In the Studio: Poet Fred D’Aguiar
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The poet, novelist and playwright Fred D’Aguiar was born in Britain, grew up in Guyana and now lives in Los Angeles. There he came across the story which became his most recent collection of poems, For the Unnamed. It was originally entitled For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Pico’s Sarco and Sepulveda’s Black Swan in Los Angeles, in 1852. That tells us what we know: the horses’ names, who owned them, where and when the race was run, and that the winning jockey was black. His name, though, was not recorded.
Fred D’Aguiar recovers and re-imagines his story, in several voices – including the horses. In this edition of In the Studio, Julian May meets D’Aguiar on the cusp. For The Unnamed is written and D’Aguiar explains how he is now preparing it for publication and his way of proof-reading. He is also feeling his way towards his next project, beginning a series of poetic studies of people he has known, people he has lost and people who inspire him. This is, tentatively, entitled Lives Studied.
D'Aguiar reveals his processes, how he begins, rising very early, taking his dog, Dexter, for a walk, drinking a coffee, then setting to. He speaks quickly, so writes always in longhand with a pen, to slow thought down, to consider. He speaks too of his reading and influences, for instance Robert Lowell and his collection ‘Life Studies’. For D’Aguiar the practice of writing is integral to his existence - writing is living.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sport, but not as you know it. |
| 0:03.0 | Nothing is ever quite as expected. |
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| 0:08.0 | If the story is wriggly, contentious, or hard to tame, I'll cover. |
| 0:13.0 | Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm a morning present, so my fresh brain cells are in the morning |
| 0:22.0 | and I devote those to writing. |
| 0:24.5 | This is in the studio, the documentary from the BBC World Service that investigates the |
| 0:30.3 | creative processes of artists all over the world. the So first thing in the morning I get up seek out coffee walk dog as I walk the dog is cool |
| 0:47.6 | it's still getting light I come back sit with coffee coffee, dog is happy. |
| 0:53.6 | Then I take out my notebook and my ink pen, |
| 0:57.1 | because when I write with an ink pen, |
| 0:58.7 | I write slowly and deliberately with my left hand |
| 1:02.2 | and it seems to be the pace of thinking and poetry. I think very quickly and speak very quickly, but when I write I deliberately have these steps slower, a movement that's organic with the pen scratching in my notebook. |
| 1:15.0 | There are piles of notebooks Fred de Garr has scratched in over four decades. |
| 1:21.0 | He was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents. From the age of two until he was 12, he lived in Guiana, brought up by his grandmother. His first collection of poems, Mamadotte, draws on his childhood there using |
| 1:36.7 | Guyanese English nation language. |
| 1:40.9 | Since the mid-1990s Fred Dagar has lived in the United States and he's now |
| 1:46.0 | professor of English at the University of California in Los Angeles. |
| 1:50.5 | Dagar has published nine collections of poetry, six novels, four plays and a memoir. |
| 1:58.0 | So Fred Dagar is a man of letters investing his life in writing in the early morning. |
| 2:06.4 | I've known Fred for more than 30 years. |
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