Reflecting on 6 years of the87press with Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel

Director of the press Azad Ashim Sharma and Head Editor Kashif Sharma-Patel reflect upon six years of the87press. They touch upon the development of the press within the context of the British poetry scene, the perils of professionalisation, structural problems for independent presses, the embattled issue of representation and much more.

Kashif Sharma-Patel: Azad, what are your reflections about the origins of the press in 2018. It was initially quite a DIY set-up, to bring a type of late modernist contemporary poetry, that we loosely ascribed to, into a wider umbrella. Describe to me what sparked this drive for you? How did you envision the project going?

Azad Sharma: What immediately comes to mind is the story of our friendship! I recall that we connected about poetry and gradually came to realise how much we could share with one another, in terms of knowledge and experience, and the87press formed as a means of us using this connection intentionally to build a project around the support of authors in our immediate landscape. Whilst I love and respect the ad hoc publications and pamphlets that energised the countercultural British poetry scene from the 60s Revival onwards, I grew increasingly frustrated that those modes of publication, indeed those very publications, didn't gather or energise a wider audience outside of its coterie. I wanted to explore what it might be like to try and offer a stable publishing infrastructure for what is essentially a 21st century experimental writing community and potential avant-garde, that hasn't yet found its 'ism' or perhaps never well because it's so diverse in terms of form and register and demographic, and build from there. 

I also recall that we never really conceived of the87 as a 'press' initially but more a reading series which would, in the long-term, offer publishing avenues. Our first event launched a chap-book by Greek poet Calliope Michail and we were much at capacity at the Roebuck Pub in Borough which was our first 'home'. I vividly remember Holly Pester coming up to me during the reading and saying 'you're really onto something here'. It grew from there and now here we are 6 years later, countless events, 48 books (11 of which are forthcoming by March 2025). I really can't believe it. I owe everything to our readers, our team, our board, our funders, our authors and partner organisations - the faith they've had in recognising the merits of the project has been a landmark moment of recognition and affirmation. It's given us all the change to grow as editors, as writers in our own lives, and move between various practices. But it all began with a hunch, a chapbook and an event. 

Of course, as things develop you encounter the obstacles: funding resources become more competitive, you can't publish everyone and have to send rejections, you burn out a few times, find ways to continue and strike a balance between work and play. But I think I only realised how unique the87press is when I was on tour for Boiled Owls. I was in conversation with Edgar Garcia at Seminary Coop in Chicago. Edgar is close with a great champion of the87press, John Wilkinson, but he offered a provocation that actually the singularly interesting thing with the87press is for all our attempts at gathering together strands of late-modernist poetry in the UK, our project was by default going to have a more worldly outcome, partly because of the people leading the press in its work who were/are too 'late' to be 'late modernist' and who, perhaps, are also too racialised. But maybe that's a nice way of exploring the valences and echoes of poetic tradition across generations, I feel as comfortable in the landscape of J. H. Prynne’s oeuvre as I do with, say June Jordan or Arun Kolatkar. But what Edgar was getting at is we’ve taken a more conventional approach to publishing in a material sense and infused it with a counter-cultural and Global South spirit. 

The press has attracted a variety of different authors who similarly feel more comfortable working with a press that values study, intellectual rigor, pedagogy, and whilst we do our fair bit, with absolute genuine intention, with regards to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, we also value how that intention has useful and informative ramifications for the ways in which a predominantly poetry publishing house explores literature in its worldly traditions.

KSP: Thanks Zid, that is really nicely put. The press has really grown quite organically, now into a bigger literary institution with its workshops, multiple event strands and online journal. The growth has been enabled primarily by crowdfunds and Arts Council funding. Describe the challenges in negotiating the financial landscape. Once we were both receiving an income from the press, it felt both more important and more pressured what we were embarking upon, particularly as much of the British innovative/late modernist scene that you describe was avowedly anti-professionalisation. 

AS: Independent publishing always has this battle around terminology to describe the size. Is it a 'micro-press', a 'small-press', an 'independent publisher'? What is left out of the 'small vs big 5' narrative is the vast array of independent 'medium' sized presses, of which there is a huge variation in scope and budget, who contribute with regularity, consistency, and themselves have built a reasonable infrastructure over the years. The87press is certainly no-longer a 'small' press with the budget of our scale, enabled as you point out by social democratic funding and community building. But with that comes immense pressures, challenges, and 99% of those obstacles are financial or related to the administrative workload one has to take on to access larger financial resources. 

Why would publishers go down this route anyway when you can just sell the books, the rogue capitalist consciousness asks, playing its classique role as the devil's advocate. Well...People are reading less and less in this stage of capitalist world systems - we are battling against the intensification of wage-labour as a survival tactic against the onslaught of privatisation and the total commodification of human life as human capital. It's a difficult landscape to thrive in - but I don't think that warrants critique of collectives and groups taking initiative to try and change how wealth is distributed, in their own singular ways, by accessing available funding and ensuring there are good standards of pay for either the labour that goes into running a publishing house or the labour that authors do by producing books. The brutal reality of finance is that as publishers you need to break even on ever increasing material costs. The impact of Brexit cannot be underestimated here, 30% of trade evaporates into the red tape (and who could blame an European reader for avoiding buying direct these days when it amounts to receiving one book for the price of two when you factor in the import duties), but the UK readership isn't growing by 30% per annum, the US is competitive on a whole new level and many independent UK publishers struggle to even get regular trade there outside of their coterie audiences. So how do you navigate that without meeting the cost of inflation and 'internalising' it as an organisation? All independent publishers are feeling this burn, it's a dire situation that has received almost no attention from government past or present. 

One shouldn't forget that however 'business like' this sounds, ultimately an independent press is enabling a public discussion about literature that is very much beyond the scope of your standard corporate publisher. The financial pressures boil down to costing that up, paying for labour in a fair and equitable way (and we are very far off from decent pay in the arts in the UK which relies far too much on goodwill and voluntary labour). The pressures of getting the funding inevitably lay siege on the values of any collective or organisation because you are embroiled in endless speculation, budgeting, forecasting, and all the things that create administrative workload (and yes, some of that is basic checks and balances which are part of the landscape) which distracts and disrupts the work of publishing proper: editing, writing, and book-selling. The book, whether we like it or not, is a commodity, it is not an innocent item, but there are ways of working against the commodity-form through the prioritisation of literatures that are not written by glorified copy-writers masquerading as novelists, or the endless profusion of celebrity memoirs. All independent publishing, in that regard, contains a rather old form of value: merit. People aren't doing these things to pass the time, publishing literature is a serious way of shaping the conversation about literature. In some senses what independent publishing does is recover the literary from the content production that seems to preoccupy the category of 'bestseller'. It is literature that is politically active down to its oxford comma.

With regards to professionalisation and the discrepancy there might be with these other more subterranean forms of publishing. Well… from experience most of those older pamphleteers were lecturers or graduate students at universities, often making use of their resources or misusing (in a good way) those resources/networks to further the Art from within the institution. Again -valuable and influential work, however eccentric it is as a mode of production with a single-person toiling with a long-arm stapler! But it's limited in scope, often serving the communities that are already 'in the know' or who 'know where to look'. So they, too, rely on some form of professionalisation and resourcing/financing, regardless of whether or not the pamphlets etc are designed to do more than balance printing costs and good will gestures. What about welcoming in new writers who may arrive from different contexts? This is why public institutions and organisations run not for profit (a model we've always adopted in principal and are looking to formalise as soon as we can) are so valuable in the context of pushing the boundaries of literature in a non-nationalistic context. Another worthwhile and wonderful model comes from the Poets Hardship Fund and their publication of Ludd Gang - which has dodged all the closed communal elements that often emit from insecure academia-adjacent poetry landscapes. 

Ultimately, though, we all need to see ourselves as part of an ecology of publishing designed to destabilise and overturn the monopolisation of big corporate publishers - there's so much work to be done on this front and that's not to say everyone working in big publishing is a capitalist ghoul. Such a perspective would be extreme, gauche, and nihilistic. It's more about what the point of publishing literatures that aren't bestselling is – for me it's always been about shifting the general, public, and accessible conversation around literature through an emphasis on the unity of ‘creative writing’ and ‘literary study’ that is both palpable in the works we love, but also the communities we build around publishers. I see absolutely no reason why the poets we work with, who are variously called ‘avant-garde’, ‘experimental’, ‘innovative’, and whom occupy a host of demographic intersections, can't reach a huge audience. I see no reason why such an audience wouldn't engage sincerely with their work were they given the time, space, and context within which to perform that enjoyable labour of reading. And this circles back to what hinders literary culture in the era of late-capital.

KSP: Great stuff. Could you also speak a little about balancing your work as a writer and poet with your work as editor. You are also engaged in academic work and more formal theory. I know we pride ourselves on being a writer-led press, and are very keen to push a wide remit for critical reading. I know also that you have been toiling away writing a prose-novel, but your recent tour in America for the publication of Boiled Owls has reignited your passion for poetry. 

AS: One of the unfortunate realities is that I feel most of the conservative literary establishment in the UK cannot get their minds around the simple reality that a lot of younger artists wear different hats. The intersection between publishing and writing is the most obvious one - and a time-honoured tradition, one might argue. There is a tendency in this country of only believing a person can play one role in society, and you're either an editor or a writer. It's rare that the celebration of both happens simultaneously. It's also true that sometimes the publishing work can take time away from your own writing, I've certainly felt that way and struggled at times to find balance between the two but then again, it's all interdependent, I'm reading inspiring works by forthcoming authors on the press and it sparks ideas of my own, there's a kind of unwritten or unspoken conversation happening in my work as a poet with the many authors I've had the great fortune of knowing and helping to publish. Academic work and my work with the Caribbean Philosophical Organisation is at an earlier developmental stage, I'm still writing my PhD but on a break in study as I'd spread myself too thin for the next year or so, and I've also been, as you point out, travelling around on tour. 

All of this enriches the visions I have for my contributions to the87press and it seems totally organic that as a result of building community through travel that would then find its own register in the types of book we commission. America has always had a more cutting edge artistic and cultural sector albeit it has come at immense cost (student debt and imperialism and settler colonialism) but the communities in the US on the side of social justice in its various forms and discourses have battled long and hard to ensure the 'creative writing MFA machine' does good work. I'm truly inspired by the way in which contemporary US poets of colour are writing with confidence in themselves, their talents, and their knowledge of the painful histories that have forged our positions and subjectivities. I feel the UK could learn a lot from that as beneath the stiff upper lip of polite literati gatherings is a lot of resentment, unnecessarily competitiveness, and insecurity. 

But there is also something to be said about living a life of letters, which is how I prefer to conceive of how I choose to navigate the world, primarily through text and the connections those texts bring with people, concepts, histories, and concrete moments of being in community (not in some abstract neoliberal sense or, even worse, some monstrous affective entanglement with the hot air that utters the word 'community' but in a completely forced and bureacratic tone rather than as the sense of being with other people and working with others). The thing with a life of letters is you need to live it, devote time to it, engage with people irrespective of identitarian criterias. I'm tired of the fascism of identity politics working its way into all things we do - I've been told not to read white writers before, told not to read a particular writer because they were disappointing in some minor political way or another. That's all well and good - but the thing is, once you start closing yourself off from curiosity, your writing suffers, once you ruminate on the cud of resentment, your writing suffers, and when your writing suffers, you suffer. Envisioning the87press as writer's-led enables us to think about how to a) benefit the writer b) prioritise editorial over content/marketing and the veneer of 'EDI' that permeates all corporations at the moment, irrespective of their actual financial commitments, and c) to do right by the tradition we're part of and to democratise it. 

Sure, sometimes a degree of separation between my position as a publisher vs my position as a writer helps, but the thing is, learning through editorial with others is always the modus operandi for all forms of writing, the works I have the great pleasure of commissioning or the works I write myself - no writer has meaning alone. The best writing is produced by that cross-cultural and trans-historical conversation through writing with other writers who have come before you. The situation now is that writers vulnerable to the coin and the gram are being, essentially, cashed in on by a publishing industry increasingly desperate for capital in a climate of declining readership and sales. 

In terms of teaching creative writing, which is decades behind as a 'discipline' in the UK compared with other parts of the world, well - the best thing to do is walk into the room and ask the students why you should care about their idea and if they can give you a decent answer you send them off to the library and get them to write, and if they need some help figuring out their intellectual context for the ideas they have: give it to them with the zeal and passion one must have to do this day in day out. Once you see the writing then you talk about technique, but the emphasis on reading has to come first. I didn't study creative writing until my second MA, I read English first and then Critical Theory. Most of the writers who are my contemporaries, whose work excites me, did something of the same. I don't think offering Creative Writing to undergraduates benefits literary culture - I believe that we should move to a model where universities fortunate enough to still have enough faculty to teach English or other forms of literature are able to and are resourced to partner with public arts organisations who offer more community based workshops. It helps keep things moving at all levels. Postgrads in creative writing who aren’t from Literature undergrad backgrounds might need a foundation year in literary study prior to their creative writing projects. I think that would raise the bar and also influence what happens in publishing. I mean it's quite clear that if these corporate publishers actually gave a damn about literary culture they would be lobbying the government about reversing the austerity cuts to the very degrees that actually fuel that culture. But they aren’t, and that is telling. 

Ultimately the issues in the UK with writing and with publishing stem from the stark reality that most of the creative writing residencies, the informal MAs in poetry, etc, they cater to a particular demographic who themselves are terrified of a younger generation speaking so openly about rights, social justice, the environment, a liveable future, and, dare I say it, a generation who are literate and enjoy the act of study in the various forms it takes. It's the sort of bland demographic for whom modernism, experimentalism, and theory are dirty words and for whom Philip Larkin is a good English poet and not a xenophobe who wrote the adult equivalent of nursery rhymes. We've seen the wild brouhahas in response to Fossil Free Books - it's because the old order of 'Literary Culture' as an ideological form is now unsustainable, uninteresting, and, frankly, in need of an overhaul. No one is saying 'get rid of festivals' but it's perfectly rational to want to keep the space of cultural production as a space of community that themselves don't need the pollution of money from the arms trade or fossil fuels. It's completely rational to say that, to make that call, to take action to change the way these festivals and platforms participate in a literary culture that does want change. There is now an exciting nationwide revolt against that stale literary festival culture of light domesticated titillation and instead there is real genuine interest in the experimental, the strange, the quirky, the weird, the eccentric, the radical and revolutionary knowledges that have been circulating through community efforts in the late 20th Century. It's just such a shame that this ‘younger’ generation, a generation I'm proud to be part of, grew up in the years of irrational austerity and in a hostile environment and mismanaged economy. 

KSP: You have alluded to it a couple times but I want to draw out your wider ideas around diversity and identity. The press was conceived as a widening of an innovative, modernist strand of poetry that could explicitly incorporate writers outside of the white-normative categories. While we are very critical of identitarianism and the reification of the self as a descriptive category, there is still something important about keeping certain explicit alterities close to the surface, both in aesthetics and at a logistical level. Racialised ontologies and neurodivergence are two aspects that you are particularly engaged with, with queerness floating through the press. Could you speak more on that. 

AS: Most of my thinking around diversity, inclusion, a sustainable cultural politics that is skeptical of identity but does not dismiss the face its a necessary pathway for a lot of people into revolutionary thinking - all of it centres really on my reading of race/racialisation through philosophy and through an intimate knowledge (phenomenological-existential) of the ways in which something like representation has suffered elite capture in the 21st century and is now a term that initiates defeat more than it does gain ground on dismantling the structures of racialisation that continue to divide humanity (for there is one human race) along ethnic and cultural lines. The thing is representation makes sense for minority / diasporic populations who have contributed in entangled ways in the global north, and also for diasporas in the global south to assert their own empowered existence and influence / contribute to social and political life. Of course we want to be represented, we vote in essentially representational democracies (many of which are now hijacked by global, interwoven, and distinct authoritarian ethnonationalist majoritarianisms) for this reason. The issues arise when we think of the system in a broader scope - why on earth would we value representation by a system of capitalist exploitation that continues to oppress, that continues to pollute, that continues to destroy? Whiteness as a norm is always felt like a knife, and here I think of Frantz Fanon, arguably one of the most erudite and complex thinkers on race and someone who is sadly misread profoundly in wayward ways by more identitarian 'takes'. Fanon is absolutely correct in his thinking of any form of affective adjustment to this kind of white-norm as an obscenity. We do not live in a post-colonial world by any stretch of the imagination. The issues arise for representational politics when we acknowledge that such a world is not existent. Coloniality's intersection with capitalism, racial capitalism, is the totalising system in which humanity is imprisoned. Identitarian politics amount to further division, the internalisation of race as the fictional reconstruction of the singular human race into multiple 'races'. One might go as far as saying coloniality produces the red-herring of representation to further its own representation as a foundation stone to capitalism.

So why do we, at the87press, continue to persist in advocating for diasporas and global majority authors alongside LGBTQ+, working-class, neurodivergent authors? One thinks of the unformed ideas of political blackness in the 80s, intersectional and (often queer) black feminist approaches to movement building in this context. As you say, alterity produces unique forms, allows for the emergence of new forms and perhaps new engagements in literary communities, and this is where we have to work with representation to a degree, to allow authors to be free to express and to offer representation should they wish. But it can't be the sole aim of writing - one doesn't write the book to 'represent' the marginalised, one does so to speak to the world from one's own situation and to engage the tradition. Some of that entails the partial perspectives we have through identity formations, but identity in this regard could also mean the specific conversation one is having with tradition. Intersectionality is made possible through the vehement and consistent critique of exploitation via capital, whether that's the ways in which, say, gender, race and class move as modalities of each other, or the ways in which queerness and neurodivergence share so much in terms of subjectivity and articulation. All these intersections are received, as individual populations moving in a collective resistance, as violence to the (white etc) norm. That is extremely important for the expansion of literary canon formations (which remain useful pedagogical tools regardless of what liberal confusion has us believe). It means acknowledging that normative canonical forms were coexistent with normative approaches to humanity - which split us off from each other through racialisation (for example). It means the norm produces gaps in knowledge and maintains those gaps through epistemic colonisation. It means people are left out, thrown away, exploited, and in a lot of cases: erased. 

Our task, therefore, in reapproaching representation in a non-corporate way, to think of what is equitable to populations who have suffered historic disenfranchisement, is not to say 'let a few of us into the seats of power' but rather to re-organise and rethink of social and political life in its entirety.  The fact that identitarian modes of writing are rewarded under the current system makes complete logical sense given the situation. But reclaiming representation, diversity, inclusion, are important tasks for us all to be engaging with, even if they're embattled terms, even if we seek to destabilise them as concepts, because ultimately we live in a world in which the majority of the world is excluded and has been excluded from deciding the fate of the world, from engaging in humanity as a condition, for much of recent history. 

Literature necessarily breaks down the boundaries between the siloes of identitarian form, making identification enunciate as process, from reading self to alter-text to alter-community or to alter-form. Literature, in other words,  when it's done with the intent on transforming not only the art/culture but the social world in which those things exist and subsist, allows us to imagine otherwise.

KSP: Was there anything else you wanted to touch upon that we haven't discussed? The question of addiction comes to mind for me. Compulsion is something that is venerated and prescribed within a high-pressured capitalist system we operate within, and something we all battle with. I know in your case the press was a vehicle for battling addiction, but has also put you in a position of negotiating a work-life balance (you mentioned burnout for instance). This has come full circle somewhat with the publication of Boiled Owls. What have you gleaned from your experience? Glibly, one might say all modern(ist) poets are responding to compulsion, and the compression of space and time. 

AS: The press was integral to my recovery and certainly helped me learn how to be a human again after all that I recounted in Boiled Owls. Compulsion is an interesting concept, without being too 'auto-theoretical' about it my therapist and I were speaking about compulsion recently, about how sometimes you need to learn to focus the drive within, even as it displays itself as a kind of restlessness or relentlessness, but I think that's what cultivating the live air of tradition for each writer really becomes about. You have to live by the letter, by the poetry that's out there, you have to emerge as an historical subject to continue it, to pay homage to elders, to work with descendents. This work is so much bigger than an individual press or person or community. It's not only global but it's world-historical. Part of that comes with resisting the dominant paradigms for living given to us under capitalism, thinking of poetry as a means of accessing a useful labour beyond economic value, the wage, beyond the notion of instant gratification and reward. Burnout happens because no one is given time to fulfill their life, it happens because we're too busy doing and spend no time thinking about how we'd like to seek out others, finding time for love and leisure. 

Of course the necessities of life as a cost - the euphemistic costs of living - play the defining role in this, constantly chasing money to survive, to pay someone else to allow you to live, it happens all the time. And in a way burnout is formed in the crucible of late capitalist intensity, where one has no room to move except with the current of currency, to follow its trail and keep moving towards the next deadline, bill, task, etc. Literary life requires durational time, interruptions to the flows of capital, and a means of survivance, to borrow from Gerald Vizenor. My experience is just my experience, everyone has to find that balance for themselves. Right now for me that involves balancing the creative with the critical, and I'm working on other projects to give variation amidst the continuous admin required in running a publishing house. I think we often think of modernist poets as always responding to the dire european civil wars (made 'world' wars through colonialism and the reach of Europe across the world so that, say, millions of Indian soldiers would be made to fight against the Germans during WW2), but there was also a vast amount of joy, excitement, folly, fun, and frivolity with those modernist avant gardes. They maintained a serious revolutionary goal and made those contributions continuously, they made mistakes, but they wrote in community throughout it all. I think we need to recover something like that now, to think of our poetic labour as beyond the nation-state boundary, as reaching out, a centrifugal poetics. 

What remains, however, Kashif, is to ascertain your reflections on the87press and I wonder if we could begin with the following question:

You've been an editor for six years now, how has your editorial practice changed? What are some highlights for you and what are you excited about working on in the near future? Also - you've been responsible for developing our journal, the Hythe, how did you conceive of it initially and what has surprised you most about its function and shift across the years?

KSP: It has been an interesting time for sure. I have really learnt on the job, so to speak, and so the practice has evolved organically, in its own discontinuous manner. I learnt quite early on I wasn't interested in questioning or didactically prescribing line-by-line corrections. If there are serious formal issues, then most likely we would not take it on in the first place. Of course each manuscript has its own pace, and its own voice--in poetry more than anywhere--so I really focussed on developing conversations with writers and their manuscripts. This is really a way of clarifying certain precepts and underlying philosophies that drive a book, a person's poetics. The writer is capable of producing the manuscript; the role of the editor, at least from my perspective as a writer and peer, is to reveal certain truths already present, latent in the work. In a way your role becomes somewhat akin to a psychotherapist. There is nothing ontologically new to add, it is more an attuning of modality and tone and perhaps revelation. Instilling the writer to assertively take their work forward, and stake a claim right in the middle of ambivalence and semantic difficulty, while thinking about the book as a totality in a way the writer may have difficulties in doing so.

For around two years now I have been based abroad, in Tbilisi, which has given me a distance from the sort of burnout culture that you refer to Azad. It has been a blessing on a personal level, and given me a different perspective to understanding what is happening in the English-language world of culture and literature. In many ways I am still very present, such is the nature of the medium of literature--the original virtual world--but I am also able to hold the whole project at a distance, enabling me to think critically and slowly. 

Of course highlights include working with people whose work you respect, and building stronger intellectual and artistic relations with them. It helps your own work, and widens possibilities. Writing can be a very isolated practice; editing less so, as you connect with a multitude of characters. Reading over manuscripts has also been life-giving and influential, regardless of whether we pick them up or not. You get a real sense of the ecology of writing on the granular level, beyond the market and its concomitant hype. Teaching workshops has also been invaluable in that regard. 

TheHythe has developed into a nice online space, participating in the widening of various aesthetic conversations, while being generally able to pay people. It brings various different schools into a broad church, with the occasional critical piece to disrupt the flow. We have always had this motley crew idea to who our peers and lineages may be, and that is certainly reflected very well in who the journals publishes and platforms. I wouldn't have it any other way.

AS: I'm picking up threads of critique here that we've discussed variously as the different between editing and proof reading, the difference between publishing literature vs producing content. Actual pedagogy vs the cult of celebrity adjacency. What other faultlines in contemporary literary culture do you find yourself working against? 

KSP: There is absolutely a huge problem in the production of derivative work across the Anglophone West. This is in part for two reasons: one is the push to homogenise enacted by the culture industry, where a particular non-consequential speaking voice is preferred and directed towards any new trending issue or topic. This should be of no surprise really, and this is something generally heralded by much of the poetry establishment in the UK, and will on occasion subsume (post)modernist techniques without fundamentally examining voice. Now in the US, which has a more developed innovative and modernist understanding of poetry, we also see this in the reproduction of technique and voice which lacks the listless and existential void that should undergird any modern artist. There should be ambivalence and doubt, but all too often we see a self-assertive branding of the individual poet. This can make it easier for the publisher—no doubt, we know this—in terms of poets self-advocating for their work, but it can too often err into the side of content-production and social capital-chasing.

Poetry, poetics, art in general, should be a refusal of identity that is commensurate with regimes of capital extraction and categorisation. Identity is a trap—it is ultimately not real. We need to be able to think both much more generally—in a world-historical, mythical, cosmic sense—but also much more specifically, at the edge of our fingertip and one's pupils dilating at the sight of the sap from the fig tree. We can do this, while also recognising the violence of racial capitalist regimes bound up in heteronormative neurotypicalities and so forth. This is the great contradictory bleeding edge we teeter upon. 

Poets, writers, publishers, people, need to be open to newness, to the great embrace of phenomena they cannot categorise easily, and sit and dwell in that, and maybe do something with it. Make food, exchange myths, learn new languages, paint. Develop your interests based on curiosity and connection, not on social capital and abstract propositions.

AS: Eloquent as ever! And a fine display of evident synergy between us. What a wonderful response. It kind of brings me to think we should think about the exchange of knowledge, rituals, and techniques for sitting on and with this tilt at the edges' bleed that you've so vividly laid down for us. Whose writing or art do you return to when you're in a rut as a writer or editor? What helps you navigate these difficulties when they become pronounced? I'm thinking, for instance, how both you and I continue to return to Callie Gardner's collection Naturally it is not and indeed have been thinking a lot about that work at this particular time. Or how we've both been circling around critiques of racial capitalism via world historical Marxist systems analyses in various discursive modalities. But then there is also the perennial presence of J H Prynne or Anna Mendelssohn or Sean Bonney or Nathaniel Mackey or Wilson Harris or Bhanu Kapil. You and I are committed readers, always taking on and embracing difference. One of the challenges comes with convincing new authors to do likewise especially when their idea of freedom, choice, and poetic diction so often suffers from the illusion, deflecting from the reality of the elite capture of their writing and it's location - which is a touch reality to see clearly. How do we stay grounded in the critique even when it's most abrasive on our own positionalities? 

KSP: Of course one should read, and read a lot. The sharp invectives of Bonney undoubtedly keep me on my toes, and reminds one of their commitment to aesthetics and commitment to life. Anthony Vahni Capildeo I also return to often, offering a different, though no less acute, exploration of language and experience. We could talk about a lot of writers, many of which you have mentioned. And reading opens worlds. Reading Dambudzo Marechera, for example, was formative as a teenager, and so too Juan Goytisolo. Thinking about narrative and race and sexuality and fragmentation. That offers you the horizon of being alive, building curiosity, understanding what you don't know. 

But ultimately one must also connect their reading and literary pursuits with embodied life experience itself. Building a theory of life, what we call Being, happens in multiple sites and is ongoing. There isn't settled ground here and it would be remiss of me to say I have found the promised land, so to speak. There is always a poet-bard figure in the back of my mind, a marginal wanderer, a ranter and hedonistic wastrel. There are also the great poet-saints and spiritualists, from Amir Khusrao to Kabir and Rumi. And of course the urban dilettantes, from Arthur Rimbaud and Mayakovsky through to the New York queer poets, Baraka and all. 

These schools, lineages, tracts keep one interested, keep the world open. It is bricolage, and decidedly undisciplined. We attempt to align these icons and visions with an interest in publication, amplification of ideas, the building of solidarities and coalitions but this is all undecidable and schematically discontinuous. Navigating it all is an abrasive experience, one fraught with compromise and pragmatism, but that is the underlying modality that we all deal with, in all forms of life. We, luckily, as publishers and writers have the opportunity to constantly assert and interrogate life, the everyday, aesthetic perception in the course of our navigation. Slow down, and let it embrace you.

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Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and serves as poetry editor at Philosophy and Global Affairs and the CLR James Journal. He is a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2024). His second collection Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) was the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award. He lives in South London.

Kashif Sharma-Patel is a poet, writer and co-founding head editor of the87press. Their debut collection is furnish, entrap (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Kashif runs a newsletter culture hawker https://kashifsp.substack.com/