Mildred: How has your heritage as a mixed race man influenced your poetry?

Filidogham: When I think of my heritage, I imagine it as the meeting of very different worlds, that might never otherwise come into real or meaningful contact. At the border of any thing, there will be mixing, and within the boundaries of myself that mixing is the garden that my art grows out of that convergence, drawing on symbols, ideas, and ways of seeing that emerge from tension and harmony, my art is born from inhabiting the threshold rather than one side alone.

Mildred: Your profile picture is intriguing. Could you explain why you chose it?

Filidogham: The image is an imagining of myself as a filid—one of the poet-seers of ancient Ireland. The filid were not just creators of verse; they were keepers of memory, law, genealogy, and myth, occupying a space between the sacred and the social. I chose the image because it reflects how I understand my own practice: poetry as an act of remembrance, interpretation, and transmission. In adopting that likeness, and kinship.

Mildred: Which three of your poems would you highly recommend?

Filidogham: The Priestess, Grace, breath beneath, and the broad stroke

Mildred: Your pen name is "Filidogham". Any deeper meaning or history behind this pen name?

Filidogham: Filidogham is a compound word drawn from Irish. It brings together filid—the learned poets of early Ireland, who were also historians, jurists, and preservers of cultural memory—and ogham, the early Irish script

Mildred: What was your first impression or thoughts of the term "Afrogoth"?

Filidogham: My first reaction to the term Afrogoth was one of intrigue. It suggested an unexpected convergence of identities and aesthetics, something that resists easy categorization and invites curiosity rather than definition.

Mildred: How long did it take you to write "batik dreams"?

Filidogham: I never time myself when I make anything, but if I had to guess I wrote it throughout a whole day and a night.

Mildred: Titles set the tone of a poem. Why batik (and not any other fabric)? Why "dreams"?

Filidogham: Batik is one of my favorite fabrics because of the way it holds pattern, each design emerging through a process of layering, resistance, and revelation. That felt true to how the poem itself was made, looking back, thinking, remembering writing and revealing Dreams enters the title because dreaming is the space where what has been lost can begin to reappear, not fully formed but felt, remembered, and reassembled.

Mildred: You mention a couple of geographical places in your poem. Please comment on one (or more) of these places and why you felt it/they belonged in your poem?

Filidogham: New Orleans appears in the poem because it is home—both geographically and imaginatively. It’s the ground of my daily life, the place where memory, rhythm, and language are. Many of the locations in the poem are drawn from New Orleans. Indonesia, and Java in particular, enter the poem for historical reasons. Batik carries a long cultural journey rooted in those places, and I felt that acknowledging that lineage mattered.

https://allpoetry.com/contest/2886266-Afrogoth---for-curious--playful--global-citizens-who-love-the-stories-and-hist../

Mildred: How has your heritage as a mixed race man influenced your poetry?

Filidogham: When I think of my heritage, I imagine it as the meeting of very different worlds, that might never otherwise come into real or meaningful contact. At the border of any thing, there will be mixing, and within the boundaries of myself that mixing is the garden that my art grows out of that convergence, drawing on symbols, ideas, and ways of seeing that emerge from tension and harmony, my art is born from inhabiting the threshold rather than one side alone.

Mildred: Your profile picture is intriguing. Could you explain why you chose it?

Filidogham: The image is an imagining of myself as a filid—one of the poet-seers of ancient Ireland. The filid were not just creators of verse; they were keepers of memory, law, genealogy, and myth, occupying a space between the sacred and the social. I chose the image because it reflects how I understand my own practice: poetry as an act of remembrance, interpretation, and transmission. In adopting that likeness, and kinship.

Mildred: Which three of your poems would you highly recommend?

Filidogham: The Priestess, Grace, breath beneath, and the broad stroke

Mildred: Your pen name is "Filidogham". Any deeper meaning or history behind this pen name?

Filidogham: Filidogham is a compound word drawn from Irish. It brings together filid—the learned poets of early Ireland, who were also historians, jurists, and preservers of cultural memory—and ogham, the early Irish script

Mildred: What was your first impression or thoughts of the term "Afrogoth"?

Filidogham: My first reaction to the term Afrogoth was one of intrigue. It suggested an unexpected convergence of identities and aesthetics, something that resists easy categorization and invites curiosity rather than definition.

Mildred: How long did it take you to write "batik dreams"?

Filidogham: I never time myself when I make anything, but if I had to guess I wrote it throughout a whole day and a night.

Mildred: Titles set the tone of a poem. Why batik (and not any other fabric)? Why "dreams"?

Filidogham: Batik is one of my favorite fabrics because of the way it holds pattern, each design emerging through a process of layering, resistance, and revelation. That felt true to how the poem itself was made, looking back, thinking, remembering writing and revealing Dreams enters the title because dreaming is the space where what has been lost can begin to reappear, not fully formed but felt, remembered, and reassembled.

Mildred: You mention a couple of geographical places in your poem. Please comment on one (or more) of these places and why you felt it/they belonged in your poem?

Filidogham: New Orleans appears in the poem because it is home—both geographically and imaginatively. It’s the ground of my daily life, the place where memory, rhythm, and language are. Many of the locations in the poem are drawn from New Orleans. Indonesia, and Java in particular, enter the poem for historical reasons. Batik carries a long cultural journey rooted in those places, and I felt that acknowledging that lineage mattered.

https://allpoetry.com/contest/2886266-Afrogoth---for-curious--playful--global-citizens-who-love-the-stories-and-hist../