Arto Vaun on Jee Leong Koh's 'Attribution'

Attribution by Jee Leong Koh 

I speak with the forked tongue of colony.
                                          Eavan Boland 'The Mother Tongue'

My grandfather said life was better under the British.
He was a man who begrudged his words but he did say this.

I was born after the British left
an alphabet in my house, the same book they left in school.

I was good in English.
I was the only one in class who knew “bedridden” does not mean lazy.

I was so good in English they sent me to England
where I proved my grandfather right

until I was almost sent down for plagiarism I knew was wrong
and did not know was wrong, because where I came from everyone plagiarized.

I learned to attribute everything I wrote.
It is not easy.

Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote.
Sometimes I think I wrote the words I wrote with such delight.

Often the words I write have confusing beginnings
and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me.

from New Poetries V © Jee Leong Koh

While in exile in Paris in 1929, Nigoghos Sarafian, one of the very few modernist Armenian poets of the twentieth century, wrote: 'We can retain our Armenian essence intact even if we write in foreign languages and on non-Armenian subjects. It is a matter of finding a universal form free from romanticism. We Armenians must exploit to the full our dispersion, our exile'. This was only 14 years after the Armenian Genocide, so to make such a bold statement was mostly anathema among Armenian intellectuals and artists. Collective trauma is usually followed by a strong desire to refortify and assert cultural and national traditions and values. And one of the places where this groping-in-the-dark plays out is in language. This is certainly also true in the effect British colonialism has had on various peoples. The dominant or host language either becomes an enclosure or a tool for empowerment, or perhaps something in between. 'Attribution', by Jee Leong Koh, attempts to reconcile this tenuousness, when one is culturally both inside and outside English, grappling with its seductive, sometimes contradictory powers.

Right from the beginning, by way of the poem's title and the quote by Eavan Boland ('I speak with the forked tongue of colony'), Koh makes clear that the poem is more a question than answer. Yet the poem's diction and form counteract this implied conflict. Written in loose-metered couplets with the majority of lines end stopped, the poem exudes a directness and overall lack of heightened imagery. Consequently, one is pulled into the language itself in a starker fashion. 'I was good in English. / I was the only one in class who knew 'bedridden' does not mean lazy.' The repetition here, as well as the schoolboy-like assertion, hints at the potential for stuckness within cultural hybridity. The speaker is both confident and insecure, wanting to point out his English skills when a child, but perhaps aware that this also reveals a desire to assert his place within the host culture.

It is of no little importance that the one metaphor in the poem is the English alphabet itself. 'I was born after the British left / an alphabet in my house, the same book they left in school.' The alphabet is both a remnant but also the future place of identity-making. And the grandfather, rather than resisting the colonial imposition, claims a preference for it, though begrudgingly. The speaker's later plagiarism highlights this quality of being uncertain about the 'ownership'  of English. 'Sometimes I cannot find out who first wrote the words I wrote.' Ultimately, 'Attribution' is a poem about loss. Yet its matter-of-fact rhythms and ambiguous ending reveal an empowered acceptance of the diasporic condition. 'Often the words I write have confusing beginnings / and none can tell what belongs to the British, my grandfather or me.' Sometimes confusion itself is a means to self-realization.

Arto Vaun

Michael Schmidt on 'Classics'

The word 'classic' has specific meanings and implications, none of them to do primarily with popularity or range of appeal. Penguin Classics come close to the present in the work they include but in general acknowledge that a classic has already endured; a text can only become classic when it is stable, that is, when the author is no longer there to alter it. It would have strained the classic category had Robert Lowell, reviser par excellence, or David Jones, or W.H. Auden been admitted in their lifetimes. A living classic is put to death as soon as classic status is conferred. The text is set in stone. Several generations of schoolchildren read selections of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn and never had an inkling that Crow or Moly had occurred. Both poets stayed in the happy time-warp of their late twenties for decades, and they weren't even called Classics, though 'set text' is the next category down.

from New Poetries III © Michael Schmidt

Will Eaves on William Letford's 'Sunday, with the television off.'

Sunday, with the television off. by William Letford

I think of the future. My death bed. I imagine the man I will be. Then I pay that
man a visit. Ask him, what would you do?

So I leave the car and walk across town. Knock on my father's door to say hello
and listen to his stories, the ones I've heard before.

It's like I've travelled in time. Now he knows that someone is listening. On the
way home, the sun falls behind the buildings, and I walk into a supermarket.

from New Poetries V © William Letford

The poet thinks of the future, of his death and of his father; he makes me think about them, too, and about the way in which listening is so subtle a part of human attachment – a sensory connection that is the precondition for love, which matters whether or not we feel or can express love -- and of how not listening amounts to a cancellation of others' lives, and often informs our deepest regrets.

I think, too, of Henry James, when he said that 'to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement'. James's observation comes from the preface to his novel, What Maisie Knew. He is pondering more than prosaic clarity: he is speaking about what people like Maisie know whether or not they can express it, what they know regardless of what they are told they know, and therefore what they instinctively perceive, beyond the trap of language. It's a good way of thinking about poetry as well, and particularly William Letford's sort of poetry, which builds up
statements and rhythms like a run of bricks, so that you can see the wall clearly, but also sense, equally clearly, how real the rubble of life is – the state of 'muddlement' that is itself one of life's 'sharpest realities'.

I think this is a wonderful little poem. The muddle of going back in time, as one thinks about absent people, or mourns them, perhaps; the way one feels their absence as a kind of missed opportunity to right wrongs; the secondary loss (or is it a gain?) as the poet is brought back to himself and 'the sun falls behind buildings'; the artificially lit supermarket – all are present to me, and essentially mysterious.

Will Eaves

David Yezzi on Rory Waterman's 'The Lake'

The Lake by Rory Waterman

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.
When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

from New Poetries V © Rory Waterman

In the space of eight well-crafted lines, Rory Waterman's 'The Lake' takes the reader from the surface of the natural world—the surface of a lake—to the menacing undercurrent of memory below. The poem’s opening sets up an expectation of bucolic serenity—lake, May, hawthorns—then quickly dashes it with 'foaming and stinking', a foreshadowing of something rotten in this leafy scene:

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.

Perhaps it is off-season or merely off-hours but the parking lot is empty and the concessions closed in this place of recreation or resort spot (maybe). Shuttered boardwalks are particularly eerie because of the missing crowds that haunt the place by their absence, like ghosts. One ghost in particular rises in the speaker's mind, the spectre of a girl raped and murdered near this spot:

When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

Waterman sets up a disturbing tension between the small boy and the young victim and meaningless violence, echoed eerily by the meaningless 'smile' of the crescent moon. The most powerful moments in the poem for me are not the gut-punches of 'full of come' or 'gagged', though those are almost searing in intensity. It is the quiet, horrible precision of 'in case' (meaning 'in case she somehow survives') and 'with care', which conveys the cool calculation and even perhaps, and more horribly, the tender thought of a savage murderer.

The motion of the poem is cinematic and reminds me of David Lynch's shot in Blue Velvet, as it sweeps past an average front yard and a gleaming fire truck before plunging into the undergrowth to reveal (even there!) an animal violence underlying the appearance of things.

David Yezzi's latest collection of poems is Azores (Swallow Press).

Our readers write

A bear disapproves of Pound's middle period.

Welcome to 'Our readers write', where we throw out a question related to poetry and ask readers to jump up and catch it. Got a question you'd like answered? Drop it in the comments section for use in the near future.

Poets like a chance to take a swing at one another, but, as this blog aims to portray only positive poetry vibes, here's a question that comes through the back door: are there any particular poets whose work you don't think much of, but whom you think everyone should read?

Henry King on Evan Jones's 'Little Notes On Painting'

Little Notes On Painting by Evan Jones

Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris. Take a Greek
painter and put him in Madrid. Take a Quebeçois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian. You wouldn’t
believe what I’m doing now. I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow. There are fewer and fewer days
like this left; they fall like uses for wax paper. Don’t ever
mention abstract artists to my face or my books, my friend, for
who owns a house and has never been kissed in one? Right?
Take a Russian painter and put him in New York beside
a Mexican painter. I am two feet from the bed; the pillows
and blankets are swelling and rising towards the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter. Take a Javanese painter and put him
in Cairo. The phone won’t ring anymore. I called a street artist
“Picasso” but thought better of it as all those women were
going down on him one at a time and bearing him children.
Take a little-known Nova Scotia folk painter and put her,
posthumously, in Cleveland or Skopjë. The mattress is filling
with honey and the box spring is humming like bees; my hand is
in my pyjama bottoms. I stop and say, it isn’t love
that makes you weak, to the night table or maybe the bed frame.
Take an Italian Futurist for example. Take a 19th century
Japanese print and slip it between the mattress and the box spring.
Take a pregnant painter by the hand. I’m home and touching
the unborn child of her easel. It would be nice for a night
if silence was the colour of water but it would be nicer
to sleep in the desert. Take a stolen Brueghel from
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and bury it
on Easter Island. I arrange the sheets every morning
to resemble Mount Athos so that every night I sleep
on God’s arm. What did I say about abstraction?
Take a British painter from a home he’s not once ever loved
and ask him why he never paints the same thing. Take a moment
to join an art school, the aristocracy or merely buy
a beret. A photograph of a painter’s palette is no
good to anyone and the sky outside is nothing like Van Gogh.
I just wanted to say that the moon’s going down.
I remember every moment. Thank you.

from New Poetries V © Evan Jones

'Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris' – aha! I know this one: it's Picasso, isn’t it. Or maybe Juan Gris. Either way, the smoke from Gauloises in Montmartre cafés immediately fills one's eyes and nose. 'Take a Greek painter and put him in Madrid' – El Greco, at a guess. But then,

                                                   Take a Quebeçois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian.

The trivia’s getting harder. Then the speaker steps in:

                    I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow.

Perhaps he’s revising for an exam – art history, probably – and meditating upon displaced artists. (Is an American displaced in Albany? A Quebecois in Paris? Are they doubly so?) But he's tired, and the room's spinning, 'The pillows / and blankets are swelling and rising towards the ceiling.' Dream-logic is taking hold, and with it, the teenager's sexual imagination:

                                                               I called a street artist
“Picasso” but thought better of it as all those women were
going down on him one at a time and bearing him children.

For a teenager stuck at home, with school in the morning, what could be more glamorous than to be a painter, to escape to Europe and get laid? 'Take a British painter from a home he’s not once ever loved' – the sentiment recalls Baudelaire:

Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! ('Le Voyage')

The whole world becomes a playground: 'Take a stolen Brueghel from / the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,' – remember how Picasso was brought in for questioning when the Mona Lisa was stolen? – 'and bury it on Easter Island.'

Finally, 'I just wanted to say that the moon’s going down' – it's dawn, but it's also Diana, chaste mistress of the chase, performing fellatio, as in a pornographic Poussin.

'Thank you', the poem ends. For what, though? Perhaps just for listening. But the operative word through the poem is 'take': take a painter, take a woman, take a moment. This may be rapacious, but it may also be generous, as in 'Please, take this.' And what is it to create art, if not to urge, almost demand somebody to take your creation? A gift economy is in play. But as Lewis Hyde wrote about gifts, 'There are times when we want to be aliens and strangers.' 'Take a Russian painter and put him in New York beside / a Mexican painter…'

Henry King

Helen Tookey on Lucy Tunstall's 'Aunt Jane and the Scholar'

Aunt Jane and the Scholar by Lucy Tunstall

In 1956, or thereabouts,
Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful
scholar from the subcontinent.

Her house is tall and thin like a doll’s house.
Pictures are filling in the walls,
but where the paint shows through in a chink
it is the authentic dull pink of oxblood and lime.

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still
like a still ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers (she must remember) a long trip
to the only part of Canada where it never snows,
weeks and weeks of sky and sea and sickness like snow-sickness.

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

We can easily imagine ‘Aunt Jane’ as the protagonist of a novel, say by E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf (conveniently ignoring the mention of ‘1956’, which puts her a bit too late for either of them); yet I think that this poem of sixteen lines tells us as much and as little about her as we would ever discover from that putative novel. The poem is wonderfully compressed, economical; yet we feel that it has given us the essence of a life, and of the oblique yet strangely close relationship between an elderly spinster and (perhaps) a child or young girl, neither of whom really fits in the proper adult world of relationships and talk and work. ‘In 1956, or thereabouts’, the poem begins, ‘Aunt Jane fell in love with a beautiful / scholar from the subcontinent’. We hear no more about this scholar – the poem immediately switches into a kind of timeless vivid present, the point of view of the speaker visiting the elderly, spinster aunt – yet the opening lines inform everything that follows; we can imagine the implied narrative, the impossible, impermissible love, the forbidden realms of scholarship, the single journey to Canada, and then the withdrawing into the ‘cloistered’ life in her house in London, which is ‘tall and thin like a doll’s house’ – a kind of pretend version of ‘real’ adult life.

The poem draws us (with its speaker) in close, through its language, which in the third stanza becomes a mimetic echo-chamber:

We take tea in the garden which is like a well
with its high walls, and deep shade and the underwater
grey-green of the thyme lawn; and sitting still like a still
ancient cloistered thing at the bottom of a well

she remembers...

We are caught, disturbingly so, inside chiasmus and echoing sound-patterns (‘well’, ‘walls’, ‘water’, ‘lawn’, ‘still’, ‘still’, ‘well’). The language holds us, with the speaker, with Aunt Jane, in a kind of stasis, immured and motionless, with only memory as a kind of half-life.

The final couplet, spare and compressed, completes the mimesis:

Ever after a drawing-in, this square
of London sky, and the cypress leaning over.

With their echo of Owen’s ‘drawing down of blinds’, the lines convey loss (the ‘beautiful scholar’, the journeying, the possibilities that then seemed open) and the slow ongoing aftermath of that loss; Aunt Jane’s horizons are reduced to the ‘square / of London sky’, while companionship comes only from the cypress, which leans over her perhaps with solicitude but also with age – like the ‘tall’, ‘thin’ house and the ‘deep’, ‘underwater’ garden, another mirroring of Aunt Jane herself. The last two lines seem to tell us so little of Aunt Jane’s life after its early promise, and yet (‘Ever after a drawing-in’) they tell us everything.

Helen Tookey