Well, just bringing some literature into the equation for a minute. Politics, poetry, political poetry… There are people who say that poetry nowadays isn’t political, that we’ve lost that thing they call the “public dimension,” that poetry now is all about navel-gazing, the boring personal epiphany, etc etc. You’ve seen it before, no doubt. Well, after the weekend’s events I remembered Tim Dooley’s second poetry collection with Salt, Imagined Rooms. Published last autumn (I think; time is such a jumble now), it shows how, in a quiet, contained register it’s possible to be both trenchantly personal and – well, trenchantly political. In a personal way. The poems were written in the 70s and 80s – you can feel it in lines like “The Trident is doing its diagonal overhead drone”, or “Optimists of agitprop rehearse in the / co-operative restaurant…”- and, sure enough, it is all feeling strangely prescient now. Or strangely plus ça change. One or the other. (I’m trying to imagine the poet in a turban and ropes of pearls, gazing into a crystal ball…)
Anyway, something like our contemporary dread – I’m not imagining that, am I? – is there in a marvellously unsettling poem called March 19, 1977. I looked up the date, there’s nothing in it, it must be just about life. It begins, like a ‘News’ version of Wallace Stevens’ anti-religious Sunday Morning: “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/ Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,/ And the green freedom of a cockatoo…”:
Trying to get things right with the terribly yellow
daffodils and the Times at Saturday breakfast,
so as to make it a leisurely morning where
hopes might sort our hours to harmonious
order. Decanting the frozen orange juice,
thinking of our friends or having paid the
credit card bill; this is sufficiency. There
is sunlight on the fruit bowl as well.
I love that. On a technical note, I love the rhyme of “credit card bill” – itself a beautiful touch as “sufficiency” – and “fruit bowl as well.”
But the thing that really struck me was this other one, A Forbidding Spring, which possibly concerns the same dour breakfast, of which I give you a selection of stanzas:
…….There’s nothing charming
about rain on a March Saturday, or a family breakfast
…….with attention divided
between window and room – forgetting one’s words
…….to focus for a moment
on daffodills that look in at us, soaking and hurt,
…….or a single item of news.…
…….The tunnels are policed.
‘When the cat goes off, the rhythm of steel on concrete.
…….Against the fact of torture,
we imagine a truth in the other prisoners’ lies.’
…….When word of such words
leaks out, it is the occasion of arrest and exile.
…….We’ve yet to know the worst.…….Today it is only rain.
They don’t tell us what was said at night, how`
…….the classified cables
have tied our tongues, twisting the torque
…….of what’s not said in love.
‘I can’t tell a joke with the new forms of speech
…….still less write a poem.’…
Spooky or what? It feels strange, reading something written then but only just published now, as if we’d discovered a secret letter inth e attic or a time capsule; some terribly important message being sent us by Tim of Yesteryear. Well, I guess those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. That’ll be us.
And as well as reflecting the past back to us like a different present, it shows us ourselves as not-yet-being. There’s an interesting bit, in a poem written for his baby son – now doing his Phd, I believe – where he says, “When he comes of age in quite another century,/ what will he think of them among what other sorrows?” (the sorrows in question being “Armenians in Baghdad before a genocidal war; Irish/ impatient for their dignity. Those who fled their patriarchs…”)
Anyway, it’s a wonderful book. It’s been on the top of the pile all this time because I wanted to write something, so I guess we have 26 March to thank now, and the dim stirrings of remembrance… and I’m not really feeling very poetic at the moment, so it’s good to find that it hits the spot.
On another note, one thing I love about the rather Mad Men cover is the fact that the room is all there; it’s the man who’s imagined. Perhaps the room is imagining him. It gives us a cool backdrop, like the cool poetry within, and gives us back our own anxiety… Design as usual by Chris Hamilton-Emery; I think he is a genius with these covers.
(N.b.: Speaking of clean, elegant, measured language in poetry of anxiety and despair, the great excitement is that tonight I’m going to hear the German pet Durs Grünbein read. Exciting! But I have to be at work at 7.30 tomorrow, and will be out again in the evening, and then on Thursday we’re having the much-vaunted Leaving Drinks – so I may never get a chance to write about Durs. I will try.)
But you have to write about Durs! I can’t make it tonight, so am relying on you…
“… clean, elegant, measured language in poetry of anxiety and despair …”: an excellent characterization of Durs. If you have a chance, say hi to him from me!
Dear Katy
The ‘German pet Durs Grunbein’ must be an Alsation or maybe a dachshund! My father never gave me much good advice but one useful thing he did tell me was to try to write about the world rather than myself. Without this sage instruction, my poetry would, I fear, have become unbearably self-indulgent.
Best wishes from Simon
Kate, can you make a book of Baroque? This is really too good to be utterly ephemeral. I want to be able to read it in bed, in my hand, without batteries or having to pay $139 for hardware. Even paperback, just in my hand, and so I can give it to other people. Nu?
xxoo