James Stanwix (JS): I was recently reading a 2020 essay by Jessica Wilkinson called ‘How Poems Make Things Happen’ and in it she quoted Louise Rosenblatt, who says that “a poem must be thought of as an event in time”.
Your piece references past selves (at 16, 18 and 26 years-old), though reads as primarily concerned with ‘now’. What is it about poetry that lets you hold the formative and the ‘formed’ in such close proximity?
Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa (SK): I love that idea of a poem as an event in time because that’s how I experience memory.
None of us arrive in the present as a finished product.
The 16-year-old who stood up to bullying, the eighteen-year-old finding her voice in Youth Parliament, and the person writing this poem are all still in conversation with each other.
The older I get, the less interested I am in the idea of being “formed”.
I think we’re always becoming.
Poetry allows all of those selves to occupy the same room.
It lets me place a childhood memory beside a political observation, or a moment of joy beside a moment of grief.
In this poem, those earlier versions of myself aren’t there as nostalgia.
They’re reminders.
They remind me that courage has always been something I’ve had to practise.
The circumstances change, but the question stays the same: what are you willing to stand for when standing comes at a cost?
Poetry gives me a space where those questions can exist across time.
Hannah Reynolds (HR): Your poem is concerned with not only society-wide issues (digital echo-chambers, political greed and incompetence, etc.), but also by those challenges faced specifically by artists (loss of funding, the threat of the artists’ message being silenced and/or neutered).
In response, you posit courage in the place of complicity and community in the place of alienation.
This is not a closed negotiation, however, as the speaker turns from their early experiences with storytelling and public speaking to the frustrations of working in the arts as an adult.
As an artist, how do you face the continual pressure to conform, to be obedient, to box-tick?
Does writing about this pressure, as you do in this piece, exorcise it in some way?
SK: I think one of the biggest misconceptions about conformity is that it arrives as a demand.
More often, it arrives as a suggestion.
Maybe don’t say that.
Maybe that’s too political.
Maybe now isn’t the right time.
Maybe there’s a softer way to frame it.
The pressure isn’t always explicit.
Sometimes it comes disguised as professionalism, diplomacy, gratitude, or concern.
Particularly in the arts, where funding is tight and opportunities are scarce, you become very aware of the consequences of making people uncomfortable.
The poem came out of observing and experiencing that tension.
We celebrate artists for being courageous right up until that courage challenges something a little too powerful.
Then suddenly we’re asked to be strategic.
Writing about it doesn’t remove the pressure.
The pressure is still there.
What writing does is expose it.
It allows me to look directly at the thing and ask whether fear is making this decision for me.
I’m increasingly convinced that courage isn’t an individual trait.
It’s a collective practice.
Communities create the conditions where people feel able to speak honestly.
That’s why the poem keeps returning to the idea of community as a resistance to fear.
Fear isolates us.
Courage brings us back to each other.
JS: The clarity and directness of your poem reminded me of pieces in Evelyn Araluen’s recent collection The Rot; lines such as “It’s fragile//Because fear is loud//And courage takes practice” are so good.
Being a piece that is speaking, in part, to a damaged arts ‘sector’, what communicative quality does poetry uniquely offer both you and your readers?
SK: For me, poetry creates an intimacy that other forms don’t always allow.
We live in a world full of statements, headlines, panels, reports and talking points.
Poetry can move underneath all of that and reach the emotional truth of something.
This poem is responding to a particular moment in the arts sector, but it’s also responding to something much larger: the normalisation of silence.
The way fear can slowly become part of the furniture.
The way people convince themselves that saying nothing is the same as being neutral.
Poetry lets me hold complexity without having to flatten it.
I can write about funding cuts and algorithms and political cowardice, but I can also write about a child who looked at my turban and saw a genie.
Those things belong together because they’re all part of the same question: what kind of world are we building, and who gets to belong in it?
I turn to art because it helps me feel less alone.
As a writer, I hope it offers that same sense of recognition.
Not answers, necessarily, but companionship.
It reminds us we’re not isolated observers. We’re participants in the story.
HR: I noticed a couple of theatrical allusions in the poem (“…a stage light pointed too directly/ At what’s been stolen,” “…folding is how the stage goes dark”).
How has your own extensive work in the theatre shaped your poetic practice?
In addition to the communicative qualities of the form mentioned by James above, what significance does the spoken performance of poetry have to you?
SK: Performing has fundamentally shaped the way I write poetry.
It taught me that words aren’t just read; they’re experienced.
Rhythm matters. Silence matters.
I think that’s probably why theatrical imagery finds its way into this poem (also I’m the CEO of a theatre so that’s been my day-to-day life for the last three years).
The metaphor of the stage feels useful because theatre is always dealing with visibility.
Who gets the spotlight? Who controls the narrative? What remains hidden?
Those questions exist in public life as much as they do in performance.
I’ve spent most of my artistic life telling stories aloud, and I think there is something profoundly democratic about spoken word.
It doesn’t require specialised knowledge.
It asks people to arrive with their humanity and their attention.
And ultimately that’s what I’m interested in, not simply expressing an idea, but creating a moment where people can collectively sit with truth.
Even uncomfortable truth.
Especially uncomfortable truth.
That’s where transformation begins.