Something Small
A collection of poems written in a month
River, Our River by MJ Stratton
The protagonist of poetry is often the writer and the writer’s perspective is rarely an untroubled one. The business of life supplying sufficient troubles at quite a rate. I forget who said that happiness prints white on the page, but it’s true. We who want the truth don’t want to read much at all of satisfaction. Of contentment. Of sureness that all is going well.
Happiness cloys fast, sticks in the throat. Just as happiness palls and fades, is vitiated by events and time, and no flower’s offering, except of a rare kind, lasts more than a season to the eye.
How much poetry is not about love itself, but about love that’s gone away or been ended by circumstance? How many victory poems and panegyric lines read hollow and false, like vain boasting, now all who praised and were praised in turn are dead? It’s been argued — falsely — that English verse, the English language, is not suitable for poems of praise. But ask any Poet Laureate and they’ll tell you it’s their job to prove the opposite. To prove the opposite to order, to prove it on commission.
It must be a rather odd life.
The wider poetic world, of course, is a place, though beset by suffering, of enthusiasts and enthusiasms. Of small magazines, small publishers, small corners of existence carved out for people who think and feel alike. A few scattered candles in a vast darkness — the implied formation, articulating, of a point of view. And what if that perspective is anxiety? Anxiety vast and immense, so great it cannot be described, filling the head and making the hands shake — taking over, annexing wholesale, every moment of life, waking and sleeping, and doing the poet’s head in?
There must be a tribe of fellow sufferers, a collective to read and to nod when the dread thing is well said.
More of life than we think is metaphor, our senses not being all that worth trusting. So many of our actions are metaphors, too. I cook and bring you food because I love you. I spend time talking on the phone because I want to show, obliquely, that there’s no one else I’d let detain me quite so long.
Genius is not an infinite capacity for taking pains. Nothing’s infinite. Some believe, truly, that love is capacity (infinite or not) for making oneself annoying. For devising things for someone else to do for you. For wasting time.
Even these little gestures are anxious, needling. I could make you something you might like to eat, but alas, MJ Stratton writes, I have crushed it badly in my convulsing hands. Or hands wring now at the water dripping down from the ceiling, dripping ever down. Some manner of water torture, it might be — a form of torture, anyhow.
Unease makes us undexterous, unuseful. Less good of hand or eye. Makes us act outwardly as we inwardly feel.
This book was written inside a single month — many of the poems fragmentary, staccato, rapped out as if from telex. Cannot get inside dream. We sleep but to dream anew. ‘The / scaled skin. The writhing gill / & still worm.’ Tap, tap, tap.
The metaphors land like hailstones. I lie on my front and move side to side like a snake for reasons that are important narratively. I am a flea — I am a child, calling out in the rain.
Come in, come in, you might cry back. The rain, you see — the rain.
But I’m not capable, so far, of hearing. Such is the poet’s task to render, to transmit.
I sleep but for to dream — and in the dream I’m a moth. Repelled and killed by light yet made to circle it, my back ever to it, banging into glass lightbulbs on occasion, riding up single-glazed windows if there’s illumination within.
A little like an apparent video some may or may not have seen of dead frogs, a great mass of them, floating in a pool. All animation gone, all life extinguished. What did this to those frogs ? for it was not only time. What made them all depart at once? The poet sometimes knows and sometimes speculates. Does the poet identify more with the frogs, now dead, or with the pool? Or more with the observer who filmed the aqua amphibian cemetery? How is the poet to identify with all that?
Existence commonplace, suffering commonplace. Hardly worth the notice of an intelligence, of a pen.
All the stories about being bent double under the weight of memory, of being made articulate then inarticulate by vague but certain fear. To talk of something big — call it the impossibility of human connection, of a real meeting of minds, bodies, intelligences — is to invite ridicule outside a world of small magazines, small publishers, small books.
It is the lot of the poet to notice some things and to ignore others, to make metaphors out of things that either did not happen or happened so minutely that no others would have noticed — to build bricks of rare quality from the straw that a single life and single mind furnishes. A difficult task. A hard one. But not a task unimportant, not a task all that small.