“I have become comfortably numb.”

When I commute into the city centre, I often take a book of poems. I read them eagerly on the way in to work. But after a long day wrestling with technical, logistical, and managerial issues, on the return journey I will invariably whip out my phone and tap away mindlessly at video games.

Certainly, energy is one factor in this pattern. Poetry demands attention (and good poetry rewards it in equal or greater measure); video games demand little but give back instantly in pleasurable (but short-lived) bursts. So, perhaps when I have less to give, I settle for the lightweight option. But this doesn’t explain the pattern entirely, because I often read and enjoy poems in the comfort of my own home when I am equally or even more tired–and I rarely play video games except to “kill time.”

The other factor is how incredibly uncomfortable I find being crammed into a tube carriage with strangers. Many people seem to take it in stride; for me every second counts. More than once, while playing video games, I have missed my interchange or only just looked up in time to get off at my stop. The stimulation and quick reward cycles of video games speed time up, which is exactly what I want at the end of a long day–to fast-forward through the unpleasant commute home.

Reading poetry, time behaves differently. I am aware of how the duration of the poem relates to the duration between stops. I progress from poem to poem and stop to stop. I notice the faces around me, the dark tunnel streaming past the windows, the flickering overhead light. My senses, rather than dulled, are heightened not only to the words on the page, but the world around me.

What I have observed under the intensified conditions of a difficult commute seem to play out to some degree in the difficulties of ordinary life. This world may not have become more tragic, but tragedy now confronts us with every mouse click. Increasingly complex social, technological, and environmental issues practically assault us, vying for our attention. No wonder biased-to-the-brink-of-propaganda news options, like the headlines my fellow commuters gulp down–telling not only what to think but how to feel–have become so popular.

Overwhelmed by emotional and intellectual complexity, numbness can be tempting. But the poems that take a lens to such issues, magnifying them to the point of–if not comprehension–an increased capacity to abide human paradox, can provide a way through, rather than just a way out. A clever game or a funny clip stays with me for seconds; the impact of a good poem can overshadow the better part of a lifetime. That is why, amid the cacophony, I still turn back to poetry to give me something no angry birdsong can.

“Not wrong, just different.”

Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of my arrival in London. This afternoon I attended a reading at Keats House in Hampstead. Four volunteers read poems and excerpts from his letters dealing with the concept of Negative Capability. This ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is something I have cultivated in my writing process, and admired in the work of others. However, it occurs to me that living in London has exercised this quality in my life as well.

My first time living abroad has also been my first time living outside of California. Stepping off the curb while looking in the habitual (but wrong!) direction can cause a visceral shock. But the same can happen in conversation. Learning to navigate the labyrinthine streets of London can feel stressful and overwhelming. Likewise, the literary terrain. And semiotic estrangement produced at least one new poem.

Challenged with startling newness, the temptation is to make a split-second decision: either “they” are doing it wrong, or I am. But neither decision is sustainable, or leads to positive adjustment (for there are more of “them” than me, but in the end, I have to live with myself). So instead, I have been repeating my English wife’s third-way statement, which she used extensively while living in California: “not wrong, just different.” This in itself expands my capacity to abide the contradictory.

Also, faced with so much newness, the temptation is often to compartmentalise. Packing experiences into suitcases and labeling them neatly gives a temporary sense of order, and abstraction is necessary to shuffle around concepts in the act of complex thought. Still, besides the obvious peril of categorical error, living among the suitcases is a poor substitute for living in appreciation of their unique contents.

In one of his letters, Keats describes “the chameleon poet”, one with no colour or identity of his own. I have been able to pass, from time to time, as a Londoner (at least until I open my mouth). But more than a superficial changing of spots, I have found both a definition by contrasts of what makes me American, and a connection through universality to what makes us essentially human. I have harnessed the sense of being an outsider into my work, and made it my work to resist tidy conclusions in my art as well as my life.

“A poem is a provisional darning across that [psychic] tear.”

Behind Jane Hirshfield, drizzle smeared the windows framing London’s icons to make an impressionist painting. She read generously from new work and old standards, and even revealed some personal detail when asked about the significance of a particular poem in the Q&A. Though myself a former Berkeleyite, I had never heard her read in person. How marvelous to encounter her six thousand miles away. Though confident and grounded, she seemed to be appreciating the poetry alongside us, rather than reinforcing the fourth wall.

In her writing process, Jane embraces negative capability, transience and paradox. For her poetry, like Zen, is about eschewing shorthand categories and embracing the moment with keen observation. Though encompassing, and often wildly associative, the work always seems sure-footed–braiding narrative and philosophy, imagery and music–and always lands in interesting territory, often far from the starting point. Increasingly political, her poems never forget to “tell it slant”, and that poetry always wins out over rhetoric for the purpose of expanding the mind.

What lovely wounds and beautiful scars; what wholeness she weaves from fleeting threads–a magnificent magpie poet, gentle spirit and kindhearted kin.

Whereas Hall’s poems are largely confessional, Dunn’s might be called archaeological. Taking the first poems from each book as examples, we find in “Her Long Illness” an account in the third-person that is none-the-less told in scene, revealing intimate details of the couple’s final moments together. By contrast, Dunn’s “Re-Reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories” takes us through an examination of the stains on a book’s pages, invokes Robert Frost’s “A Considerable Speck” in addressing a fly, and only obliquely touches on the matter of grief itself in the final words of the poem: “one dry tear punctuating ‘Bliss’.”

Some of this stems from the vantage point taken up by the speaker–whereas Hall is re-living experience, going back to the hospital scenes in his mind, Dunn is reflecting, rooted in the present, casting forward and back. How each poet chooses to reflect or relive, however, and the effect this produces in the poems, brings colour to certain value differences between the two poetics.

Dunn’s reflective mode plays against contrasts to create irony. In “Arrangements” for example, the speaker visits the Registrar to receive his wife’s death certificate, asking “‘Is this the door?’ This must be it. No, no. / We come across crowds and confetti, weddings / With well-wishers, relatives, whimsical bridesmaids.” The adjacent office issuing death certificates is hardly jovial.

Dunn also contrasts their intimate lives, and his personal memories, with external social obligations and a deep-seated cultural value on keeping up appearances. In “Thirteen Steps and the Thirteenth of March”, the husband tends visitors with “Tea, sherry, biscuits, cake, and whisky for the weak… / She fought death with an understated mischief– / ‘I suppose I’ll have to make an effort’– / Turning down painkillers for lucidity.”

For Hall, the obligations that steal away the couple’s precious remaining private moments together, as well as much of their dignity, are medical in nature. His re-living is rife with shock, the first shock being the word in “‘A Beard for a Blue Pantry’” written in his wife’s “shaky large block capitals / staggering eight letters / out: L E U K E M I A”. Following this come the aftershocks.

There is the shock of humour–cracking jokes in the middle of a harrowing fight against death. In “Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room”, after “mucositis  / from the burn of Total Body Irradiation / frayed her mouth apart,” the husband enters her “antibiotic / cube … wearing a wide / paper hat, yellow mask, long white / booties like a Dallas / Cowgirl, blue paper surgical gown, / and sterile latex gloves. / Jane said he looked like a huge condom.”

There are also bodily shocks, as in last days when the wife realises her illness, in contrast to tender moments of lovemaking in the past, means “No more fucking!”, and in the remaining three nights before her death when she became incontinent and needed to be lifted by her husband onto the commode and wiped afterward. Fearing she would fall by attempting to do it herself, the husband phones for an ambulance to the hospital. She cries, and he cancels. Invoking her husband’s invented pet name, she says “‘Perkins, be with me when I die.’”

Even this sincere request is overshadowed by a note of humour, invoking a kind of “Kiss me Hardy” drama, and toying with the ethos of stoicism as in “I’m going out and I may be some time.” These moments of contrast, playing with received British mythos about how one should die, serve to underscore a relationship to grief that deliberately eschews dignity to explore the shocking physical and psychological aspects of death, and of losing the love of one’s life.

Looking through the lens of elegy is insufficient to make any sweeping, hard-and-fast distinctions about Anglo-American poetics, and looking at the cultural nature of elegy through just two poets may well be insufficient to pin down the differences in attitudes toward grief. Still, I chose these examples because they seemed to me to epitomise distinct possibilities within two culturally-informed literary treatments of similar circumstances.

Furthermore, the more I look at the distinctions between confession versus archaeology, re-living versus reflecting, and irony versus shock–the more these have become at least working models through which I have gained in understanding of the subtle differences in poetries written by two people separated by an ocean, and a common language to boot. More than this, I have come to understand the many ways in which honesty and introspection, realised through culturally-specific devices, can transform grief into art.

My aim was twofold: First, a kind of spring cleaning, aimed at de-cluttering the site and focusing the experience primarily on the articles, rather than myriad sidebar links. I have come to realise it is not so much reading on screen, as reading on a screen full of other options, that I find distracting and therefore distressing. Hopefully, in this sense, the new site mimics the experience of a print publication just that much more.

Second, I wanted to make my site more mobile-friendly. I extended the forthcoming and much-anticipated WordPress TwentyTwelve theme (still in alpha) with touch-friendly features such as a button-like top navigation menu and larger search box. The site also adapts based on screen size to avoid having to zoom and swipe around when reading on a small screen.

Although I typically have only upgraded my site every couple of years, it felt important and appropriate to serve a growing mobile readership with a better experience, and everyone else with what I hope to be a more elegant and visually-appealing presenation of my writing.

What do you think? The site may well have a few kinks to iron out (let me know if you find any). For those interested, you can also view past site designs, dating back to 1999.

The opening poem by Hilde Domin, a so-called “assimilated Jew” whose privileged life was upended by flight and exile, speaks chillingly to survivor guilt. “Build Me a House” begins, “The wind comes…” and describes it lifting old papers “like doves” and displacing us “like jellyfish” on shore. It is a gentle but inevitable force, against which she builds a pretty house. Finally, “the wind passes / like a hunter, / whose hunt is not / meant for us.”

Mascha Kaléko works through personae at an ironic distance. In “Autobiographical” she tells us, “I was a clever embryo, / I didn’t want to come into the world.” In “Meeting in the Park”, an old man encounters a pair of lovers in a “capsule of bliss”, and can only remark “poor things!” Age is a recurrent theme for Kaléko, as maturity brings its own existential difficulty. In “Future Music” not being young makes her “Glad but not cheerful.” Even though “war was my Kindergarden. My playmates / hunger and fear”, still she laments the modern condition–pollution, drugs, Napalm wars–ironically more. In the end she pleads, “Don’t tell anyone, my case is hopeless / for I suffer chronic longing / for things which don’t exist on earth.”

In “But I Say to You”, Hans Sahl praises the refugee, repeating ecstatically, “They were wonderful.” Despite not being “heroes” of the resistance, instead “often frightened and disheartened, / unwashed and covered in straw”, he insists “They were wonderful. / The moon over the barracks / was their moon alone” and asks, “Is survival an achievement / that one may call on? To do the most necessary in a moment of danger / an act worthy of fame?” Although “Some, who were not there / found it insufficient” he praises surviving and even thriving–learning languages, writing books and painting pictures (“good ones and bad ones”)–as worthy of our wonderment.

Indeed, this whole collection is wonderful–fileld with poignance, bitter irony and sweet, haunting beauty. It is a gift to have them in English, rendered into fine poetry no less, thanks to Ruth and her many supporters, and especially the poets themselves.

I wrote this poem in America for a different breed of yellow flower. But seeing the daffodils erupt in London has brought a new shade of meaning to my experience. Here it is for your enjoyment.

Yellow
The weed has no mind,
except what I lend it, there
between two concrete slabs,
growing flowers so yellow
they burn in my sight, remain
long after I close my eyes,
as if I might see them in death,
smoking torches, sulphurous
beacons, guiding me on their
tough green stalks, lighting
the damp walls of the cave,
itself a borrowed mind, thinking
what stones must think when wet—
thinking sparks from flint,
thoughts about sharpening metal,
thinking what concrete thinks
when tree roots whisper deep down,
conspiring against its underside,
first a crack, then a gap,
a birthing ground for seed dust
to take hold, and rain to fill,
and then a stalk emerges, popping
buds, which become the living
thoughts of yellow beyond yellow.

The poem was first published in Iota 85 and subsequently appeared in my short book Human Shade.

Treatment in Outline

It is the shape of things to come I like–
the edge of a puddle, describing its dryness,
the thud of a drain cover signifying snug fit.

I like the mortar as much as the brickwork,
see the leading as equal to the held panes of glass.
And the sky is described by the branches that fondle it.

To consider a droplet of rain, we consider meniscus,
and all that is held by its borders together,
or limned by proximity to what it is not–

a clothesline dividing the sky from the sky,
leaf-work stitching the horizon’s patched quilt.

The programme was designed to intersperse British poets with continental European voices, in hopes of overcoming some of the “ossification” of British perceptions of European poetry. Indeed, it was the Europeans I found most vital and captivating, and upon them I will focus for now.

Swiss poet Daniele Pantano read from his “undergraduate” work in honour of his own undergraduate students making the trip out to see him. He spoke of his time in suburban America as an “exile”, which he defined as “a city reared by eternal artifice.” His most striking work revolved around his mother’s suicide and the haunt of Nazism in Europe. In a chilling poem, his grandfather teaches him how to slaughter guinea pigs, admonishing to do it with a smile so that when “your turn” comes around, “they” will be likewise kind. Later he discovers a box of memorabilia including an iron cross and an old photo of his grandfather, whom he was always told was a chimney sweep, in an S.S. officer’s uniform. His poems were by turns spare and shocking, generous and closely controlled.

Tadeusz Dąbrowski read in Polish alongside his translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. He read deadpan, gently chewing his lip, whereas his translator brought the English versions to life with the expressivity of a BBC Radio performer. The contrast itself seemed slightly ironic, but like many of his contemporaries, Tadeusz seemed to relish irony. In discussing an argument with a friend about “the existence of God,” he pronounced the phrase while his face fought against itself to simultaneously smile and frown, making a sideways “S”. Yet his poems were not merely deconstructive for their own sake, and admitted a well-earned compassion that seemed like a kind of faith. One particularly hilarious poem following on Barthes and mocking Magritte he described as his “private war against postmodernism.” Indeed it seems that he, and the other Europeans reading last night, have worked hard to transcend a poetics of dissolution and pure effect. Poetry for them was not a game, or, if it was, the stakes were mortal.

At the intermission, Nikola arrived to sighs of relief. He rushed onstage without removing his scarf, and read in his native Macedonian while Peggy Reid followed on with her English translations. He spoke only a few words of deep gratitude to the Southbank Centre organisers for seeing him through to arriving tonight. After that, he did not introduce his poems, but read one after another, alternating with Peggy. Having heard him in Los Angeles, where he read his own work in English, it was wonderful to hear the music of his poems in their first tongue. Peggy also dramatised the English version of his work somewhat, with a careful elocution that I took for respect. “Nothing is ever new, the bus seat is always warm” he said, and yet here I felt I was witnessing something entirely new–as new as fresh joy or sorrow. With the quiet elegance of a city just covered in snow, he read poem after poem with a purity at heart that can only come from great experience and deep introspection. Here, too, is a poet writing as though life depends on it.

I crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridge, over the glittering Thames, with a renewed sense of purpose and hope–that there are poets working hard to transcend the emotional self-indulgence of confessionalism, and intellectual self-indulgence of experimental postmodernism, into something earned and true we can believe in, encompassing irony, humor, pathos and wonder–all of which filled me to overflowing last night, and stayed with me all the way home.

“Many of us became writers because we were silenced in some way, and the written self on the page speaks more authentically than we do as individuals”

The Troubadour is a small cafe in Earls Court with a basement stage that played host to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in their day. Last night, I squirmed my way through the crowd and took to the glossy black stage to read a poem as part of the launch of Magma Poetry 52. The standard of poetry, and audience–both quality of attention and sheer numbers–was remarkable. Unlike readings I have attended in America, where often the audience is composed mostly of poets and their friends, the crowd that assembles fortnightly in this cultural dungeon seems deeply committed to taking in poetry as a way of life.

Perhaps in a culture where one often does not say quite what one means in polite company, poetry serves an even more necessary function, propelled forward by two equally intense desires: to expresss authentically, but resist sentimentality. Poetry, then, speaks for those who gathered last night from all walks of life and crowded around tables like a rush-hour train, hoping to be taken somewhere wonderful. I was. And I am grateful to those who planned it, those who read, and those who listened for making last night something special.

I will also be reading this poem as part of the official launch on Monday, March 5^th at 8PM at the Troubadour in London. If you happen to be in the area, it would be great to see you there!

Single issues and subscriptions are also available on the Magma Poetry website.

Unfortunately, it also means that it did not progress further to a commendation or award. Still, it is nice to know the poem made it this far along. And I suppose if we are still living in the UK around this time next year, I will have a chance to enter again. Looking forward to the announcement of winners next month.