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This special issue of
ABC is an attempt to re-emphasise the importance of
contemporary poetry, in its broadest sense, in a world that
seems more than ever troubled, apprehensive and suffering
pain and persecution. Given the pervasive reach of world
news-media, we will know all about the latest atrocities and
financial disasters, wherever they may have happened, before
we are even out of bed in the morning. Poets themselves
sometimes think that poetry is powerless to affect events
and attitudes in the world. W. H. Auden, for instance,
maintains in his elegy to W. B. Yeats that ‘poetry makes
nothing happen’, and that it necessarily exists far away
from all the action and has meaning ‘only in the valley of
its making’. Yet in ‘1st September 1939’ he
proclaims that ‘All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded
lie’. This seems
to claim a considerable power for poetry, especially when he
goes on to specify that by ‘the lie’ he means both the
self-deceiving lie of the average citizen, which makes it
possible to carry on as normal in the face of impending
disaster, and the ‘lie of authority’ which colludes with and
encourages that self-deception. To raise such matters is to
strike a sombre note, but in this morning’s paper (along
with all the gloom) I read a review of a Faber anthology of
poetry (edited by William Sieghart) called
Winning Words:
Inspiring Poems for Everyday Life.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this anthology is that
it is published by Faber, rather than some exploitative
vanity press. The poem ‘Happiness’ which is printed
alongside the review, is, surprisingly, by Raymond Carver.
It is a cheering, if not exactly inspiring, poem about two
boys delivering morning papers in the dawn light, spotted
through the kitchen window as the writer brews the first
coffee of the day.
This issue of
ABC features American and British poets, which takes care of
the A and the B, but the C (for Canadian) is not
represented, and I will acknowledge the omission by quoting
Fred Wah, who is Canadian-born (in 1939) of mixed
Chinese/Swedish parentage, and the current Parliamentary
Poet Laureate of Canada. He is the fifth poet to hold this
office, which is held for a two-year term, and he was
appointed to it in December 2011. Information about him, and
samples of his work, can be found at Canadian Poetry Online
(http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/).
The lines I wanted to quote proclaim a kind of
trans-national identity – he says ‘My
Borders are Altitude/
and silent’, a great and beautiful aspiration, but in ‘Untitled 2’ he
recalls a moment in childhood when his father was ‘hurt/ing
at the table’, ‘very/ far down inside’. And why was his
father hurting? The poem goes on to explain:
because I can't stand the ginger
in the beef and greens
he cooked for us tonight
He recalls this moment because he has just seen the same
look on the faces of his children, (or grandchildren) and
felt the same deep down hurt his father felt. On the
practical level, when we break the silence and come down
from altitude, borders determine what herbs and spices we
are brought up to like in our food, and a host of other
differences, which we can either enjoy as differences, or
brood on resentfully and obsessively until they end in the
shocking events we hear about while barely awake on an
ordinary weekday morning.
‘Poetry’ is understood in this issue in the broadest terms:
Ovidiu Matiu’s interview with L. Lamar Wilson is a fascinating
exchange with a young American poet who relates his poetry
primarily to deeply-held convictions, particularly to the
formative convictions which are the direct product of our
upbringing. Somehow, these convictions will remain
foundational to our being, even when we no longer believe in
what we were taught to revere, and do not practice the way
of life we were taught to follow. By contrast,
christopher oscar pea, who is also American, is primarily a writer of
plays, but Adriana Neagu’s revealing interview with him
turns up the moment when a friend asked him whether he is a
playwright or a writer, as if these are mutually exclusive
categories, and he frequently asks himself whether or not he
is a poet. Reading his play
however long the
night, in this issue, makes it clear that he is certainly a
poet, and I note that the dramatic lines even have the look
of poetry on the page, not to mention the characteristic
compression of image, motif and enigma which we find in the
best poetry. Tiffany Atkinson is a young British poet,
highly distinctive in voice and subject matter, and of
increasing reputation. The surreal, border-crossing
experience of flying is vividly evoked in the first of her
three poems, ‘The hands of flight attendants’, and every
poem of hers seems to concern a ‘crossing’ of some kind.
David E.
Thomas is a poet of my own generation, long-time resident of
Missoula, Montana, and a man who, in his time, has worked in
railroad gangs and on big construction projects across the
USA. He writes in a
relaxed style, with memorable denotations of the everyday,
viewed from an angle which is always slightly oblique.
Matthew Jarvis’s article about the poet Ruth Bidgood (‘A
poet in the heart of
Wales’ as his title
memorably calls her) gives an overview of the career of
another person whose whole life has been dedicated to
poetry, even though she only began writing it when she was
forty. Like Thomas, she too is a poet of place, as all poets
are to a great extent. But such poets register both the
place and the borders, and always exist in and across both.
Finally, my own piece ‘Concrete Canticles’ explores another
hinterland – that between poetry and the visual, trying to
classify the different ways in which poems embody a visual
or shape element, so that they demand to be looked at as
well as read. In my poetry classes I often start by asking
students to look at the poem before they read it. I ask them
to do this for two minutes – it always feels like a long
time – and then we talk about what they have seen. The
resulting conversations are often strange, amusing,
surprising, and revealing. I hope the material in this issue
on contemporary poetry will seem that way to its readers.
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