In Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s stunning debut, Strange Beach (Soft Skull, 2025), we are invited to deep-dive into the psychic landscapes of light and body. Abstract imaginations and sharp linguistic scourings pulse on the page in a tender push and pull that reminds us of the possibilities of being. Private and public memory from personal erotic encounters in Portugal to the haunting legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade become entangled on the page, assuring us that “The past is in each of us/ blistering, chapping, / the pus arriving like snow.” Olayiwola ignites language’s kinetic energy, transforming it into an intimate choreography that is at once silent and explosive, severing time from its mournful longings for pasts and futures. Ocean, grotto, and the “waves moaning how they’re / moon-trained all year” are the effervescent stages on which this heartbreaking choir of lush voices sculpt and re-sculpt the blue offing of queer masculinities.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer, and performer based in London. A multidisciplinary artist, Olayiwola’s writing, choreography, and hybrid choreo-poetic practice meditate on questions of queer desire, contemporary intimacies, and the multiplicities of time. During our conversation, we spoke about water, time anxiety, the dueling inspirations of Jorie Graham and Louise Glück, and the generative connections between writing poems, sex, choreography, and transcendence.
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The Rumpus: I can’t think of your book without thinking of the ocean. It appears as a site of memory, of pain, of desire for others. What is it about the ocean that compels Strange Beach and you as an artist?
Oluwaseun Olayiwola: The river that goes through the center of London is about a hundred feet away from my door. When I was writing the earliest poems in the collection, it felt like I was always coming back to the water. Place is important to the book and living near water, having the river always flowing as the different traumas and different narratives were returning to me was something I was able to hold onto. I’d often wake up and walk along the river during the pandemic when that was all you could do. The river became important to me, and I started imagining other bodies of water that one could throw oneself into. I say this all as being someone who doesn’t know how to swim. My fascination with water has always been interesting to me, knowing that if I really were to be confronted with a big body of water, I might struggle.
While I am a poet who is concerned with place, imaginative nowheres are where I think a poem begins. My poems don’t necessarily always begin in London, but rather they begin in imagistic psychic landscapes that only exist through language. Water, as opposed to the forest or outer space, is one of those spaces that always felt very natural for me. There’s so much of the ocean that we don’t know because it’s just too dark to be able to truly explore its depths. There’s something about our proximity to that unknowability that catalyzes a lot of my thinking in the work. Water is something we need, something that we often live close to, something we go back to. That paradox: that even though it’s essential to life, we know little about its capacities. What it holds is moving to me and feels like a poetic space.
Rumpus: A refrain throughout the collection is the tension between body and light, between the carnal and ephemeral. Within this tension, the bones of lovers become entangled, sex gives way to lessons in Greek, and language articulates the memory of mothers. What inspires you about this tension?
Olayiwola: Body and light is a kind of dyad between the image and the abstract or the real and the invisible, or the felt and the sensed. The point of dancing is the ambition to move towards light, towards lightness. As with the best poetry, the best performances make me aware of not the visible world of the body moving but the vastness of what we don’t see—energy abstractions like intimacy, closeness, heat, and light. These are things you can’t see. They’re only measured by visceral reactions: by sweat, touch, some sort of illness even. The body becomes the medium through which we pass into these invisibles that float around us as abstractions.
Of course, when you’re writing you might be asked, “What is the ‘sense data,’ as Jorie Graham would put it, around a feeling of love or intimacy or grief?” I think that the body, its movement, and its sensations are real. The body is the image that helps me move towards talking about abstractions like light, intimacy, love, closeness, and farness.
For example, the pleasure in sex, in part, is the physicality. As a gay man, I think there’s a level of transcendence that is possible in the sexual encounter, but you must go via the body to get to that existential plane. Maybe another word for that existential plane is presence. It has to do with escaping time anxiety, which is a kind of worrying about the time ahead or nostalgia, which can be wanting the time behind. To truly be present is a kind of transcendent state when time no longer feels as if it’s ahead of you or that it’s trailing you. There’s a moment of forgetting that time exists. That moment is a state of transcendence or a state of presence that feels connected to these invisibles that we’re always trying to pin down with images.
To get to that sense of presence with another during sex, you have to try things. You have to try twisting and turning and putting it in. There is a sense of tangling with each other, of awkwardness, of bumping, of the actual detritus of the body. You have to go through the uneven, slanted, tense, stressed, corporeality of the body. Then there’s pleasure, excitement, joy, and titillation, which allow you to keep going in amidst the awkwardness or shame or the unfinessed. These are the forces that go back and forth. It’s the dance between the awkwardness and the detritus of the body and pleasure and excitation. This is the spectrum along which presence becoming transcendence is made possible.
If I’m able to place the physical and these abstract invisibles in these dyads, then writing poems is like that work. The poems are the connective tissue because they can’t really be connected in language because we can’t say two words at the same time, but the poems are like that bridge. They’re trying to tether these two ends of the spectrum together.
Rumpus: That explains why your poems are so dynamic, in motion, and at play. Throughout this collection, images spin on themselves and leap beyond the threshold of the poem as a cohesive movement. How does your experience as a choreographer shape your poetry? How does your writing impact your work as a choreographer?
Olayiwola: I didn’t come to writing with any shame about looking exactly like the people whose work was important to me. As a dancer, you’re trained to become a better version of yourself by trying to look exactly like the people who are teaching you. I think this is very different than being a writer, where you’re generally told you need to find your thing very early and not to imitate. Writing these poems from a choreographic standpoint, I really wanted to emulate certain writers. As a dancer, however, you recognize that your little body is never going to be the exact same as another person’s and that you’re constantly operating within this paradox. You can teach me the exact steps, a sequence of movement, and yet because I am not you, it will never be the same. That makes its way into my writing such that I really allowed myself to imitate certain writers with the express understanding that I could never emulate them.
As a choreographer, I also look at the big picture and try to capture shapes, energy, and movement. For me, dance is inherently abstract. The body is only a representation of itself and doesn’t inherently possess messages. Knowing this translates into my sentence and line making and allows me to play with words, line breaks, and spacing on the page in such a way that doesn’t feel beholden to constructions that have come before. I think a leg up behind you is just as powerful as a hand extended. Words have this same kind of porousness in that a great metaphor is just as good as the word “and.”
As far as how writing has influenced my choreography, dancers talk a lot about form. However, I really developed an understanding of form through poetry, which I tried to instrumentalize to see how I could take conventions of literary form and abstract them into compositional tools, improvisational tools, and improvisational tasks for choreography and dancers.
There’s just so much structural integrity to a poem. You don’t want to write poems that people can fuck with. You want any change to a poem, once it’s finished, to be dire. If you move one thing in a poem, ideally, it should reveal, delete, transform a whole network of meanings. I learned that from poetry, which I didn’t have a sense of choreographically. That need for integrity is something that I take into my choreographic practice now. As I’ve become a more serious poet, I’ve begun to ask, “How can a dance work have that much integrity?” This is a question that has hopefully strengthened my choreographic works.
Rumpus: I want to talk more about poetic integrity because there are also moments that are eruptive and thrilling, moments that feel like volcanic fissures in Strange Beach. For example, in one instance, you write, “Okay, I’ll say it. The old lover must fuck the old lover out of memory.” Can you tell me about the balance between precision and control and this explosive voice?
Olayiwola: I see that as the confluence of two of the most important writers in my writing practice: Louise Glück and Jorie Graham. Glück represents the control, almost abortive of speech, every word turned over. You can feel the silence. Graham is at the other end of the spectrum: just complete eruptive passion and flow, allowing whatever comes to come.These are the poets I’ve trained myself on and the reason you’re sensing this hyphenate voice that does multiple things.
I’m also a Gemini, so I get bored of things very quickly. Often, the moment when two voices collide is the moment when I sense something beginning to wilt or settle. I needed something to remind the reader not to fall asleep, to let them know that this poem wasn’t going to end the way they thought it might. It has to do with a kind of restlessness.
When I first started writing this book, I really wanted to have an emotional book like Ararat by Louise Glück. I wanted it to feel like a grand symphony that could make you feel cold and heartbroken. But I couldn’t help these ruptures of voice. I think of a poem like “Cruise” that’s long on the page and a passionate description of an encounter with a set of different kind of men in Portugal. I think of that as this kind of release. Poems like that made me realize this is not, again, imitation. I wanted to imitate Glück’s refinement and dash anything that wasn’t important, but more poems were asking for length, for overflow, for passion, for thick description. The actual voice of the collection just arose. It’s not exactly what you thought it was going to be in the beginning, but it’s also not this other thing. It’s something in the middle.
Rumpus: This range is also reflected in your examination of masculinity. In “Simulacrum,” you write, “The sky is a masculinity.” In your poems, masculinity is nuanced by a Black and queer identity and erupts beyond a fixed gender experience. Masculinity here is tender, slippery, and, at times, even mythological—transforming and absorbing traditionally female figures like the nymph and the siren. How does the lyric allow you to dialogue with—and critique—masculinity and its various complex and multidimensional forms?
Olayiwola: I like to sing. I’ve always been a musical person, and music has usually been a feminine experience for me. The people whose voices I try to emulate tend to be women artists. When I was growing up, I always sang in my falsetto head voice because I was listening to women who were mezzo-sopranos or sopranos. I don’t know if I want to say the lyric is inherently feminine, but for me, there’s a feminizing force I’m calling upon when I am trying to make something that is orally and audibly beautiful. That, for me, feels like a feminine project within my cisgendered male body. The Gen Z in me wants to just say I’m gay so it just makes sense that I’m critiquing masculinity, not only explicitly but just by being gay and deciding to live as that is a kind of critique.
As I mentioned, movements don’t inherently contain meaning and our actions don’t inherently contain gender expression. We’ve assigned them those things for reasons of power, economics, and control. When I’m critiquing masculinity, I’m more trying to reveal to myself what it means to be capable of an action that I had once imagined as feminine. What becomes of it? I’m trying to return the action to its neutrality. By calling the sky a masculinity in a poem that is coded feminine and where the speaker is receiving and being penetrated, I’m introducing a proposition that this vastness might be masculine and asking that these two realities tango. If you can get the masculine and the feminine to tango, which hopefully reveals some neutrality of action, then the shackles of gender are released from that action. And then we can ask, what is the effect of sensing, of seeing, of feeling that action happen? This critique of masculinity is a way of recognizing that actions are without valence and are better measured by the effect they have in the world beyond them, not what presupposes them.
Rumpus: Has Strange Beach transformed you? How do you hope it transforms readers?
Olayiwola: Strange Beach was first a dance I made in 2017 when I was a junior in university after I had read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. It was five people in red and included music by Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey. It was an exercise and the inception point. From 2017 to now, Strange Beach has become a document that proves I’ve been alive, and I feel. I want to remember that I have had experiences that were long and that changed me. Seeing Strange Beach in this final form as it is now, I feel proud, but it also reminds me that there is a life being lived. I think in our current ecological, geopolitical, and technological climate, it can feel as if the seconds of one’s life are not only whisking by but that you’re powerless to do anything about it. This book reflects to me that there are slow, deep, rich experiences that I have taken time inside of. Maybe not in the time I was experiencing them, but in the time it took to make the poem, to come to the page, to revise until it was done. What was maybe a ten-minute experience could be stretched out to a four-year process.
The book is a reminder of the multiplicity of temporal experiences. I’m speaking to you now, but I also have the experience of Portugal that’s been extended up to this point in the book, and poems that I started writing a couple of weeks ago that will go on. There are multiple temporalities happening simultaneously, and my body is containing them. The book reminds me that those multiple temporalities are happening and that if I keep investigating them through poetry, those experiences that feel like they open and shut quickly are actually a lot longer, a lot richer, and have imprinted upon me more than I think they have.
I just want readers to feel, to feel as I do with my dance works. You don’t need to be sure of what you felt, just that you felt something familiar or something unfamiliar. You don’t need to think about it for the rest of your life or even for the rest of your day, but just for that moment, where there is this kind of vortex, portal, or nexus between my speakers, my work, and you where you didn’t feel pulled in time, but you were able to, just for the length of a poem, be present. We can be aligned and united in that encounter. Creating that presence for people I don’t even know feels like the most rewarding thing.
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Author photograph by Jury Dominguez
