Editorial: August 2011

June 29, 2011 The Netherlands domain has served up a range of treasures by Lucebert, who was a key figure in post-World War Two Amsterdam and was at the forefront of experimental artists emerging from visual and written movements.

The selection here spans five decades of practice and is only a small representation of the work of a prolific and publicly active poet. One of his most famous lines, ‘Alles van waarde is weerloos’ (‘Everything of worth is defenceless’), sits on top of a drab-looking building in Rotterdam, yet it is a heartfelt and representative statement for the group of urban artists and poets who emerged around 1948 calling themselves CoBrA. Through his urge to bring his art to the public, Lucebert reflected the movement’s political consciousness, radicalism and drive to express personal experience in his poetry.

Visual art is both an influence on, and a goldmine of inspiration for his writing. At his most precise, tight, formal pieces demonstrate how images flow into each other, capturing the movement of brushstrokes:

under clouds birds sail
under waves fly fishes
but in between the angler rests

waves become high clouds
clouds become high waves
but meanwhile the angler rests

(from ‘Angler by Ma Yuan’)

There’s a hearkening back to Imagism, but also a quiet, meditative moment from the poet’s life, a tribute to a fellow artist. Such tributes continue in his work from the 1980s, such as in ‘James Turrell’, where a more direct verbal address captures the speaker’s imaginative response to the painter’s work: “I briefly dreamed that I was half nothing half cat”.

Equally important is Lucebert’s spiritual side, which shows the poet grasping towards an understanding of humanity’s place in the universe. There are numerous deeply considered references to divinity, spirituality, philosophy, good and evil. Yet these are offset by an equal engagement with the poet’s contemporary social engagement, such as in ‘State of Affairs’, published in 1993, in which Lucebert addressed his feelings on the war in former Yugoslavia.

From the UK we have selections from two poets, Polly Clark and Martin Figura. Both demonstrate a fascinating engagement with the personal and political in unique ways.

Polly Clark has written directly on political issues, at times. Her most recent collection, Farewell my Lovely (Bloodaxe, 2009), includes a sequence of poems imagining a young British soldier narrating his experience of the Falklands war. Yet alongside facing up to politics through persona, she adopts a multi-layered engagement with personal experience, something W.N. Herbert has described as her control of “the necessary art of saying two things at once”. Her poetry delivers acute subtextual meanings through gentle narrative surfaces, such as in ‘My Life With Horses’:

and you give me a necklace,
bright as a bit, and you’re
stamping your name
into the earth, and my arm
is around you, weak as a halter,
and nothing can stop me, no mother or father.

The last line in this quotation is a fitting link to Martin Figura’s work. Readers are told that the starting point for his latest collection, Whistle (Arrowhead, 2010), is his father murdering his mother when Figura was nine years old. Yet, once again, the approach is oblique, surprising; as Jackie Kay says of the collection, he writes with a “humanising restraint”, working in the opposite direction to melodrama and excess sentimentality.

He’s also a wickedly funny poet at times, despite what his latest work might suggest – and Clark has her fair share of humour on display too. Written in a surge of epic bathos, yet with a tender and authentic portrayal of a working class childhood, we have for your reading pleasure Figura’s version of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’:

who had more words for toilet than the Inuit have for snow
      and put their teeth in jars then slept in their vests
      under candlewick counterpanes in cold bedrooms
      with dreams of winning the pools and bungalows
      in Cheshire with inside loos and labour saving devices

(from ‘Ahem’)

There’s a great sense of life in the north of England running through the poem, with the kind of local references of which even a southerner like me can get an easy sense, and chuckle at too.

As ever with poetry featured on PIW, all these poets provide a chance to open a door into another time and place, to see what makes other people laugh, cry, rise in protest or settle in meditation. And poetry’s a reminder, once again, that wherever and whenever we are living, we’re still capable of feeling the same things as the many other inhabitants of the world.