Meet London's new generation of poets: from Caleb Femi to Greta Bellamacina

Riotous readings in Peckham and storming the catwalks at Fashion Week — a poet’s life ain’t what it used to be. Samuel Fishwick meets London’s new guard
From left: Greta Bellamacina, Miriam Nash, Kayo Chingonyi, and Max Wallis
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

As London’s Young Poet Laureate, Caleb Femi chooses his words carefully. But on the subject of his contemporaries, he waxes lyrical. ‘A win for them is a win for me,’ laughs the 26-year-old from Peckham. ‘When your friends are doing really well, by a kind of osmosis, it helps you get what you need to improve.’ Femi, appointed to the role last month, is the latest in a new wave of innovative, energetic young poets emerging in London.

They’re a close-knit bunch: Femi has been friends with Kayo Chingonyi since he bumped into him at his first poetry event, with a copy of Chingonyi’s collection Some Bright Elegance nestled in his rucksack, while he befriended Selina Nwulu through poetry organisation Spread the Word’s Young Poet Laureate programme (she was the previous incumbent). Chingonyi is great friends with Miriam Nash, who lives on the same road as Richard Osmond in Peckham (the latter pair first met at a poetry workshop).

Osmond studied postgraduate English under the poet Don Paterson at the University of St Andrews, where he met Will Harris — who’s worked closely with Chingonyi and Femi with the Complete Works education charity. Harris and Osmond co-founded The Poetry Inquisition, a series of nights around London set up as a riposte to the Jeremy Paxman accusation that the form had ‘connived at its own irrelevance’ at 2014’s Forward Prizes for Poetry, an occasion where poets have to explain their work satisfactorily.

Greta Bellamacina and Max Wallis speak to the city’s wild at heart: their collections, Perishing Time and Everything Everything, leaf through sex, drugs, refugees, childbirth, same-sex and three-way relationships. Wallis sees the benefit of poetry released of inhibitions: ‘I’m not trying to say you should work when you’re off your face at all, but you can create amazing art in those moments.’

They can all agree that poetry is having a resurgence. This year, annual poetry book sales are set to smash the £10m mark for the first time. Warsan Shire, Femi’s predecessor as the first Young Poet Laureate, was catapulted to worldwide renown in April after Beyoncé featured her work on her album Lemonade, while the poet Rupi Kaur’s self-published collection Milk and Honey is this year’s bestselling poetry title, thanks to her army of social-media fans. ‘The internet has given us a greater inclination to take something from inside you and share it with someone else through words,’ says Chingonyi.

Literary groups such as Spread the Word have provided a network to help these voices. ‘Their influence has always very much been about writing poetry that holds up on the page, is editorially strong, rigorous, can be delivered, and has an immediacy,’ says Nash. But these poets are breaking new ground on their own.

Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Caleb Femi

Filling the boots of Warsan Shire as Young Poet Laureate is only the latest step in Caleb Femi’s young career. But will he be upset if Beyoncé doesn’t come knocking with an album? ‘No way!’ he exclaims. ‘I’m feeling the benefits just by her reputation alone — I know all the wonderful things she’s done, and it encourages me to do more of the same. Besides, I’m more into Bon Iver.’ Femi’s poetry revolves around the question of where he fits in the world. ‘That sounds very self-centred, very me me me. But it’s not, it’s about my understanding about being in London, Britain, the world.’ It touches on spirituality too (his father is a Bishop, his mother works in charity), although he doesn’t consider himself ‘religious’. He’s more likely to be found at Burgess Park near his flat in Peckham (where he lives with his parents) than church on a Sunday, a ‘no-man’s land’ between so many ‘different landscapes’, where you can see The Shard peeping between the estates, a good place to contemplate where you fit. Not that you’ll find him perched there for long. London, he says, is a ‘place of endless opportunity — but if you sit around it’ll pass you straight by’.

Miriam Nash
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Miriam Nash

‘The ideal poem isn’t just one you’ll read again and again on page; it’s one you can say aloud once, and hold a whole room with,’ says Miriam Nash, 31, who lives with her husband Hristo, a CNN reporter, in Peckham. A contemporary of Kate Tempest and Yemisi Blake at Goldsmiths, her latest collection, All the Prayers in the House, is subtle verse to make you sit bolt upright, and is set to create quite a stir when published next June. ‘Poetry can be a form of secular prayer,’ she says. ‘It’s something that we reach for in times we need support, to recognise another human’s experience as our own.’ While she counts poets Jacob Sam-La Rose among her mentors, it’s her family she often returns to in her writing — she was raised by her mum and sisters in the Findhorn commune in Scotland, which was ‘set up in the 1960s as a vision of what society could be’. ‘Writing allows me to feel a closeness to them when I’m away,’ she says.

Richard Osmond, Selina Nwulu, Will Harris, Caleb Femi
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Selina Nwulu

Performing live poetry takes practice, says Selina Nwulu, even if, like her, you’re an award-winning inveterate of nationwide tours, and last year’s Young Poet Laureate. ‘I’ve been advised to practise in front of a mirror, although I find it quite excruciating,’ laughs Nwulu, 31. ‘I guess that’s the point, if you feel comfortable performing to a mirror then an audience is no problem.’ She grew up in Rotherham with four older sisters on a diet of Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson. Now based in Lewisham, she says spoken word and page poetry’s resurgence is partly down to being featured by mega-artists like Beyoncé, but partly because people are looking for ‘other forms of knowledge’ in a time where ‘people are becoming more and more disillusioned with big power and the information that we’re receiving’. But she says the real trick is to make the private public. ‘My first collection, The Secrets I Let Slip, was poetry like a diary. It was like letting go of those things that I write in secret.’ She writes poetry ‘on my bed, in my PJs’, and her guilty pleasure is RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Richard Osmond

Poet, publican, and professional forager: Richard Osmond is a man who likes English traditions. The 29-year-old co-owns The Verulam Arms in St Albans, to which he commutes from Peckham — ‘where most disadvantaged poets gravitate’ — supplying the pub with berries, herbs and mushrooms he’s picked. Foraging’s a hobby he’s had since childhood, then cultivated while reading Middle English at Queens College, Cambridge. ‘I feel most comfortable on my own in the forest, but I don’t think that’s necessarily right,’ he says. His upcoming Picador collection, Useful Verses, follows in the footsteps of some of the great nature poets. ‘I identify with the early romantics, like Wordsworth,’ he says. But it’s a comparison he’s wary of taking lightly. ‘When those poets are talking about a walk in the woods, they’re not talking about what a fun afternoon they had among the flowers, but something that cuts to the heart of what it means about being part of a society.’ Foraging, he says, is just as rewarding in London, among old buildings and canals. ‘There’s something really interesting about watching how one landscape combines with another.’

Max Wallis
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Max Wallis

Max Wallis, 27, wrote the book on modern romance. Literally. Born in Ealing, but raised in Lancashire, his collection Modern Love was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Meanwhile, his book Everything Everything, released next month, has already been lauded by the TV writer Russell T Davies, and covers everything from wet dreams to his year-long three-way relationship with two men (although the three-way relationship’s over, he’s still with his boyfriend, Sam). ‘They’re all about communication, which is what much of the poetry’s about,’ says Wallis. ‘Most two-way relationships are people on stilts, and they constantly have to lean on someone for support; a three-way one is a tripod, and actually supports itself.’ Did he raise any eyebrows? ‘No one cared whatsoever. What I find fascinating about millennial sexuality is that people dip in and out of that sexuality.’ Born into a family of scientists, he studied six A-levels, wanting to be ‘every single thing I could possibly be, because everything’s a story’. He supports his poetry by modelling — he’s done catwalks at Paris Fashion Week and an Evian campaign — and admits to a ‘chaotic and frivolous life’ with ‘lots of booze’. ‘Beauty isn’t the perfect form who walks into a room, that’s a load of bullshit,’ he says. ‘It’s rag and bones that show the beauty of everyday experience, or the extremes of experience.’

Will Harris
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Will Harris

‘People have been turned off poetry for too long, with good reason,’ says Will Harris, 27, co-founder of The Poetry Inquisition. ‘Preening, white middle-aged male poets have long dominated the establishment, won all the prizes and fostered a culture of self-perpetuated irrelevance.’ No longer: Harris says technologies and platforms such as Twitter are allowing space for young poets like Rubi Kaur and Warsan Shire to ‘go direct to their readers to create an immediate community of poetry’. Harris thinks putting poets in the headlights is healthy. ‘When poets are often asked about what their poetry means, they reply with poetry,’ he says. ‘For a mainstream audience, it’s problematic because they cloak their work in a fake mystique, and we’re trying to strip that away.’ Having studied at Oxford and St Andrews, he gave up on his own poetry for a period after becoming ‘lost down a technical rabbit hole’. But now he finds inspiration writing about his mixed-identity and family. (‘My Dad is English, my mum is Indonesian-Chinese.’) His debut pamphlet All This Is Implied comes out next year. He’s a hard question master, with samples including: ‘Why would you write a poem which makes no logical sense?’ Ouch. How many times will he charge a poet to ‘answer the question’ in the Paxman-style, though? ‘Three’s my limit, but I think I should raise the threshold.’

Greta Bellamacina
Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Greta Bellamacina

As a songwriter for Sony, Greta Bellamacina’s father was pushier than most. ‘Dad [Benedict Bellamacina] was always getting me by the piano, saying: “Come on, let’s try and write some lyrics and make a number one together.”’ Instead, it was poetry that came out: elegiac modern verse that speaks from the heart of the city, and what’s on her doorstep. ‘I find it the easiest language to speak in, weirdly,’ says the 26-year-old. It helped her cope with family tragedy. ‘There’s something about poetry which is quite pinnacle at moments of life and death,’ she says. ‘It’s always read out at weddings and funerals.’ On the one hand, she’s supported her poetry by modelling for Burberry and Stella McCartney (she’s currently with special bookings at agency Viva London); on the other she’s set up her own imprint, New River Press, with her boyfriend Dazed & Confused contributor and poet Robert Montgomery (they run it from their Fitzrovia House, beneath the shadow of the Post Office tower). They’ve also had a baby boy, Lorca, in the last year, and motherhood’s changed her perspective. ‘You feel so connected to the sisterhood of other women, a whole conversation to be had with everyone you haven’t met.’ In her spare time, you’ll find her at the London Library, or in the back of classes at her friend AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities.

Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Kayo Chingonyi

‘Everybody has part of themselves they don’t interact with; everybody contains splits,’ says the Stoke Newington poet, Kayo Chingonyi. His next collection, Kumukanda, is a coming-of-age collection published next year, evocative of a diasporic Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. ‘It’s about the idea of being outside my native context,’ says Chingonyi, 29. ‘I grew up here with the English language and with English schooling, various things that didn’t belong to me.’ Kumukanda means ‘the initiation’ in Luvale, the language of Chingonyi’s father (he passed away when Chingonyi was six, at which point he moved from Zambia to live with his mum, who was studying in Newcastle). While the poets he looks to include Terrance Hayes, Alice Oswald and Safia Elhillo, Chingonyi explores the poetics of grime, garage and hip-hop; he DJs, and, as part of his spell as the ICA’s poet in residence this year, led a seminar on the subject. ‘When somebody’s taken the time to put together an intricate structure that sounds effortless, there’s a delight in it that connects to people on some deep level, taking us back to being really small and playing, experimenting with language.’

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