The Open Door

When Poetry magazine reached its hundredth year in 2012, it had published more than 40,000 poems, including many of the century's most famous: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Eliot's first published poem; Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"; Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon." Choosing 100 poems for a 100th year collection must have been agonising, but one of the best things about The Open Door is the rich, conversational introduction by editor Christian Wiman, in which he explains not only the choices he's made but his view of poetry. It's an inclusive, strident view, insisting both that poetry is a public good and that it requires no public defence. He concedes that poetry for many will remain remote and inaccessible, but wonders, reverently, "by what unconscious routes poetry is reaching into lives that seem to have nothing to do with it? Who knows what atomic energies are unleashed by a solitary man or woman quietly encountering some arrangement of language that gives their being - shunted aside by chores and fears and who knows what - back to them? This is why I regret adding to the clamor over poetry's 'relevance.' The reaction is defensive and misguided, not because there is no hope for elevating poetry's importance but because its power is already greater than any public attention can confer upon it." I respond instinctively to the vision of poetry as majestic, almost miraculous, certainly unquenchable whatever disrepute, in an unworthy age, it might fall into. The best poems require no more defence than a Monet or a sunset. They pull you up short, break open the world you think you're in and show it to you afresh, lit by myth and aglow with gods. They give you back what you didn't know you'd lost.

One of the poems that did that for me was Mary Karr's "Disgraceland," published in the magazine in 2004. The poem opens with her first communion, describes a parched and luckless wandering, and ends like this:

When my thirst got great enough to ask,
     a clear stream welled up inside,
          some jade wave bouyed me forward,

and I found myself upright
     in the instant, with a garden
          inside my own ribs aflourish.

There, the arbor leafs.
     The vines push out plump grapes.
          You are loved, someone said. Take that

          and eat it.

 

 

Magic words

Olivia loves books. Our tastes don't always coincide but there are several family favourites in her growing collection. We like Charlie and Lola. We're happy to read One Fish, Two Fish many times over, which is just as well. 

My reintroduction to the world of children's books after a thirty-year gap has been instructive. Some books are enduring, like Dr Seuss and other mid-century classics: Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, where the monkeys all have wild 60s sideburns, and the very sweet Are you my mother?, published in 1960, which I remember from my 80s childhood. I remember Each Peach Pear Plum, and still delight in its lovely woodland feel. Some newer books are already classics, like Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo. Not all her books are that good, but this and a few others are cleverly plotted and charmingly rhymed, and Axel Scheffler's illustrations conjure a vivid and inviting world. I also love Sarah Garland's books, with titles like Going Swimming and Doing the Washing. These are rich vignettes of ordinary life, in which the illustrations beautifully embody the quality of life the simple stories evoke: bright, fluid and warm, imperfect but deeply nourishing. The unnamed mother in these books is a role model for me.

I've also seen beautifully illustrated and touching stories that leave the toddler unmoved. They're clearly aimed at sentimental parents, not imaginative two-year-olds. Other failures come from successful authors who turn out sequels that don't measure up. At the library the other day I discovered several sequels to a book I remember fondly: There's a Hippopotamus on my roof eating cake - none of which are really justified. As a plot device, there are only so many things to which a hippopotamus on the roof eating cake can reasonably lend itself.

More troubling to me is that so many books still reflect a world where everybody's white and protagonists, especially animals, are male by default. Almost worse than this, though, are the opposite books, where diversity is the subject, not the fabric. 'Look, brown babies are just as good! Kids with glasses can have almost as much fun!' These books only reinforce the hierarchies they're trying to overturn. They're morals without stories.

Still more disturbing, though, are the children's books - and there are many of them - that are just badly written. Stories that go nowhere, storytelling that's clumsy, prose that's loose and bland, and, unforgiveably, verse that doesn't scan. Why should little children be subjected to bad writing? Why should these tender minds - so receptive, so retentive - be offered anything less than well-conceived stories told in elegant prose or flawless verse?

If the worst books comine bad writing with storyless morality, the best books bring together the magic of the imagination with the magic of words. They show little minds what words, as well as pictures, are capable of, giving them a taste of how delicious language can be. That's why, I think, Dr Seuss has endured the way he has. Even at 60 or 70 years old, his words still dazzle and tickle. They cast an unfailing spell.

No one chooses refugee camps

On World Refugee Day, this poem ‘Home,' by Warsan Shire. 

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
...
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
...
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

This miracle in black ink

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
  O! none, unless this miracle have might,
  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Since he was wont to muse on mortal things, it seems fit that Shakespeare’s supposed birthday (the true date, like so much else about him, is unknown) is also the day he died. Death — sad mortality — loomed large to him, and so it’s a marvel of poetic irony that 400 years since the day he died, the world still bears witness to his life. So much of his surviving verse bears out his belief that verse could survive death, his will that it would. The miracle of his work is that it worked. His hand, after all, was strong enough. On this day, he’s not 400 years dead; he’s immortal.