s. This followed her acclaimed debut collection R.A.W., her collaboration with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smart on FO(U)R WOMEN, and the success of Atomic Lip, touted as poetry’s first pop group. Mixing rap with a poetic style influenced by writers and performers as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Public Enemy, Agbabi’s work is inflected by what she terms a ‘bicultural’ upbringing and outlook.

In the introduction to Agbabi’s debut collection R.A.W., Merle Collins describes her work as ‘poetry in the tradition of social commentary, informed by techniques of the oral performance mode,’ (9) reminding the reader that performance is Agbabi’s primary communication method. Yet she is equally adept at writing poems meant specifically to be read rather than heard. The poem ‘One Hell of a Storm’, for example, relies on visual structure to convey its meaning, evoking the rush of turbulent weather within a narrative of feminist resistance. Her 2000 collection Transformatrix brought Agbabi particular renown and she undertook writing residencies at institutions as diverse as Eton College, Oxford Brookes University, and ‘Flamin’ Eight’ tattoo parlour.

Her third collection, Bloodshot Monochrome (2008), deals most explicitly with themes of sexuality and race: poems such as ‘Comedown,’ ‘Skins’ and ‘Eat Me’ evoke the transnational anxieties of marginalisation and uncertain belonging in one’s own body and in social space. Literary critic Manuela Coppola notes that ‘as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men’s and women’s identities’ (369). The comment gestures to the multiple influences on Agbabi’s work and her adept reshaping of traditional poetic forms so as to produce new conceptions of intersections between race, gender, and sexuality—conceptions that are loaded with social and political critique.

During her time as the Canterbury Poet Laureate, Agbabi produced her fourth collection, Telling Tales (2015), in which she satirically revises Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales for modern times. Simon Armitage lauded Telling Tales as ‘the liveliest versions of Chaucer you’re likely to read.’ This collection was also shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes for New Work in Poetry. In 2015, responding to the growing refugee crisis, Agbabi participated in the first Refugee Tales walks with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and Kent Refugee Help. The resulting collection of work from this project, published in 2016, reflects the capacity of the written word to capture otherwise inarticulable experiences of dislocation. Resistance to the dehumanising of refugees in the media and political narrative is encapsulated in the final line of Agbabi’s contribution to the collection: ‘The story ends where you put the frame: / but however it begins, remember my name’ (132).

—Chelsea Haith, 2019

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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