Two very different meetings. Now photography I know next to nothing about and poetry I imagined I understood a lot about. It’s surprising but not disturbing to realise that every year you know less and less.

I don’t know much but I know Daljit Nagra is adorable.

No Gunga Din, this gig

WHEN DALJIT NAGRA entered the Smith/Doorstop poetry pamphlet competition with Oh My Rub! in 2003 he looked around for a pseudonym. “I didn’t take poetry seriously and I didn’t really write till I was in my 30s. But I wanted to create an Indian character in English poetry. I wanted a really forceful character, a positive character.” He cheekily chose Khan Singh Kumar, sure that no average white person would call his bluff — they would have to know how utterly improbable this logjam of Indian surnames was. For a while after he won the contest, some people even called him Mr Kumar, respectfully. Five years later, Nagra acknowledges that the joke is on him. The 41-year old British schoolteacher is in lively danger of having his poems included in the textbooks he had robustly mocked for their arbitrary grouping of poems from “Udder Cultures”.

When the high holy Vatican of poetry, Faber and Faber, published Nagra’s exuberant first collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover in 2007, the poems astonished Britain with the latitude they took with the English language and the range of immigrant experience they were able to capture. For almost all the poems, Nagra created characters and complex speech patterns. He unleashed the anal-retentive Mr Bulram, who savagely mimics his less-educated Punjabi neighbours; poor Rapinder telling his angry teacher how his father yelled at him for doing Hail Marys while watching Amar Akbar Anthony; Jaswinder who hates that her mother makes her “sheep my eyes/shelled in salwaar once hers”; the old Punjabi narrator whose utterly vulgar imagery in Bibi & the Street Car Wife does not ever obscure her despair.

Though the poems are like nothing you have seen before they are also easy to enter and fun to read aloud. It’s difficult to imagine how this has been achieved. Nagra says he likes to hold on to poems for a few years. “Wait a couple of years, change a single word and everything changes.” He happily cites Elizabeth Bishop, who redrafted a poem for 19 years till she was ready to publish. “Since I had no hopes of being published, I experimented as much as I wanted. When I started to write I was breaking down words and it was mad. It took a while to make an emotional connection with the reader, to break the language up in a way that is still accessible,” says Nagra.

When Nagra made the leap of faith, it could not have been better rewarded. He won the Forward Prize, among other awards, and was invited everywhere. Indian and non-Indian audiences took to his readings — couched as they are in charm and high spirits, Nagra’s sting is barely visible. So perhaps it was sheer perversity that made him choose a poem with expletives for a performance in a gurudwara. A small town had invited several poets, including Nagra, to read and his session was set in the langar (“There was someone who specialised in love poems, he was asked to read in a hotel bedroom”). The old granthi indicated that it was all very nice, but what was with the language?

Whatever is with the language, you never quite miss the trees for Nagra’s startling forest. Made-up syntax, faux accents, thickened accents — the poems still tell you popular culture and literature have behaved as if Punjabi immigrants are all gross simpletons. Nagra’s poems force you to see grand tragedy in working-class lives the way Roddy Doyle did by immersing you in the inner lives of Paula Spencer and the Rabbites.

“When I was growing up, an Indian accent on the telly signaled someone dumb. I wanted to use Indian accents to remind English people of Britain’s racist heritage. So, when I am using the accent, I want them to ask, am I like another white person blacked up like Peter Sellers or am I an Indian asking what’s wrong with my accent? Like in Darling Me, you have the Punjabi couple speaking in that accent but feeling superior to the white couple.”

The hugely enthusiastic reviews usually forebear to mention that he is only the third non-white poet to be published by Faber after Derek Walcott, preferring to say instead that Nagra was born in England, the son of immigrant Punjabis. Nagra blithely brings the difficult years centrestage. His father worked in several factories (sausages, crockery, rubber) and his mother in the laundry department of a hospital until they saved enough to run a shop. You have to see past Nagra’s wide eyes to sense the (only faintly) malicious enjoyment of those whose brains are whirring like nosy relatives, wondering whether poetry pays. “I usually have two to three readings a week. Now they give me money to come and read poetry. Isn’t that amazing?” Having raised hopes that he has created a revenue model in poetry, he tells you that he turns down residencies in American universities so as to not interfere with his teaching. Nagra is serious about teaching, seeing it as a site of both conflict and growth in a Britain that aspires to multiculturalism. But newfound success has liberated him from the grind, he now only teaches twice a week.

In Booking Khan Singh Kumar, Nagra writes his complicated response to success. “Should I read for you straight or Gunga Din this gig?” he asks. It is the voice closest to his own and the epicentre from which we can chart his excursions. “Perhaps I was hiding behind characters, but it was also a way of having multiple perspectives.”

Outside of poetry, Nagra discusses his political concerns with simple directness. “They are taking away people’s rights in Britain under the pretence that we are being terrorised by Muslims. Since 9/11 racial discrimination is no longer about being Indian. This is Islamophobia.” It is a different sort of racism from what he feared as a child, he says. Growing up in predominantly white working-class areas in Thatcher’s Britain, Daljit and his brother escaped racial violence but constantly feared it. “I don’t know how we learnt what we learnt to fit in. I guess survival instincts kick in.”

THAT NAGRA is a great admirer of survivors is amply evident in the title poem, Look We Have Coming to Dover, his response to Matthew Arnold’s classic. Dover Beach is a vast Victorian sigh that continues to inspire strong feelings, including Anthony Hecht’s parody Dover Bitch and now, Nagra’s rollicking poetry.

“The poem picked me — it’s beautiful. But here is the narrator feeling sad, worrying about the decline of the British empire. It should have been the people in the colonies and the working class who were sad. So my poem is a tribute to immigrants, to strong and stoic people, who have come to Britain. And where Arnold had his perfect English and a polite iambic rhythm, I have used my made-up English and a seafarer rhythm.” Nagra is experimenting with sonnets and classical forms for his second collection. Does he see himself as part of Britain’s comic poetry tradition? “No, British poetry is usually gloomy stuff. And the humour tends to be ironic. Punjabis are not ironic. They are loud, noisy, gossipy and bitchy, silly, in your face.”

His parents are very proud of his success, he says. “Before they wondered where this poetry was going. Of course, their ideas about poets came from India. Someone who drinks, gambles, turns out love poems.” Nagra falls silent for a moment. “A Punjabi bohemian. Can’t imagine what that’s like.”