Life Lines, Ear worms and Derek Walcott’s White Egrets

I don’t know how widely this is known – The Academy of American Poets website has been collecting people’s favourite lines of poetry, along with a short explanation of why it is that those particular words matter to them. It’s called Life Lines, and is well worth a visit. (As is their Poetcast podcast. But that’s another post.)

I love the stories people tell about how a certain line of poetry has stayed with them, how it has helped them or given them something to hold on to. And it’s different to the way you carry a whole poem. Even people who profess to hate poetry will usually have a line or two tucked away somewhere. In song writing it’s the whole idea of having a ‘hook’ – something that stays with the listener, something that catches their attention, and holds them long enough to consider the song as a whole. (And then the album, the T-Shirt, the mega-stadium-concert …) German has a word for this sort of thing: ‘Ohrwurm’, which translates literally to ‘ear-worm’. Don’t you love that?

But back to the world of poetry. Is that a way to measure the success of a piece, whether it is memorable as a whole, or only with one (or two) singing lines? Or, to turn the question around, is a poem with a single wonderful line a success, or a failure? Both? Neither? It depends?

I’m currently having a second go at reading Derek Walcott’s White Egrets, which won the 2011 TS Eliot Prize. It may be that I’m preoccupied with other things, but so far I’m finding it very hard to settle into. It’s almost a book-poem, or maybe a better description is a series (rather than sequence) of poems that tussle with his typical set of concerns.

Partly it’s because I keep remembering the whole Oxford Professorship scandal, and the various snippets of comments that he was alleged to have made. Given that background, it’s hard not to read lines like

Some friends, the few I have left

and

Sometimes the hills themselves disappear
like friends, slowly

(both from part iv of “White Egrets”) as being self-referential.

Then there’s

The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.
What a happy friend and what a fine wife!
Your death is like our friendship beginning over.

(from “7″ – emphasis mine) which makes for slightly uncomfortable (even creepy) reading. I know it’s a mistake to read too much autobiography into any poem, but still … There are a lot of references to women he has known (and lines like ‘grizzled satyr … they think: you’re too old to be / shaken by such a lissom young woman’ put the word squarely into the biblical sense). Walcott’s writing has always been quite luscious, and there are places where it frankly drips. And they do so very often involve women. I don’t really feel that the poems are misogynistic, so much as casually oblivious to everything outside the poem’s own frame of reference. A non-female example, from the end of the first part of “The Acacia Trees”:

… The new makers
of our history profit without guilt
and are, in fact prophets of a policy
that will make the island a mall, and he breakers
grin like waiters, like taxi drivers, these new plantations
by the sea; a slavery without chains, with no blood spilt—
just chain-link fences and signs, the new degradations.
I felt such freedom writing under the acacias.

I quite like the pun on profit / prophet, (although logically, can they be prophets of the thing they themselves are causing to happen?) and the section from ‘the breakers’ to ‘no blood spilt’ is amazing – insightful, deftly phrased, brilliant.But it loses power after that, when he wades in with the ‘by which I mean that these are’ penultimate line. But it’s the last line that had me put the book away for six months. Maybe it’s intended to be ironic – the concerns of the individual contrasting with the concerns of the wider community – but it’s hard not to also hear the thundering of a great ego, and the ringing it leaves in your ears drowns out the sad majesty of the previous lines. I think I almost preferred the exhibition of his libido.

Either way, I’ll persist with the book. Who knows, maybe it’ll grab me later. (Snigger on your own time, please.)

One thing that does stand out for me is how many poems have one really gorgeous line, but little else that holds my attention. (Yes, I know this may be a sign of my own deficiencies.) It makes them great for pillaging for my Reading for Writing exercises, but doesn’t really help me appreciate his work as a whole. Is it that these particular lines, being so good, throw the rest into somewhat unflattering relief? Or am I, in these cases,  salvaging the gold from the dross? (Exaggeration, but you get my drift.) To return to my original question: does the wonderful line help or hinder the poem as a whole? Or, rephrased in a way that will be familiar to the people who have been to one of my editing sessions – if you can’t bring the rest of the poem up to that level, are you better removing that line completely?

Hanging out my shingle(s)

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted – sorry about that. Among other things, I’ve come down with Zoster, (aka shingles), which is every bit as much fun as you might imagine.

Actually I’ve had very few of the nasty side-effects, just aches and a general feeling of malaise (such a great word!) and an interesting rash right on my bra-line, which has rendered my daily choice of underwear a rather more tricky event than usual.

The main symptom though has been an attention span that a goldfish would be ashamed of, with similarly flacid powers of concentration. So I offer the following first draft of a new poem with even-stronger-than-usual caveats about its state of public-readiness. (In other words, it has received zero editing, and I’m not even sure how to begin …)

The Ministry of Sorrow

Build it of stone, of brick, of twisted
metal. Build it of shards of glass.
Build it of rubble. Build it of cards
of condolence. Build it of tears. Build it
of lives, of lies, of lying alone
with the stone of absence filling your belly.
Build it of the extra place you still set.
Build it of footsteps. Build it of sky
in unfamiliar places. Build it of letters returned.
Build it of phone calls at three a.m., and the hours
torn open till dawn. Build it of photograph albums,
page after page, seen through a lens of regret.
Build it of sleeplessness. Build it of anxiousness.
Build it of thankfulness. Build it of guilt,
gild the lobby and marble stares, build it of loss, build
it of all the words too late
for utterance. Build it of families. Build it
of doctors and firemen and mothers
and teachers and shopkeepers,
build it of strangers, some of them family.
Build it of books with inscriptions
that catch you off-guard
one night, late, browsing the shelves.
Build it of faces, clouded
and fading from photos, from payrolls, from memory’s
unbolted store-room. Build it of favourite
restaurants. Build it of charity.
Build it of hope. Build it of random
diversions, phrases from surveys and polls
with boxes to tick, yes or sometimes.
Build it of trees, build it of weeds.
Build it of flowers sprouting from traffic cones.
Build it of soldiers, build it of lawyers, build it
of puzzlement, injustice, poly-syllabic abstractions
in helmets and hi-vis vests. Build it of trying
to buy the other kind of black dress.
Build it of knowing that those days
are over. Build it of those days. Build it of these.
Build it of hearing his voice on an answer-phone,
hearing him laugh on the telephone, his voice
speaking the lines back, missing the punchline (that’s
not like you, old friend), skipping the deadline,
guarding the red-line, under the breadline.
Build it of stars. Build it of asphalt. Build it of shoes
by the bed. Build it of chocolate. Build it of all of the ways
that the world has to wound us. Build it of wounds. Build it
of sutures. Build it of sirens and smoke alarms,
build it of false alarms, build it of falling
and bruising and broken bones,
build it of failing hearts, build it of false starts,
build it of cancer, build it of age and the dying of light,
build it of madness and raving and hurling your howl to the wind,
build it of rattling bars, build it of clubs, heaving,
spilling their fear on the footpath, build it of last drinks,
build it of last toasts and last posts
and last rites, build it of last words, build it of lasting,
build it of finally sleeping the night. Build it of quietness,
spreading like light through a shuttered window.
Build it of paper. Build it of paperwork. Build it of forms
and letters, of ancient address books,
of cancelled engagements.
Build it of notices. Build it of broken
and battered and blistered and barely-healed,
build it of make-do, build it of make-up, build it
of shells to crawl into. Build it of gestures,
build it of faces seen in the rear-view mirror,
build it of hands outstretched in the darkness, hands
falling to fists, hands gripping the phone,
the frame of a door.
Build it of sentences uttered so often
it seems that they utter themselves.
Build it of words, filling with smoke.
Build it of all the things still to be done.

Build it, and we will come.

Two years on … and on … and on …

So here we are, the second anniversary of the quake that broke my city. Two years. Seems like much less. And much more.

Talking to other people, one of the things that is really clear is how fuzzy the memories of life pre-quake have become. I remember having lunch at the Strip occasionally, and how much fun that was. (Expensive as heck, but fun.) And it no longer exists, which is immeasurably strange. I remember going back to the Twisted Hop after the poetry readings, and sitting with a whole group of poets talking and eating and drinking and laughing and breathing poetry into the night. Ironically, the Twisted Hop was pretty much the only building to survive in Poplar Lane. You can look across Madras Street and see the fountain and the sculpture and the building, still there. Quite a bit worse for wear, but still there, when so much else is gone. And they’ve re-opened in new premises – the Woolston Hop is doing very nicely, I hear.

We had so much determination, after the shock started to fade, that the rebuild would be good and positive and bring something beautiful out of the rubble. But more and more tilt-slab and glass bunkers are going up everywhere. We should be erecting buildings that give people joy. 185 people died, and hundreds of businesses went under. We have been given the chance to rebuild our city and put up buildings that people actually want to look at. People (usually architects, owners of brand new concrete bunkers, and Victoria Matthews) keep saying “well, we can’t go back, we need to look forward and build something new.” If that counts as an argument against Neo Gothic style being re-imagined and rebuilt here, surely it is just as potent an argument against the 1970’s concrete bunker garbage. Grr!

I hadn’t meant to rant about buildings. I was going to talk instead about the insurance industry, who, despite reports to the contrary, haven’t failed at all. Managing to delay settlement of 70% of claims for two years is extremely good business practise. So well done, you malignant bloodsucking bastards. The result of the O’Loughlin court case will be very interesting.

The truth is, I think most Cantabrians are becoming too tired to keep fighting. My cynical side suggests that this is exactly what ‘they’ want (in Gerry Brownlee’s own words, “the concern about the immediate situation and lament for the past appears to be subsiding a little bit”). So many people aren’t just at the end of their ropes – they’re swinging by one or two frayed threads, way below the official rope’s end. We live in a dictatorship, with the central government having usurped most of the power of the people we actually elected to run our city, and we’re all too battered and worn down to fight back. The whole damn province is suffering from battered women’s syndrome.

And the shakes keep coming. We’d had a lovely long stretch with nothing much, but a few more decent wobbles in the last month have got me jumpy again. Not helped by the fact that one of the nasty little jolts was in a new area, closer to us here in Southbridge than to Christchurch. (And it felt different to the way the Greendale fault and Lyttleton fault quakes feel – bouncier, but not rough. ) Eleven thousand shakes, and counting. And today is the same grey overcast that it was two years ago. Ugh.

Right, enough misery. Just one last political comment, one suggestion to those of you outside Canterbury about what you personally can do to help, and one poem excerpt.

The political comment: if anyone is planning to strap Gerry ‘what crisis?’ Brownlee and Victoria ‘it’s not your cathedral’ Matthews to a wrecking ball, let me know when and where and I’ll bring the tape.

The suggestion: if you would like to do something today to help Cantabrians, then do. Buy something from a Canterbury business. The Recover Canterbury website has a list of links to help you find open businesses, so have a look, and see if there’s something that takes your fancy. Come in to town for a meal. Book tickets to a show. Buy something. Or even just phone a friend – today is going to be pretty emotional for a lot of us. So call someone. Say hi, we’re thinking of you, how are you?

And the poem: to mark the day, I thought I’d put up the section of Fare where the earthquakes insisted on coming in. (Still looking for a publisher …) Fault was showcased earlier in the week on The Tuesday Poem, for those of you who feel like having a look. Thanks to Catherine for choosing it, and to all those who commented.

Sorry to those who came here to read something … uplifting. Life in Canterbury is full of lots of joy, it still is, and tomorrow I’ll start being positive again. But today, I think, belongs to what we’ve lost.
Kia kaha,

Joanna.

from Fare

I’ve known this city all my life – each bridge,
each cul-de-sac, each block – but now,
as though she’d summoned them, new streets appeared
and we drove on

turning left, always left, against the clock
into a city changed, and changing, in
to neighbourhoods that never were before.
Streetlights wavered

through windscreen’s brimming lens of water,
through the wipers’ keening gesture. In the
sullen rain the buildings hunched their shoulders
and lay down.

I saw the church where I was married pulled
apart, its bricks and stone stacked onto pallets,
its spire a child’s toy, tumbled on the grass.
Another corner,

and against the sky a stairwell reached out
past its shattered building into space –
I tried to speak, to ask, to plead, but the words
twisted and set.

I drove through a broken city, and I wept.

Titles, titles and titular singularities

I’ve been spending a bit of time lately trying to think of better (or at least more interesting) titles for some of my new poems. Having three current ones that languished as ‘untitled’ was one of the things that prompted me, as was getting a copy of James Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems. I don’t know of anyone writing non-humerous poetry who has better titles – flicking through randomly, there’s “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon”; “Arrangements with Earth for Three Dead Friends”; “A Gesture by a Lady with an Assumed Name”; the epic “A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Gully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour”, and my current favourite:“Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me”. And that’s just from a brief flick through some of his more obscure poems – another one that most people will have come across is “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (where there is only one fewer word in the title than there are lines in the poem). It can get too cute of course – too many fancy names, and they all blur into one gigantic heading. And there’s always the risk that the title sets up expectations that the poem can’t fulfill.

I had an argument about that when I was coming up with the final title for my Tinterrn Abbey poem (and yes, you can even read it for yourself here). (That’s the poem; not the argument.) I wanted to use the phrase ‘freezing my arse off’ in the title; others felt that it was too colloquial, and set up the expectation of the poem being a bit raucous, and certainly a bit amusing. I argued then for the title it was originally published under, which substitutes the word ‘bum’ for ‘arse’, on the basis that I quite liked throwing people a bit off balance, and surprising them with a poem that turns out to be an elegy, but which still ends with my most shameless pun ever. (The others were not convinced, but hey, it’s my poem.)

Sometimes it’s the title that gives you the poem – I came up with the title for “In the House of Fallen Roses” first, and then had to write a poem to match it. Same sort of thing with roughly half of the Venery poems – the title suggested something, and so I had to write my way towards it. (Easy to do with “A Superfluity of Nuns”; proving less so with “A Blush of Boys”.)

On the other hand … I’m reviewing David Beach’s Scenery and Agriculture for the NZPS (overdue – sorry Laurice!), and he numbers his poems under headings, rather than giving them a title. So we have “Scenery 1” to “Scenery 12” and “Agriculture”s “1” to “46”. It does make remembering which poem a paricular image came from a little tricky, but it fits with his style quite nicely. Louise Glück did something similar in The Wild Iris – there are seven poems sharing the title “Matins” for example, with no numbering to distinguish between them. (But again, it does fit with what the collection as a whole is trying to do.) I think it’s probably not something that works unless you either have a strong framework for the whole gathering of poems, or are Emily Dickinson.

Away from poetry, I came across a wonderful thing called the Diagram Prize (more correctly, ‘The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year’). It’s for the strangest title published in a given year, and the list of previous winners is truly awe-inspiring. (I am seriously thinking that this is either a killer workshop exercise, or possibly the basis of a new poem-sequence.) (Or both.) (Mwa ha ha hah.)

Apparently it’s gotten to the point where publishers are suspected of  coming up with “too many self-consciously titled entries – presumably in a bid to emulate the 2003 champion, The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories” …

The mind boggles. (And then has a game of cribbage, to calm itself.)

And so the year begins (… better late than never)

Hooray, I’ve just written my first poem for the year!

(Yes, I know it’s February already – return your gaze to the post title for a moment. See? I realise it may seem as though I create the titles first and then organise my life – or at least my posting schedule – to follow from that, but it’s actually the other way around.)

Ahem. As I was saying: the first computer-draft of the year’s first poem is sitting beside me, and looks pretty decent. More to the point, it feels really good to have written. Now it goes to the file, and will be presented to my first reader when we get together for our first session of the year. Then it will languish in a brand new folder, awaiting its turn in the editing queue. I’m not going to post the poor wobbly thing here (or not yet awhile), but as part of my plan to use providing updates as a motivating tool, I will give you some background to it, as well as the title, first two and last lines. (Yep, I’m a tease. And a wuss. But tease is the main aspect currently on show.)

The poem started from a translation by Tony Barnstone of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Music Box”, spun up from my Poetry Foundation app. (Seriously, if you have any sort of iDevice, you need to get this one. It’s free, and it’s brilliant.) I Chinese Whispered it (put it through several different languages in translation, making sure it got as many ‘errors’ as possible along the way), and then sat down to see what it suggested.

The resulting poem was a lot of fun to write. It’s completely different to the source, although if you knew to look I suspect you’d probably be able to see some traces of its parentage. Somehow it ended up taking a glance at Japan after the earthquakes and tsunami of 2011, although it’s not really an earthquake poem as such – informed by the earthquakes, but not about them, if that makes sense. (Cantabrians, I hear you nodding.) I spent quite a bit of time Wikisurfing through Japanese history, and especially the history of the Sendai region of Japan.

One of the weird things that came up was a reference to a famous Japanese poem written by Doi Bansui, called “Kōjō no Tsuki” or “The Moon over the desolate castle”. Believe it or not, one of the best regarded recordings of it is by the German soft metal band, ‘Scorpions’ … (for a nice translation of the poem, have a look at Minako Watanabe’s site). I’m quite glad I had the draft complete before I went looking for this poem.

Anyway, that’s one down. Just another hrumhrumphindestinguishablehrumph to go.
Enjoy your ‘amuse bouche’. And remember – eat more vegetables! (Nothing to do with poetry: just good advice.)

Postcard from Sendai

When you speak of Japan, I hear temple bells,
their deep-throated song through morning air
[…]
past future, voices lifting in song, in laughter?

Oooh, such a tease!