On my second day here, I want to extend the range of poets I wish to share with you, by offering three poems by three poets, who, each, in different ways, broaden the mainstream of British poetry, and, challenge its norms, without becoming iconoclasts.
The first, Giles Goodland, makes nonsense of the old us-and-them tussle between experimental and mainstream that so occupied the poetry battles of the last decades, with his poems that are variously lyric, or avant-garde, and sometimes both; often inflected with surrealist play, and an interest in formal constraints. Primarily, as a lexicographer, he is fascinated by words, and lists. He is becoming a very significant mid-career poet in Britain.
The second, Carrie Etter, is also admirable, for her hybrid ability to move between the differing parts of the poetry playing field – as academic, anthologist, and poet; Etter’s own work is popular (and, performed beautifully) but also willing to explore language and form. Her recent anthology of experimental women poets is a highly-useful and timely intervention; further, Etter, as an American expatriated to London, occupies that vital continuum that began with Pound and Eliot (and Frost) of Americans in England who actively shape the poetic discourse of the country, and very much belong to two nations.
Finally, the most cosmopolitan of the three is the Oulipo-inspired Paris-based poet-editor Rufo Quintavalle, half-Italian, half-English, whose Francophile interests have intersected with a long project to ingeniously incorporate text from Whitman into his own poems. Again, commonplace ideas of identity and labels are complicated here – it is almost silly to attempt to place his poetry, though another link with Britain is surely the Oystercatcher pamphlet, recently become a hallmark of innovation and surprise.
Giles Goodland is a poet who lives in London and works in Oxford as a lexicographer. He has had several books of poetry published from the mid-1990s, when he won an Eric Gregory award. These include Littoral (Oversteps, 1996), A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006) and What The Things Sang (Shearsman, 2009). He has also produced chapbooks for the Dusie Kollektiv and recently had a pamphlet from Oystercatcher press with the title Near Myths. He has a PhD from Oxford on the subject of “Modernist Poetry and Film of the Home Front, 1939-45”; his father John Goodland was one of the key poet-editors of the 1940s in England, and worked with Nicholas Moore. Giles is the winner of the 2010 Cardiff International Poetry Competition, one of the most important of its kind in the UK.
Spider
Spider, you are curled up in death like
you were too cold
an image of you sleeps in the mouse
but also is tangled in beds
seamstress of pulselessness
for whom the trees make sense
over a pallet a suspended grab
disquiet earth
the air was taken from
there are birds left in which liquid spoke
and seconds to none
each motion ends with the finger
dusted in answer
you tell me shadow is sex of the moon
ask me in how many languages
does the shadow drip
spider of us, I cannot say.
Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter received her MFA in creative writing and PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine. In 2001 she moved to England, and in 2004 joined the creative writing faculty at Bath Spa University, where she still teaches. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as The Iowa Review, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her first collection, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), received the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award, and her second, Divining for Starters, will be published by Shearsman in 2011. She has also edited an anthology, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010).
Heroin Song
When she heard the hospice nurse had poured the last of the morphine into a bag of sand, then she wept. Mid-March yet the temperature neared seventy. I rubbed my eyes with fists. Mom wanted her to leave, wanted to sleep. The phone rang every ten minutes. When his breathing changed, I was awakened. I didn’t think to hurry. The cats circled and perched, circled and perched. So warm for March, ideal cycling weather. His last breath was a tremendous gasp. I made calls. It was dark. I rubbed my eyes with fists. I didn’t think to hurry. The cats watched from the sofa, scattered when the funeral men arrived. When his breathing changed, I was awakened. It was two-forty a.m., all dark. She came by at seven or eight. Mom wanted her to leave, wanted to sleep. The phone rang. The temperature nearly reached seventy, his ideal cycling weather. When the men went for the gurney, I kissed him good-bye. He was neither warm nor cold. I rubbed my eyes with fists. I called the hospice nurse, then, hours later, my sisters. Mid-March, Friday the thirteenth in fact. His last breath was a tremendous gasp. Sandra arrived first. The phone rang every ten minutes. One cat had gone missing. She came by at seven or eight. I didn’t think to hurry. I kissed him good-bye. When she heard the hospice nurse had poured the last of the morphine into a bag of sand, then my sister wept.
Rufo Quintavalle was born in London in 1978, studied English at Oxford and the University of Iowa and has lived in Paris since 2005. He is the author of a chapbook, Make Nothing Happen (Oystercatcher Press, 2009) and his poems have been published in such journals as Barrow Street, The Wolf, and The Stinging Fly. He is currently Acting Poetry Editor for the award-winning webzine, Nthposition, and is on the editorial board for the Paris-based literary magazine, Upstairs at Duroc. He is one of the invited poets for the 2011 Biennale internationale des poètes en Val de Marne and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on a book-length poem based on Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, sections of which will appear next year along with a French translation by Oulipian poet, Ian Monk. His work also features in an anthology of Paris writers to be published by Tightrope Books (Canada).
from Shelf
25.
Do you remember the garden square
In which we slept one day in June?
When
We woke in the dusk
My mouth
Was
Sure of itself,
It knew the melody
Which the wood pigeon
Cooed, the way in which pollen
Drugs with its spread.
We headed out,
The world before us,
Into the city’s twilit
Miasma, and into a nameless
History
My dream
Escaping into London’s noise.
I let it go and clung to you
We were lost in the
Infinite
Weekend public.