Poem by John Tranter

Eyewear is pleased to feature one of the true pioneers of online poetry this Friday, and one of the English-speaking world's most active, engaged and compelling contemporary poetic talents.

John Tranter (pictured) is the founding editor and publisher of the online literary magazine Jacket, at http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/ and is the leading Australian poet of his generation. For more than thirty years he has been at the forefront of the new poetry, questioning and extending its procedures.

He was born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1943. He attended country schools, and took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production. He has lived in London (1966-67) and Singapore (1971-72), and now lives in Sydney.

He has published many volumes of poetry, including Urban Myths: 210 poems: New and Selected. A selection of his poems appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (New York, second edition, 1988). His recent books include The Floor of Heaven (Harper Collins, 1992), a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, At The Florida (UQP, 1993), which won the Melbourne Age Poetry Book of the Year award for 1993; Late Night Radio (1998) and several from Salt. He compiled and edited (with Philip Mead) the new Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1992), published in Britain and the US in 1995 as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry.


Care and Feeding of a Small Poem

Allow enough sunlight. Ignore
that traffic, it’s going nowhere.
Wear something nice. When I smile,

smile. Write an entry in your diary
that will display, to future generations
of grieving fans, your fastidious manners.

Don’t let on how you grovelled
and sobbed when you were ten.
Stay away from violent or distressing movies.

A special recipe would go well here:
the baked eel you fondly imagine
everyone likes. And a watercolour,

or, failing the talent for that, a photograph
of a child on an empty, rain-soaked beach.
Write about how you live life to the full,

despite the migraine and the panic attacks.
Now secure all this in a locked box
and throw away the key.


poem by John Tranter

Cope Can't

Wendy Cope has been quoted by the BBC as suggesting the position of poet laureate be binned (or banned). What a pity. Cope - one of the truly beloved poets in the UK of the last 40 years (in the company of Larkin, Hegley and Hughes in terms of public esteem) - often uses her public profile in ways that endorse a conservative view of the world - witness her public opposition to copyleft poetry online.

I admire her a great deal, and consider her a friend, but often find myself disagreeing with her opinions, if rarely disagreeing with her poems. Ironically, she seems to undermine her own position - that poets should write poems, not become statement-machines - by actually being that rare thing - a poet the press and people want to hear from, on any number of topics, not all of them poetic. Anyway, her latest jibe at the poet laureate position is, I think, sad, because she would have made a great one. She's wrong, in my book, to think the "role" of the poet is merely to "write poems". In this wired age, where intertextuality, education, and the Internet, fuse ceaselessly, poets are, above all else, master communicators - and what a "poem" is is expanding.

As Broadband moves into every UK home in 2012, what new forms of hybrid poems may emerge - ever-more performative, digital, or multidimensional? A poet laureate needs to reach out, I think, to several communities - the young, who need to believe poetry can speak to them, and also, the educated and well-off, who more and more tend to prefer novels, plays, and films, to a good collection of poems. A third community is the disenfranchised - a poet laureate can speak to and from the margins, of class or wealth as well. I have tried to speak to all three of these communities as Oxfam's poet-in-residence, 2004-0ngoing, through various events, and CDs etc. Ultimately, Andrew Motion made the position viable again, and very 21st century. Cope's complaint seems very last-century, and does much to undermine what could be an increasingly innovative and wide-reaching remit.

Eulogy For Jack Swift

Jack Swift was a Montreal lawyer and art collector, who died over Christmas, in the Eastern Townships, at the age of 72. He was also my father's brother, and my closest family friend. He was more than an uncle, but also my mentor, introducing me to many of the key interests of my life so far: Ireland, literature, theatre, music, film, and the genius of queer culture. Below is the eulogy I wrote for his funeral, edited a little, as some of the comments are too personal for a blog.

...

Those who knew Jack Swift will know that, in his dying, the world has lost an extraordinary figure. We are so often informed by the media that X or Y is charismatic or larger than life that we sometimes forget to test such claims against our own experience. John A. A. Swift was truly larger than life - the sort of brilliant, compelling enthusiast, bon vivant and interlocutor who instantly dominated - no other word will do - almost any situation he found himself in. In his modes of personal and public conduct (which had its tragic dimensions, to be sure) there was something of genius.

Jack Swift did nothing by halves - but always with grandiose intent, and extravagant style. In many ways Jack was an heir to Oscar Wilde - with the intriguing addition - suitably paradoxical - of that killer legal mind of his that made Jack equally enjoy reading Carson's masterful prosecution of Saint Oscar during his trial; in this way, exemplifying the fusion of Walter Pater's 19th century aestheticism and a more 18th century Swiftian approach to rhetorical style.

I wish to place Jack in such a literary context because that is what he himself did - and how he lived his own richly-imagined, complex and complicated life. Jack Swift lived the life that Pater inspired Wilde to, when he wrote that life should be lived as if a work of art, beyond moral utility, sufficient unto itself for justification:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

In this way, Jack Swift's life was a success. I can think of few other people who have so consistently, throughout their life, pursued beauty with such desire. As a child, I recall Jack's wonderful gifts (wonderful being one of his key words) - he loved giving people lovely things and was often superbly generous (he had a tender heart as we know). In my case, the gift was books. At Christmas, he'd sign the book with the year, and his name. So it is, I still treasure Irish Fairytales - Christmas 1972. Jack was fascinated by Ireland and its myths.

...

Jack would have enjoyed being a Sultan or Asiatic potentate one imagines, if only for the Byzantine patterns on the tiles, and the golden pillows. Jack had a definite genius as an interior decorator, of course - who can forget his various impeccably, if exotically furnished homes, in Point Claire, in Westmount, and so on - all decked out with the style and pomp of Kane's Xanadu. His taste in antiques, and art objects, was impeccable. Jack once explained to me, driving back from the Shaw Festival, the philosophy behind his seemingly wilful extravagance: Otto Preminger.

As the possibly apocryphal story goes, Preminger, a young man over from Europe, arrived in America an unknown quantity. He promptly checked himself in to the best room at the best hotel in New York, without the means to foot the bill. Within days, word had circulated that he was there. Soon, the cream of New York's show biz world was seeking him out. Suddenly, the penniless man had work.

Jack loved the idea of such self-created importance - the perfomativity, the event, that declares a person's wonderful difference, indeed, their panache. In Jack's impressively decorated Montreal office of Swift & Associates, there hangs a solemn portrait of a bald, round-faced gentleman, dressed in the manner of a mid-Victorian solicitor. Visitors arriving at the offices might be forgiven for assuming that the portrait was the founder of an august, longstanding law firm. But no.

Jack had simply spotted the portrait, and the uncanny resemblance to himself. Jack was the first in his family to go to university (though thanks to him not the last) - and was the first lawyer in his family, starting the firm himself, after graduating with superb grades from McGill, where he'd studied with, among others, Professor F.R. Scott, law scholar and modernist poet.

This portrait therefore doubles as both mirror of anxiety, and sly sense of showmanship - the Wildean mask that tells a truth. Jack loved illusion, drama, theatre - how artifice can reveal depths, how the surface is also in itself profound. Jack loved plays, playwrights, actresses, and actors.

He once invited the entire starring cast of a major motion picture to dinner at Montreal's then most-expensive restaurant, providing limousine service to and from the private party, and ended up having to deal with a very drunk, unruly Oliver Reed. Since he had no script to peddle, and no urge to be an actor himself, there was no cynical reason to spend thousands on such a blow-out, except his urge to create, and then participate in, a marvellous event.

Jack enjoyed the full delights of the theatre - as a true connoisseur - its sensuous, emotional, and intellectual offerings. He knew plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, Maxwell Anderson, and O'Neill - and the names of the players who had premiered them in London and New York - sometimes because he had been there himself. He was proud to have sat through all of Man and Superman. He loved, most of all, perhaps, the poignant, erotic, gothic family dramas of Tennessee Williams.

If one were seeking for the quintessential act of Jack's life, consider his three-day Odyssey across America, upon learning of the death of Williams (who he had once spent an afternoon with in a bar in Key West), to place a Maple Leaf on the great writer's descending coffin - thereby perfectly symbolizing his kind heart, his love of the plays, and of his homeland, and its great natural beauty.

Jack was a great patriot - he loved Montreal, he loved Quebec, and he loved Canada. Arguably, his fondness for hockey, and the Montreal Canadiens summed all these loves up in one form. One of his favourite musicals was Nelligan, which tells of the tortured life of the half-francophone, half-Irish-Canadian, poet. Jack loved to follow the careers of Canadians abroad, in music, film, theatre - like Norman Jewison, or Rufus Wainwright. He was immensely proud of the creative potential, not only of his own family, but of our home and native land.

It remains a mystery why Jack never completed his cleverly-titled play Atwater Square Dancers, about a sensitive young man seeking love. After all, his sense of drama, of language, and of occasion (as anyone on the receiving end of one of his eloquent tirades or legal letters will recall) was certainly masterful, even, at times, unparalleled. He was, though, at heart, modest. He'd come so far in life, and gotten past a few societal prejudices along the way.

Still, his enthusiastic engagement with great songs, and entertainment across decades meant his friends and close family were generously included in his appreciation of what his excellent taste early discovered. Jack was not, then, a selfish aesthete, but a critic who enlarged appreciation of things by his notice of them.

...

Though his brother Tom had the music recording career, Jack himself had a beautiful singing voice. Jack was always open to celebrating, even swooning over, delicious, delightful new talent - forever sensing when someone's artistry was both stylish and true. What Jack loved most - aside from his family and loyal friends was the idea of ceremony itself - indeed, ceremonies of experience - often consummated in courtship, or communion. This is the metaphysical tradition, that tension between the world of the sacred and sensual.

Jack helped us all to see the poetry in life. He made us believe that the dream of art and beauty is no dream at all for one with a writer's vocation, or artist's soul. Instead, it is a reality, painfully made of experience and artifice. In my case, this helped inspire me to become a poet. His encouragement and love and friendship was ongoing, from the moment I could talk, to the last time we spoke, a few weeks back.

...

No longer can we look forward to having steak tartare, a bloody Caesar, and a brilliantly bitchy, funny conversation with him. Jack admired men like Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote - men of glittering words and flamboyant creativity. Such writers, in a sense, enabled him to find a place in the world, and he was, to a degree, their creation. However, Jack with his exceptionally stylish, kind, fierce manner - his unique face, voice, perspective, and bearing - was a true original. His legacy is our memory of him, and, indeed, our great sorrow at his passing - for nothing great leaves the world without a wounding.

I think it is apt to end with a quote from Blanche DuBois:

Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella, my sister, there has been some progress since then! Such things as art - as poetry and music - such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching. Don't, don't hang back with the brutes!

In Jack Swift's heart, the tenderer feelings were flown as a flag at high mast.

Guest Review: Naomi on Women's Work

Katrina Naomi reviews
Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English
edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack

This is a whopping great book, twice the size of the last women’s poetry anthology that I read, and features 271 poets. I don’t envy the editors’ task: Eva Salzman and Amy Wack have set out to provide a modern-day canon, and I’m impressed with the variety of poetry which they’ve chosen. Eva Salzman tackles the potential ‘own goal’ of producing a gender-segregated anthology head on.

Her introduction is impassioned and thought-provoking. In my pre-poetry life, I worked as a gender officer. Yet I still found my eyebrows gravitating skywards when I heard of a new women’s anthology. Isn’t this just a teensy bit out of date? But Eva Salzman’s rigorous essay shows why such an anthology is still needed. I won’t rehash all the arguments here, buy the book and read them for yourself - it’s well worth it. But even a cursory glance through any number of anthologies will show that male poets’ work is chosen over women’s. Eva Salzman provides a battery of statistics to prove the point. She concludes by stating ‘many editors (mostly male) […] are simply not familiar enough with women poets. This book, in introducing this part of the canon and re-writing the list of “essentials”, throws down the gauntlet to future critics and editors in the hope they can better represent the true breadth and vitality of the tradition’.

While this anthology includes a wealth of poets that I would hope to find in any anthology, whether gendered or otherwise, including: Eavan Boland, Colette Bryce, Amy Clampitt, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Nual Ní Dhomhnaill, U.A. Fanthorpe, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Hacker, Mimi Khalvati, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds (more of which later), Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Carol Rumens, Anne Sexton, Stevie Smith and Anne Stevenson, the real interest in Women‘s Work is the discovery of poets that I hadn’t previously read, or knew little about.

In this latter category I would include: Amanda Dalton, Christine Evans, Lauris Edmond, Beth Ann Fennelly, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ask yourself, ask other poets, male and female, how well do you know these poets’ work? I’ll confess that I’d never heard of any of them before. Here’s a taster, from the opening lines of Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘The Small Vases from Hebron’: ‘Tip their mouths open to the sky/The turquoise, amber,/the deep green with fluted handle,/pitcher the size of two thumbs,/tiny lip and graceful waist.’ From here, the politics of the poem cuts in, culminating with: ‘But the child of Hebron sleeps/with the scud of her brothers falling/and the long sorrow of the colour red.’

The editors have provided a decent-length biography on every anthology poet, so it’s easy to find out more about the poets’ work, publishing record and background. The editors say that they set out to bridge ‘the US, UK and Ireland divides’. While I might quibble about divides, it is true that most of the poets I knew little or nothing about were North American.

On more familiar ground, I was delighted to see recognition of the work of poets whose writing deserves to be far better known, including: Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Forché and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Here is a central image from Brigid Pegeen Kelly’s ‘Imagining Their Own Hymns’, in which angels ‘are sick of Jesus,/who never stops dying, hanging there white/and large, his shadow blue as pitch’.

The inclusion of Eavan Boland in the list of poets that I feel deserve to be far better known and in the list of those I might expect to see in any anthology is deliberate, and goes to the heart of the reason for this book. Indeed, Eavan Boland has written on the difficulties of being a woman and being a poet in her wonderful Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in our Time. For anyone who doesn’t know her work, I would recommend 'An Elegy For My Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears’ and ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’. Both are included in this anthology.

Most of the poets included in Women’s Work have just the one entry on which to judge them. This is in contrast to many other anthologies of women’s poetry before them, ranging from Making for Planet Alice (1997) to Salt and Bitter and Good (1975) - one British, one North American. T here are pros and cons to both strategies. Women’s Work provides access to a far larger number of poets. Yet it can be hard to get a lasting impression from one poem. Having said that, the editors have chosen the single poems wisely.

A handful of poets have three or more poems in this anthology, namely: Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, Marilyn Hacker, Jane Hirshfield, Phillis Levin, Denise Levertov and Eva Salzmann. I do have some questions about the balance of the anthology. For example, I was surprised to find that Sharon Olds has just the one poem 'I Go Back to May 1937’ and even Sylvia Plath only has two: ‘Lady Lazarus‘ and ‘Sheep in Fog‘.

The editors discuss the issues around the ‘omissions’, some of which are down to cost - putting together an anthology is an extremely expensive exercise - but I also wonder if the editors may have decided that Sylvia Plath, at least, is so well known that space might be given over to lesser-known poets? Still, I really missed ‘Morning Song’, among many others.

However, a much-lamented omission is that of Elizabeth Bishop. It is clear that the editors worked hard to overcome this. It is generally known that Elizabeth Bishop did not want her poetry to appear in gender-segregated books, and this anthology is the poorer for that. However, in a neat move, Eva Salzman sidesteps the problem by suggesting four ‘crucial’ poems that readers should seek out - and here again, the choices are good: ‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘One Art’, ‘The Fish’ and ‘The Fishhouses’; thereby enabling Elizabeth Bishop’s work to be ‘present’, in at least some sense of the word.

There is also frequent reference to Elizabeth Bishop’s work (and to Sylvia Plath) in the introduction, which was insightful and compelling. So the editors have done their best here to square the circle. I expect they are now wishing they’d included a poem or two from the recent TS Eliot Prize winner Jen Hadfield.

I have no complaints about the range, in both content and style in this anthology. This is not specifically ‘feminist’ poetry (whatever that might be). There are poems about love, about children, about the home. I’m also happy to report that there are poems about war, greed and sex. T here are poems about virtually any issue you can think of. The book is divided into 14 sections, some of which are tighter in terms of theme than others.

The ‘themes’ where I found the strongest poems included: ‘The Work of Art (The Arts, Fine and Otherwise)’, ‘The Mechanics of a Body (The Body, Science)’, ‘A Word’s Work (Language and Writing)’ and ‘Insiders, Outsiders (Culture, Heritage, Identity, Displacement & Exile)’. And formalists will be delighted at the range of poetry on offer. There are sonnets by the bucket load.

The anthology purports to feature poetry that should be considered part of the modern canon. On the whole this works, but the inclusion of work from some poets from the early part of the twentieth century or even further back is a puzzle. For the most part these work brilliantly: poems by Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker sparkle in this book. Indeed, Emily Dickinson’s poems crop up with a pleasing regularity throughout the anthology. At six entries, she has been honoured with the largest number of poems by any poet in the book, including one of my favourites ‘341’ or ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes -’. However, try as I might, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnet 43’ and Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’ don’t cut it for me as modern poems.

If I do have a criticism, it concerns production rather than content or ideology. This anthology really could have done with another proof before going to press. There are some typos that might have been avoided, and surely will be corrected in the next edition.

I would encourage men and women to read this book. The subject matter is as wide as you can imagine and I’d be amazed if you didn’t come across a number of brilliant poets (or poems) that you’d never heard of before. You might also wonder why that is. If that is the case, then this anthology and its editors will have achieved what they set out to do.

Katrina Naomi Naomi won the 2008 Templar Poetry Competition and the 2008 Ledbury Festival Text Poem Contest. Her first pamphlet, Lunch at the Elephant & Castle is published by Templar Poetry. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. She has received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2009.

Not Since 1945

This is, perhaps ominously, the 1,221st post at Eyewear - perhaps apt for a 21st century blog reporting on the worst economic crisis of the postmodern period. Indeed, there's an argument to be made that, since Britain is now about to enter a period of economic slump not seen since the austerity years of 1945 (according to the IMF), this first decade of the new century ends, ushering in a new era - one curiously mixed in outlook: exciting because Americans seem about to renew themselves, but dire as the world grinds to a halt. Will 2010-2019 be the decade of Green fightback, as we address the climate and remake the market economy in the new image of Obama? Or is this a new Great Depression, Mark II?

Peacock on Canadian Poetry

Molly Peacock has blogged about the ways in which American and Canadian poets relate to their British peers. Now, blogs are always a bad place to locate someone's poetics, or deepest thoughts, but I for one was a little disappointed by this simplistic take on things. Now, I need to say, I am in the book she has series edited, Best Canadian Poems in English 2008, and am very proud to be; I admire her work immensely, as poet, and editor.

Still: I feel it's not enough to observe the cultural and aesthetic differences of American and Canadians, by commenting on the fact Canucks have the Queen on their money, or "stayed at home" with "mom and pop" while the noble Yanks broke free of the British empire. I think American poetry is a lot more complex than that (many American poets draw on British and European traditions) - and I know for sure British and Canadian poetry is far more complex. For one thing, Peacock doesn't really observe the biggest shadow of all hanging over her blog post: the American one.

America, despite suddenly being wonderful again, has bothered Canadians since day one, because its economic, political, and cultural clout is so impressive and often dominant. Canadians spend more time breaking away from America, without having to break away from Britain. On that point, few Canadians actually read much new British verse these days - though I agree that Babstock and Starnino do. Nor is "British poetry" monolithic - it has many streams that diverge, from the work of Prynne, to that of Lumsden.

It's ironic, to me, that Peacock hears so much Britishness in Canadian poetry, when what I tend to hear (being in Britain) is how American the Canadian poets tend to sound. Sure, Americans that have read some canonical poems by Brits - but still swaggeringly, robustly, loosely, American in tone and style. I for one think Canadian poetry would be wise to move back closer to some of the British and Irish roots of its own poetry, rather than locate all its force in the immediate geocultural facts of its environment. Poetry may come from local things, but style, form, and the conversation poems have with each other need to extend, broadly, beyond such limits, to enter the canons of the future - diverse and global as they look to be.

Poets Blog New Poems About Obama

Thanks to the Weekly Rader blog for alerting me to this - an exciting new blog about Obama's first 100 days. So far, so good.