Between the Seen and the Unseen: a pas de deux
Isabelle Baafi interviews Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Isabelle Baafi
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer, and performer based in London. His poems have been published and anthologised in the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, Tate, bath magg, fourteen poems, Re·creation: A Queer Poetry Anthology (2021), and Queerlings. As a Ledbury Poetry Critic, he has written reviews for the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry London, the Poetry School, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, and the Poetry Book Society. Shortly before the release of his debut collection, Strange Beach – published in January 2025 by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and Soft Skull (US) – reviews editor Isabelle Baafi interviewed him about his depictions of landscape and the body, which interrogate notions of time, identity, and connection.
Isabelle Baafi: Congratulations on the release of your debut! The collection as a whole and three of its poems are called ‘Strange Beach’, a title that comes from a quote in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, where the poet writes: ‘each body is a strange beach’. Across your collection, beaches are a recurring image of loss and the ways in which memories echo through time, as evoked in the final poem: ‘on the shore in the sand into a beige never-thereness— // All my beloveds. Somehow, it is like they were never there—’ (‘Night on the Thames Path’). What made you pick this title, and would you say that you agree with Rankine’s claim?
Oluwaseun Olayiwola: Thank you for the congratulations – truly. It still feels unreal being able to walk into the bookstore and see my name on the bookshelf. Most recently, I walked into a shop and saw my book between Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam and Mary Oliver’s Blue Horses, books from two poets who have passed, books I deeply admire.
In 2017, I choreographed a dance with the same title. Shortly before that, my friend had bought me Citizen – which I believe was my first poetry book – during a visit to the West Coast. I’d been attending the funeral of a friend, Haruka Weiser, who was murdered in a random act of violence on our university campus. The dance didn’t contend with the incident per se, but it did feel like an inception of grief, strangeness, a confrontation with one’s own mortality. There were five dancers in the piece, dressed in various reds and burgundies, and I used a soundtrack that fused Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey, and some loose techno. When that was over, the title ‘Strange Beach’ didn’t feel as if it had been wholly excavated, so I think for that reason it lingered, asked for further exploration – though I didn’t know then that this exploration would be in the medium I’d originally encountered it (poetry).
Yes, I do agree with Rankine’s claim that ‘each body is a strange beach’. In many ways, the book serves as a way of asserting that and asking: and if so, how? The poems come out of that ‘how?’ How is the body a strange beach? Who visits and what do they leave behind? A beach is a place where land and water meet. It’s a kind of interstitial space. Not completely one thing or the other, but the product of their constant collision. And in this light, the beach – and the body as a kind of beach – becomes a ripe landscape across which binaries and dialectics can tussle. The point of the collection is to depict that tussling rather than lay it to rest.
Lastly, I recently asked myself, why the word ‘Strange’? Why not ‘Eerie Beach’? ‘Unusual Beach’? ‘Off-putting Beach’? Beyond losing the satisfying spondee of the title, the word ‘Strange’ at once identifies a peculiarity and a willingness to not turn away, to still participate.
IB: There’s a mother figure that haunts the collection in some ways, giving directives on how the central speaker should use, mark, share, and carry their body. What was your relationship to language like as a child, and how was it shaped by your earliest relationships?
OO: I wish I had cared more about language when I was younger, like certain writers who are able to articulate these instigating mythologies that revealed their fate to be writers. The language I can remember most fervently being sworn to was the language of church: prayer, the Bible, even phenomena like speaking in tongues. I’d sit in church and all around me people would break out into these individual languages, these missives only God and they could understand. I can’t recall ever thinking, ‘This is fake’, or that the whole congregation was in on some joke meant to dupe me. No, it all seemed very real, especially from my mother, who was, and still remains, a prayer warrior.
My sisters and I all had talents for music, which we lent to the church for concentrated periods – my sisters in the choir, me with my trombone. Church taught me in many ways to use my talents, musical and linguistic, and offer them to an invisible force that in many ways could never confirm for me, while I live, that it was there listening, that I was saying the right thing. Surely this must be some analogue to writing poetry. My poems feel very concerned with the invisible/visible dyad.
IB: In ‘27 Ars Poeticas’, you deconstruct the common idea of the speaker as the poet’s page-bound avatar, and instead posit the speaker as a kind of offspring of the poet, who – like a small child – depends on the poet for meaning but also rebels against the poet’s intentions: ‘The speaker / cannot be cancelled out / but it can say more than the poet intended.’ The poem brings to mind Barthes’s essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, in which he wrote that literature is ‘the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’. How would you describe your relationship to your speakers as you were writing the book? Did any of the poems go in directions that you weren’t expecting? Do you think of your speakers as having a mind or will of their own?
OO: I’m glad you bring up Barthes, whose spirit animates some of these poems, and whose work helps me cultivate hesitation. By hesitation I mean a willingness to accept that perception is fundamentally fractured and incomplete, and that working with that incompletion as a kind of meta-concern can lead to more interesting language than declaring one’s perception as truth. In ‘The Death of the Author’, I think Barthes is articulating a paradox: that we write from ourselves to escape ourselves. This feels related to my conception of speakers at the moment: speakers don’t pre-exist the language they use to articulate themselves; it is their speaking that makes them real, that casts ‘identity’ upon them.
I also think my speakers have things they must, at all costs, say. And this is perhaps where the distinction between the poet and speaker comes: there are infinite things the poet could say, and they spend their practice dizzying themselves over the many possibilities. Speakers don’t exist until that utterance – or, maybe, they continue to be redefined through the process of speaking. This might be close to what I meant when I wrote ‘[s]peaking defines it’, ‘it’ being ‘happiness’, but also, the speaker.
‘27 Ars Poeticas’ is a poem I wasn’t expecting, but which came out pretty finished in one sweep. And it gave itself the rhetorical breadth I felt emerging, not because my mind was particularly buzzing that day, but simply due to the seductive let-me-rephrase vibe that emerged in the syntax of the first three sections. Once I had that, and the numbering, the rest was more improvisation that I just had to harvest and record.
IB: In ‘Poem’, you write: ‘writing is, at best, protest. / Not protection.’ Has writing poetry been a fulfilling form of protest for you personally, and if so, what would you say you are protesting against?
OO: I think the ‘at best’ there is important, and I cannot yet confidently cement myself into that category. I actually think of these lines as a double failing of my own writing. I think the best writing might inspire personal or public protests, and I think this stanza more revels in my inability to see my writing as either protest or protection.
IB: n ‘The Applebox’, you use the act of dancing in a gay club to explore desire, freedom, and connection. In addition to being a poet you are also a choreographer, and you teach dance at Kingston University. What relationship do dance and choreography have to your poems and the way you write? Do you think of arranging a dance like arranging a poem?
OO: I think choreography and poetry share the desire to make intangible concepts real. The most obvious intangible is Time, which, at its heart, is what I see as a larger concern in my artistic practice. When I’m writing, I use a lot of improvisation like I usually do in choreographic practice. This is why received forms are often hard for me to complete, because once the limits have been set my mind immediately wants to rail against them. About eight years ago, during a dance research laboratory, one of my favourite choreographers, Sidra Bell, said during one of our sessions: ‘My limits give me freedom.’ Writers have said this in myriad ways, but hearing it from a choreographer, I think, is a bit different.
IB: Being a dancer as well as a poet means that being seen – whether figuratively through your poems or physically in terms of your dancing – is a big part of your artistic practice. Yet at times, the speakers in the collection seem to wrestle with this – what one of them calls ‘the hydraulic weight of being / looked at, deliberately, persistently’ (‘More Night’). Also, in ‘Chlorine’ you write: ‘The cost / of being visible / is being visible’, meanwhile, the characters in ‘Cleanness’ seem to revel in being looked at, at times even taking pleasure in it. Do you think about ‘the gaze’ in your performances – whether poetry, dance, or the ways in which you ‘perform’ your identity in the world? If so, whose gaze? Is being looked at something you enjoy?
OO: This is a great question. And it is one of those questions which can only be apprehended post-publication. I’ve said already I am concerned with trying to make certain intangibles – invisibles – real, which doesn’t necessarily mean tangible or visible, but rather felt. My hope would be that there is a quasi-apophatic approach here: that meditating on, training myself on, and brooding over the consequences of visibility might move me closer to understanding its opposite. I like being looked at, and yet, this does not drain it of its complication.
In Jorie Graham’s ‘Act III Sc 2’ from her 1987 collection The End of Beauty, the last two lines are: ‘Then just the look on things of being looked-at. / Then just the look on things of being seen.’ I must have read these lines in 2021 or 2022, and whilst the context of the poem is not very clear to me (a google reveals it references Act III Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the scene where Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt), those lines ping in my head all the time. The perceptive switch that they demand of the reader feels enormous. Even now I still find it difficult to put into words the nuanced differences between the ‘looks’ Graham posits. But there is a difference because, as it seems to Graham and now to me, they can be partitioned, insofar as they are representable in language.
IB: I’m struck by how, in several poems, you use the behaviours and features of the natural world to reckon with internal anguish, and to ask questions about how remnants of the past linger in the present (e.g. in ‘Once’). Seabirds in particular are an example of that device, which is interesting when one considers how the ocean also features heavily in your book: the ocean as a seemingly endless, bottomless, all-consuming expanse, and the birds who are able to traverse it, who float on top of it. Was that idea of gravity vs flight something that you were thinking about a lot?
OO: You know, gravity is a word that I come back to often – the psychological gravity of moments that impress on you, but also the physical gravity that pulls us towards the earth’s core, or the gravity of another person on top of you. These questions are great cause they continue to reveal my squeamishness with a bunch of binaries: visible/invisible; body/mind, which is very near to poet/speaker; image/abstraction which mirrors gravity/flight.
In one poem, I write, ‘Gravity thirsts—because I feel it.’ I can’t say that I had consciously thought of it before it appeared repeatedly throughout the manuscript. What I can say is that I want my poems to have the weightiness of intensity, meaning, and predicament whilst simultaneously achieving a philosophical, meta-poetic, and soul-lifting take-off. It’s no surprise to me that you mention seabirds – which, unlike birds of land, move nimbly between multiple atmospheric strata: in the water, on the water, on the earth, and in the air. This movement is meaningful to me, though there is a difference between that continuous movement up and down that birds must adhere to and the discrete portal jumping poems can enact.
IB: Snow is a recurring motif in the collection, which I find intriguing because you’re from Texas, which is known for its warm, humid climate. What does snow evoke for you, and do heat and cold have a symbolic resonance that you like to play with in your poems?
OO: Surprisingly, it snows in Texas a lot more than you’d think! And when it does, school gets cancelled, people don’t work, businesses don’t open, there are no cars on the road. When I was young, we’d get a couple inches a year, though climate change takes an inch each year; some years are even snowless. A snowscape is a mystical space, quasi-cinematic, and in Texas at least, snow is a more silent form of precipitation than rain, and not nearly as violent as hail. The Guardian reviewer of this book remarked upon the auditory quality I imbue snow with. The lines, ‘Cold is not real’ and ‘absence is real’, which appear in ‘27 Ars Poeticas’, travelled through many poems before arriving there.
Snow is also the meteorological event in which, imaginatively, my speaker’s mortality feels most foregrounded. Robert Frost’s (no pun intended) poem ‘Stopped by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is a poem I’ve come to know more through the writing of this book. The delectably haunting iambic tetrameter, like four hooves of a horse repeatedly crushing snow, entrap me. There’s a matte greyish blue to the tonal register, if I had to ascribe a colour.
Snowy landscapes are almost like nocturnes to me: they catalyse a certain kind of energy. And for me, having grown in the South, snow is a transient climate: it comes and goes, it’s impressionable, it melts and the landscapes that it briefly covered return to what they were before. In these poems, in addition to mortality, snow is also the weather in which I really take to task the mandate of change.
IB: What are you hoping readers will take away from your collection?
OO: Situations of aliveness and situations of presence, which are not entirely nested within one another – these are what the collection attempts to tesselate. There’s so much left out in a book, and as I read these poems back to myself, so many questions fill me, questions about what sensory information, what details, minutiae, were not picked up on, not registered, and thus, in a peculiar way, not lived. Poetry has been so powerful to me because it explains my life back to me. This is what happened to me with the earliest collections I read like The Wild Iris by Glück and Citizen by Rankine. If just two lines of my work can at all make someone else’s life more liveable to them, then I would call that worthwhile.
