Artikel
Editorial: September 2009
28 augustus 2009
The rich Irish storytelling tradition informed Ian Duhig’s development as a poet: he grew up in a large family where his Irish mother would recite verse by heart to the congregated group of children. Irish Eugene O’Connell’s ‘Mapping the Interior’ also recognises the kitchen, and the fireside, as a place of cultural exchange and a repository, therefore, of social history. Through the image of a huge dishcloth soaking up “the individual traces / Of people who came to swap yarns” from the kitchen floor, the narrator urges an imaginative reconstruction of past kitchen gatherings and of what his forbears “Were thinking when their eyes fell, in the silence between the stories”.
The idea of a house as a holding-place for past conversations, and that interior lives can be mapped through the cartography of interior space, is explored in Julia Copus’s ‘A Soft-edged Reed of Light’, which begins: “That was the house where you asked me to remain / on the eve of my planned departure. Do you remember? / The house remembers it”. Stylistically, this poem seems to be in close dialogue with an older poem, ‘Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’. While Hardy’s poem recalls being told as a child the myth of farmyard animals kneeling at midnight on Christmas Eve, Copus’s remembers a moment that determined the future of a relationship: both look back with a degree of yearning to times of comparative innocence, faith and hope. Interestingly, ‘The Oxen’ takes as its starting point a story told by the fire; the cosy scene of “hearthside ease” that Hardy depicts contrasting with the uncertain “gloom” at the end of the poem.
The ending of Mary O’Donnell’s ‘Exiles’ also evokes the image of a fire in its reflection on the feeling of comfort within the walls of a house – illusory as it can be given that outside events, such as war or terrorism, can threaten our safety even when we are in our homes. “What jeopardy”, she asks (perhaps half rhetorically, half anxiously), “inside these walls and windows, //whiskey on the table, / bare feet stretched to the night fire?”
The complex interplay between the turbulence of the outside world and everyday domestic life is explored in Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s ‘The War Comes Home’. In this poem from a sequence about her grandmother Eva Sounness, Lo masterfully interlaces political events of the Second World War, being fought “in faraway places”, with the child-bearing years of Eva in Western Australia, where “the war is a headache that lasts six years, / tightening sometimes into a deep sense of unease”. Lo’s poetry is a validation and interrogation of the everyday and the domestic, and particularly of female subjectivity and experience in relation to the home and family: again, in the events and actions that take place in the interior of a house inner lives can be read.
Each swipe of the dish-sponge is anger or regret,
choices have consequences, consequences constrict
to the tightness of skin on a fruit, this feijoa
I slice into, savagely, and stop.
(from ‘In Autumn I Take Up My Knife’)
Similarly, Colette Bryce’s ‘Woman and Turkey’ counters idealised images of fireside snugness with an affirmation that the home is not always a space of security and social harmony; that domestic tasks, such as preparing a Christmas turkey, can be as violent and charged as relationships inside the home: the hearthside, whether literal or figurative, is not only the place where stories are told, but where stories take place. Link
Stephen Fry’s keynote speech at the iTunes Live Festival, 2009
I was recently listening to a podcast of British actor, writer and director Stephen Fry’s keynote speech at the iTunes Live Festival. Prior to the development of written language, he reminded the audience, music, stories and poems were always transmitted through performance. “It is very deep inside us to be in a round place listening to someone telling a story, usually with a fire flickering in the middle.” The Latin word for ‘hearth’ is focus, and “we use that word focus now for almost anything around which we concentrate ourselves”.
Today the place where members of the family congregate, where stories from the outside world are transmitted, is more like to be in front of a flickering screen than a fire. But although in many parts of the world oral storytelling may have largely been displaced by other forms of dissemination − books, newspapers, radio, film, television, internet; although buildings can be heated and food cooked with gas or electricity, it seems difficult to dislodge the fireplace from the consciousness as an embodiment (whether nostalgic or simple primal) of cosiness and protection from the outside world and as a familial gathering place. Certainly the hearth – and the social and cultural role of domestic space in general – are evoked in a number of the poems published on PIW this month.The rich Irish storytelling tradition informed Ian Duhig’s development as a poet: he grew up in a large family where his Irish mother would recite verse by heart to the congregated group of children. Irish Eugene O’Connell’s ‘Mapping the Interior’ also recognises the kitchen, and the fireside, as a place of cultural exchange and a repository, therefore, of social history. Through the image of a huge dishcloth soaking up “the individual traces / Of people who came to swap yarns” from the kitchen floor, the narrator urges an imaginative reconstruction of past kitchen gatherings and of what his forbears “Were thinking when their eyes fell, in the silence between the stories”.
The idea of a house as a holding-place for past conversations, and that interior lives can be mapped through the cartography of interior space, is explored in Julia Copus’s ‘A Soft-edged Reed of Light’, which begins: “That was the house where you asked me to remain / on the eve of my planned departure. Do you remember? / The house remembers it”. Stylistically, this poem seems to be in close dialogue with an older poem, ‘Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’. While Hardy’s poem recalls being told as a child the myth of farmyard animals kneeling at midnight on Christmas Eve, Copus’s remembers a moment that determined the future of a relationship: both look back with a degree of yearning to times of comparative innocence, faith and hope. Interestingly, ‘The Oxen’ takes as its starting point a story told by the fire; the cosy scene of “hearthside ease” that Hardy depicts contrasting with the uncertain “gloom” at the end of the poem.
The ending of Mary O’Donnell’s ‘Exiles’ also evokes the image of a fire in its reflection on the feeling of comfort within the walls of a house – illusory as it can be given that outside events, such as war or terrorism, can threaten our safety even when we are in our homes. “What jeopardy”, she asks (perhaps half rhetorically, half anxiously), “inside these walls and windows, //whiskey on the table, / bare feet stretched to the night fire?”
The complex interplay between the turbulence of the outside world and everyday domestic life is explored in Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s ‘The War Comes Home’. In this poem from a sequence about her grandmother Eva Sounness, Lo masterfully interlaces political events of the Second World War, being fought “in faraway places”, with the child-bearing years of Eva in Western Australia, where “the war is a headache that lasts six years, / tightening sometimes into a deep sense of unease”. Lo’s poetry is a validation and interrogation of the everyday and the domestic, and particularly of female subjectivity and experience in relation to the home and family: again, in the events and actions that take place in the interior of a house inner lives can be read.
Each swipe of the dish-sponge is anger or regret,
choices have consequences, consequences constrict
to the tightness of skin on a fruit, this feijoa
I slice into, savagely, and stop.
(from ‘In Autumn I Take Up My Knife’)
Similarly, Colette Bryce’s ‘Woman and Turkey’ counters idealised images of fireside snugness with an affirmation that the home is not always a space of security and social harmony; that domestic tasks, such as preparing a Christmas turkey, can be as violent and charged as relationships inside the home: the hearthside, whether literal or figurative, is not only the place where stories are told, but where stories take place. Link
Stephen Fry’s keynote speech at the iTunes Live Festival, 2009
© Sarah Ream
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