POETREE

It will probably come as no surprise to you that, being me, the thing I want to talk about is literally the body politic, and the body as political: the ways in which we have meanings ascribed to our existence.

( Half-Caste, by John Agard. )

Words have cadence, assonance, resonance. Devices used in rhetoric are used in poetry, and vice versa; we construct our realities out of words; and labels, even when they're incorrect, are stars to steer by. Cicero wasn't a poet, but he talked like one; oral histories take, often, the form of epic poems or of songs; musical and linguistic memory interact in strange ways. Poetry has power.

Half-Caste is a poem I was introduced to during GCSE English Literature. Like a lot of them, it's stuck with me

Last week, I finished reading Derek Walcott's Omeros - and oh, but in addition to its lyricism and beauty, its portrait of life, it is bitingly political: from the slave trade, via nineteenth-century wars over the island and a retired British Major in the twentieth, to the ways in which tourism can act as colonialism; through its exploration of Walcott's complicated relationship and personal resonance with Homer; set against the resonances of history, and the claims that the Odyssey is a universal story.

There is Bao Phi's Yellow-Brown Babies For The Revolution. There are slogans to chant: nothing about us without us; we're here, we're queer, get over it. There is every punk song ever (and there's a reason we call them rock anthems).

Poetry has power.

This is in part because we let it. I am increasingly convinced that in poetry - and not quite, in any other medium, at least not to the same extent - it is permitted to be angry, to express hard emotions explicitly. Poems get described as evocative and, yes, powerful - rather than histrionic or overwrought.

So many of us are used to having meanings ascribed to us in ways that align neatly with censorship/dismissal: too loud, too angry, too emotional, too irrational; we take up too much space, we're inconvenient; or we're erased wholesale, because others' perceptions of us is given primacy over our own realities, and over listening to us.

Poetry isn't a simple way to take power back - because after all it's art, and that is oh-so-readily reframed as frivolous; because in so many ways it's very much part of the Academy - but nonetheless it's a way we can tell our own stories.

this is the last song on earth,
this is the last song on earth
there is nothing else,
there is nothing else
so fill your lungs
and sing

-- Bao Phi

Listen & read

• One of my favourite things is the extent to which the epic poems that form part of the oral history of Hawai'i can be matched up with the geological record.
  
• John Agard performing Half-Caste at the Southbank Centre
  
• An extract from Omeros at the Poetry Foundation
  
• The Indelicates, Class (... a school of gothic arches/and a college of them too/and a Parliament that looks and feels the same/a comfort for the blessed/a horror for the rest/and each and every one of us to blame...)
  
• Freshlyground, Doo Be Doo (did you hear the news on the radio today?/People have agreed to give their love away/I can't wait to be there in line!/Politicians have agreed to honour and obey/they'll come down and listen to what the people say/I can't wait to be there in line, no no!)
  
• Ani DiFranco, Birmingham (I was once escorted through the doors of a clinic/by a man in a bullet-proof vest, and no bombs went off that day/so I am still here to say: Birmingham, I'm wishing you all of my best on this election day...)
  
• Tangentially related: Memorising Music, a blog that explores what it says on the tin.

[Content notes for Sweetness: cancer, mass murder, car accidents.]

( Sweetness. )

( Prayer. )

( An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow. )

( Yellow-Brown Babies for the Revolution. )

Thank you, so much, for having me this week: it has been an absolute pleaure. Most of the poems I've shared with you I first came across in the trilogy of anthologies by Bloodaxe Books, Being Alive, Staying Alive, Being Human. I wish I'd had more energy to write you better posts, but I hope that what I've done has sufficed. <3

( The Cinnamon Peeler, Michael Ondaatje )

In much of my own work this year (seek & ye shall find; [a scribble]; writing my wrongs) I play with the idea of the body as palimpsest: of our histories being written on our skins, metaphorically but also literally (laughter and frown lines, and of course scars, for those of us who have laid our bodies on altars of surgical steel). But it's not just that: it's about struggling with being queer, and genderqueer, and making that legible: the idea of "legible" identities, of being correctly "read". And it's the assumptions that other people make about my queer disabled body (and my queer disabled self) and my capabilities, and how oppressive that can be and can feel.

But more than that, for me it is about coming to terms and, yes, my word for the year, reclamation. Through the constraints of poetical forms I explore (at least in theory!) the constraints of my body: I've not yet written the sonnet about the pillars of my ribcage, but it is mulling, gently.

But it's not just about constraint, about strictures: my words have also been about body-as-poetry, poetry-as-body, encircling and enfolding and making safe. Among others, I think that I am here drawing on Ani DiFranco: your bones will be my bedframe and your flesh will be my pillow. And then, of course, there is Neruda, who is close to my heart because he makes bodies into the Earth into poems.

So: one of the things that poetry helps me with, helps me relate to, is my changing body and my changing relationship to it and why scent is so important to me; and poetry helps me better understand the bodies of others, and the embodiment of others.

And it all circles back, over and over, to my feeling that our histories are (being) written on our bodies, and simultaneously we write them in poetry, and both are cryptic and both are layered, and there is the tension between the action of the world on our selves and of our selves on the world; of the concept of the death of the author and how it applies to spinning our own lives into narratives, and weaving ourselves into the stories of others, and how we are seen by others. (And the shifts of perspective, of course: in Ovid's Heroides, in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, who take people whose value was in part determined by their bodies and give them voice, make them into something else.)

As you've probably gathered by now, one of my absolute favourite things about poetry is resonance - how we can communicate via the echoes of poems we love in poems that are new to us (and this is going to be the subject of my next post for you). It makes space for us to talk: and so. If you are comfortable, I would love for you to tell me about your experiences and your favourites, and -- in advance, I thank you, because I am keenly aware of how intimate a request this is.

... the most beautiful thing/on the black earth, wrote Sappho, two and a half thousand years ago.

It was twelve and a half million years ago (this, you see, is why I'm a little inexact: what are a few years between friends?) that Lesbos (or Lesvos) was last volcanically active. And yet: and yet. The Aegean has its volcanoes today, that still bring forth fire and brimstone, but they're a long way south, this being the way of subduction zones and time.

The black earth: it suggests richness, perhaps; dampness. But to me, it also suggests volcanic ash, worried and weathered into fertility.

It is not, you understand, that I intend to provide a close geological reading of this fragment: I am given little else to go on, after all. But I wanted to suggest to you that Sappho's choices, here, said not only fertility, but also home.

What I'm really here to do is to give you a necessarily brief overview of what has grown in that soil, through the gulfs of time and silence between us.

(There is - are - also Michael Field, the pen name adopted by a lesbian couple who lived from around 1850 to the beginning of the First World War. The main bulk of their work, prior to 1906, had among its influences the traces of Sappho, as she was understood by Victorians.)

Borges wrote that every writer makes their own precursors: that a work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. I cannot, I'm afraid, tell you much about Sappho's precursors - but I can tell you who I see looking back at me from the shards of fragment 16.

( Read more... )