I S S U E  9

Editorial

Naush Sabah

The assertion ‘I love poetry, but not contemporary poetry’, and its converse, ‘I love poetry, but only contemporary poetry’, are worthy of each other—worth nothing. No lover of poetry . . . will say such things, no real lover of poetry will hack off yesterday’s—and always’—actuality in favour of today’s . . . no one will commit—upon art, upon nature—the politicians’ sin: of setting up a pole of dissension on a ground of unity. 

—Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry, trans. Angela Livingstone (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2010), 88 – 89.

Poetry magazines are often such a ground and much of the pleasure of reading them comes from encountering fresh critical insights and appreciations of yesterday’s poetry set alongside newly published contemporary work in ways that spark connection and enrich our relationship with the artform. Although it must be said we enjoy some dissension, for sport, and magazines are fertile ground for that too.

‘Lovers of poetry’ will have complex and compulsive feelings towards it including aversion and contemporary poetry is no monolith either since many poetries exist coevally. Still, to condemn the age is as easy as it is silly; what’s harder, and worth doing, is to know it and find the poets who make it, mark it, and transcend it. A vanishingly small readership in contrast with an over-abundance of poetry being published—and editors are keenly aware of this through the difference in submissions compared to sales—has knock-on effects that have been lamented for decades: insularity, leading to a lack of independence, leading to a lack of critical acuity in discussing or appreciating the poetry of the day. Yesterday’s poetry can seem more fixed and scrutable; despite the missing pieces, over time enough of the puzzle has been turned and arranged for us to put it together but that also makes it particularly satisfying to seek and publish critics who can take a clear measure of the moment. 

Tsvetaeva’s essay is concerned with the contemporality of the poet, the extent to which they reveal their time and place, are their time and place. She asserts that a universal work, going beyond that, reveals all that is not its time and not its place and yet: ‘Every poet is essentially an émigré . . . Upon the poet . . . there’s a particular mark of discomfort, by which you’ll know him even in his own home. An émigré from immortality in time, a non-returner to his own heaven. Take the most various of them up in your mind: whose face shows presentness? All of them are—over there. Kinship with soil or people, nationality, race, class, and that contemporality which they create—all this is only surface, the first or the seventh layer of skin, which the poet does nothing but try his utmost to shed’. The poet then co-creates the contemporary moment while being essentially, inwardly, exiled from her time and place. This feels right, the attuned apartness of the poet—or any artist—from all they have a special sensitivity to. It’s the distance necessary for any observation or creation that goes deeper than surfaces.

Take the poets of Birmingham and their particular attention to the sounds of words, their sound-meanings and sound-suggestiveness, their flighty outsideness from the place, or the ghostliness, the supranatural presence and charge to the places they create in their poems. They are unmistakably here and here becomes elsewhere in their hands, a word becomes a container for another word with a different meaning; the universal poem transcends and so embeds itself as new language. Since W. C. Williams said a poem is a machine made of words, poets have variously reconfigured the phrase to try and tell us what sort of machine that is and what it does. Here, the poem is a music-making machine of movement—it is a work song. The metal-clang of the forges is under the music of this city’s metre. This is a place though where unmaking, not recognising so not belonging, are foundational. Just as Auden returned to a city he didn’t recognise, so do we all, month by month and year by year. This surface-level kinship with Birmingham is the glue that binds this publication from issue to issue and editor to editor. In this number, it is front-loaded with two essays on MacNeice and Auden which use the city as a window into their work. I trust our readers not to tire of Birmingham as I trust them not to tire of poetry itself.

Then and now are considered side by side by Fred D’Aguiar in his review of two anthologies. There’s an appreciation of the qualities of both, their sounds and idiosyncrasies, but a challenge also to perceived atomisation. Ian McMillan considers how contemporary writers renew the sonnet form; it is living poets who till that fertile ‘ground of unity’. The present is measured by the past or else by some imagined future and despite their work being grounded in wonder and faithfulness to the thing at hand, poets often find the present wanting; it is raw material for imagining and creating anew. Jacqueline Saphra sets forth a case for poetry with purpose, for the role poets and their art might assume in the formation of progressive futures. Art as activism produces a certain resistance in me—not complete, by any means, but there is a sense that such work has a baked-in flatness. Flatness, however, has its merits too, as Noreen Masud—who reviews the Letters of Basil Bunting here—would attest. 

I’ll leave you with more Tsvetaeva: ‘The poet’s marriage to the time is a forced marriage, consequently an unreliable one. In the best case, bonne mine à mauvais jeu [making the best of a bad situation], in the worst case, continual and actual, it’s one infidelity after another with always the same lover . . .’ The ‘lover’ is that thing the poet is an émigré from and that’s what makes a poet of her.