Kayo Chingonyi: The most formalist poetry I have been exposed to is rap lyrics
When Kayo Chingonyi was awarded the £30, 000 Dylan Thomas prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda, he used his acceptance speech to thank some of his former school teachers, including one who had given him a copy of Thomas’s play for voices Under Milk Wood. “I was very grateful for that, it led me to Thomas’s poetry,” Chingonyi says; he was delighted and surprised to have come out ahead of fellow shortlisted authors including Sally Rooney and Gwendoline Riley for the prize awarded to writers aged 39 or under, the age Thomas was when he died. “I was also grateful that these teachers shared their enthusiasms with me. A lot of what I write is embedded in my wanting to share enthusiasms.”
The enthusiasm that most obviously animates Kumukanda is music, specifically garage, grime and hip-hop. Chingonyi thrillingly integrates their rhythms and rhymes with more conventional poetic metrics - there is even a sonnet - in a collection that tackles race, identity, masculinity, migration, bereavement and longing, not to mention literary tradition, with a rare energy, intelligence and sophistication. The influence of Eminem is probed alongside that of Pinter and Lowell, as Kumukanda cuts through sterile delineations of page or stage by simply privileging excellence in language and literature, whatever its source.
“The most formalist poetry I have been exposed to is rap lyrics,” Chingonyi explains. “They are hyper-metrical, the rhyme schemes are intricate and the levels of allusion, and allusive play, in the average rap song is staggering. When you put that against the work of more canonical poets I think there is a lot of kinship between people driven by an affinity with, and flair for, language.” He is particularly moved by those forms which unite story with song. “My work is always trying to achieve a balance between the written and oral traditions of literature, and so it makes sense to bring together traditional canonical poetic forms with forms which are a part of their own canon, to create a canon of my own.”
Some of the bare facts of Chingonyi’s life can be glimpsed in Kumukanda. He was born in Zambia in 1987 and moved to the UK when he was six after his father died. He lived in Newcastle, London and Essex and his mother died when he was just 13. He was an avid collector of music on cassette and fancied himself as a rapper: “K to the a to the y to the o, / lyrical G with a badboy
The winner of the Dylan Thomas prize explains how his poems are infused with the rhythms and rhymes of garage, grime and hip-hop
flow” as the teenage Chingonyi announces in “Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee”. “But I resist the idea that the poems are my story in any authoritative way,” he says. “The poems are drawn from certain influences and experiences, but the act of creativity is to ask how can I move beyond that into sharing with someone a text or a poem that encourages them to reflect on certain things in their own life. And when I enter into that kind of conversation, with a reader or someone in an audience, then the poem really lives in that it has a life outside of my life.”
The primary theme of the book is presented in the title poem. Kumukanda is an initiation ritual for young men of the Luvale people in Zambia. Chingonyi says he first heard about it in conversations with an aunt which “opened up a space in my work to write about this feeling of loss which attends moving from one place to another. When I was thinking about this book and what type of poems I wanted to put out in the world, I kept coming back to this theme and found myself writing into it and out of it.”
He says missing out on the ritual served as a metaphor for other things that he had missed from a culture which was part of his life, but was remote; this led him to consider the events that had moved him “across that threshold into the adult world”.
“The death of parents is something that makes people grow up sooner than they otherwise would expect,” he says. “But there are other ways. Black men are particularly racialised and some of the ways they are viewed prejudicially prompt moments of having to grow up quickly. As a kid I was never in trouble with the police, but certain interactions with them were fraught because of stereotypical notions held on both sides. Those were moments where I had to learn to carry myself in a certain way, which was not the way a child should be learning to carry himself. There have been many things that stood in for that singular moment of initiation.”
Chingonyi is currently writing poems for a second collection but says he’s in no rush. “Kumukanda only came out a year ago and it still feels like early days. I’m also working on Kumukanda is an initiation ritual for young men of the Luvale people in Zambia. Chingonyi says he first heard about it in conversations with an aunt which “opened up a space in my work to write about this feeling of loss which attends moving from one place to another some essays that deal with notions of autobiography, cultural criticism, music, migration and other issues that sit in the middle of my life.” He will take up a post as an assistant professor at Durham university in the autumn, where he will teach creative writing as well as doing his own research. “I like it that I can participate in conversations within institutional and academic spaces, but also participate in events in the wider world. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to draw on that hybrid sensibility.” In his early writing he says music and poetry felt like separate enterprises, but he is now consciously working to integrate them. His route to poetry came through memorising song lyrics and he wants to continue to explore the powerful allure of rhythm and rhyme.
“There is something about the compression of poems, and songs, that encourages you to memorise them and take them with you into the world. The best become wonderful travel companions for life.”