Wasafiri Wonders: Ashley Barr
Winner of the 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize, Ashley Barr talks about discovering the subject of their winning essay, British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil, private space, books they're reading right now, and whether academic writing should be niche or for the masses.
The 2025 Wasafiri Essay Prize is now inviting submissions from early-career researchers, including PhD candidates, offering publication, mentoring, cash, and more. Enter by 30 June, 2025.
Your prize-winning essay was ten years in the making — could you tell us what sparked such a deep engagement with Kapil’s work, and how it changed over that time?
I first encountered Bhanu Kapil’s writing in 2015 when Ban en Banlieue (2015) was published. I read the book in a day (for a class), and I found it really difficult, disarming, engrossing, invigorating, troubling — so much, honestly. But I couldn’t talk about it!
In 2020, I taught on a module for which we read Ban, and I remember at some point hearing from a student who wrote an essay on it. They said that they were moved by it and were totally fascinated and consumed by it, but it was so hard to write about. I told them that I also found it so impossibly difficult to write about and that I had to do a whole PhD just to grapple with it.
Shortly after reading Ban, I was working on writing poetry that was really process-forward, so the way that I was writing seemed as important (at least) as the poems themselves, or the poems themselves are also about the way I was writing them. I was inspired by Kapil’s work in that way, too.
I had also been co-running a poetry reading series in Boise, Idaho for about five years, and I loved it for a lot of reasons (community among them), but I felt conflicted about poetry readings as a practice too. I wondered what the poetry reading was for, and why poetry in particular is so ‘naturally’ associated with readings. These questions coincided with a moment (post Trump’s first election), when more poets started saying they wouldn’t attend or participate in ‘all white’ readings, which was especially interesting as a sentiment in Boise. I didn’t know what the answer was, or even fully what my question was, but I had a hunch that Kapil’s performances could help.
Boise is also a setting in Kapil’s Incubation: A Space For Monsters (2006). In Boise, the speaker/Kapil gets picked up as ‘in [her] innocence’ she ‘had been walking on a road that led to the country compound of KKK leader/operative, Charles Reynold.’ In an invited talk at the University of Sussex in November 2020, Kapil said that ‘when you step across the threshold of the downtown Boise Greyhound station, you become a writer.’ My family moved to Boise on a Greyhound. So, for me, I crossed that threshold in 1995.
Anyway! All of this did eventually lead to me doing a PhD on process-based poetry (inspired by the difficulty of Ban), and a lot of what motivated it was a desire to understand more about these fascinating and elusive aspects of Kapil’s writing and performances. The work that would become this essay changed shape multiple times across those years, from an essay with a thesis I couldn’t even articulate, to multiple chapter drafts, to a rogue introduction for a chapter that’s actually on conceptual writing, gimmicks, and whiteness as property in the digital economy, to now. I’ve learned a lot by getting time to sit with the work, reading, speaking to so many people, and living in the UK for seven years.
In your essay, you engage with Kapil’s conceptions of what might be a ‘habitable space’ for a poem. As a poet, what is your relationship with space/s and what have they come to signify for you?
Looking back at that summary, I guess I’ve been thinking about ‘space’ for a while! When I started writing this essay, I was working on a creative project that is partly about the placement of the shower in the studio flat I was renting. This shower is in the middle of the bedroom/sitting room, but more than that, it’s on a raised platform in the centre of the room, and it has a proscenium arch like a stage. So, it felt like a stage both because of its shape and because I could potentially have an audience while showering, which made using it and being in the flat itself feel strange.
In the PhD, I was interested in the process of writing poetry and what made someone a ‘poet’, and in the moments when process-heavy work could be used to shield the actual making body behind a screen that said something like: the process is doing the work, not me, so my identity doesn’t matter!
I had rented this apartment to do a PhD on poetry partly because I felt I needed privacy (defined as self-containment) in order to write. The shower, in general, in the post-war west, was supposed to be a hidden space (part of the bathroom), but this one was a stage, and it was pushing me towards seeing all these otherwise concealed ways of relating (as ‘private’ individuals, family units, tenants ...). It also made me ask questions about what seems ‘natural’, what it means to be housed, and how poetry connects to the spaces and processes of urbanisation and suburbanisation.
So, I started writing from the shower and doing that helped me see all the ways in which poetry’s ‘spaces’ make the ‘poet’, and how someone acting as the ‘poet’ can remake those spaces.
What is the best advice you’ve received from an academic or a teacher about your writing?
I’ve been fortunate to have many amazing writing teachers in my life. A lot of the best advice comes from close attention: suggestions of different methods for writing, ideas for additional sources, new ways of looking at something I’m already too familiar with.
When I was finishing my PhD and feeling lost, one of my supervisors told me (in the words of Merce Cunningham): ‘The only way to do it is to do it.’
Do you believe academic writing should be more accessible to wider audiences or remain tailored to niche, specialist audiences?
I think the answer to this is partly in the brand new essay I wrote for the first question! Obviously, I must think that academic writing has an important role to play in the way we interact with and understand literature, community, and honestly, everything. But, for me, academic work has never been separable from life amongst the wider audience. Even my most academic work is informed by mundane, non-specialist concerns.
Important work can often be difficult and inaccessible for necessary reasons, though. Like, Kapil’s work is both accessible and inaccessible. If academic writing can be more accessible, amazing! But there’s also something meaningful in what’s structurally/inherently/impossibly inaccessible. In many ways it’s a privilege, but I’ve frequently benefited from being able to stay with things that I don’t immediately understand.
More importantly, the concerns of literature aren’t ‘merely’ academic, and so this way of thinking and being with that literature shouldn’t be either. It should be accessible in the sense that the path should be open, and ideally, we should be able to help each other find ways and time to traverse it.
Which other contemporary poets do you feel are relevant to our political climate? Whose works do you recommend to students and politicians alike?
I’m really bad at answering questions like these, so I’ll tell you what I’m reading and finding helpful/relevant right now:
Butter Intervention by Ellen Dillon.
Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.
ERGASTULUM: Vignettes of Lost Time by Azad Ashim Sharma.
Solitary Pleasure by John Weiners.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner.
Isabel Waidner isn’t a poet (or are they??), but everyone should read We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, if they haven’t already.
What are you working on nowadays?
Sometimes, I’m writing an auto-fictional, metafictional off-campus novel about suspense, fixed-term contracts, and being in the launderette. Sometimes, I’m working on a few more journal articles (some about the poets whose work is mentioned above). Most of the time, I’m teaching rhetoric to engineering students.
Cover image: Illustrated by Simone Khanyi Hadebe
