Warsan Shire: I look forward to translating more work in Somali, that’s really important to me. I can speak Somali and English fluently. How do you feel about this and how many languages do you speak? Geosi Gyasi: Your poetry has been translated into many languages including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Estonian, & Swedish. Everything I know about editing I learnt from him and my mentor – the beautiful poet Pascale Petit. Warsan Shire: I edit until life gets blurry, then I work with my editor, who is also a brilliant poet – Jacob Sam La-Rose. Geosi Gyasi: As a poetry editor, do you edit your own poems before you send them out to publishers? On occasion I would be asked if I was also, a Rapper and ‘how did you learn to speak English so well?”. Too often I would be interviewed by journalists whose only intention, it felt, was to make clear that I was a spoken word poet and not a ‘poet’. Warsan Shire: A major part was the writing residencies, all over London, from the Houses of Parliament to a shed in a park in East London. I would sit and write poems all day for a year. What were your roles as a young Poet Laureate? Geosi Gyasi: In October 2013, you were selected as the first Young Poet Laureate for London. The title can always change later, to something a little bit more subtle, maybe. I recently found a freewrite of mine titled ‘WHY IS UR EX-GIRLFRIEND HAUNTING US IF SHE IS NOT DEAD?’. Most of my poems have working titles of whatever state I was in at the time of writing. Warsan Shire: It’s a natural process, sometimes it comes before the poem, sometimes the poem names itself. Could you tell me the technical process by which you give titles to your poems?
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Geosi Gyasi: So in 2011, ‘teaching my mother how to give birth’ was published by flipped eye. I wanted to write books, so when this manuscript I started writing at 18, was actually published by Nii Parkes – I had something real and physical to point to. I didn’t come from a world where your dreams could actually come true.
Warsan Shire: On some level, when ‘teaching my mother how to give birth’ was published – I had something tangible to reference. Geosi Gyasi: When did you first regard yourself as a poet? Geosi Gyasi: Do you regard the United Kingdom as your home? Then the civil war broke out soon after and we couldn’t go back. My parents moved to Nairobi, where I was born. Warsan Shire: My father is a writer and journalist he was forced to leave Mogadishu soon after I was conceived because he wrote a book questioning the government.
Geosi Gyasi: You immigrated to the United Kingdom at the age of one.
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Warsan lives in Los Angeles, where is she working on her first full collection. She teaches workshops using poetry to explore memory and heal trauma. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Estonian and Swedish. In 2014 she was Australia’s Queensland Poet-in- Residence. In 2013 she won the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Magma, and the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She has read her work extensively internationally. Her début book, ‘Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. She was the first Young Poet Laureate for London. Warsan Shire is a Somali poet raised in London.
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