Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award - Sarah Howe

This week, I have been interviewing the four nominees for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, discussing their early years as writers, their influences, inspirations and ambitions. The final interviewee is the poet Sarah Howe. Howe was born in Hong Kong, and moved to England as a child. Her debut collection, Loop of Jade, was inspired by her experiences of returning to her birthplace as an adult, and has been described as 'sinuous, shimmering and mirage-like'. 

When did you first start writing seriously?

When I was about twenty-one I moved to America – Cambridge, Massachusetts – for a year. There was something about being in an unfamiliar place, feeling foreign again, that pushed me into writing poems, with a commitment and need I hadn’t really felt as a jotting teenager. Reading the ancient Chinese poets Li Po and Du Fu that year for the first time was another spur: the scales fell from my eyes. 

What where the books which inspired you to write?

When I met them at school, poems like Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ and Plath’s ‘Tulips’ sucked the air out of my teenage lungs. Likewise, when I picked an old edition of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ off the library shelf, not really knowing what it was – ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each’ – I wanted desperately to be able to make something like that, singing just beyond sense. People often associate poems encountered in the classroom with the staid authority imposing them. But at that age I think I’d already started to see poetry as a sort of disobedience, an ‘alternative’ or illicit activity that countenanced other ways of thinking and being in the world.

Is there anyone you would consider your literary mentor?

I have been tremendously lucky in having a handful of older poets who, at different times, have taken me under their wing, offering crucial advice and support. Now that I teach myself, I’m conscious of how important a responsibility that role can be.

I’d like to draw attention to a scheme I benefited from called the Complete Works, which offers community and mentorship to Black and Asian poets – in recent years it’s been helping to change the landscape of poetry in the UK. They’ve just opened their doors to a new round of applications for 2016 – apply! 

Did you do any formal training – creative writing courses or similar?

I did study English at university and went on to write a PhD on Renaissance literature, so in some ways I’ve had bucket-loads of training, albeit not exactly in how to write poems. Still, so often I find my poet-self compelled to follow Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker: ‘You must unlearn what you have learned!’ 

What is your ideal place to go when you write?

I used to like writing on holiday, in the sun. But these days, it’s more usually at my desk in the piercing silence you get circa 3am. There’s something I find very conducive about the illusion that the rest of the world is asleep.

What’s your ambition for your poetry?

I’d like to write poems people return to again and again for mystery and nourishment. I like the idea of them lodged deep in the mind, where they subtly screw with the wiring.

Who are your favourite contemporary writers?

Among poets, I’m currently in love with Ross Gay, Emily Critchley, Brandon Som, Tracy K. Smith, Maureen McLane, Caleb Klaces – though that list is an ever-changing kaleidoscope. Among novelists, longstanding icons of mine are David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Kazuo Ishiguro. W.G. Sebald’s brand of intuiting the past through the veil of the present has also been a big influence; I seek out his recent followers (Edmund de Waal, Daisy Hildyard) in various genre-bending modes. 

Do you have a muse, and if so what form does it take?

If poetry has a Muse she’s definitely a jobbing one. I don’t find it possible to write poems all the time. Such is the pitch of intensity when I do write, to be constantly in that mode would be exhausting and counterproductive. Distraction is often the key. Poems become displacement activity from the more urgent tasks my days throw up.

Can you pitch your book to someone who hasn’t read it?

The most obvious pitch for Loop of Jade would call it a poetic meditation on my mixed Chinese-English heritage. A string of poems tells the story of my Chinese mother, who was an unwanted girl adopted as a baby, growing up in Hong Kong in poor and precarious circumstances. In some ways, the poems try to make sense of the difference between my life and hers.

That strand is a strong one in the book, but it’s also slightly misleading: a lot of the poems are weirder and consciously less placeable than that summary would imply. In fact, troubling at labels and categories is a large part of their conceptual and emotional work.