E.E. NOBBS reviews
(Shearsman
Books, Exeter, U.K., 2010)
Carrie Etter
says it’s counterproductive to try to categorize a poem as either 1) traditional/mainstream
or 2) experimental/Avant Garde. Things are blurrier than that, which is a good
thing. Instead she calls non-mainstream the “Other”.
Etter’s
lively introduction to the anthology includes her take on the poetic politics
circa 2010.
It can be
read online at the Shearman’s site (as a PDF excerpt). The link also provides
the list of 25 poets included in the anthology. Etter’s well referenced and persuasive
arguments call for making poetry more inclusive, more broadly-defined. She
encourages us to loosen up on the ways we approach poetry, to view it as a
“spectrum holding infinite points of difference”. She explains why and how she
organized the anthology and made her selections (and why women-only).
The
anthology is an excellent resource for learning about this “Other”. There are usually 3 or 4 poems from each poet;
and each poet provides her own writer’s statement. These idiosyncratic self
descriptions are valuable, giving a sense of what’s important to each woman. This helped me respond to their poems. I noted with interest how several used the
word “lyric” when describing their poetry (and yet resisted traditional
definitions that usually have a specific “I” as speaker), often keeping the
connection of “lyric” to music – the music of the body, its movement and
sounds.
Carol
Watts in her poet’s statement writes –
“I work with what feels like the music—or pitch—of
language, the visceral sense that it calls you out, makes you ring like a
tuning fork. Working in a silence, full of noise and word arrivals,
frequencies, poetries take place. A passage of writing that remains as open as
I can make it in that moment to unknowing, curiosity, thought, breath. Such a
calling out is social, interpellative …”
Making a
poem deliberately “open” so that the reader must decide themselves how to
interpret the poem – what meaning to ascribe, how to respond – seems to be a
common objective in this anthology. Somewhat paradoxically, the poets are nevertheless
serious and particular about the choice of subjects and themes which they use
as inspiration or source material. They
often seem intent on confronting political and societal concerns (the
environment, women’s lives, war) – but also confounding us, because their poems
refuse to be clear or easy. And I suppose there’s a form-follow-function
justice to that.
Many of
the poets cited other poets who have influenced them, and performative,
multi-media or translation projects they have done – such as collaborations (or
inspired by) with the visual arts, music.
Most briefly
commented on techniques they used, such as fragments & unusual
juxtapositions, syntax, collage, gaps, form, line breaks, text sources, the
look on the page, translation etc. I found it useful to know that many of the
poets deliberately construct their poems to obscure the meaning from original
source texts – this shakes the reader out of habitual reactions to words and
phrases and the reader has to decide if and how they will engage with the poem.
For more discussions and examples of techniques, here are two which I have
personally used and found helpful: an essay on Jacket 2 and the free on-line
MOOC ModPo.
But back
to Infinite Difference—after each
poet’s poems, there is a short bio. All the poets have UK connections but many
arrived from elsewhere. There are a couple of people born in Canada. Some from
the USA, including the editor. And other countries. Several (most?) have lots of formal education
credentials, and are teachers or professors.
Some had science backgrounds. But there’s the whole spectrum of ages,
experiences, interests, stage in their writing career, collaborations etc. —which
of course helps to strengthen Etter’s case about infinite differences—and hence
infinite combinations and possibilities.
Here’s an
example of technique in the anthology that I found intriguing.
Isobel
Armstrong has a sequence of 3 titled Second, Third and Fourth Desert Collage,
respectively. The subtitles hint at the text sources by providing names of a
man and a woman (John C. Van Dyke and Gertrude Bell) and that they are combined,
but we are not told what words are from which source, or how Armstrong chooses
what to keep or in what order. I knew nothing about these two people I googled.
The American Van Dyke travelled in the Colorado deserts, and Bell who
was British adventured
throughout Arabian desert … both in a similar time period, both eccentrics.
The
re-selecting/ discarding of text continues, with the poems getting shorter and
shorter, until we are left at the end of
the “Fourth Desert Collage” with this
single line of mirrored words with gaps:
sands weeping men shot
shot men weeping
sands
The poem sequence
works for me on its own. I sensed that it’s from a past time in history and
that these deserts are dangerous places.
The overall effect of the 5 pages of 3 poems is rather like a desert sand
storm, catching glimpses of scenes and emotions being played out like an old
film. The whittling down of the words to
the final stark line is an imaginative way to show how two separate stories can
come down in the end to the same thing: death. As a reader I did not need to
know the back stories (though I was curious and glad that I googled).
Another
poet Claire Crowther stresses that for her it’s all about the line breaks. She
says that “Shaping, sorting, clumping and cutting line-making connected words
give far more than the individual words could be …” She thinks of herself as
having “perceptual dyslexia” and doesn’t really understand “the usual
narratives” but does the best she can. Even though others have sometimes called
her poetry “fractured, strange, nonsensical”, poems are for her “word ladders”
—the “equivalent of an unlined world, as sturdy as I can make them.”
She has 4
poems in the anthology. My favourite of the whole anthology is her “Young Woman
with Scythe”. I like her choice of words, its music, and its compact shape, and
yes, its sturdiness and what strikes me as a confident tone in a dangerous
world. It’s one of the shortest poems in the book, so I will include the whole
thing:
Young Woman with
Scythe by
Claire Crowther
As if soil was noise, the legal notice
shivered on the barrow, Louise tore off
her scything gloves. High on a pine, wild
parakeets, harbingers of change
in our climate, stared from their margin, chattered
about apocalypse. Carefully, eking
out a holiday, I watered plants.
That’s my dialect of territory
against the elocution of possession.
I looked for so long at Louise’s face,
that, in the bedroom mirror, it smoothed mine.
Poetry
that can seem “difficult” is some ways but still be enjoyed is nothing new. For
example there’s Emily Dickinson. In my old copy of Final Harvest Emily Dickinson’s Poems- selections and introduction by
Thomas H. Johnson (Little Brown & Co, 1961), Johnson writes
“Her manner of writing helps give assurance of the
infinite adaptability of writing. An innovator is necessarily unorthodox, and
Dickinson’s syntax forces the reader to unexpected levels of concept. She uses
dashes as a musical device and capital letters as a means of emphasis. Her
readers are now gradually accommodating themselves to such eccentricities since
they know [she] …deliberately fractured grammar to achieve special effects ...”
And in his
The Poem is You – 60 Contemporary
American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016), Stephen
Burt (like Etter) showcases the diversity of recent poetry. He says poems take
on at least one of two main tasks. Sometimes they do both. The first task is to
“let us imagine someone else’s interior life. The second goal is less
traditional, but just as important. Less about providing information or telling
a story. Poems “can make language
strange; that can reveal or upend the assumptions or habits that go without
saying when we use language in less unusual ways ... it means to keep the language and the
world weird, either to keep us alert to the social, political and economic
problems that make the world worse than it could be or else just sharpen our
sense of what we hear and see…”
Some of
the poems in Infinite Difference have
unusual shapes and formatting on the page, so “seeing” them helps a reader
decide how to respond. But I can imagine getting extra enjoyment from many of
the poems in this anthology by listening to them being read aloud or performed.
The music of a voice and a moving human
body would add layers of appreciation, I think. The effect might be a bit like
listening to an opera or the symphony.
The
anthology is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to learn more, and better appreciate
“other” poetry. And true to Etter’s spectrum definition, this anthology
provides a varied and broad spectrum-within-the-spectrum of “other” poetries. And
I’m very aware that I’ve only given you two examples of (or from) actual poems—which
I know is not enough, but I don’t want to make this engagement of mine any
longer. I’ll just say that one needs to read the whole book to appreciate the
scope of what’s possible—which is probably the point of the book.
I don’t
know enough to comment on whether non-mainstream poetries by women are better
represented now in the big prizes and getting published compared to how Etter
described the challenges faced in 2010. The publisher Shearsman and the
editor/poet Carrie Etter are both well known and active in the UK scene. Of the
25 featured poets, I recognize several names but I haven’t done a search to see
what they are all currently doing as of early 2017.
After
reading the poems, and about the poets in Infinite
Differences, I feel that one of the main ways for “Other” poetries to be
enjoyed, accepted more widely – and to encourage poets – is through innovative
collaborations and performances.
One
example is The Enemies Project based in the UK but with projects and events
worldwide.
Another
example - The Poetry Society encourages collaborations and innovations with a
major prize - http://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/ted-hughes-award/examples-of-new-work/
We live
in chaotic times. The challenges of diversity, inclusion and being open to the
“Other” are everywhere. The issues we face with racism, immigration, poverty,
gender issues, climate change, species extinction – all these things are
connected, and any solutions will be connected too. Sometimes to get unstuck, we need to see
things in new ways, before we can move ahead – being surprised, or puzzled,
deciding to spend time with a non-straightforward poem and do the work of
responding to it. And this anthology Infinite
Difference is a reminder of how something that is a bit (or a lot) different
or unexpected or hard to decipher – can help us stay awake.
*****
E.E. Nobbs lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada. She won the 2013 Doire Press International Poetry Chapbook Competition. Find out more at her website https://ellyfromearth.wordpress.com/
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