In advance of this Saturday’s Free Verse Fair at the Senate House, University of London, we had a quick chat with Rishi Dastidar – Nine Arches published poet, chair of Spread the Word, consulting editor for The Rialto – who is running a workshop at the fair for poets on how to get noticed in the poetry world.

Your workshop is called “Get in the game: Building yourself a profile in poetry” – to what extent is the concept of play important in self-promotion?

Well, I think it’s useful, especially if you feel that selling your work is a bit icky… treat it like a game, one with ill-defined rules admittedly, in which chance plays an outsized role but experimentation and the willingness to say “why not?” can lead to some serendipitous moments. Personally I think taking a playful approach to most things in life is the best way to go. “Take the work seriously, not yourself” is a pretty good maxim to live by – or at least, it has worked for me.

What is your favourite social media platform and why?

Despite appearances to the contrary, I’m not actually on all of them. If you define ‘favourite’ as ‘most amount of time spent on it’, then it’s Twitter all the way. But when I tire of it, which appears to be more often than not these days, then at least the cat photos on Instagram are soothing.

On Twitter, you recently applauded a Paris Review article about David Foster Wallace which includes recipes for a basic burger, baguette pizza and blondies. What food items do you feel the greatest affinity for?

Bolognese – I am anybody’s for a half decent ragu. Heck, even a quarter decent ragu.

One of this year’s National Poetry Competition judges Mark Waldron wrote a poem called ‘All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me’ – do you find that for you the language of poetry and branding intertwine?

They do, and not least because I work four days a week as a writer at a branding consultancy. A few years ago, a client was struggling to write a new mission for the business after a big merger. The brief had gone round various different agencies, until I got a summons to go to Paris the next day to meet the CEO – I’d been billed as ‘the man who will solve it’. I walk in to the meeting and before I’d even sat down, the CEO said, “Ah the poet – finally, a proper writer.” True story.

You’re doing a Meme challenge with Young Poets Network in January 2019 – what do you find appealing about the idea of the meme?

If we define creativity as taking two unrelated things and smashing them together to make something new, then internet memes do that in a very raw, immediate way that I find very appealing – not least because of the velocity with which an idea can take off. Others more scholarly than me can tell you things about they’re a performative aspect of living online – I might be a bit busy giggling and sniggering.

Read more about – and book onto – Rishi’s workshop at Free Verse

17th September 2018