That quote in full...

Thanks to Miriam, who's just forwarded me the context of the Mahon quote that Seamus Heaney referenced in the interview mentioned below. Ahem:

"Battles have been lost, but a war remains to be won. The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life (poetry is a great lubricant) and the rigot mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or to the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics - of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have had darkness enough, God knows, for a long time."

I love the phrase 'people talking to each other with honest subtlety'. It precisely articulates one of poetry's gentle powers, as well as how the most sensitive and transformative people I know communicate. Perhaps they recognise themselves in my description: I hope so.

Speaking of Magma...

...the magazine has launched a new blog here, as part of their new website here. Doesn't seem to be very busy on there yet, but give it time. Magma's always struck me as one of the poetry magazines that most 'gets it' in terms of being readable, accessible, contemporary, interesting and generally part of a world that you'd recognise from everyday life.

The blog will also, apparently, include contributions from Rob Mack of Surroundings (which is how I found out about it).

American politics and poetry

In the light of all the excitement about Barack Obama being seen in public with a copy of Derek Walcott's Collected Poems under his arm, I was reminded of seeing an anthology of Langston Hughes that John Kerry edited in the run-up to the 2004 election.

It's hard to imagine such things happening here in the UK: Gordon Brown protesting "Arctic Monkeys? No, no: I said I love Moniza Alvi" or David Cameron cycling to work with a copy of Paradise Lost being driven in a car behind him. Although, to be fair, I do remember a thoughtful article by David Blunkett about Philip Larkin in Magma a little while ago. Perhaps the revolution will be poeticised, after all...

Glory Box

I've just come across a poem by Rob Mack of excellent-blog-Surroundings-fame, that is (pleasingly consistently) excellent (imho). It's called Glory Box and it goes like this: 'a-one, two, a-one, two, three, four...'.

Oh ok, I'll link to it instead. Here.

People are shouting: it must be politics...

A storm in a teacup seems to have erupted following Poetry Review discussing political poetry here. There's an interesting follow-up by the writer of one of the original articles here as well. What strikes me most forcefully (I may come back to the issue at issue at a later point) is the sheer angriness and rudeness of some of the comments in response. 'Ignorant and frightened bunch of bores', 'reactionary conservatism', 'one of the most reactionary and tedious magazines', and various suggestion that the writer of the article is a 'moron' and hasn't read beyond 1967, or 1981 or some other time well in the past. There is, of course, plenty of back-story on this one, but it doesn't seem very constructive and good-natured. Peace and love, people; peace and love...

Setting the darkness echoing

A fantastic interview with Seamus Heaney in the weekend Guardian - as ever, he has some resonant and thoughtful things to say about the creative process and how poetry works. Sometimes I wonder if he's not an even better critic than poet. The following quotes stuck me particularly:

'I'd say you aren't so much trying to describe [experience] as to locate it'

'anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it'

'all of us probably had some notion that a good poem was "a paradigm of good politics"'

'Each poem is an experiment. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing, it's a programme of the avant-garde...The experiment of poetry...happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go'.

His matter of fact description of why the filtering process of time is, broadly, just is also refreshing. Read the whole kit and caboodle here.

Laying siege to Shakespeare

Another reason to include Shakespeare (as if I need one) is that it's good to enlarge the sense of the possible: it's a curious thing that returning to the most staple of the staples of English Literature seems to do that more than anything else.

One argument I was repeatedly puzzled by was the attempts of scholars to date the plays by putting the most similar ones next to each other. I'd have thought the opposite principle (in moderation, of course) was more likely. As a working dramatist and entertainer, continually providing something different seems more desirable than repeating the same elements before moving on. That he managed to engage in such radical experimentalism and variety at the same time as being generally entertaining is one of the most remarkable things about him. And whilst there are obvious progressions of style, some of the plays seems like determined efforts to do things differently. Even within the two sets of four history plays (that include Henrys IV to VI and Richards II and III) there are several different types of play: a tragedy of court intrigue, a poetical and symbolic study of weakness, a counterpoint between low-life comedy and affairs of state, a triumphal statement of nationalistic pride. If the sets of plays vary within themselves so much, it's no wonder that the one-off plays switch from the daring ruinousness of Hamlet to the classical lines of Othello in quick succession.

Shakespeare seems rarely to get enough credit for his inventiveness: much emphasis is placed on his 'all encompassing humanity' and such stuff, but his inventiveness seems to be treated more as a by-product of his achievement: the emphasis is placed on him showing all human life, rather than varied human life (though the former admits of the latter as a necessity). Whilst there are, of course, many themes and patterns between his plays, the sheer variety within over three dozen works should be obvious. One side-effect of this is the necessity of working out the aesthetics that each play demands to understand it for itself, rather than being able to bring critical apparatus from play to play like a siege engine from castle to castle...

No holds bard

I've been revisting Shakespeare over the last couple of weeks: rereading plays such as As You Like It, Timon of Athens, Othello and (currently) Richard II. And reading a pile of criticism, too (mainly from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s: gotta love retro criticism with it's humming and hawing about the ruinous modernity of the times). Anyhow - my point is that I was disinclined to post on here about it, because it's 'not proper poetry'. But, of course, I'd let myself get blinkered by the particular dish our poetry gets served up in these days. Shakespeare, or at least much of it, fits the definition of 'irregular margins' quite as neatly as anything else.

Something else, then something else again

I've just reread Miriam Gamble's collection This Man's Town, with pleasure. It's published by Tall Lighthouse, who set out to publish talented young writers and they've definitely succeeded here. I've said before that she's a fine critic, but clearly, she's also a fine poet.

One of the poems, Interface, concludes with the lines:

Momentarily, you snuffle, and rise for tea,
then I lose you to the depths again. Your breath gutters

like a stuck pig's, your eyelids leak an underwater tear.
There is havoc at the gallery, you say, taking
my wrist. And Plato's on the river bed. Then you roll over without
so much as a 'Help me'.

This is striking writing - and also reminds me of a poem from John Wain's 1961 collection Weep Before God:

Anecdote of 2a.m.

'Why was she lost?' my darling said aloud
with never a movement in her sleep. I lay
awake and watched her breathe, remote and proud.

Her words reached out where I could never be.
She dreamed a world remote from all I was.
'Why was she lost?' She was not asking me.

I knew that there was nothing I could say.
She breathed and dreamed beyond our kisses' sphere.
My watchful night was her unconscious day.

I could not tell what dreams disturbed her heart.
She spoke, and never knew my tongue was tied.
I longed to bless her but she lay apart.

That was our last night, if I could have known.
But I remember still how in the dark
She dreamed her question and we lay alone.

Awkward Movements

Back to those Collected Poems. I’ll write a fuller review another time, but one thing that’s struck me is this: for a movement called ‘The Movement’, its writers had at best a curious sense of movement in their verse. This occurred to me when getting entangled in the following couple of lines by Amis about ivy damaging a wall: ‘Then it would all become a legal quibble: / Whose what has wrecked what how and by whose what’.

This style is archetypally ‘Movement’, like Thom Gunn’s ‘I know you know I know you know I know’ in Carnal Knowledge. Their role model, William Empson is perhaps the only other poet (at least since the most extreme contortions of John Donne) to write such self-consciously wooden lines. Which isn’t to say they’re bad, exactly, just that they’re so heavy on their feet, even while they’re going through an elaborate pattern of steps. It’s as if they lack all sense of movement...