Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume VII | Issue 1
“Seems like George Szirtes is India’s favourite foreign poet,” chuckled the poet I was lunching with at Delhi’s India International Centre. The comment was sparked by Szirtes’s blurb of Fafnir’s Heart World Poetry in Translation, an anthology I’ve recently edited that draws from the pages of Poetry at Sangam. The poet is possibly right. I don’t know any fellow poet who has turned to Szirtes for encouragement and ideas and returned empty-hearted. This, besides the admiration we hold for his truly dazzling work as poet, translator, teacher and now, memoirist with a tribute, tender and tough, to his mother Madga, The Photographer at Sixteen. You can read his earlier contribution to Poetry at Sangam here.
One wintry morning almost twenty years ago, I met George Szirtes, dressed for the cold in navy blue and a smile, at a literature festival on the lawns of the same India International Centre. Szirtes was already a much awarded poet, it was my first such festival. I remember he read beautifully that evening, his voice smoking through the twilight, trailing a wake of glow, later he spoke about books, craft, language, his tone was unfailingly gracious. Over the week, we became friends.
You can, with a tap on your phone , read more of his work and much praise for his work, read excerpts from his translations, his essays and interviews, hear his podcasts, his prize-winning speeches etc. Therefore I swerve — to share with you my gratitude to George Szirtes, the person, through one incident from numerous others.
I was in London. My father had recently passed away, his first death anniversary approached. ‘George,‘ I mailed, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through the day.’ He and the wonderful painter, Clarissa Upchurch, his wife, drove down from Norwich. They linked arms, one on either side on me, and walked me through the day. A week later, at their home, they were perfect and charming hosts.
We are deeply honoured and thankful to George Szirtes for editing the Spring 2019 issue of Poetry at Sangam, as we are for the support he has always extended to us.
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Now to a matter that needs clarification: our curatorial and submission policy. Poetry at Sangam morphed into a quarterly some years ago. Since then, I invite an admired poet to guest edit each issue. This, I figured, would vastly enrich the journal by introducing us to diverse voices and styles. In the last year, for instance, we were fortunate to have Naveen Kishore, Luis H Francia, Philip Nikolayev and Sumana Roy curate issues. Now here’s the thing: I do not make recommendations, preferring to leave every choice to the guest editor. (However, unsolicited submissions are sent on.) Consequently, some poets I would like to feature cannot be accommodated. Also, I do not, as a rule, invite poets who themselves edit journals, curate festivals, organise readings etc. to be guest editors, reasoning they have spaces to nurture and celebrate eclectic poetic voices. Sadly, this decision to minimise my role as editor has occasionally backfired, resulting in a few fissured friendships. I trust this note ends all misunderstanding. Next year, Inshalla, we hope to add a section that will feature extracts from new releases for there is much exciting poetry being published by small presses that we’d also like to support.
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Now on to George Szirtes’s fantastic folio !
— Priya Sarukkai Chabria
It is a great privilege to be asked to select poets for Sangam: a privilege, an opportunity and a responsibility. To select six poets from the many available and worthy means neglecting other, possibly as good, possibly more justifiably or unjustifiably famous. But I am not concerned with fame here although all six poets are well enough known and Christopher Reid and Marilyn Hacker are both international figures.
Nor was I concerned with being too representative. Representative of what? Of whom? To be properly representative one would need far more than six poets, one would need fifty or more, because the range of poetry being published in individual collections now is much wider than it was when I myself first appeared in book form at the end of the 1970s. There are far more books of poetry now than there were then, more publishers, more poets, more various ways of writing.
The reasons for that are partly technological, partly educational, partly social, partly political. These ‘parts’ can’t be separated from each other because they are interdependent. And so, before getting on to the poets themselves it might be useful to offer a broad sweep – an unavoidably subjective sweep – of the landscape around them, of the four elements that have done so much to change our circumstances.
Physical production is certainly cheaper now than it was then. Computer setting and printing have not only brought down unit costs but have helped train and develop designers of books. New small publishers are plentiful, all living on a knife-edge but some of them, little by little, making incursions into the realm of prizes among the ranks of bigger, well-established publishers. Beyond print, a great deal of poetry now appears online, in online magazines and publications and, sometimes hugely successfully, in terms of social media. Everything moves faster and wider. Poetry is not quite the Oxbridge dominated field it used to be though Oxbridge is still an important element. Young poets have access to work they would never have come across before and can make reputations just waiting to break into what could once, reasonably confidently, be described as a mainstream without relying too much on the old gatekeepers of the house of reputation.
Education, in the UK at least, has invested quite heavily in competitive postgraduate creative writing degrees. These courses are best described as a kind of partly-democratised range of bottega led by working writers in various fields, lodged within and yet at an angle to their academic environment. An increasing number of these working writers will themselves have come through such courses and have qualified to teach at university by taking their writing to doctoral level which involves more critical and theoretical work. This process produces a more intellectually grounded form of writing, not necessarily always in the academic sense, but in that the writers will be expected to be aware of both the historical and contemporary climate of ideas. This, combined with online life, results in more eclecticism, more sophisticated ways of moving and slipping between various notions of voice. This does not mean a closing down of outsider extra-academic or independent writing if only because the outsider and independence are themselves areas of concern in universities. Nor is the situation too easy to compare with that of, say, the Elizabethan ‘university wits’, who wrote manuscripts they passed to each other in a relatively closed circle – and yet there is a sense that those who produce the poetry are also a significant part of its consumers.
The social element involves the ease of communication, which links back to both the online world and the network of communications established at university. Since bookshops stock far less poetry than they used to and because there are far fewer independent bookshops that might show an interest in poetry, it has become necessary for poets who publish books or hope to publish books to organise events where poems might be read or performed and publications or recordings sold. This applies as much to older writers like myself who developed before the circumstances I am describing as to younger ones. Frequent public readings result in improved performance skills and a good many young poets now memorise their work or take sneaky glances at the text on their mobile phones. The distinctions between the slam scene, theatre, and stand-up comedy are blurring.
The fourth and last part is the political element. We are living in the greatest and most powerful age of arts administration. Administration provides funding and approval: no funding without approval. This works at both at educational and publishing / performing level. Here two unlikely currents join to become a confluence. On the one hand there is the heritage of Thatcherism, the notion that students are consumers of services rather than scholars working within established disciplines. If you, as a student, pay money, goes the principle, you must have consumer choice and the most effective way of establishing choice is economic. The choosing requires managers and administrators. Managers and administrators don’t necessarily come from the same ideological base but their interests and domains overlap. From the economic managerial point of view events and publications have to sell as widely as possible in order to justify investment: from the ideological administrative point of view that wide sale is to be achieved through models of maximum social diversification. These become conditions for support. There are highly detailed requirements for funding that include a strict feedback processes. This last administrative element is not likely to influence individual poets directly in their writing but is the environment within which they increasingly work.
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I will put all this aside now and concentrate on my selection of writers. At the simplest level it is enough to say I particularly admire their work. With one, possibly two exceptions, they are not straightforward products of the environment I have described above, within which I myself worked for some fourteen years, an environment that has produced some outstanding poets and which will produce more, but I want to cast my net wider.
The six writers here do not represent a particular trend though one might argue that back in the 80s Christopher Reid was himself a potential trend in that he was regarded as one of the Martian poets, possibly just one of two, along with Craig Raine, who, in their love of the visual pun were sometimes classed with the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets. Reid was the lighter-footed, silkier of the two, all grace and wit. But Martianism, for all the éclat, did not last for long and Reid moved on, almost danced on, into a less dandified form of playfulness, still witty but more easily touched by common human emotions. This culminated in the Costa Prize-winning A Scattering, the book he wrote after the death of his wife, Lucinda. Reid has also produced beautiful illustrated books of verse for children but the group of poems here consists of a single sequence about President Trump. Here grace is sharpened into a furious burlesque comedy, employing a natural but knockabout rhyme that Reid handles as lightly as he did his Martian metaphors and his later semi-comic but sad poetic narratives. The Trump poems are one way of responding to a phenomenon like the forty-fifth president of the United States. It is the figure the poems address rather than the climate out of which he was born and which Trump looks to direct.
Marilyn Hacker has long been a hero of mine. The American poet who lives between Paris and New York and translates from both French and Arabic, was adapted as the leading figure in a movement she never herself joined, a sort of feminist version of The New Formalism, as represented in the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes, edited by Annie Finch in 2007. Hacker was never a programme or manifesto poet. Her formalism was always racy, observant, politically engaged, brisk, and never statuesque; producing exhilarating intelligent and heartfelt works that never stood to admire themselves. In recent years she has been interested in ghazals and sapphics. There are examples of both here as well as a tanka, plus two translations from the Arabic. But everything comes naturally to her. I think she is one of the major English-language poets of our time.
I wanted to include Helen Ivory here because despite her four books, with a fifth shortly to come, and being much loved, she has not had the formal appreciation due to her. I’d like her to be better known. She is a fascinating talent. From a working class family in an unfashionable town near London, she attended art school, not university, and is even now working as both artist and poet. Her poems are marked by plain, extremely precise language and a fascination with transformations. The voice is impeccably steady and underplayed, the transformation run deep, often into personal history, but there is nothing of the confessional in them. Instead there is an almost serene numbness in the poems as if they were methodically sleepwalking themselves into a trauma that is elsewhere, just out of sight. She is difficult to place and that can sometimes present a problem for those awarding prizes, but hers are startlingly original worlds whose transformations lean on legend and fairy-tale without displays of horror or eye-catching enchantment.
It is only recently I began to fall in love with Tiffany Atkinson’s poems. She is rather extraordinary. Born into an army family and studying in Birmingham and Wales she is a feminist academic at one level but her poetry has nothing of the smell of the seminar room. Her three books have won prizes, one of them, Catulla et al, a female version of Catullus. But none of the easy headline descriptions fits her poetry which is a combination of comedy, loss and invention, a spectacular inwardness that is nevertheless light in touch, sometimes threatening to blow away in front of us, like a shred of electrically charged material. A poem like ’21 points for a feminist essay on film’ is clearly driven by a subject and an idea but the imagination is constantly spinning off, the material exceeding the programme. There is nothing in the least programmatic about the poems. They are not statements but states and sensations that dance on the nerves. The humour, the melancholy, and the twists and turns of feeling offer a defiance of the disasters of the spirit and are wonderfully energising to read.
Nick Makoha was born in Uganda and fled the country as a child with his mother at the time of Idi Amin’s rule. He is a poet, playwright, and performer who is becoming well known in the USA as well as in Britain. His book, Kingdom of Gravity (2017) involves a series of personal memories and set pieces based on life in Amin’s Uganda, but his use of verse is as much in the European as the African tradition and is entirely at home in it. His control of line and image is firm and haunting and that, for me, is part of its power. The subject refers to Africa but has travelled via London and New York to an authoritative hybrid domain of its own, a hybrid energy that is urban and open. His eye moves across a setting in the manner of film. It is reportage with a dangerous camera. I wanted to include his poems here as they not only strike me as powerful but embody the social dynamism of this point of history in the UK.
Like Makoha, Jack Underwood is new news. His first book, Happiness, was published by Faber in 2015. The book description mentions Simon Armitage and Michael Donaghy as elements in his voice but I think he is lighter and more elusive than either, witty and urbane at one level, but dislocated and dreamlike at the other. The urbanity serves as an ironic note on the dreams and dislocations, but he has an extraordinarily sure touch. Sometimes we do not see where a poem is going or quite where it has come from but it materialises out of the voice as it puts itself together. Underwood is one of those who has made the full journey through the creative writing process from first degree to masters and doctorate then back in to teach at masters level. Although he, like Makoha, ‘represents’ something – the environment I talk about at the beginning – he is not ‘representative’ of anything formulaic, except perhaps of the intelligence that the companionship of other poets and ideas can offer when processed by a singular mind.
Makoha and Underwood started from different places and are likely to spin off in different directions. But like many of their newly heralded generation (such as Eliot Prize-winning first-book poets like Sarah Howe, Ocean Vuong, and Hannah Sullivan) they are both the landscape and its architects.
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