Anthony Anaxagorou – Favourite Things
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His second collection After the Formalities”was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. He is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.
These are a few of his favourite things…
Tea
Gongfu cha (a Chinese tea ceremony) has been an integral part of my life for over a decade. On average I have three sessions a day, each consisting of a different tea type. Taiwanese oolongs, ripe or raw pu-erhs from Yunnan, aged white teas, and roasted greens. Loading the gaiwan (or clay pot) with a healthy dose of loose-leaf premium Chinese tea, adding water, allowing the leaves to steep for ten or so seconds, then pouring the liquor into a small glass pitcher before filling my tasting cup is a procedure that those with a more casual relationship to tea often find excessive. The meditative and biochemical effects felt from both the properties in tea and the ritualistic element act as my day’s mindful interlude. Coffee is designed to speed us up, tea asks that we slow down. Coffee can launch us quite abruptly outwards, whereas tea very subtly shifts the focus inwards to restore.
Late night cycling
An ongoing issue I have is never being able to fully relax. When I’m not at my desk I’m reading. Nights tend to be difficult. My flailing concentration and general restlessness preclude me from an hour or two of passive television viewing. I head back into books, which when the hour is late can create overstimulation resulting in agitated sleep. The solution, for me, is late-night cycling. The unplanned weaving in and around backroads, soporific parklands, and derelict street markets invokes a sense of calm. Fretful foxes, stumbling drunks; there’s something to be said about the tranquillity or suspense of a hypnagogic metropolis. Not being able to use my phone means I take note of the ground, the branches caught by a streetlight, wafts of foods emanating from houses. Never stationed in a single place long enough, in a moment I’m elsewhere.
Thinking in the shower
As quotidian as it might sound, standing under a shower for a prolonged period of time is where much of my thinking crystallises. I’ve often thought it’s due to the combination of hot water slowing down the heart rate, coupled with a contained space and nothing else to do besides stare helpless at your own body parts. From my feet up to the shower tiles I ruminate on the unrealised poems in my head – their potential structures and forms. Occasionally I say lines out loud, the spray slapping against my shoulders, aggravating my skin, almost demanding I push the idea further. I feel I’m able to visualise a poem’s shape under such conditions — couplets? Tercets? A single unit of text? Something even stranger? There’s an added sense of conviction which comes with being able to see a poem’s outline, albeit only as an imagined sketch. This gives impetus to a fervency, propelling me out of the cubicle towards my notebook where I scrawl down whatever I’ve managed to salvage.
Records
The house is asleep. The television remains uninviting. My eyes feel bruised from a day of screens. In the living room corner waits my Onkyo turntable. With the door closed I kneel, thumbing through my collection of records, pulling out whatever I feel can speak back into my mood. Scandinavian jazz, 50s blues, classic folk. It’s exactly this — deciding on what to play. Everything feels deliberate. It involves effort. Thought. A process. Feeling myself respond to each album title, the sounds and textures they evoke. Drawing on my chosen record, opening the sleeve, freeing the odour. The gentle drop of the stylus affords me a few seconds to sit back down, then, I’m there; in the hollowness of midnight where a small room suddenly bristles with atmosphere. As a sound engineer once told me, an MP3 is an approximation of a sound, analogue is the fact. Hearing each instrument blend and contort in its own sweet battle for prominence, until finally nothing but a few light pops remain.
Writing into nowhere
Writing with no aim aside from indulging one’s own proclivities, without intent on the work being read. Nobody need like or engage with it. It doesn’t require you to present as erudite or rehearsed. It’s unfettered solipsism. Each morning I write for around 30 minutes with the intention of drawing out whatever comes to mind, irrespective of its inanity. The word cathartic derives from the Greek word καθαρός, meaning to clean or make pure. For me, the act of writing without thinking primarily of the reader is the most inexpensive mode of therapy. On days my mental health feels manageable, I try to tune into external sounds, capturing bits of talk — scaffolders yelling at each other, drivers arguing, conversations overheard in the supermarket. I write down what I can. Not in a judgmental way, more to feel a sense of connection with people. Maybe I’ll go back and lift out an interesting line or two with the hope of turning it into something, but generally these discursive entries serve as a reminder to me in my future years, that once I was alive enough to notice the world.