Jason Allen-Paisant – T.S. Eliot Writers’ Notes

Welcome to our T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 Writers’ Notes. This year, alongside the usual Readers’ Notes, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Poetry School are collaborating on a set of Writers’ Notes for the shortlisted collections. These are educational resources for poets looking to develop their practice and learn from some of contemporary poetry’s most exciting and accomplished voices. Here’s Jason Allen-Paisant on his collection, Self-Portrait as Othello.

Self-Portrait as Othello: Kicking the Can Down the Road

For me the editing process looks like kicking a can down the road. It has a long temporal arc. I have many documents on my computer. Each document corresponds more or less to a project I’m writing into, a work I feel is being formed, even if I don’t know exactly what it is—even better when I don’t know exactly what it is! I believe very much in Hilary Mantel’s idea of ‘growing a book’. My many Word documents are for growing books; therefore, I go back to them as I read things that help me sort my own thoughts. There are notes, one liners; paragraphs, descriptions of scenes, philosophical meditations, drafts of poems. Going back to the document—kicking the can down the road—is giving myself time to understand the form that the work is suggesting to me. For example, might something that I initially thought was just verse poetry turn out to be a hybrid form of text or lyric essay?

“Writing involves stealing bits of time. I can hardly ever see where I’m going in writing. I have to always write a little bit before I’m interrupted. But by writing those little bits constantly, I end up amassing pages.”

On Interruption

Kicking the can and down the road: I’m actually speaking as somebody who has very little time to write, all things considered. I have two very small kids—five and three—and a lot of my writing powers have revealed themselves to me since I’ve had the first one—How frustrating… Why did they wait so long?! But the point is that I have these two small kids, and my life is structured around them. For me, then, writing involves stealing bits of time. I can hardly ever see where I’m going in writing. I have to always write a little bit before I’m interrupted. But by writing those little bits constantly, I end up amassing pages. That, too, is what I mean by kicking the can down the road: amassing pages and then seeing where it all goes. I am always writing, and I have so much written, in so many documents, under so many headings, that writing frequently ends us being also editing. Yes, editing is also writing, its own mode of writing: cutting, pruning, adjusting line breaks, figuring out how the poem works on the page. And as I said before, amassing pages means that you end up editing as a different self: that ‘you’ that looks at the work you produced in that document, the one buried in that folder, the one you almost forgot about, is a different ‘you’ from the one who wrote it. That you’s powers of seeing what the work is about and where it wants to go have been multiplied. Sometimes all you need to move the work along is a different reader from yourself, and that reader is yourself over time. I’ve just stolen time to write this. My wife is on a Zoom call for a board she’s been invited to join, and with this essay now overdue, we’ve had to put our kids in front of a cartoon for twenty minutes.

“I conceive of poetry as a fluid practice that might call upon our bodies in different ways at different times.”

The Centrality of the Body

I conceive of poetry as a fluid practice that might call upon our bodies in different ways at different times. The composition of my first book was certainly very different to my second in terms of the writing practice around it. For my first book, Thinking with Trees, I went walking in the woods near to where I live. I went every day, or most days. I would write while walking or while stopping and I was conscious that I wanted a kind of writing that would reflect the physical experience of interruptions, stops, starts, shocks, and disruptions, in its texture; a form of writing that would reflect the experience of going for a walk in those particular woods, near to where I’d come to live—which was anything but smooth for someone walking in my kind of body. And the sort of lyric non-smoothness inhering in the experience of a Black man walking through public woodlands in England was an unthought position within the field of lyric nature poetry. All of that to say, I realized the centrality of the body in the work that I was doing. How could I show the ways in which physical environment and embodied experience were impacting on, inflecting, affecting text? And how could I show this process as process, meaning, it happening in real time. Thinking with Trees is many things, but one of them is certainly a kind of auto-ethnography, the process of going into those woods and of going again and again, and an archiving or recording of that experience in the form of poetry. It took place over a period of roughly two years. And I conceived of the line, which was by turns scraggly and gappy, as a space in which to score shock, interruption, and astonishment, but also the taking of breath—to formally accompany the book’s political inquiry around breathing and the taking of time.

“It took me a number of years, to learn that good writing is the product of failure, of vulnerability, of taking time with yourself. You can’t write great stuff by writing to be perfect.”

Learning to be Gentle with the Self

The process of composing Self-Portrait as Othello, by contrast, was much longer, pre-dating, in fact, Thinking with Trees. The process of creating it had much more to do with myself and the sometimes lonely intimacy of my notebook, and then, later, of my computer. Self-Portrait as Othello began with things recorded in my journals, notes and snippets of poetry ideas. When I began the work (I had no idea what it would eventually be called), I didn’t know how to write. I put so much pressure on myself. I thought that writing was getting it perfect, whatever it was. I thought that to write a couplet down was to aim for something that was ‘ready’ when it came down on the page. I was demanding from myself some sort of exactitude, and, poor me, I didn’t realize that writing would be far better when I learned to be gentle with myself. It took me a number of years, to learn that good writing is the product of failure, of vulnerability, of taking time with yourself. You can’t write great stuff by writing to be perfect. You write to leave a trail that you can come back to, a thread that you can return to after a while—two days, two months, eight months, two years—and you pick it up, taking it further down the road or down the valley.

“If I had just let my impulses flow through my pen and through my body I would have gone much further, much faster.”

Patience, the Edit and Play

I have found that great writing requires patience, that it requires living. I didn’t know that when I began Self-Portrait As Othello and perhaps that’s why it took so much time to write—eight years, more or less. I wrote so little back then because I thought that whatever I put down on the page needed to pass some exacting standard of the sublime. I was mainly trying to sound like Derek Walcott in those days. If I had just let my impulses flow through my pen and through my body I would have gone much further, much faster. I would have had much more to work with; I would have preserved much more of myself, placing more of my thinking out into the world, because interesting writing, as I found out later, was a question of amassing pages. OK, by ‘amassing pages’, I mean, obviously, not in abstraction, but volume coupled with an ability to edit. I learnt at some point that I had to trust myself to just churn things out. That first stage of writing happens between myself and the page. There’s nobody to witness, to judge. The second phase of good writing is editing, where you begin to think about the meeting between yourself and your reader. So Self-Portrait began to be successful as I learned to edit, as I started thinking about sending things out.

As the work (Self-Portrait as Othello) came together in its final stages, one of my most important moves, editing-wise, with was to go for a formal structure that would bring off tightness and rigour and play all in one. This was a challenge especially in the first part of the book, where the voice element was the most important aspect. That section was written with performance in mind, and as a Caribbean writer, I have strong precedents for this: Brathwaite, Anthony McNeill, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, etc. My instinct was for my lines to be explosive—full of ruptures in tone and pace, channelling a dub sound aesthetic. But I eventually realised that the discipline of controlled, uniform stanzas would nonetheless allow me to play inside of them. The uniform stanzas created something of a pressurized environment, which hopefully adds to the sense of something strange and linguistically playful.

“I’d say that just reading the work again, as a different self, over a period of time, helped me to recognize the weaknesses in my writing”

There Will Be Rejections

Pivoting my mind back to earlier days in the process, I’d say that just reading the work again, as a different self, over a period of time, helped me to recognize the weaknesses in my writing, but they also helped me to recognize my sound and therefore a kind of internal perfection that I could work towards. I began to think, whom am I writing for? For any number of reasons, the mainstream of book marketing is invested in safety, in what is marketable, meaning that it reproduces tastes: what is marketable is marketable is marketable. How does writing that’s disruptive, lacking in smoothness, convulsive, filled with the things that people withhold, the things nobody wants to talk about, with subjects that are inconvenient, with ways of writing that don’t reproduce the given formats, fit into all of that? There will be rejections.

I’ve had a fair amount of rejections in my time. My earliest poetry was rejected by the people I most wanted to speak to. By Caribbean readers, or readers of Caribbean poetry, because it didn’t look and sound, in their mind, Caribbean enough. You see, from the start, my poetry was multilingual. It was interested in moving around in multiple linguistic landscapes, reflective of my movements around the world and of my hunger for different languages; it was an attempt at gathering my different selves. I felt that, in its own way, my hunger for dwelling in multiple languages was a very Caribbean experience. It had to be, since I’m from the Caribbean and the experience is mine. As a Jamaican poet, I wanted to speak about pain or loss or memory or joy in a hybrid kind of language. But it was rejected by certain magazines and gatekeepers because it didn’t trade enough in what they considered to be the tropes of Caribbean writing. But I met the right poetry mentors—many of them were themselves from the Caribbean—who encouraged me not to censor myself. That’s how I was able to produce Self-Portrait as Othello, which utilizes existing Caribbean soundscapes in English, integrating ones from other languages, with the aim of creating something very new.

“It’s because I’m always reading why I’m always writing. I write to respond to the things I read.”

Don’t Worry About the Results

I refuse to be tied to a timeline. Things must be given the time that they need. It’s hard to accept, and perhaps my way of dealing with impatience is to always have several things on the go. Perhaps that tricks my mind into forgetting about arriving at a finished product. I’m creating, and that’s not only fine, it’s all I need to be doing. I’ve had two award winning poetry collections published in the space of less than two years. Within that same two year period, I also finalized the manuscript for a philosophical monograph that will be published soon, and I completed the third pass on my memoir. Was that just me being inexplicably prolific? No. Just a result of kicking the can down the road. With all these projects maturing behind the scenes over a number of years.


I think what I’m trying to emphasize is that I don’t worry about results anymore in my writing—not that I don’t care about the power and the integrity of my work, about the way it moves in the world, but I don’t think at all about results when I start a new project. I’ve come a long way from believing that the writer should know where they’re going. I feel an idea pressing against my thoughts and I begin to follow it. I write; I’m not preoccupied with form. I use what’s ready to hand. I let myself be influenced by the thinking of the writers I’m reading at a given time, by the forms they use. I let myself be influenced by anything that wants to influence me. I just need to get things down on the page before I forget them, just need to record stuff, to make connections before those connections—the ones that surprised me when I landed on them—slip me. I’ll have lots of time to edit when I sit down at my desk, or on my couch. I always have lots of things to work with. It’s precisely because I don’t worry about the finished product anymore that I have so much material, so much richness. I don’t always know what to do with it, but I know that there is a wellspring of material there.


It’s because I’m always reading why I’m always writing. I write to respond to the things I read. The things that I read give me responses to a problem my mind has been trying to work out. I’m always reading voraciously. I think the fact of always writing is organic to that. I’m fortunate to be able to read in several languages and everybody who can do that would agree that that’s a superpower.

“Kicking the can down the road also helps when a piece of writing feels stagnant: I can always go work on something else. What I’m trying to say is that my writing and the editorial process depend on relinquishing a sense of control. “

The Gift of Community

Kicking the can down the road also helps when a piece of writing feels stagnant: I can always go work on something else. What I’m trying to say is that my writing and the editorial process depend on relinquishing a sense of control. Hilary Mantel’s essay on ‘how to grow a book’ has been enabling. That said, much of the inspiration I find for writing I’ve encountered by listening to podcasts where writers speak about their practice: Between the Covers and Always Take Notes are two examples. One of the most empowering episodes of Between the Covers I’ve listened to of late is ‘Writing on your own terms’ by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore. In an electrifying way, it confirmed some of my own practices around writing and editing. Bernstein Sycamore emphasizes the ways in which listening to your own writing and following your own intuitions might result in work that’s shocking, disruptive, challenging; meaning, in other words, writing that challenges the mainstream publishing market. Meaning that there will be rejections.

Staying close to my wonderful mentors and to my poetry community is how I’ve managed the rejections. I’d say that to weather rejection in the best way, it’s necessary to be part of a writing community. Have a community of people who see you and who see your work for what it is. Who can help you walk above those rejections. Surround yourself with people who can understand your language and help you preserve the integrity of your writing impulses while encouraging you to hone your craft. There’s a truth that my writing buddies will give me that I know I won’t get out there. I can trust that they’re looking out for the integrity of the work, that their feedback, even when tough, is always in service to what I’m trying to portray in the work. Therefore, I can be vulnerable with them. We can look at the work and talk about it without ego being in the room. I recognize that as a gift.



Jason Allen-Paisant‘s Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet) is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Order your copy here.