The new poetics

We all know that the internet is for porn, but it is also for poetry.  The amount of time I have ignored, more or less, the latter of these two facts is perhaps surprising, given the extent to which my ability to make my living has been contingent on making contentions about poems and poetics.  Indeed, my writing life started as poet and prose stylist in equal parts, the adolescent rip-tides of Feelings and Self-Expression driving only slightly off-course my attention to form in both these modes.

The difficulty with being a teenaged writer of any kind is that it is hard to develop an understanding of your practice, leaving constantly the feeling of being at the mercy of forces beyond your individual control.  Robin Hyde, through one of her narrative ciphers, talked about it as the adherence to “IT”, not information technology, but whatever it was that made writing possible: that terrible thrill when IT was around, and the fear when IT departed that there would be no return, that this was it, for writing, for ever.  For poetry, as the form least easy to explicate, I felt the greatest fear, and drifted away from writing it largely because each time I sat down with pen and paper, I was paralysed by wondering if I was ever going to be able to produce anything worth preserving.

There was, too, the fact that I was interested in the more modern and postmodern kinds of form, which left cold those to whom I would typically show my writing.  As this became increasingly awkward for family and friends, I took my work underground, deep underground, to the point where I simply stopped writing and read, more or less exclusively, instead.  Even this reading was circumscribed, however: despite a PhD in poetics I can’t produce the kind of wide-ranging lists that are seen at both Reading the Maps and The Imaginary Museum.  In many ways, my canonical knowledge is as fragmented as my reading and writing habits: it has depth but an inconsistent breadth.

The internet, however, is a consolatory place for two-bit scholars and writers such as I: it is full of people producing things of work, of wonder and of hard, bright sorrow.  The tragedy of Merc’s bereavement lays art so tightly over life that to read seems at times to intrude, and yet the new tercets continue a process of storytelling that has been in progress for several months now, interweaving past-published with present-composed, until the whole makes a book seem like a different kind of artifice in itself, a discrete gathering together of what a poet’s blog reveals as continuous: emotion, thinking, re-thinking, re-feeling.  This practice, whose present engine is loss, reveals the internet as an agent not only of publication but also of form.

And so, at present, is it the case for me.  A comment on a post of Paul’s last year saw us drawing on our Wallace Stevens, and Martha’s more recent chance post about Saddam Hussein’s poetry inspired me to the composition of doggerel.  When Stephen wrote about his ancestors, I was tipped over the edge: ancestors were my topic of choice around the time I abandoned my practice.  The exchange of our verse in the comments to the post led to an informal commission from Giovanni, since when I have appended each of his posts with a poetical response.  It is a little scary actually to be trying to produce something of serious intent: what if I try and fail?  (My scholarly field is the 1930s, you see; the threat of the aesthetic rests against my writer’s neck like a well-sharpened blade.)  Even then, the internet makes this easy: if I fail, I’ll stop for a while and then perhaps start again.

I know myself to be a contextual learner: my way of knowing anything is to understand its connection to something else.  It makes sense, therefore, that I might return to earlier modes of writing in response to the present-day work of other writers.  My hope is that it might also function as a spur to some more original writing of my own, but even if it doesn’t, we are having fun.

To bring the narrative to a circular close, Giovanni’s stylistic elegance in his second language (although I may be incorrect in this; it could be his third or fourth) has led to comparisons which themselves bring about the coining of a porn-style nom de blog.  If Signor Tiso is Conrad Nabokov, to whom may I be compared in style and competence?  I welcome your suggestions, serious, light or indeed insulting, in the comments below.

And because an assertion should always be supported by evidence, here are four poems I wrote in 1997/8, around the time I abandoned that particular form.  I am not now the writer who put together these, but I think she does okay for what she’s trying to do.  The formatting has been destroyed by copying them over from rich text files, but all else remains the same.

Orepuki

I want to go back to Orepuki,
to get solitary along that beach,
bend back like the trees’
ferocious limbo in
the horizontal winds

Further round the bay I could see Stewart Island,
and say easy to myself ‘Rakiura’ –
a fine name, sharp and gritty-edged,
making me foreign to the place I was born –

and, forty miles round the coast,
is the harbour through which, after all,
came no Japanese submarines,
though I can imagine the dark sky portentous,
a bleak vault, rebutting optimism

and that’s how it was
1942
and my grandmother
screws up her eyes, looks south
into the flattening wind
wonders
how, with five children
and only two arms, one pair of hips,
you might run to the hills
and what you would eat once you got there.

At Orepuki though, it’s flat enough,
unsheltered escape from troubling things
real though slight,
chronic though never new,

and I want to get before the whipping sea
and into the wall of wind,
driftwood bleached grey and blue Rakiura,
wait for the tethers that will come to get me:
the face of ancestors, the dialect of sea and sky.

(1998)

Pylon Valley

Welcome to Pylon Valley.
in this particular nightmare
congregate all the transformed places
of your imagination.

if you thought that you would miss your train
forget your seminar notes
come home to find your goldfish dead
then you are right.

indeed, in all conversations here
you will be the one holding the
ill-fitting towel about yourself.

on the valley floor
languish unhappy lovers.
As well as their recent rejection
(which, despite what they told themselves,
they continue to handle badly)
there are the many pylons to contend with.

innumerable, unaesthetic, monstrous,
they crowd the sky and the spaces
between the earth and sky.
You don’t have
to listen for long

before you think they’re singing.
This is not what you thought you chose,
but here you are.

(1997)

XY

the other side
of this equation
demands both pain
and speculation.

and what has brought
this wonder home?
the twisting of
a chromosome.

(equations for
the air and sky
are simple: they
begin XY.)

(1997)

eighty thousand words

eighty thousand words Iris
I wish I could break open
they’d all fall out

and as for what I chose this<
well I’d like right now to
plant my garden

summer’s going and it’s
time already for the
spring bulbs.

(1998)

Tagged as: poems, poetics, poetry