Smart Devices E-Book

Carol Rumens

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 260

Beschreibung

A year of hand-picked poems and commentaries from the Guardian's 'Poem of the Week' blog. Carol Rumens has been contributing 'Poem of the Week' to the Guardian for more than a dozen years. Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs! No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. 'A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.' Rumens partly agrees with Williams but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem 'as a more flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective, super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain'. She tries to avoid poems built from kits with instruction manuals. She looks for surprises, and she surprises us.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

HOWARD ALTMAN -

The Lake of Memories

PETER DIDSBURY -

A Fire Shared

KAREN MCCARTHY WOOLF -

Outside

FRED D'AGUIAR -

Boy Soldier

RUTH FAINLIGHT -

The Coloration of Feathers

JUDITH WILSON -

A Bone Flute

DENISE RILEY -

Death makes dead metaphor revive

ZOHAR ATKINS -

The Oy of the Poyem

JOHN ASHBERY -

Breezeaway

ELAINE FEINSTEIN -

April Fools' Day

MAYA CHOWDHRY -

Microbial Museum

R.F. LANGLEY -

To a Nightingale

JEAN 'BINTA' BREEZE -

Tweet Tweet

TONY CONRAN -

Jasper

SAUNDERS LEWIS -

Lavernock

- translated by Harry Gilonis

MIRIAM NASH -

The Walking Father Blues

NAUSHEEN EUSUF -

Poem for Professor Frye

MILES BURROWS -

But Those Unheard

KAMELA DAS -

Someone Else's Song

ZAFFAR KUNIAL -

Us

ROSS COGAN -

Lapstrake

VAHNI CAPILDEO -

They (may forget(their names(if let out)))

SYL CHENEY-COKER -

The Colour of Stones

ROBERT SHEPPARD -

Prison Camp Violin, Riga

MALIKA BOOKER -

Sin Visits Me

IAN GREGSON -

Squaks and Speech

SIOBHAN CAMPBELL -

Origin of the Mimeo

MIMI KHALVATI -

Everywhere you see her...

NAOMI FOYLE -

Your Summer Arm

W.S. GRAHAM -

How Are the Children Robin

JANE YEH -

Musk-Ox

KATERINA ANGHELAKI-ROOKE -

The Barber Shop

- translated by Jackie Wilcox...

PAUL HENRY -

The Black Guitar

CLIFF FORSHAW -

Loop

BILLY MILLS -

Tiny Pieces

ANDREW LAMBETH -

Why the swan

PHILIP FRIED -

Yoga for Leaders and Others

ROBYN BOLAM -

Moving On

MARILYN HACKER -

A Braid of Garlic

JOHN KINSELLA -

Chainsaw

PETER BALAKIAN -

World Trade Center / Mail Runner / '73

YVES BONNEFOY -

The light, Changed

- translated by John Naughton

ANNE STEVENSON -

The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves

MAURICE RUTHERFORD -

The Autumn Outings

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY -

Ay, but Can Ye?

- translated by Edwin Morgan

LEAH FRITZ -

Going, Going...

EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN -

The Words Collide

JEE LEONG KOH -

In His Other House

DICK DAVIS -

Political Asylum

MARIA TERESA HORTA -

Poem

- translated by Lesley Saunders

STANLEY MOSS -

Visiting Star

FRANK ORMSBY -

Fireflies

Acknowledgements

Index of Poem Titles

About the Author

SMART DEVICES

52 Poems from The Guardian ‘Poem of the Week’

selected and reviewed by

CAROL RUMENS

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2019.

Cover: ‘Lightning’ © Wayne Hogan www.waynehogan.com

Editorial material copyright © Carol Rumens, 2019. The right of Carol Rumens to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

Individual poems are published by agreement with their respective poets, publishers and estates. All copyrights are retained by their original holders. See pp. 236–8 for details.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 780 2 Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 781 9 PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 782 6

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

IN MEMORY OF YURIJ DROBYSHEV

1932 – 2015

Your shadow, once light, Over the calendar of years the years re-write

INTRODUCTION

This anthology steals its title from the digital technology where, not so many years ago, the concept of the ‘Books Blog’ was unheard of. But the phrase is intended to set up an antithesis. Poems, which fundamentally rely on technology no more complex than human voices and senses, are devices of a different existential order. Their slow connections take us farther and deeper into human being.

      As a metaphorical vehicle, the mechanical carries some of poetry’s structural attributes. William Carlos Williams famously declared in The Wedge, ‘A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.’ I prefer to see each poem as a more flexible implement, a miniature neocortex – that super-connective, multi-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain. As for redundancy, the poet’s task is to convince us that no word is redundant, however wildly plucked. For some advanced readers, metaphor is dead as the exclamation-mark (see the latter bouncing back in Frank Ormsby’s poem ‘Fireflies’ (p.231). But Williams’s emphasis on language is important. The poem’s external machinery is verbal; its wordy devices – line and stanza, figure and image – compel readers’ focus towards language itself.

      The ‘web-log’ is essentially a short form, and, in the case of the Guardian ‘Poem of the Week’, both the prose review (the ‘blog’) and the poem are expected to add up to an optimal 800 words, although a little leniency prevails. I usually choose published work, encountered first in print and the sweet idleness of the days spent reading for pleasure. While the online poems cover a wide range of historical periods, the fifty-two poems in Smart Devices, representing a year’s worth of work, but no particular year, are all contemporary. Some have seasonal references, and my arrangement hints at the traditional, newly beleaguered arc of the turning year. That’s the extent of the ‘agenda’. I’ve represented a small fraction of the contemporary work featured over the years. Maybe another day I’d have made different choices. The hundreds of equally worthwhile poems excluded can easily be tracked down online in the Guardian’s ‘Poem of the Week’ archive.

      All the poems featured during twelve-plus years of ‘Poem of the Week’ will have made the first move towards attracting my attention, will have stirred or startled me, pleasingly puzzled or simply pleased me, shown me language at its most precise, or conducted a survey of its imprecisions. The poem will have convinced me the voice it sounds in my head is authentic and trustworthy. Importantly, it will have compelled me to write something, not a poem, as I’d prefer, but a review. If it interests me, I’ll believe I have something interesting to say about it.

      I don’t discount a poem’s ‘message’. Politics and eco-politics play a part in my choice. Sermons have limited appeal, even when eloquently preached, but I like a poem to express a certain grounded idealism and, however questioningly, the sense that an objective truth exists. ‘Sacred’ would seem a dodgy word, but, for a humanist, it invokes not theos but daimon, the mysterious appearance that is god-like. Why do so many contemporary poems enact or narrate transformation, although with humility and caution? The need for a poetry of vision and encounter might be all the more pressing for contemporary culture. Our technological forms of mimesis favour the feel-good epiphany (blue sea, brave goal, beautiful child). The satisfaction of these images, even for their creators, often proves temporary. The uniqueness and complexity of the experience they represent dies in stereotype, unexplored. I believe we all have intensely interesting truths to communicate, and, while not everyone’s a poetic genius, the talent for language is beautifully commonplace. Viva the neo-cortex.

      The poem on the webpage is surrounded by capitalism’s crudest banalities, and, by words alone, out-smarts them. Poems challenge ‘marketing content’. They evade the deductions of surveillance, the super-swift predatory algorithms which invade our imaginations and Midas them into money. I like poems that grab the digital language (which is rich and fascinating) and pin it on an intellectual and moral dissecting table, as does Zohar Atkins’s ‘The Oy of the Poyem: 28 Lessons in nonMastery’. Siobhan Campbell’s ‘Origin of the Mimeo’ tackles a now-obsolete smart device with potent political effect. Poems love new language, but only make it significant when they press it into the service of bigger human stories.

      There are advantages to the digital platform, of course. Online reviews don’t have to be lightweight; they can gain substance from hyperlinks that open magic boxes of reference and cross-reference, and demolish the immigration laws that divide disciplines. But what’s really important is the democratised interaction enabled between the contributing journalist and the readers who post comments ‘below-theline’. These conversations are the main factor in the success of the ‘Poem of the Week’ blog, and the reason I still love doing it and taking part in it.

      I inherited it in October 2007 from its gifted founding-editor, Sarah Crown. My first choice, a recommendation from a Welsh colleague, was the late Iwan Lloyd’s ‘Far Rockaway’ translated by Robert Minhinnick. I won’t easily forget the horror I felt on reading the tagline:

In order to prevent ‘Poem of the Week’ from going the way of all flesh I’m taking the reins. This week’s poem is a dreamy choice to chime with National Poetry Day.

I shuddered, not only at the clichés, but the authoritarian sound of ‘I’m taking the reins’. There were eleven comments that first week, and they were generous, despite the ‘positioning’. In subsequent weeks, though, while the number of commentators increased, challenges were delivered. ‘My poem of the week this isn’t’, one poster wrote of a subsequent choice, and so I had to learn that the poem often wouldn’t be as loved as I thought it deserved, or loved at all. Suggestions that I was involved in exchanges of favours, including accepting payment from publishers, were more infuriating. They were, are, always will be completely baseless. I answered back, not always politely.

      The blog increased steadily in popularity. The number of comments could hit 300 or more, but at that point, there was much ‘off-topic’ chit-chat and argument. At the time of writing, in summer 2019, they have settled at around 150. The discussion is sharp, eloquent, focused, and relatively troll-free, but not, I’m grudgingly glad to say, unquestioningly approving.

      Sometimes, we laugh. Sometimes, we’re cruel. A comment might seem too jokey to be mean, and sometimes it’s too mean to be jokey. When Jane Yeh’s wonderful poem, ‘Musk Ox’, was derided in two words, ‘boll-ox’, or when the poem from Jon lee Keoh Steep Tea generated the complaint, ‘…another week of feeble tea’, the word-play didn’t make the unpleasantness palatable. Re-reading comments like these, and far worse, I still feel the jab in the guts the poet may have felt. But wordplay of the more neutral variety is a delight of the blog: the posters are very good at it, whether pointing out the fact that ‘painkiller’ contains the word ‘ink’ or suggesting ‘Fake Muse / Is worse than / Fake News’. Sometimes people post parodies, imitations or simply poems of their own. I’ve done it myself. A critical riposte that rhymes has mnemonic qualities: ‘Roses are red, / Violets are blue. /Rhyming is hard, / Meter is, also.’ The latter was meant as a joke, but the most frequently posted serious criticism of contemporary poems is that they’re ‘chopped-up prose’. Possible answers have included searching out the hidden rhythms or assonantal qualities of the work, blaming the Americans, or asking ‘Why does it matter?’

      In the past, a poet sometimes contributed to the inter-pretation of his or her work (or joined in a quarrel about it) That tradition declined. If a poster’s poem is chosen, as happens, because many of the posters are serious poets in their own right, the poet tactfully withdraws. Still, I am sure that most glance at what’s said. It would be foolish not to, when there are so many devoted acts of close reading and analysis below-the-line.

      I hope readers will follow the links included at the foot of each article. Close-reading the poem in question is only a part of what happens. For instance, during a somewhat tedious discussion of the identity of the new wife and former wife in Miriam Nash’s ‘the Walking Father Blues’ (p xxx), the issue of poetic mentoring arose. The question of whether poets can learn to write poetry is always a hot one. This time it sparked an exceptionally well-argued debate.

      A week’s discussion can be a swirl of hostilities or a marvellous act of shared, collaborative reading. It can be both, where the hostility is backed by good arguement. In the potw community everyone may teach, everyone may learn. It has its brilliant mavericks and blow-ins (I am grateful for those who seem to fall out of the sky with a splash of sunlight, or drop of icy rain) and a fine core of residents. It discloses friendly couples and habitual sparring partners. It has welcomed newcomers and mourned deaths.

      Gathered in a compact space like this anthology, poems can be trusted to interact. The ones I selected in my chancy way started to converse intertextually almost without my noticing. I’ll leave the subtler connections for readers to discern: at the simplest level, subject-matter, ornithology has established a nest or two: the post-romantic nightingale (Langley, Burrows), the undying swan (Lambeth, Willson), the Jamaican blackbird (Binta-Breeze).

      More frequently than gods and goddesses, allegorical animals reveal contemporary us to our contemporary selves. Horta’s wolf, Yeh’s musk-ox may be challenged, or simply balanced, by the less-anthropomorphised species (Forshaw’s Tasmanian Tiger, Capildeo’s dog). Today’s poet is increasingly an ecologist. A newly responsible pastoral records and names as though conservation itself were part of aesthetic response: sometimes, this pastoral raises its voice. John Kinsella’s ‘Chainsaw’ for example blazes invective. The bird-watchers in Judith Willson’s ‘A Bone Flute’ raise their phones to photograph the swans, but the picture the poet takes transcends the contemporary moment. Her secular epiphany is connected not to an intimation of immortality but to a swathe of past, present and, implicitly, future time. Ross Cogan’s ‘Lapstrake’ is ostensibly about a technique of boat design; it also unpeels the layers of awareness and empathy which make up ‘the best’ of the good human self.

      A poem is more phone-call than smart-phone. We don’t respond unless we feel its voice moving, metabolising, inside us. There’s much to be said about a poem, but where it meets us most radically may be where our words fail us. One of the reasons I originally accepted the commission was to find out what makes an effective poem, or, more accurately, what I thought makes an effective poem, and how I could say that. Editing the blogs for print publication, I’ve again tried to refine my critical focus, and justify my heart’s affections

      The essential quality of smart devices is that they connect to each other without proximity or affiliation. In the popular stereotype of the Internet of Things, toaster speaks unto refrigerator. Poems equally distinct connect across tracts of space and time. Short lyric poems, the microcosmic expression of a particular language combed into personal, provincial dialect, combine as a macrocosm, a borderless epic, inclusive and anti-canonical. As more and more voices, previously marginalised, claim their space of utterance, they make the big story of poetry in English immensely vibrant. Smart Devices reflects the beginnings of this radical global renaissance.

      There is a good deal of simple generosity in the air around the blog: that of the unpaid poets, the publishers, and, not least, the Guardian’s poetry-friendly sub-editors. The ‘posters’ remain the stars of the discourse, contributing a vigorous range of insight, wit, bullshit and scholarship. Poems, poets and poetry-commentators might not be smart enough, or sufficiently heard, to contribute to our spoiled planet’s redemption, but it still forms the sharpest seeing-feelingknowing machine we currently have. The astonishing linguistic integrations which are poems, are also ourselves, and therefore give us cause for hope.

HOWARD ALTMANN The Lake of Memories

Voices sit like broken chairs in a room.

A room stands for the ceremony of impermanence.

Impermanence cracks the façade of self.

The self builds its walls of healing.

Healing frames the house of wounds.

Wounds bridge darkness and light over time.

Time winds through the lake of memories in frozen tongue.

Howard Altmann grew up in Canada, and has lived for many years in New York City. He writes plays and children’s fiction as well as poetry. ‘The Lake of Memories’ comes from his second collection, In This House.

      The ‘house’ for Altmann is rarely a protected personal enclosure: its doors and windows may be open to infiltration by inhuman nature and passing time. It can have more in common with human skin than with bricks-and-mortar: ‘A man in a room / is a house in a field’ (‘Night & Day’). In ‘Field’, on the other hand, an impregnably shuttered building which ‘has sealed its windows and removed its signs’, symbolises religion. The day itself is a kind of building in ‘Gravity’: ‘the day’s architecture collapses’ and the poet finds himself ‘walking over words’. In the collection’s title poem, the speaker ‘can hear a home / knocking at a door / left unlocked for years’. The home finds him in an unhomely but welcoming space, ‘at the top of some ridge / […] / with my walls / building solitude out of trees’. ‘The Lake of Memories’, too, features a mysteriously potent, almost decipherable lake, its shimmering surface turned by the wind ‘into Braille for the half-standing trees’.

      The inside-outside fusion in ‘The Lake of Memories’ is explored through form as well as imagery. The tercets are linked, their stanzaic borders opened by the use of anadiplosis (the repetition of a word at the end of one clause at the beginning of the next). This kind of ‘daisy-chain’ or ‘echo’ technique is made more noticeable by the short lines of the tercets. It slows the poem’s forward-impulse to a more tentative, step-by-step movement – the manner in which someone might explore an apparently empty house.

      ‘Voices sit / like broken chairs / in a room. // A room stands / for the ceremony of impermanence. // Impermanence cracks / the façade / of self.’ Voices that resemble broken chairs are hardly reassuring: they are damaged (by the distortions of time and memory?) and, although they ‘sit’ in the room as if settled and at home in it, they are evidently not to be relied on. The repetition of solid statements with uncompromising, end-of-line finite verbs (sit, stand, crack) co-exists with a threat of disintegration. Yet the third stanza already makes a concession: the cracking of the ‘façade of self’ might not be destructive, after all, but the necessary prelude to enhanced consciousness. It seems that a new process is initiated, and concerns the building of ‘walls / of healing’. This may primarily be a psychological process, but it also suggests the biochemistry involved in the healing of physical wounds.

      The imagery in stanza six, implying that the wounds are historical and their healing long-term, reminded me of a poem nearer the beginning of the collection, in which the speaker recounts, ‘When he was a young man / at Auschwitz / my father leapt out of line / for a potato / and was saved by a bell / that never rang. / Sixty years later he stands / in his place / by his mother’s tomb – / the only tomb – containing / his hunger for memory’ (‘History’). While ‘The Lake of Memories’ stands by itself, it may reprise that earlier memory-infused narrative in compressed, symbolic form.

      The process implied in the last tercet is a strange combination of movement and stasis: ‘Time winds through / the lake of memories / in frozen tongue.’ The phrase ‘frozen tongue’ has many metaphorical overtones: unsatisfied or thwarted hunger, a language no longer communicative, perhaps no longer spoken, a decision not to speak. There’s a paradox in the idea that such a tongue can ‘wind through’ the lake, somehow alive despite its frozenness. But the future nonetheless seems to have been brought into being by the transformative concept of the wounds forming a bridge.

      Wounds heal by a complex, gradual process which includes some connective, cellular activity not dissimilar to bridge-building. The scar might be seen as a ‘bridge’ of skin cells, regenerated, though no longer fully functional as before. Altmann’s poem seems to perform in its slow-paced repetitions and accumulating metaphors a similar operation. The ‘ceremony of impermanence’ is not only destructive: time’s ‘frozen tongue’ itself may form a secret bridge.

      Despite the poem’s brevity and economy, and the fact that it continues to inhabit, through the repeated symbols of wounds and healing, a physical enclosure, the sense of surrounding open space contributes a frail atmosphere of hope. It reminds us that the poet’s formative years were spent in Canada. The lake is ‘the lake of memories’, and, like the other natural imagery in Altmann’s poems, it’s metaphorically liberating, but never simply metaphorical.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/dec/05/poem-of-the-week-the-lake-of-memories-by-howard-altmann

PETER DIDSBURY A Fire Shared

This evening I have spent in the Irishwoman’s room.A fire shared is a fire cheaper.

A twelvemonth since I knew her not at all.Our hearths were crowded thenbut now it is fitting that one of them bides cold. A fire shared is a fire cheaper by far.

She has enough English nowfor January tales of our slavering bargeist which stalks these dark flagged yards intent on the taking of children. She would not have understood a year ago.

A year ago her English was just enough for blessing or cursing, to ask the price of bread or directions to a pump. But now a fire shared is a fine instructive tutor.

She has enough English now to match my bargeists and goblins with pookas and suchlike, and I find I have learned what these are, from many a night spent sharing and cheapening fire.

A twelvemonth ago I would not have knownthe Irish for ‘sorrow’, ‘cholera’, ‘children’, or who stood by me at the same wide grave-mouth as we wept after each of our fashions. But now I know these things, which are things I have learned in the school of the ruined hearth, which is held in both our rooms, where a fire shared is the cheapest fire of all.

The Hull-based poet and archaeologist Peter Didsbury brings an informed historical imagination to his writing. At the same time, he is often a poet of borderless transition – between lyric and narrative, comedy and tragedy, fantastic and realistic.

      ‘A Fire Shared’ recalls the old proverb, ‘A trouble shared is a trouble halved’, traditionally abbreviated to ‘A trouble shared’. Plenty of trouble has afflicted both characters in the poem, and it’s what connects them across different cultures. The wry, unsentimental variations played on the theme of ‘a fire shared’ (‘A fire shared is a fire cheaper’, etc.) form a refrain which has a slightly teasing, evasive quality. Subtle changes may imply a building intimacy between the couple, (‘many a night / spent sharing and cheapening fire’) and draw us into the hearth-side of the night they’ve narrowly escaped.

      Many Irish immigrants arrived in the port city of Hull during the nineteenth century. In the essay that accompanied the poem’s first publication in Poetry Ireland 78, Didsbury notes that, during the summer cholera epidemic of 1849, ‘upwards of two thousand people perished in three months’. He quotes a report by a clergyman of the time, describing how the Irish women would fling themselves onto the graves and ‘howl out, in their native tongue, the ‘death wail’. The echo of this ‘keen’ (Irish – ‘caoine’), softened by the passage of time and the sharing of friendship, can perhaps be picked up in the cadences of the poem’s refrain.

      The linguistic process detailed in stanzas 3 – 5 foreshadows an eventual loss of language for the Irishwoman. Her estrangement from English has been modified… ‘a fire shared / is a fine instructive tutor’. She will become fluent in English and, implicitly, the dominant language will obliterate her own. But at this early stage of assimilation, the learning is two-way, and delicately balanced between the conversationalists.

      In bridging languages, the speaker and the woman have used local myths which relate to the snatching of children, and are therefore relevant to their particular tragedies. Their ‘bonding’, it’s implied, is a shared humanity deeper than linguistic and cultural sharing. Mutual compassion forms a sturdy foundation for the ultimately fiery politics of the poem.

      There may be an erotic dimension to the narrative. The sharing of fire could indicate sexual or romantic excitement, and the economy of sharing which the poem praises might suggest marriage. The speaker could be of either gender, but I imagine a male speaker, perhaps a clergyman or teacher, who has fallen on hard times. He has offered help, and sitting down at the Irish woman’s hearth, perhaps he goes beyond the faintly scholarly pleasures of exchanging folk-tales and words, and both progress beyond the sharing of grief to pleasure.

      Whoever the speaker is, male or female, fish-wife or school-master, there is nothing literary in the voice. The language is beautifully plain and simple, with its unforced touches of dialect. The inversion of the opening sentence (‘This evening I have spent / in the Irishwoman’s room’) surprises us into attention. Does it have a faintly Hibernian-English flavour? And what about ‘A twelvemonth since / I knew her not at all’? That fine, homely verb, ‘bides’, as in ‘bides cold’, belongs to Old English, of course (‘abidan’). These little quirks of idiom not only give the poem force and freshness: they seem to suggest the assimilations and losses that the speakers are already sharing.

      The narrative moves forward cumulatively, almost like a folk-tale, quietly building up the background detail. It’s hard not to seem over-expository when imparting information in a monologue. This poem never seems so. Description is minimal but essential. ‘Dark flagged yards’ evokes an entire neighbourhood; the isolate words, ‘sorrow’, ‘cholera’, ‘children’, give us the whole emotional and narrative core. So we discover that these two people have met unknowingly before, at the graveside, where they expressed their grief in such different ways they did not realise that it was essentially the same grief.

      Shakespeare’s ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’ is another ‘saying’ the poem calls to mind, and to which it give edge. We understand that the characters have somehow learned to be generous, patient and unaffected with one another. We can almost hear them, muttering quietly like the fire. But the sweetness is bitter, too, and hard lessons learned ‘in the school of the ruined hearth, / which is held in both our rooms’.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jun/28/poem-week-fire-shared-didsbury

KAREN McCARTHY WOOLF Outside

under the arcade and the floor-length glass shop front: a green pop-up dome

flanked by a Burberry suitcase and a sleeping-bag

a makeshift shelter for Sai from Stratford with time to invest

in a four-day queue – he’s first in line for an iPhone 6s

no-one moves him on or threatens arrest as it’s not about where

but why you pitch your tent

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s collection, Seasonal Disturbances,is a delicately interlocked, formally experimental, almost origami-like collection of poems and sequences. Among the highlights is a set of found sonnets, ‘The Science of Life’, drawn from the eponymous 1931 encyclopaedia, and responding to ‘eXXpedition’, an all-women sailing voyage investigating the effects of micro-plastic pollution. There’s also a ‘disrupted zuihitsu’ threading through the collection like a partlysubterranean river, and work in a glosa-like form, invented and named by the poet, coupling.For all its internationalism, McCarthy Woolf ‘s poetry engages with the local and personal. Reading Seasonal Disturbances is like picking up a map of her home-city, London, and unfolding a new map of the world. It seems vandal-ish to pick it apart, but there are some poems which stand singly, forming little pools of calm in the interwoven currents, and ‘Outside’ is one of them.

      The poem is tactically simple, depicting a young man queuing overnight to buy a smartphone, and noticing his immunity to the harassment usually inflicted on rough sleepers. The tone is resolutely objective, though rising at the end to a wry, summary aphorism.

      Brief cultural signifiers position ‘Sai from Stratford’, a young city-type, ‘with time to invest // in a four-day queue’. In fact, he’s first in the queue, which indicates a certain heroism, or at least determination, in the pursuit of a perhaps notaltogether secure personal ‘status’. The repeated ‘s’ sounds in stanza 3 onwards (invest, first, 6s, arrest) rustle like the notes he probably doesn’t carry.

      Sai’s designer (Burberry) suitcase, lodged outside the ‘green pop up dome’ advertises his affluence and therefore guarantees his rights of residence on London’s (or any Western city’s) ‘charter’d streets’. He is covered by that charter, in fact. Another person would be designated by law a vagrant or trespasser but he’s a wealthy consumer. And so he’s left alone.

      I had to do some research on the iPhone 6s, being of the generation for whom ‘6s’ meant the very decent childhood sum of ‘six shillings’. The treasure Sai covets boasts 3D Touch (‘the next generation of Multi Touch’) and a 12 megapixel iSight camera, with Live Photos and Retina Flash. It opens up ‘new possibilities for how you interact with your content’.

      As its name suggests, the iPhone’s focus is egocentric. It wraps up our brains in a feedback loop no analogue device could achieve. It presents a miniature world, and announces you the emperor. It can sell you anything. It lets you delete all the rough sleepers from the streets.

      Sai (pronounced Sah-yee) is a significant name, meaning ‘saint, master or lord in Sindhi and Marathi’. In naming her protagonist Sai, McCarthy Woolf has evoked the sacrosanct, suggesting the possession of so-called ‘iconic’ goods confers nearly godlike power. The word literally means ‘shade’ and it was once a ‘poetic way’ of referring to the Sufi mystics, associating them with ‘the protective and influential’. Sai from Stratford may have become an outsider to his own tradition. But he is still protected, even when queuing for four days outside ‘the floor-length glass shop front’, because, in terms of Western values, he is an insider.

      ‘[I]t’s not about where // but why you pitch your tent.’ The poem makes its point and stops. A writer of less subtlety than McCarthy Woolf, wishing to make a similar point, might have chosen to depict a vagrant in all his or her misery, or to contrast the two urban figures, neighbours but worlds apart, sleeping out on a city street. McCarthy Woolf zones in on the more fortunate figure. But she also holds back. No blame attaches to him for buying into the values that surround him.