Introduction to Kostya and Joanna

Transcript of audio

Hello, I’m alice hiller.  I’d like to welcome you to Voicing our Silences with Joanna Ingham and  Kostya Tsolakis.  They are going to be talking about the energies desire, shame, and reconciliation have brought to their work, in between performing poems from their brilliant debuts from ignition press, and offering you two workshop exercises.  I’ll begin with a few words about Joanna and Kostya. 

Joanna Ingham grew up in Suffolk and now lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and daughter.  She’s worked in education and new writing across theatre, literature development and museums, and also run workshops in a wide range of sites, including prisons.  Alongside this, her own wonderful work has been widely published and honoured in numerous competitions, most recently winning the Paper Swans single poem prize for 2020.  Joanna was also awarded a prestigious year long Arts Council grant to develop her creative practice. She’s got a great website with links and information if you want to find out more, or buy her pamphlet, naming bones.

naming bones plays time like a concertina. The opening poem, ‘Fontanelle’, finds a newborn daughter’s heart “too close to the surface”, beating “just under the smear of hair” then flips its perspective to discover instead the speaker’s own “heart in a plastic cot/ for anyone to look at.” Being able to see the everyday as strange and miraculous, and the body as a site of extreme vulnerability as well as delight, is a keynote in a world where tongues are found sliced on plates, and hearts are elsewhere dissected by teenagers in biology classes.  Like Kostya, Joanna doesn’t shy away from darkness, or exploring family griefs.  She’s  also a poet whose wit, and ability to find tenderness in the everyday, is unparalleled. In ‘Neutrogena Norwegian Formula’ hands that have been meticulously moisturised each night, are thanked for making “me come, over and over”.

Kostya Tsolakis is a London-based poet and journalist, born and raised in Athens, Greece. Prior to the publication of  Ephebos in 2020,  he won the 2019  Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition with the poem ‘Photographs’ which looks with love back through his parents’ history to when his mother was the “girl, stem-thin/ in a little black dress”, and his father “the smart lieutenant Mum has yet to fall for.” Widely published, as his website records, Kostya is also a key mover in the global poetry community. He founded and co-edits harana poetry, with Romalyn Ante, for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language, which has been hugely supportive of rising talents. He’s also just become the deputy poetry editor at Ambit where I’m sure his generous and sharp eye will deliver more key works. 

Kostya’s debut ephebos is as compelling as it is moving. Poems fit together a spikey jigsaw of growing up queer, and necessarily closeted, in religious, conservative Greece, and then coming out to claim a queer identity in a landscape illuminated by lovers, but also stalked by predators.  In ‘Bathroom in an Athens Suburb, 1994’, “catalogues/ from archaeological museums” provide the only sources of erotic images, which come to life for the poet. Challenging conventional masculinities, in ‘First Time’ “lovemaking” turns out, pungently, to be “this angular, stinky wrestle”.   Like Joanna, Kostya calls upon humour to heighten and deflect darkness, but like her,  he is also a poet of ecstasy, and beauty, as when in ‘Athenian Light’, he bathes in a “rooftop pool”  with “swallows above me/ like musical notes” and the light brings out “the veins in marble/ and the arms of men.”

It’s now my great pleasure to hand over to Kostya Tsolakis and Joanna Ingham.

The video of our event is below.  Please turn on captions through Youtube if you need to.