a sudden line of poetry

I am standing in the post office, about to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family. I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop). Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language. He knew Luther and translated the New Testament. When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger no one suspects that I am a Finn. I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid to show their quivery emotions, secure in the knowledge that my grandparents really did emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia? Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s one hundredth birthday, though he is not Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten and fox. There are about 35,000 elk. But I should be studying for my exam. I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight, assuming I pass. Finnish Literature really came alive in the 1860s. Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no one cares that I am a Finn. They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää, winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a Finn, this infuriates me.

James Tate (1943--2015) was an American poet, born in Kansas City, Missouri. His first book, The Lost Pilot, was published in 1967 while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa’s Writer Workshop. After graduating, Tate taught creative writing, teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1971 onwards.  James Tate passed away on July 8th, and I confess I had forgotten about Tate’s poetry until I read about his death, and took a morbid joy in rediscovering his writing. Tate was equally influence by the conversational and colloquial poetry of William Carlos Williams and the surreal and startling poetry of Benjamin Péret, and this infusion rings out in his writing. ‘I Am A Finn,’ from Tate’s 1990 collection Distance from Loved Ones is a favourite Tate poem of mine for the way it perfectly infuses humour and the philosophy of poetry without diminishing from either. The speaker, Kasteheimi is wholly realized, a lively and surprisingly relatable character. 

A neurotic, the key to Kasteheimi comes in the line ‘But I should be studying for my exam.’ Tate has the confidence to let the reader wait for this line, and uses the rhythm and structure of the poem to make it simultaneously stand out and be unremarkable. The numerous references to Finns and Finland are paradoxically unconscious distractions from his real concern about his exam results (and therefore, his future) which we find out in ‘I Am Still A Finn,’ he has failed. Kasteheimi’s constant reassurance that he is still a Finn could therefore be seen as a point of comfort; that he will fail his exams because he is a Finn in America, where they do not appreciate Finnish literature. Moreover, he is attempting to find a point of pride to soothe a hurt ego. However there is also a beautiful metafictional game being played. The title is almost taunting--we are well aware that James Tate is not a Finn. The facts that Kasteheimi brings up about Finnish people are superficial: ‘Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue / or grey eyes.’ Tate draws us in and pushes us out with his weaving of poetical language and plain prose, creating humour in the understood gap between the narrator and the writer. The final stanza almost dares us to believe him: ‘They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää, / winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. / As a Finn, this infuriates me.’ Kasteheimi is obsessed with his identity, but the poem inherently undermines him at every step; and therefore calls to question our own ways in which we write our identity. There are three people in this poem--Kasteheimi, Tate-Kasteheimi, and Tate alone as the author--and all combine to create the identity of Kasteheimi that we as an audience then interpret. 

Half-eaten fries, the remains of hash browns, fill the table's distance between them. She scoops the car-keys, says she'll not be long.

In the washroom mirror she checks her face close up; sees years of wearied waiting. She steps into a sticky afternoon.

How long before he'll notice, before he'll ask – the forecourt is nauseous with diesel and ocean – ask if anyone's seen a woman in middle years.

She's onto the freeway, jittering across lanes. And why, he'll wonder, now that the kids are gone, now that they're free to hit the road each spring.

She overtakes on automatic, clearing Carolina – recalls the one dream he has left, of building a boat; upriver in summer; dry dock in winter. The two of them.

An unforeseen calm settles with sundown: she longs for nightfall on unbroken stretches of highway. It's clear ahead as far as her eyes can see.

Anne-Marie Fyfe (1953--) is a British poet born in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. She currently lives in London where she has organised the Coffee-House Poetry evenings at the Troubadour theatre since 1997, and was Chair of the Poetry Society from 2006--2009.

‘Interstate’ first appeared in Fyfe’s collection Late Crossing and was reprinted in Understudies: New and Collected Poems, both collections that--like much of her poetry--feature themes of travel, variously moving between Northern Ireland, England and the U.S. 

Much of ‘Interstate’ is uncertain. A tension between hope and fear runs through the poem; the subject has had ‘years of wearied waiting’ but is ‘jittering across lanes.’ We don’t know what exact reasons the nameless woman has for absconding--although the ‘Half-eaten fries...remains of hash browns’ suggest a dissatisfaction with model American life--but the vagueness allows the reader to impose their own thoughts onto her.

The voice of the poem is authorial and plain, particularly in the repeated use of ‘she’ at the beginning of lines which gives a tone of calm reportage (the shifting rhythms help to keep the poem engaging as well as mirroring the rhythms of interstate driving). But this is at odds with the hesitancy felt by the woman as she ‘steps into the sticky afternoon,’ and we get the feeling that the actions of the husband are all imagined by the woman as she continually agonises over her actions.

That autumn I was quick getting away:        only about one-twenty on the rain-drenched Wednesday I locked the premises and motored out, all staff sent home, all workshop plant closed down, all sense of any kind of business gone, and not until I'd driven fifteen miles along fast-flooding roads back into town, past rival complexes just clinging on, did rain let up and vision clear: those files

I'd never see again; that desk, the phone        that shrilled all day when first it was installed; not hear the moan compressors made, be soothed by lathes, nor say 'Good morning George, alright?', or 'Nice one, Bert', the human touch, no more, not to distract them too long from their work, but just enough to let them see I cared, and not to hurt old feelings as I tried to breast the fact of cancelled orders, creditors turned rough.

The friendly bank soon bared its teeth – drew blood;        and then that bane, the Tax Man, claimed his pound. And so, the flood. (fine detail dims again as, too, the pain recedes three autumns on; yet loss stays true.) The rain comes vicious now – wipers full speed, dipped headlights on, rear fogs – the journey seems to lengthen every time I live it through, involuntarily, as when the need for sleep is scuppered by recurring dreams.

My crowd was breast-fed clichés, meal on meal:        to pull its weight, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, and, once it stepped inside the factory gate, was wedded to its work; slapped all the time by Newbolt's hand: Play up, and play the game. Well, this sounds fine; but what about the bloke who's anorexic, short-nosed, cannot climb to reach the wheel, and never makes the team? For him such wedding tales are guffs of smoke.

Again the morning paper hits the floor –        banner headlined PIT CLOSURES SHOCK – and umpteen thousand more are facing broken marriages to mines. A few, lured by that bit-of-fresh, fool's gold, pin hopes on boarding-houses, market-stalls; one man sits out his protest down the pit, while lefties call for strikes with all the old clenched-fist salutes, and aerosol the walls: SCARGILL FOR KING and TARZAN IS A SHIT.

Their first few days of idleness will see        in those it hits undreamed-of traits in personality: some will get by and others go to bits; the strong become the weak, the weak make good as quickly as it's said. Then, as the days stack up to months or, as in my case, years, high principles get trampled in the mud where guile and self-survival point new ways to quick back-pocket jobs, fiddles and fears

of being caught. But fears will yield, in time,        a sort of pride, though not the social pride that saw men climb from old-world swamps: a sense that one's defied the odds, the system; finger-licked the crème, nose-thumbed some top brass, bested those who made the rules and all the running. What survives? Of Us: too early yet to tell. Of Them: 'Indifferents and Incapables'; their trade in UB40s and P45s.

In brass-lined boardrooms up and down the land        deep in regret a million more redundancies get planned, while chairmen's hiked-up salaries are set, and Urban Councils chase arrears in rents. Wide-boys, insider-dealers, some M.P.s grow richer by a second home in Spain, a custom-plated white Mercedes Benz, that new portfolio. True-blue disease. The spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain.

Maurice Rutherford (1922--) is a British poet, born in Hull, currently living in Bridlington. He worked for many years as a technical writer in the ship-building industries in Hull.

‘The Autumn Outings,’ from Rutherford’s 1994 collection Love is a Four-Letter World, directly references Monday’s poem, Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. The intertextuality of the poem is unusual, though: it is not a parody, nor even a pastiche; instead, it is as if Rutherford uses Larkin’s poem as a seed text to begin his own meditation.

If there is a link between the poems--beyond the replicated structure and key phrases such as ‘all staff sent home, all workshop plant closed down, / all sense of any kind of business gone’ (’ All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone.’)--it is in the theme of distancing. 

In Larkin’s poem, it is the speaker who is distanced from the people he observes; capitalizing on this vantage point he observes the way all people are fatally connected. But Rutherford is far closer to his subjects, and speaks of them in affectionate terms: ‘umpteen thousand more / are facing broken marriages to mines.’ From the very beginning he is consumed with sympathy for his fellow works.

Instead, the distance is between the managers and the workers, and the consequences are catastrophic. The final two stanzas are a condemnation of the indifference of managers and politicians who are more concerned with abstract figures than the reality of their decisions--however, Rutherford is clever in not making this a blind polemic but suggesting it is a consequence of the adversarial system they exist in: ‘a sense that one's defied / the odds, the system.’ 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:     Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river's level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept     For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn't notice what a noise  The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what's happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go, As if out on the end of an event     Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Struck, I leant More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.     Yes, from cafés And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical;    The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast Long shadows over major roads, and for Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem Just long enough to settle hats and say     I nearly died, A dozen marriages got under way. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side --An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And someone running up to bowl - and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: There we were aimed. And as we raced across     Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Philip Larkin (1922--1985) was an English poet, novelist and librarian. Disqualified for military service due to his poor eyesight, he begun his English degree at Oxford University in 1940 and graduated three years later, taking up a librarian position in in Wellington, Shropshire. 

After a five-year stint as librarian at Queen’s University Belfast, Larkin became the University Librarian at the University of Hull, a position he held until his death; Larkin is often admired as much for his librarianship as his writing. Larkin is often characterised as a traditionalist, holding out against the wave of Modernism, but his distinctive voice is built upon contemporary language and turns of phrase, and a pessimistic, ironic which captured post-war British attitudes. 

In ‘The Whitsun Weddings,’ Larkin recounts a train journey he took--presumably from Kingston-upon-Hull to London--and a procession of wedding parties he sees upon a train platform along the way. ‘Whitsun’ refers to a Christian holiday which occurs seven weeks after Easter; before 1978 in the UK ‘Whit Monday’ was a bank holiday, making the weekend popular for travel and weddings. 

Larkin is slow to get to the weddings; he first etches out glimpses of the countryside and railside towns. Away from the ‘hurry’ of the city we get a sense of yearning for the pastoral scenes, still tainted by ‘the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth.’ An uneasy continuity is formed between the city and countryside, with the train threading together the two sets of images.

When the wedding parties do enter it is with vibrant clashes of vision and sound: ‘fathers...with seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; / an uncle shouting smut...The lemons, mauves and olive-ochres that / Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.’ Larkin’s vocabulary is concise and evocative, bringing to life the chaotic bustle of emotions as several newly-weds board the train.

Larkin realises that although there are many wedding parties at the station, the couples are focused only on themselves: ‘And none / Thought of the others they would never meet / Or how their lives would all contain this hour.’ An observer on the train, flitting between towns, Larkin occupies a liminal space where only he is able to see the connections between the groups and the ‘frail travelling coincidence.’ 

When they cried freedom, when the sweet mingling of woodsmoke and jasmine with dust – grass, granite, antelope bone – gathered into wrists which turned

light the colour of blood, darkness a memory of the colour of blood – when their voices lifted that song and sent it echoing

across Africa, I knew it. Sibanda had taught it to me, polishing the family's shoes, squatting outside the scullery

door. We both wore khaki trousers many sizes too big; no shirt, no shoes. I spat on the toecaps while he brushed: and while he brushed

we sang: 'Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika…' over and over till the birds joined in. August birds. '… Maluphakanisw' udumo lwayo …' *

It comes back to me, this August, now that the jasmine is blooming and the air is stilled by woodsmoke; how they cried freedom, and how I

knew their song. A lingering chill pinches Zimbabwean sunsets into the cheeks of my children squatting beside me as I write.

It is their song too. I teach it to them, over and over, till my tired eyes are pricked with tears held back, sweet smoke, dust and jasmine.

*"God bless Africa … Raise up her spirit."

John Eppel (1947--) is an African poet, born in Lydenburg, South Africa. His miner father moved the family to Colleen Bawn in Zimbabwe when Eppel was 4, and he currently teaches English in Bulawayo.

Flowers are a common image in Eppel’s poetry, as seen in this example from his 1995 collection Sonata for Matabeleland. He has meditated on different flowers in his ‘Flower Poems’ series, and often uses them as a symbol of hope or tranquility as in his poem ‘Star of Bethlehem’ where he recalls finding the eponymous flower as a soldier “and stuffed it in my combat / jacket on top of a phosphorous bomb.”

However, in ‘Jasmine’ it is not clear that the flower unambiguously represents hope. As we first delve into the poem there is a rush of images which impressionistically flow into one another: the ‘sweet / mingling of woodsmoke and jasmine’ morphs into ‘wrists [which turn] light the colour of blood.’ The images of darkness and violence all spring from the cry of ‘freedom’ which opens the poem but we are not allowed to make easy judgments about this cry, and are constantly unsettled by the shifting meter and enjambment.

As we are introduced to the main memory of the poem, however, the images solidify a little and a calmer meter takes precedence. ‘I knew it. / Sibanda had taught it to me.’ Assuming the speaker is white like Eppel, we are given an image of two lower-class boys, wearing identical clothes, sharing the work of polishing shoes. Sibanda teaches the speaker the pan-Africa anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ and they seem to regard each other as equals. But we also know the relative privileges of each boy and the massive societal changes which will occur after this memory.

Is there a bitterness to the image of woodsmoke and jasmine mingling? The speaker remembers ‘how they cried freedom, and how I / knew their song.’ Implied is that this freedom never came to the speaker and even as he teaches, still speaks as that boy polishing the family’s shoes. 

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-      dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the reign of wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,      As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing. Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844--1889) was an English poet born in Stratford, Essex (now Greater London). The son of deeply religious High Church Anglicans, while studying Classics at Oxford, Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism and entered the ministry in 1868. For much of his life he educated, teaching classics, and served as a curator in various ministries. Hopkins moved to Ireland in 1884 after becoming professor of Greek and Latin at University College Dublin, where he died.

Although Hopkins published few poems during his lifetime it is clear Hopkins was an accomplished and innovative writer  (the poet Robert Bridges, a close friend, making the posthumous effort to preserve Hopkins’ legacy). Hopkins categorised the usual fixed meter of traditional English poetry as ‘running rhythm,’ and developed an Anglo-Saxon-influenced ‘sprung rhythm’ writing style that anticipated free verse. 

Hopkins wrote in lines with fixed numbers of stressed syllables, but with any number of unstressed syllables in between. Nearly every line in ‘The Windhover’ begins and ends with a stressed syllable. This allows for a more natural and energetic meter than the sing-song iambic pentameter of a traditional sonnet, while keeping an authorial and confident tone.

The subject of this sonnet could be the eponymous kestrel, or the dedicatee Jesus Christ, but the sheer joy contained in the sprung rhythm suggests Hopkins’ passion for life itself. 

The two opening lines with their exciting mass of alliteration ‘morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin’ make way for the calm sublimity of the kestrel ‘in his riding / of the rolling level underneath him steady air.’ The freedom of the bird exhilarates the speaker: ‘how he rung upon the reign of wimpling wing / In his ecstasy!’. The kestrel is beautiful in pure action, and the speaker longs for this simplicity of fulfillment, ‘the mastery of the thing.’

The sonnet’s octet quickly moves from the kestrel to describing other subjects that this beauty exists in. First Hopkins’ generalises ‘Brute beauty’ to ‘air, pride, plume’ then imagines the bird buckling against the wind. In an excited shift we then see ‘the fire that breaks’ from this act, in which Hopkins sees the goodness of Christ, ‘my chevalier.’

In the final tercet Hopkins next describes a plow digging up a small monastery farm and discovering beautiful ‘blue-black embers’, which then fall and make new flames ‘gash gold-vermilion.’ The emphasis on the word ‘Fall’ and the allusion to blood in ‘gash gold-vermilion’ recalls the Sacrifice of Christ, by which the speaker feels humbled. 

I’ve been thinking about the night I slipped and the coal scattered on the snowed drive. Then it was time spent in luck’s appleyard gathering its black fruit; or it was time collecting what I’d left too long to gather, a harvest all wilt and harrowed—anyway, it was time spent, and I held the steel bucket, filled it to the sound of nothing at all.

Niall Campbell (1984--) is a Scottish poet, originally from South Uist in the Western Isles. He begun writing poetry as an undergraduate studying English at the University of Glasgow, before completing an MLitt at the University of St. Andrews. Widely praised as a talented new writer of the modern poetry scene, Campbell’s first collection Moontide (Bloodaxe, 2014) was the winner of the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize and the Saltire First Book of the Year award, as well as being shortlisted for Best First Collection in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. He speaks of his love of Celtic poets such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Douglas Dunn among others for their ‘clarity of their thought and music’ and wishes to follow their principles of ‘song and quiet reflection.’

‘Harvest’ from Moontide seems firmly entrenched in these principles. Describing a simple scene of the speaker dropping a coal scuttle what is most striking about this poem is how Campbell uses concise, distinct images to describe with brevity wide-ranging and expansive ideas. ‘Then it was time spent in luck’s appleyard / gathering its black fruit,’ for example, is a startling analogy of luck to waiting for apples to drop in an orchard which is filled with the contradictory positive and negative feelings regarding luck, culminating in the bitter comic image of shining coal as fruit.

The poem is written in a loose blank verse which is combined with enjambment to both comfort and distance the reader. The opening couplet is fairly regular, for example, barring the substituted anapest and trochee of ‘and the coal scattered.’ But after that the iambs are frequently broken—‘luck’s appleyard’, ‘too long to gather’, ‘all wilt and harrowed’—only to be saved by a caesura which briefly restores the calmness of cadence, until we reach ‘held the steel bucket’. Aside from reflecting the clumsiness of the speaker these breaks create a shifting rhythm that both keeps the poem alive but also captures the train-of-thought of the speaker.

Opening with ‘I’ve been thinking’ tells us immediately that this night, this moment, has become an obsession of the speaker; a reflection of the repeated ‘time’ they waste on mundane activities. But there is also an irony: their driveway was ‘snowed’ and they’d already put off the task (‘what I’d left too long to gather’). There is a curious passive voice throughout the poem (‘filled it to the sound’) and the repetition of ‘it was time spent’ emphasises both the obsession with the moment and the distance from it to the present.

If you can't eat you got to smoke and we aint got nothing to smoke:come on kid let's go to sleep if you can't smoke you got to Sing and we aint got nothing to sing;come on kid let's go to sleep if you can't sing you got to die and we aint got Nothing to die,come on kid let's go to sleep if you can't die you got to dream and we aint got nothing to dream(come on kid Let's go to sleep)

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894--1962) was an American poet, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings wrote from a very early age--it’s claimed his first poem was written at the age of 3. He attended Harvard and received a B.A. degree and Master’s degree in English and Classical Studies. After graduation he served as an ambulance driver in World War I; however, in 1917, five months after arriving in France, he was arrested by the French government under suspicion of being a spy and held prisoner for three and a half months. This experience formed the basis of his novel The Enormous Room, published in 1922. 

Cummings is possibly one of the most easily-recognizable poets due to his unorthodox typography and syntax, which were greatly influence by Gertrude Stein and Dada. However he never quite fit comfortably within the ‘Modernists’ such as T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams--the majority of his poems, syntax aside, are in fact quite traditional, usually focusing on Romantic themes. Many of his poems have traditional forms, like the sonnet.

‘if you can’t eat you go to,’ from Cummings’ 1940 collection 50 Poems shows some of the poet’s play with typography and syntax. What should be noticeable is that every deviation carries purpose. While many imitators of Cummings use lowercase and punctuation injections as pure style, Cummings wrote in the belief that the form of the printed page was a wholly different canvas to speech, and that a poet could manipulate these to produce surprising and transcendental results.

The poem is a direct address from one speaker to another; the repeated use of ‘kid’ suggests a seniority to the relationship. His use of couplets is quite striking--I almost find it impossible to describe the metre of this poem. At it’s core it seems iambic but the linebreaks after ‘to’ and ‘got’ on every other verse give extra force where they wouldn’t normally be, piling on the stressed syllables and giving a very thumping, staccato rhythm to the poem. Coupled with the repeated ‘aints’ it’s hard not to imagine the speaker saying the words in a grizzled, tired tone.

This style is quite unlike Cummings although I feel there’s something similar in ‘Nobody Loses all the Time.’ Together with the relative simplicity of the words it feels to me then that we read the poem as a third party, an eavesdropper. The speaker lists the various deprivations, from ‘we can’t eat’ to ‘we aint got / nothing to Sing’ and there should be a sense of guilt in allowing this to happen.

The genius of Cummings here, for me, comes in how this very sparse poem with an abundance of refrains uses syntax and typography to subtly build upon the pathos of the speaker. The changing punctuation before ‘come on kid’, for example, redraws our attention to unheard pleading of the child. 

The use of ‘nothing’ and it’s change is perhaps the most important. To begin it is very literal--‘we ain’t got / nothing to smoke’--and the dark comedy of the repetition illustrates the chain of poverty the speaker and his child are caught in. But we are then introduced to how this affects the pair spiritually (’if you can’t smoke you got to / Sing’) and the cruelty that even death would only make things worse as they may have further family to support (’we aint got / Nothing to die’). The capitalised N draws our attention to the importance of this, and it almost feels like an authorial interjection to bring attention to the absurdity of the situation--something that can’t even be expressed fully in “proper” English.

‘Dread Beat an Blood,’ Linton Kwesi Johnson

brothers an sisters rocking a dread beat pulsing fire burning

chocolate hour an darkness creeping night

black veiled night is weeping electric lights consoling     night

a small hall soaked in smoke a house of ganja mist

music blazing sound thumping fire    blood brothers an sisters rocking stopping rocking music breaking out bleeding out thumping out fire   burning

electric hour of the red bulb staining the brain with a blood flow an a bad bad thing is brewing

ganja crawling, creeping to the brain cold lights hurting breaking hurting fire in the head an a dread beat bleeding beating fire    dread

rocks rolling over hearts leaping wild rage rising out of the heart an the hurt an a fist curled in anger reaches a her then flash of a blade from another to a him leaps out for a dig of a flesh for a piece of skin an blood bitterness exploding fire wailing blood and bleeding

Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952--) is a Jamaican-born, UK based dub poet, most famous for his fiercely political poems about Afro-Caribbean youths in inner-city Britain during the 70s and 80s. Born in Chapelton, Johnson moved to Brixton in 1963 and graduated from Goldsmiths with a degree in sociology in 1973. While still at school he joined the British Black Panthers and organised poetry workshops within the movement. The majority of his work is dub poetry, released on his record label LKJ records and composed in collaboration with producer Dennis Bovell

'Dread Beat an Blood' is a poem from Johnson's second collection, and first album as Poet and the Roots, both also titled Dread Beat an Blood. Throughout the poem images of celebration and violence are intertwined--beginning with the opening lines 'brothers an sisters rocking / a dread beat pulsing fire burning'--as Johnson describes a house party, most likely occuring in inner city London where the majority of the poems in the collection take place.

Johnson makes excellent use of rhythm and cadence through the poem to capture the atmosphere of the party. The majority of the feet in the poem are trochee, with the occasional bacchius--an unstressed syllable followed by two stressed syllables--thrown in. The spondee is an inversion of the iamb, the most common foot used in classical English poetry, and combining this with Jamaican-British slang like 'a dread beat' immediately forces the reader to take on the language of the speaker. Additionally, the focus on stressed syllables creates a curious thumping yet skipping rhythm. On the record this of course matches perfectly with the dub reggae beats of the instrumentation, but by itself it feels like the muffled beats of party music heard from outside.

We can see this rhythm is deliberately emphasized in Johnson's organization of the poem, by placing caesuras before a new stanza begins: 'electric lights consoling    night // a small hall soaked in smoke.' There is a tension created before each stanza by this method--at first it seems to relates to the music, as if we are anticipating the beginning of a new bar, but as the violence imagery returns we realise that 'a bad bad thing is brewing.'

This imagery first seems metaphorical, to describe the intensity of the party, but we soon realise it has far darker intentions. Johnson repeats words and phrases as if to emphasise their incongruity with the joyful scene he is supposed depicting: 'sound thumping fire     blood / brothers an sisters rocking stopping rocking / music breaking out bleeding out thumping out fire    burning.' This repetiton creates an urgency but it is complemented by the increasing stanza length--as if we are trapped by the violence, or unable to look away from what will inevitably occur.

1 In the black hotel a child is asleep. And outside: the winter night where the wide-eyed dice roll. 2 An élite of the dead became stone in Katarina Churchyard where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard. 3 One wartime winter when I lay sick a huge icicle grew outside the window. Neighbour and harpoon, unexplained memory. 4 Ice hangs down from the roof edge. Icicles: the upside-down Gothic. Abstract cattle, udders of glass. 5 On a side-track, an empty railway-carriage. Still. Heraldic. With the journeys in its claws. 6 Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself is floating before us. Our smiles on the way home. Bewitched avenue. (trans. Robin Fulton)

Tomas Tranströmer (1931--2015) was a Swedish poet and 2011 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. A graduate of poetry and psychology at Stockholm University, he first worked at a juvenile prison in Roxtuna before working as an occupational psychologist for the state, mostly working with the disabled. He suffered a stroke in 1990 which severely impaired his ability to speak; nevertheless he continued to write poetry into the 2000s. He passed away last week, Thursday 26th, at age 83.

As a poet he has been described as a “buzzard poet” for the way his poetry describes the world from a great height. His works are typically described as being Modernist and Expressionist as opposed to the Post-modernism of his contemporaries, grappling with the unknown and searching for transcendence. The haiku-like poems of ‘Six Winters’ seem to encapsulate the particularly stark free verse of his later career, appearing in his 1989 collection For Living and Dead.

Each poem centres around vivid images and strange contrasts: the ‘upside-down Gothic. / Abstract cattle’ of the 4th poem, for example. The small stanzas and sparse sentences force us to pay attention to every word, and refuses to let us settle comfortably. The point-of-view is not immediately clear: ‘I’ appears in the third poem and ‘our’ in the sixth, but the other views have a far more detached voice--most of all in the first poem, where the voice takes us from the ‘black hotel’ to the night outside. 

These imagistic poems feel like a chronology, but told through the specific lens of memory. The third poem is the most personable but appears to take place over a vague period of time: ‘One wartime winter...a huge icicle grew.’ (At the middle of the series it offers us the best explanation of the poems: ‘unexplained memory). Other poems give a far more intense flash of imagery, as if giving us a single vision and it’s associated memory-emotion: ‘an empty railway-carriage. / Still. Heraldic. / With the journeys in its claws.’ 

However, there is no certainty that there is a strict chronological order occurring. The ‘icicle’ moves from the third poem to the fourth, presumably from two different winters as the title suggests--following a trail of thoughts. If the ‘child’ in the first poem is the speaker, is ‘Katarina Churchyard’ a memory soon after, or a giant leap to a place where he reflects back on his childhood? Does the irony of the ‘elite of the dead’ anticipate the wartime dead, or does he again look back to deaths of the past?

Let me now sleep, let me not think, let me Not ache with inconsistent tenderness. It was untenable delight; we are free-- Separate, equal--and if loverless, Love consumes time which is more dear than love, More unreplicable. With everything Thus posited, the choice was clear enough And daylight ratified our reckoning. Now only movement marks the birds from the pines; Now it's dark; the blinded stars appear; I am alone, you cannot read these lines Who are with me when no one else is here, Who are with me and cannot hear my voice And take my hand and abrogate the choice.

Vikram Seth (1952--) is an Indian novelist and poet, born in Kolkata, now living in Salisbury (in a house formerly belonging to poet George Herbert). He is most famous for his novels A Suitable Boy and The Golden Gate (in fact, a verse novel written in Onegin stanza). Although Seth’s Indian heritage is a constant theme throughout his work--and he studies, speaks and writes several languages--he writes in English, most often in rhyming forms.

Seth has long been one of my favourite poets, someone who I’ve featured several times on this blog back in it’s infancy. I recently finished reading The Golden Gate recently and was reminded as to just why I love Seth’s poetry so much: his ability to write poetry about serious, tragic topics in a light and almost comic manner that doesn’t detract or undermine the subject at hand.

‘At Evening,’ from Seth’s 1980 debut collection Mappings, is a perfect example of this ability. The title immediately places the poem as belonging in the serenade tradition (meaning here a love poem featuring lovers in the evening, as opposed to an aubade which takes place at dawn). However the poem almost immediately contradicts this: the lovers are seperated, ‘loverless.’ Seth opens the poem with a long, broken line--‘Let me now sleep, let me not think, let me / not ache with inconsistent tenderness.’--which unsettles us in its incomplete, split thought, and also starts the theme of contradiction which occurs throughout the poem.

The poem suggests the two lovers have chosen their separation deliberately, arguing ‘love consumes time which is more dear than love, / more unreplicable.’ But now in the evening the speaker regrets this decision. During the day they could see that they at ‘separate, equal’; now in the dark the speaker realises that ‘only movement marks the birds from the pines'. The separation is self-imposed and their distinct identities self-perpetuating, but the speaker wonders with regret if they can live without their lover.

‘At Evening’ is a sonnet, mostly written in iambic pentameter but Seth plays with the lines: examine how the metre shifts in the second verse to include more anapest and dactly feet: ‘I am alone, you cannot read these lines / Who are with me when no one else is here.’ It is as if the speaker realises how ridiculous he is being--their ‘reckoning’ in the first stanza falling to the tenderness and desires of love--in the end hoping that in the darkness, like the ‘blinded stars,’ his lover appears.

Today there has been so much talk of things exploding into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we all run outside into the hot streets and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth you can always see. With more sparkle and pop is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes into acid jazz. There are small typewriters that other people keep in their eyes clicking away at all of our farewell parties. It is hard to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving their silly little hands.

Wendy Xu (1987--) is a Chinese-born, American raised poet currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has published one collection of poetry, You Are Not Dead. 

Xu typically writes one stanza’d, almost prose-like poems that uses line breaks and sudden juxtaposition to oscillate between the personal and the public--and explore the meaning of this in the 21st Century. Themes of artificiality and alienation are prominent in her poetry. ‘And Then It Was Less Bleak’ has this at the (literal) centre of the poem: ‘There are small typewriters / that other people keep in their eyes.’

Xu has said of poetry: ‘I think language is always waiting patiently on us to engage it, to play with it and arrange its parts, to build something weird out of it  ...’. I think we can see how she applies this to her poetry here in the bombardment of images and sensations she throws at the reader: ‘Romance is a grotto of eager stones / anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth / you can always see.’ There is a refusal to contemplate these images, and the combination of short declarative sentences and consistent enjambment creates a belting pace that calls to mind the information overload of modern media culture.

However, while lesser poets attempting a similar style can overreach--with paper-thin, overly mawkish and romanticised images--Xu is clever with her word choices and line break decisions. Here, she opens with imagery that calls to mind war or acts of terrorism (‘Today there has been so much talk of things exploding’) but this is quickly situated at a distance from the speaker (’we all become curious, that we / all run outside into the hot streets’). With the striking first line hanging over the poem, the rest of the narrative focuses on finding a real meaning in life while indirectly participating or benefiting from invasions of third-world country (which reminds me of John Forbes ‘Love Poem’). But there remain constant reminders of violence throughout the poem: ‘sparkle and pop’, ‘confetti tongue explodes’. 

Something is taking place. Horns thrust upward from the brow. Hooves beat impatient where feet once were. My Son, youth grows alarming in your face. Your innocent regard is cruelly charming to me now. You bristle where my fond hand would stir to stroke your cheek--I do not dare. Irregular meters beat between your heart and mine. Snuffling the air you take the heat and scan the lines you take in going as if I were or were not there, and overtake me,      and where it seems but yesterday I spilld the wine, you too grow beastly to become a man. Peace, peace. I’ve had enough. What can I say  when song’s demanded. I’ve had my fill of song? My longing to sing grows full. Time’s emptied me. And where my youth was, now the Sun in you grows hot, your day is young, my place you take triumphantly. All along, it’s been for you, for this lowering of your horns, She had Her will of me and will not      let my struggling spirit in itself be free.

Robert Duncan (1919--1988) was an American poet, most identified with the Black Mountain College (despite only spending a small time at the school). Born in Oakland, California, he was adopted and raised by a Theosophist couple as the conditions of his birth met their prophetic demands. An anarchist and open homosexual, Duncan was a prominent figure in pre-Stonewall gay culture and his essay The Homosexual in Society is considered a landmark of gay history.

‘Rites of Passage: II’ comes from Duncan’s 1984 collection Ground Work: Before the War. It is part of a serial poem titled ‘Poems from the Margins of Thom Gunn’s Moly’ and is a recontextualising of Gunn’s poem ‘Rites of Passage,’ which we discussed on Monday. (As an aside, the collection I first found this poem in was published in 1974--featured on the behest of Gunn alongside his poem. Duncan deliberately did not publish work between 1969--1984 but did pass around chapbooks during this time; very little of the poem changed before Ground Work aside from a linebreak inserted after ‘overtake me’.)

While Gunn’s poem seems very personal, Duncan’s is far more public: possibly a knowing joke considering it was literally written in the margins of Gunn’s published collection. Puns on poetic composition such as ‘Irregular meters’ and ‘scan / the lines’ highlight the differences between Gunn’s restrained formal poetry and Duncan’s free verse, while also drawing attention to the poem’s artificiality. 

Duncan recontextualises Gunn’s poem to have the father as the speaker, and it is interesting to see how this changes the meaning of ‘Rites of Passage.’ Gunn’s speaker is rebellious, wild and angry; Duncan’s is sentimental (’where my fond hand would stir / to stroke would cheek’), somewhat regretful (’My longing to sing grows full’), but also hopeful (’my place you take triumphantly’). Duncan’s lines are longer but far more of them have a regular rhythm and there is hardly any enjambment until the final stanza, giving the voice a feeling of measure and wisdom.

‘Something is taking place. Horns bud bright in my hair. My feet are turning hoof. And Father, see my face --Skin that was damp and far Is barklike and, feel, rough. See Greytop how I shine. I rear, break loose, I neigh Snuffing the air, and harden Toward a completion, mine. And next I make my way Adventuring through your garden. My play is earnest now. I canter to and fro. My blood, it is like light. Behind an almond bough, Horns gaudy with its snow, I wait live, out of sight. All planned before my birth For you, Old Man, no other, Whom your groin’s trembling warns. I stamp upon the earth A message to my mother. And then I lower my horns.

Thom Gunn (1929--2004) was an English-born poet who lived in San Francisco for the majority of his life after emigrating in 1954. He was most famous for his gay and AIDS-related poetry such as the collection The Man With Night Sweats (1992). His poetry is typically praised for its clarity of diction, and an embodiment of vibrant sexuality and forthright descriptions complemented by classic, formal structures.

‘Rites of Passage,’ comes from Gunn’s 1971 collection. The collection was written at a dynamic time in Gunn’s life: he quit teaching poetry at Berkeley, experimented with perception-altering drugs such as LSD and begun learning to write in free-verse although he described his efforts as ‘chopped-up prose, of the worst kind - I knew that was boring, and not rhythmically interesting in itself.’ Moly itself--while still largely written in formal structures--received mixed reviews, with criticism given to how poetic forms lacked the playfulness of Gunn’s previous writing and worked to limit rather than elucidate his ideas.

Moly takes its title from the herb given to Odysseus to prevent the witch Cerce from transforming him into a beast, and the theme of metamorphosis runs through the collection, as expanded on by Gunn in his letter to the Poetry Book Society. The opening lines of ‘Rites of Passage’ strike us immediately with images of transformation: ‘Horns bud bright in my hair / My feet are turning hoof’--which of course also has heavy Freudian connotations. 

This Pan-like description of the speaker’s body does not come with the horror we might normally associate with adolescent change, however; Gunn’s matter-of-fact description of this metamorphosis draws our focus to the actions this new body can take: ‘I canter to and fro. / My blood, it is like light.’ The rhythm of the poem complements this, comparing the terse, complete descriptions of transformation with the enjambed, rolling lines of the speaker’s actions: ‘Horns gaudy with its snow, / I wait live, out of sight.’

However the ABCABC rhyme scheme also neatly binds the stanzas, but here we might be able to see the struggle Gunn was experiencing with his poetry at the time. The poem feels very hesitant, continually stopping and starting, as it moves towards its conclusion. While the half-rhymes are not necessarily at the thought--used tremendously by Gunn in other poems--they are often much more subtly placed than ‘harden / toward a completion, mine.’

Today the river slinks like oil, Hardly a current in its mud As autumn leaves crawl on its face. I left them in their blinding talk To meet adopted path and sky, And bend the grass for light and space. Here I can hold the air with birds, Still, solitary in their flight Without men's calculated race. Now only sun and water rule Unchallenged over silent pain: And the burst cry of a grey swan.

Lotte Kramer (1923--) was born in Mainz, Germany, and has lived in England since 1939 when she escaped the Nazi regime by a Kindertransport train. She started her writing career late in life, beginning in 1979, when what she called the 'ice-break of words' forced her to confront the traumatic experiences of Nazi Germany and the death of her parents and extended family during the Holocaust.

Rivers are a common theme in Kramer's poetry: in 'Rhine' she imagines the river as an unwielding force outside of the destructive whims of man: 'Always the father of my being/Unchanging in your majestic song.' In 'Three Rivers,' she charts her life by describing the three rivers that have been major features of it, including the Nene in Peterborough where she lives: 'Alien at first / But soon a slow companion / Oozing muddy arms.'  Rivers are a contradiction--ancient and permanent, yet ever-changing--and this juxtaposition rules over 'Silence' as the speaker meditates on the central image of the poem. The first three stanzas all end on a rhyme, a curious rhyme-scheme which creates a flowing but halting rhythm, emphasized by the slightly erratic pentameter that Kramer writes in. 

This movement punctuated by stillness creates a retrospective feel to the poem. With reminders of time such as 'Today,' and 'I left them' we gain a sense of a person looking both forward and backward in time. The images of movement throughout the poem ('slinks like oil', 'crawl on its face', 'bend the grass') juxtapose with the third stanza's descriptions of holding 'the air with birds / Still, solitary in their flight,' where we have a vivid sense of the speaker actively, possibly consciously, forming memories of what they see.

The 'silent pain' of the last stanza challenges me: does this suggest the speaker is unable to come to terms with a traumatic event in their past? 'Sun and water,'--usually images of hope and cleansing--rule over this pain but the grand descriptions of the river paired with the slow, steady rhythm of the poem create a sense of the sublime. 'Unchallenged' suggests that the river, and nature as a whole, are simply indifferent to the pain of the speaker. The break of the rhyme scheme (and cadence) in the final line creates dissonance--but should this be judged against the methodic, meditative images of the first three stanzas?

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise! These things are with us every day even on beachheads and biers. They do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

Frank O'Hara (1926--1966) was an American poet, writer and art critic, as well as curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art. He attended Harvard to study music funded by a veteran's scholarship for serving in World War II, although he changed his major and graduated in 1950 with a degree in English Literature. After completing an M.A. at the University of Michigan he moved to New York; he became intimately associated with the city and it appears in many of his poems.

O'Hara's poetry is often autobiographical and most famously chronicles his experiences in New York. They are usually written in the present tense and characteristic to his verse is a fast-paced, hurried style which suggests both joyful exuberance and the bombardment of senses present in hectic city life. When considering the influences on his writing, O'Hara aligned himself more closely with Pound and Carlos Williams than the scholarly verse of T.S. Eliot, and this can be observed most obviously in his direct, un-metaphorical language. Nearly all his works centre around O'Hara as an individual, with specific references to real people, locations and events in O'Hara's life.