Nisha Ramayya is a poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London. Her recent book, States of the Body Produced by Love was published by Ignota in 2019. We find out more about her process of crafting poetics, the ritualistic elements of language, play, and creation. 

What do craft and the decorative mean to you?

I’ve never fully shaken off my teenage/emo dreams, and the first thing that springs to mind about ‘craft’ is – embarrassingly – The Craft and all those midnight experiments alone and with friends, candles, dried herbs, and heavy-breathing ghosts. The second thing is craft in the context of poetry and literary tradition, and the ways in which it is turned against poets who emphasise sound and performance (‘not enough refinement’), or who experiment with traditions that do not emerge from Europe (‘not enough relatability’), or who tend towards conceptual and procedural writing practices (‘not enough natural talent’). Will Harris has a great thread on Twitter about this.

How you approach the craft of poetry?

I like thinking about writing poetry as creating and entering into a ritualistic space – an early poem ‘Ritual Steps for a Tantric Poetics’ outlines different practices, methodologies, and feelings about writing poetry that I still find helpful. There are so many contradictory impulses/drives and so many internalised obstacles/enemies that can prevent you from getting anywhere in writing, and so lots of the process seems to be about ‘writing through’ until you find yourself somewhere else, maybe outside yourself or in a make believe space. Tantra refers to mythical and ritual traditions as well as the act of weaving, which is something I explore – over-indulging in the metaphorical possibilities – in Threads (a creative-critical pamphlet co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil) and in States of the Body Produced by Love.

Can you speak to the way ritual informs your work and the ways in which you work with language?

Approaching poetic practices as ritual practices can be really generative and fun. For example, setting up particular rules or rites (such as time of day, or finding your voice via quotations from others, or listening to a piece of music on repeat); meditating on a symbol or image (in my book, it’s yantras/mandalas and goddess iconography all the way); or focussing on something you want to transform (like an emotion or a relationship or a social/political situation). Also, ritual can provide a safe space in which to dwell on, respond to, and even perform violence, fury, revenge. Not that I think those things should be defanged in language according to some distinction between art here and life there, but that poetry can be a place to try on and sharpen those fangs! For example, writing my antinationalist poem that’s really a diatribe against right-wing Hindu ideology and rule really helped me to identify and articulate my feelings and my political position, and then to channel it outside myself into the world.   

Tell us a bit more about ‘States of the Body Produced By Love’ and working with Ignota Books…

Ignota first published Spells: 21^st Century Occult Poetry and have gone on to publish an amazing catalogue, including the Ignota Diary, which is intended as ‘a tool for discovery in the practice of everyday life’. Sarah Shin, one of the editors, has been – quite literally – a dream come true. She has encouraged and supported me and my writing, read my work more closely than anyone and helped me to say what I’m trying to say, organised events and done the sort of promotional work that is anathema to many poets, and helped me to reach so many different people and readers for which I am endlessly grateful. It was important to me to work with a woman of colour (somewhat uncommon in poetry publishing) and with someone who understood and shared my twofold approach to spirituality and politics. I didn’t actually think I’d meet that very person and am so glad that I waited as long as I did to publish my first book – in that way, it’s been pretty romantic!

Could you tell us a bit more about your work in creating a ‘rackety bridge’ between Tantric poetics and black studies?

This bridge – oscillating between safe crossing and descent into the depths, set to the music of Alice Coltrane – is how I am trying to get across the many holes in my research interests and poetic practices; there are many bridges crossing back and forth, like weaving, like suturing wounds. I’m currently thinking about performance as sacrifice, the poetry reading as ritual space and as bloody offering, which will hopefully lead into a research project on Fred Moten’s discussions of blackness and non-performance, the correspondences between legal language and spellcasting, and the fascistic shadowlands of Tantra…

Check our Nisha’s ritual poetry here

Interview: Jade Elizabeth French