Editorial: November 2008

October 29, 2008 The Irish poet Eavan Boland, in her 1995 book Object Lessons, wrote about the difficulties she found in her poetic career in reconciling the life as a woman, traditionally the “mute object” of a poet’s expression, with the life as a poet, historically “an emblem for the grace and power of a society”: “in a real and immediate sense . . . the subject cannot forget her previous existence as object”. When Boland was writing in 1995, British poet Helen Mort, the youngest in this month’s issue, was just eight years old. I wonder whether she has had to grapple with similar tensions. Perhaps not: she has been gaining prizes and recognition for her poetry from a young age, and she sites mainly male poets as her influences. But although expression of women’s subjectivity may not be her primary concern, her poetry still displays an engagement with female identity. In the love poem, ‘Litton Mill’, for example, the narrator likens herself to water in millpond, fluid and ungraspable, in comparison to the firm, masculine “clank and jostle of machinery”:

where once, you were the waterwheel,
I, the dull silver it must
catch and release
as if it can’t be held.

At the other end of the historical spectrum from Helen Mort is Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century poet featured in this month’s Belgium issue, and whom translators Veerle Fraeters and Frank Willaert describe as “the first woman in Europe to risk singing of mystical love in pure love poetry”. Her poetry brims with passion and unique imagery – love is not a delicate flower, for example, but a strong hazel branch budding in the cold of winter – and although she writes ostensibly about divine love, some of her descriptions could be equally applied to erotic love:

Sometimes hot, sometimes cold,
sometimes modest, sometimes bold:
its whimsies boundless, manifold.
                                                   (‘Song 5’)

Esteemed by her medieval contemporaries, Hadewijch’s work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and has again recently experienced a revival. Lucienne Sassaert, a contemporary Belgian poet featured alongside Hadewijch this month, has translated the thirteenth-century poet into modern Dutch. In her own poems, Sassaert’s love imagery is equally strong and striking. In ‘Pushed out with worn-out furniture’, for example, a woman is compared to an old mattress, which in turn embodies the history of a love life, its ‘kapok’ and ‘lumpy burls’ infused with the ‘refrains and duets’ of lovers, including the vivid evocation:

Come my love, pull me in
like a snail does its feelers:
I do not want to see the light
that whistles in my ribs . . .

For poets such as the feminist, activist and writer Malathi Maithri, featured on the India domain this month, writing poetry, and in particular openly expressing female sexuality and trying to reclaim the female body as a site of subjectivity within poetry is a deeply political act. Kutti Revathi writes that Maithri has been “brave enough to confront . . . the oppression directed against women in contemporary Tamil writing” through her poetry. ‘Large as the World’ is a powerful metaphor of fragmented identity, and the poet’s urge to reassemble and reclaim the female body. I particularly admire the subtle and complex ambiguity of the image in the final stanza of this poem, in which the narrator’s vagina has been sighted ‘as a butterfly / Flitting about among the hills’: is the vagina, masked in metaphor by centuries of male poets and patriarchal oppression, resisting being returned to its rightful owner, or does its winged, free existence symbolise its escape from the shackles of tradition?

The fifth female poet of the issue, also featured on the India domain, is Nitoo Das, whose poem ‘how to cut a fish’, through its use of energetic rhythm and syntax, imbues a seemingly innocuous domestic task – which has to be done sitting “properly / woman-like” – with violence and power, her use of the pronoun ‘he’ in reference to the fish introducing unavoidable overtones of gender struggle. Also displaying the verve with which she handles the English language is her poem ‘Love Song IX’, which is rich in medieval, Jabberwockian vocabulary: “Her wiggance is so gizsal. / So houndeous, so beauteous, / so imperfeccamble.”

This kind of linguistic play parallels, interestingly enough, with the two young male poets on the United Kingdom domain this month, selected, along with Helen Mort, by guest editor Catherine Smith. John McCullough’s ‘Georgie, Belladonna, Sid’ is infused with Polari vocabulary, an English homosexual and theatrical slang prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century: “My eek hovers / above Lady B’s sink, bleach storming my scalp. // Open your aunt nells, dear. No beauty / without agony.”

Chris McCabe also challenges readers with his experimental use of language, risking, as Catherine Smith observes, “being told that what he’s written ‘isn’t poetry’”:

Then Lord Schmiggles of Schmiggville retesting
the Schmiggleometer to avert a Schmiggle-ectomy
– schmig schmig schmig schmig – all schmigged-out
in the schmiggle machine waiting with a gurn in his eyes
for someone to start the journey
                                                                      (‘Mr Schmiggles’)

Both McCullough and McCabe’s poetry, though at times very different, is unafraid to embrace objects of consumer culture and urban living, juxtaposing beermats, USB cables and Burger King with references to writers such as Sophocles or Frank O’Hara.

This kind of urban energy is found too in the work of Marathi-language Indian poet Sachin Ketkar, in whose vision tradition and modernity, East and West collide. Ketkar, Hemant Divate observes, “usually writes about mundane and ‘un-poetic’ objects in an exceptionally imaginative way”: a heart is likened to “a booster pump”; a hair fallen “between the keys of a keyboard” or “on the mouse-pad” is a potential cloning sample; Jarasandha, the king of Magadha in the Mahabharata, becomes, in Ketkar’s imagination, the author of a blog.

In contrast, the work of Rituraj, a senior Hindi poet, is characterised by a calm, strong focus on what editor Arundhathi Subramaniam describes as “the minutiae and trivia, the quiet ironies of daily living, so often ignored in the furious clamour of urban mainstream existence”. “The poor call their women by so many names / Their vocabulary is full of synonyms” Rituraj writes in his poem, ‘The Poor’, which begs the question whether the rich also have different names for “their women”, and whether or not these women, rich or poor, share this vocabulary or have alternative strategies of self representation. Incidentally, Rituraj is currently compiling an anthology of women-centric poems entitled Mashuq, which will surely encompass the varying and problematic representations of women and female subjectivity.

The final poet of this issue is Vinod Kumar Shukla, whose poetry, like Rituraj’s, is not focused on fast-paced urban life. Rather, it is, argues Mangalesh Dabral, “[marked by] the experience of an almost lifelong stay in small towns, far from cities or metropolitan centres of political and cultural power”. Shukla’s poems are ethically motivated articulations of human compassion and understanding, characterised by simplicity of language but depth of feeling. His poem ‘A Man Had Sat Down in Desperation’ is an expression of shared brotherhood and love for a stranger, while in a poem such as ‘One Should See One’s Own Home from Far Off’, this compassion extends, without flamboyance or false modesty, to consideration for all people of the world, regardless of race or gender.

I’ve greatly enjoyed editing this month’s issue; I hope you also find the poems rich and thought-provoking. Bibliography

‘Numbers Trouble’ by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young Chicago Review article about ratio of published female to male poets, written in response to Jennifer Ashton’s article “Our Bodies, Our Poems”, published in American Literary History 19.1 (2007).

Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Carcanet, Manchester, 1995