POETS OF CAMBRIDGE
REEM ABBAS With a lack of access to poetry books when she was growing up, the Jeddah-raised, Yemeni-Syrian poet Reem Abbas truly began to take flight when she began her undergraduate studies in Ankara. “Before, the only outlet I had for poems was Instagram. I wasn’t aware that magazines and publication were a thing,” Reem recalls. “I made a point of publishing something each day, which meant I had to produce something each day. But once my poetry found expression on the page, my experience and playfulness really exploded and expanded in ways I had never thought possible.” Now in Cambridge as a postgraduate student, Reem skirts between various languages and forms to capture her thoughts – partly a response to the culture shock of arriving in the UK. “It seemed to me no one spoke any of my languages,” Reem says. “I – and all my experiences – needed to be explained in order to be understood, or even known.” The writer is involved with the scheme Polylingual Poets Please and endlessly inspired by other lyricists combining non-Anglophone forms with the English language. “One of the things that Mimi Khalvati does is take Persian forms and render them in a way that is congenial to the English language,” Reem says. “Up until the point of reading her, I thought rhyme was a thing of 20th-century poets.” Reem often writes in the Arabic qasida form, tinkering with possibilities presented by the use of different languages. “As a polylingual poet, one does not live in the world with a segmented mind,” Reem states. “Things intermingle whether you want them to or not. The longer I stayed in the UK, the more I realised that I don’t need to keep explaining myself to an Anglophone readership.” For Reem, the city’s scene is fed by its history. “It’s magical, walking the landscapes and thinking – centuries ago – these poets roamed the same fields.”
FRAN LOCK Fran Lock is this year’s incoming Judith E Wilson poetry fellow, a scheme pairing poetic practice with academic study. Authoring a multitude of collections (often touching on her Irish traveller background), among them 2019’s Contains Mild Peril , Raptures and Captures and Ruses and Fuses , Fran started out on the spoken-word scene in London and won third place in the National Poetry Competition in 2014. Dogs crop up in her work frequently. “I’m interested in the imaginative yoking of abject animality and others – gendered, racialised and classed others,” Fran says. “A lot of the cultural representations of travellers are linked to the dog, particularly this idea of the dangerous dog. I felt an affinity for that. But the real reason is: I just like dogs. I’ve got a rescue pitbull-lab cross. I used to walk dogs for a living – I’m sort of a dog whisperer.” Her work over the past few years has probed this through therianthropy – the melding of human with animal. “I have an idea stuck in my head, and the only way to get rid of it is to write it – much like the remedy for having an ear worm is to sing it.” The figure of the hyena has Fran in its clutches, with research sending her on trips to London Zoo, rifling through textbooks and delving into the medieval bestiaries. “Poetry exists to push the limits of the things we are comfortable and habituated with in language, and the definitions that we apply uncritically and without thinking,” Fran insists. “Discomfort and unease is a really productive place, creatively.”
As an eco-poet, Fran hopes that the increasing tangibility of global warming will precipitate change. “We’re past the stage now with poetry where bearing witness is enough in raising awareness,” says Fran. “It’s important that you try to situate yourself back in nature, not as a poetic witness whose job it is to interpret what’s going on for everybody else. Your job is to acknowledge complicity, to make a space for that terror and that mutual experience of vulnerability and suffering.” The Judith E Wilson Centre entices names from around the UK, going hand- in-hand with exciting events and projects. “I want to get everyone involved and also bring other writers down to Cambridge to have some crazy, juicy, awesome poetry performances,” enthuses Fran.
BEST FRIEND Fran Lock has written on a wide range of topics, but dogs come up often!
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK OCTOBER 2022 33
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