Happy National Poetry Day! While I’m sure that everyday is a poetry day for you, or a potential for poetry day, it’s nice to make a big song and dance about the medium which is all song and dance; lyric, rhythm and (sometimes) rhyme.
This year’s theme is ‘change’. Poems (and poets, but mostly poems) are very changeable beasts, they can transform between readings so that what once seemed to be an incomprehensible stanza – how does ‘an open eye’ drop someone ‘bone by bone’? – can become bleakly clear a few months later, and the poem’s universe steadies slightly, even while your own reels (thankfully the Forward Foundation has chosen a relatively jolly offering from Emily Dickinson).
And our focus on poets has changed, too, in that there are far more women, queer poets and poets of colour on our radar. Danez Smith, a black, queer, gender non-binary, HIV+ poet won the Forward Arts Foundation Prize for best collection this year, and they weren’t even the only black, gender non-binary poet on the shortlist. If you do nothing else today, please listen to their electric performance of ‘dinosaurs in the hood‘ (16mins35secs).
The dead straight white dudes who dominate curricula will stay on that list for a good while longer, I imagine. And you know what, they’re going to stay dead (in the beneath the ground sense, obviously a lot of their verse feels very much alive and John Keats is more vivid to me than some people I’ve met in real life).
W. S. Graham – another dead white man, but last one I promise and his poetry is quietly spectacular and life-changing – wrote that poetry, and language, is most valuable when we are ‘telling/Each other alive about each other/Alive.’ So it makes sense to celebrate the amazing poets who are writing now, changing how we see things now.
Jenny Bornholdt
Full disclosure: I know New Zealander Jenny Bornholdt, which means I also know, literally, for a fact, that she is one of the nicest persons on the planet but I did not know, until more recently, that she is – of course – a fabulous poet, and now a firmly ensconced favourite on my shelf. I am not a gardener but I very much appreciate writers who are on the ground, hands in the earth, and Jenny is one of these – you can feel changes in the weather in her poems, and you know that whether it’s raining or uncomfortably hot, her words will give you shelter.
There are poems about her excellent children with equally excellent names and haircuts; a poem about the life of an old shirt, which is the one I go back to most often; the visits to and love of France; and other more poignant moments. I don’t always feel like a half New Zealander (perhaps because living in England means spending a lot of time explaining that my accent is Scottish, not Irish, not American) but it’s very comforting to hear Jenny’s familiar voice, and to laugh at that subtle NZ humour.
Mary Jean Chan
Mary Jean Chan and her many poems about mothers and daughters are very much my jam – I find ideas of female inheritance fascinating in poetry especially when exploring the difference between what you inherit from your family and what you accidentally inherit in a relationship, which in a same sex relationship might offer a kind of funhouse mirror effect when we see our not-quite-selves reflected back.
Chan is from Hong Kong but writes the majority of her verse in English; perhaps English doesn’t carry the same emotional complications as Cantonese does in terms of her queerness – something which is not wholeheartedly accepted by the mother who appears again and again in her poems. Issues of translation, language as instinct versus a reader’s comprehension, are also present; there is a sense of bargaining between the two.
But the thread that interests me most in her pamphlet, a hurry of english, is desire: desire for a lover and for female bodies, which jostles beside a desire for home and a peaceful moment with her mother.
Tracy K Smith
Wade in the Water is what I’m currently reading so these are only my first impressions rather than deep submersion, but I imagine it won’t be long before I get there.
I read Lincoln in the Bardo this year, and while I did find it inventive and bones-deep sad, I wondered why, in a novel with the Civil War so close to its broken heart, there weren’t more African-American voices. Smith’s second sequence in this collection is an energetic, emotional look at those forgotten voices, not just the soldiers who fought but also the family survivors trying to get their beloved dead’s pensions, and many of the poems are collage style splicings of real letters (all faithfully acknowledged at the end) and historical documents. We hear pleading for freedom and can only guess at the unsatisfying answers.
‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘Urban Youth’ are quiet, intimate poems, where there is possibility and comfort in memory. In the universe of that poem, on ‘very nearly steady legs’ the reader can also take a moment to appreciate a piece of fruit, a blue sky, moving through space with an ok unknown ahead.
not just a funny face 