Your piece turns a poetic eye to something that is not often the subject of poetry – garbage and refuse. Could you speak more about what inspired you in writing this poem?​

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I’ve taken the trash out every Wednesday for the past two years. On the morning this poem came together, I walked to the place where I dump it before the cleaning truck came, thinking, we actually do have constant refuse leaving our lives. Even newborns. And I kept wondering what the lives of the garbage men were like and how they treated what we no longer needed. The image I had was of these heaps and towers of trash that kept growing, how all those things were useful once and what their disposal might symbolise. It was one of those quick and happy poems to write.

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‘Garbage men’ carries a sense of the density of life that can be observed through its discards. It renders the ordinary, when looked at so closely and so relentlessly, increasingly strange. How do you cultivate your poetic gaze or attunement?

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Something’s always going on. Some wheel somewhere is always turning. Whether you blink or not, whether you realise it or not. I think my approach to writing poetry or even creativity in general has been attention. You have to listen. You have to see. And you have to feel. Immensely. There are times when life seems pretty ordinary and it feels like there are no poems around to find. But tranquillity, rote of action, the mundane, is where the poetry is hiding. In plain sight. So I look and look and look again until some lucky day, it looks new and exciting. Then the words come. 

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What are some things you are reading, watching, or listening to that have been inspiring you lately?

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I have been reading a lot of poetry by Kenneth Koch. He wrote in this very elegant style where the poem might seem random but the inner workings of rhythm and deliberate word play are there, allowing you to enjoy the poems with never ending freshness. I’m a big fan of his fecundity. I’ve also been reading Spells by IS Jones; a brilliant first collection of poetry tackling spirituality, gender and queerness in ways I found surprising. I also watch a lot of dance videos, voguing especially. It is that fluidity that I aim at translating into flow and rhyme. Fem queen voguers have within them an inbuilt ‘beat-catcher’. I learn a lot from that.

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Do you think your poem speaks to the possibility of an otherwise, and if so, how?

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While my poem doesn’t directly hint at an otherwise, it highlights continuity. Human beings continue to generate refuse all their lives. And that refuse needs a place to go, needs to be handled responsibly, sustainably; with due regard to the environment. ‘Garbage men’ is a call for mindfulness.