Editorial: March 2009

12 februari 2009 In her deft comparison of “This is how it was” with “This is how it looked to me” in ‘On Derry’s Walls’, Irish poet Kerry Hardie reminds us that how we perceive and what we communicate about the world is inescapably subjective – a state of affairs that can be masked by the language of facts, of declaratives. Poetry, on the other hand, makes explicit not only the subjectivity of experience, but also, through use of metaphor and imagery, the act of pushing and stretching the limits of language in attempts to recapture and convey something approaching the essence of these subjective emotions and perceptions. Take for example, Portuguese Ruy Cinatti’s attempts to describe, as much to himself as to the outside world, the sensation of ‘Amazement’ – “What’s happening inside me is a wonder. / A yes that spreads itself / until its path is lost / far off, like the fleeing / balloon of a child.”

In one of my favourite poems featured this month on PIW, Kerry Hardie’s ‘She Replies to Carmel’s Letter’, the narrator remembers experiencing another viewpoint of the world – “Sometimes, water-proofed and not caring, / I’d sit in a road which was really a stream-bed, / being and seeing from down where the hare sees,” – and longs for the ‘you’ of the poem to have shared that perspective with her. Interestingly enough, the shift into the present tense towards the end of the poem – “So, you will see how it is with me” – indicates that although the experience wasn’t shared, the description of this change of perspective and of the narrator’s desire to share it perhaps serves as communication enough between the writer and reader of the letter – the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ – and, by extension, the poet and the reader of the poem.

The distance and proximity of ‘you’ and ‘I’, the interplay between conceptions of self and of other, the relationship of writer to reader, lover to loved, are at the core of ‘Where I Become You’, a new long poem by Antjie Krog, which was recently published in Afrikaans and Dutch, as the Netherlands and Flanders National Poetry Day booklet. It appears now on PIW, alongside an English translation by Karen Press that captures wonderfully Krog’s play with language, and with evocative audio recordings of the poet reading in Afrikaans. A phenomenological investigation of being and syntax, the poem nonetheless casts aside its philosophical probing in warm expressions of love that are yoked in concrete, real-world imagery (such as “the hopelessly lovable shadows / of your collarbone”), as well as in cosmic metaphor:

there where I am other than you
I begin
it’s true

but there where I am you
have become you
I sing beyond myself
light pulses of quicksilversong
a thing cast beyond all humankind

To say that ‘you’ and ‘I’ can become the same thing may seem radical, but it is not much of a jump from what in English occurs frequently: ‘one’ can be used to mean ‘I’ or ‘you’, especially in the sense of a universal ‘you’, while first-person experience is often narrated in the second person, with the effect of presenting an individual’s experience as collective. Aidan Murphy’s poem ‘The Habits of Guilt’, a wry yet emotive personification of guilt, is an excellent example of this:

Smooching beside you
with its tongue in your ear, it somehow whispers,
if you weren’t so dumb in the first place
I wouldn’t be here

Murphy, editor Patrick Cotter notes, writes about the effects of alcohol “affectingly and with such stark honesty”; it’s the honest articulation of the experiences of the ‘I’ that capture so well the slow, lean melancholy of the morning after a night of drinking in poems such ‘Accidental Blood’ and ‘Circles’.

Our final poet this month is Alan Wearne. Regular rhyme schemes and tight forms lend ballad-like satirical thrust to many of his poems, which cast a wry eye on the lives of urban and suburban Australians. Although Wearne does write in the first-person singular, the ‘I’ is rarely autobiographical in the poems published here, which include monologues spoken by a journalist and a courier of a drug syndicate. He also uses the first-person plural ‘we’ in several poems, and employs a second-person narrator to interesting effect in ‘Anger Management: A South Coast Fable’, the tale of a single mother’s troubled relationship with a musician. In its appropriation of different voices and perspectives, Wearne’s body of work expresses not merely the consciousness of an individual poet, but of a collective subjectivity – less “this is how it looked to me” and more “this is how it looked to us” – a notion vital to our conception of community.