“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

Oscar Wilde would be pleased to know that, based on my experience so far as an American in London, Britain and America are still very much separated by a common language. More than this, as a transplanted poet beginning to send down roots into unfamiliar ground, I am discovering that the set of poetic impulses that find favour in the UK differ from those enriched by my native soil. This makes sense: so much about art is a matter of taste, and so much about taste can be cultural.

And so, even as I have been experiencing culture shock in my ordinary life, I am also going through a kind of poetic culture shock as I find my way in this new literary terrain. One of the best ways I have found to get through culture shock of any kind is to articulate and embrace what is unique about the new environment. While it would be impossible to describe, universally and categorically, what distinguishes British and American poetics, I recognise certain differences on instinct. The Americas could not have made a Seamus Heaney; the British Isles could not produce a Sharon Olds.

And so, I have been making a personal and highly subjective investigation into the strengths of each culture’s contemporary poetry, by reading and re-reading two books: The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt). I took note of the poems I liked most, then listed the qualities held in common by my favourites from each book.

Obviously, this list does not hold up as a set of universal generalisations. Particularly when it comes to poetry, for every rule there is an exception. London might have produced a Li-Young-Lee; New York could have fashioned a Paul Muldoon. Plus “American” poets in this volume like Charles Simic have strong ties to Europe, and at least one “Brit” in the book is an American transplant. So it goes.

This evening, I will participate in the peculiarly British tradition of Bonfire Night (having previously only ever lit fireworks in the warmth of summer), and then am looking forward tomorrow night to my first gathering of a local poetry group. I am not trying to bend my sensibilities to suit the new context as much as I am trying to get in touch with what I admire and respect about British poetry, to invoke those qualities from within. I was drawn to London to learn, to be influenced, to find out more about myself by contrasts, and to embrace the Old World. Overcoming poetic culture shock helps me further that journey and lighten my load.

“A short poem need not be small.”

I am tapping this out on my iPhone from Florence, having left the laptop in London. My first time in Italy finds me marveling at so much grand art, and wondering if there is still a place in the post-colonial, post-modern, post-financial-collapse world for the enduring opera magnifica.

Though my nickname in the seminary was “Dante”, my own poems often focus on small moments, coaxing the universal from the quotidian. To attempt to expiate like Milton these days just seems somehow naïve.

Is it true? Has the grand just become grandiloquent? The epic apocryphal? What is left worth having writ large? If Signor Alighieri knows, he isn’t saying so far.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.

“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

The train that galloped up to the platform this morning, normally crammed with humanity, was empty but for the discarded newspapers lining the window ledges. I thought I had missed the memo about the start of the zombie apocalypse. Turns out the kids have gone back to school, and the tourists have gone home. So I spent some time on my morning commute thinking about the similarities between poets and werewolves.

Culture, like poetry, is so often about what gets transmitted between the lines. It is not, I decided, the bankers and CEOs who normally sit across from me on the train who hold the most cultural power. What we learn on our mothers’ laps goes deep, to a visceral level. What gets passed down, mother to child through generations, forms the culture of a people. Mothers, therefore, are also “unacknowledged legislators” creating and replicating the very “operating system” of a society–its culture.

Moving from California to London certainly feels like I have switched operating systems. Apart from the obvious fumbling as I seek to find where they’ve moved the new buttons and menus, this shake-up gives me the opportunity to discover what is universal among computers–er–people. Contrast is one powerful way to heighten perception and uncover commonality in the quest for what is essentially human.

I have also discovered, however, that poets are not entirely human. A good poet, like a good poem, is always a bit unpredictable. And one thing all societies dislike, and strive to minimise, is unpredictability. (Which may be part of why Plato excluded both the undead and poets from his ideal Republic.) Outsiders, however, often make the best anthropologists.

The so-called “Martian poetry” of the 70s and 80s appropriates self-reflexive techniques to obtain an outside-in objectivity on our world. Confessional poetry of the same era takes an inside-out subjective approach. But a third approach, to art and to life, involves a participant-observer model, where one is in, but not entirely of, the surrounding culture, keenly and perpetually aware of one’s otherness. The perceptiveness that results from such mild but incurable alienation is precisely what put the “Howl” in Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem.

And so, my hairy little secret is out: I have learned to live here as a werewolf. That primal thing within me finds its voice on the lunar-white page. This feeds a hunger nothing else in life can satiate, and helps me get through each clean-shaven day in The City, knowing, soon enough, the moon will rise full over London, and in me, once more.

But it was the advent of film that brought new possibilities to poetic collaborations by opening up both fronts–visual and auditory–at once. One of my favourite examples of the successful intermarriage of film and poetry is a segment of the 1987 German film “Wings of Desire” that incorporates Peter Handke’s poem “Als das Kind Kind war” (“When the Child was a Child”):

The advent of interactive online media made poetic collaborations of a different type accessible worldwide. A favourite in this regard is Marvin Bell’s poem “Why do you Stay up so Late?” arranged as an interactive Flash piece by Ernesto Lavandera circa 2005. Here the observer is in control of the pace of the poem, as looped sound segments accompany written words and abstract images served up click by click.

The recent prevalence of video sharing and social media has birthed a new form of collaborative art, so new that the term has yet to be standardised. A Google search as of this writing for the following terms yielded these number of results: poem-film (32k), poemfilm (8k), film-poem (99k), filmpoem (30k). For now, I am going with the majority in referring to these works as “film-poems”.

Aesthetically, these pieces tend to feel like a music video of the spoken word. It is a tricky mix, where both the perils and possibilities are great, owing to both media being intense forms in their own right. Done well, both the film and the poem take on greater impact. But the extent to which the combination seems disjointed or drawn out, the form can quickly feel pretentious or silly. Sparing you that, I will give an example of two very different approaches that seem to work.

American poet Michelle Bitting has been working on a series of “poem-films” this summer in collaboration with her husband. People appear in each of them–both live and through photographs. “In Praise of My Brother, the Painter” is a poem about the speaker’s brother, an artist who committed suicide. The poem-film introduces and emphasises new elements distinct from the poem, using footage of Houdini to draw visual analogies, and special effects, such as the three colourised words at the end, to emphasise their impact.

Scottish poet Andrew Philip collaborated with lens artist Alastair Cook in “MacAdam Takes to the Sea” as part of Alastair’s “Filmpoem” project. This piece is more visually abstract. Despite being about a man, only the back of a head in silhouette appears. The majority of the video is composed of recurring sea imagery. These visual loops create their own texture and rhythm in accompaniment to Andrew’s words.

The film-poem is a nascent but promising form, bringing together one modern and one timeless art, exploring both the visual and auditory possibilities of each. Gaining notice on both sides of the Atlantic at once, it will be interesting to see how this mode develops and matures, and how the audience for poetry will be affected by its rise.

“[W]reathes of smoke / Sent up in silence, from among the trees.”

My family and I left for a much-needed holiday on the Welsh border as London exploded in riots. We decided weeks ago that we wanted to “escape” the city, but little did we know all that we would be escaping. Since that time, we have been following reports of neighbourhoods very near our own North London home erupting in looting and violence.

Meanwhile, we have been exploring the idyllic countryside of the Wye valley. Images of London engulfed in flame have interspersed with dazzling greenery, the likes of which inspired Wordsworth to compose his famous poem set above Tintern Abbey. The Abbey itself, dismantled by decree from Henry VIII, rises skeletal in the countryside, like the fire-gutted shops, double-decker buses, and police cars photographed on London streets.

In the poem, Wordsworth declares, “I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.” Indeed, this still, sad music has been with me on our journey through the “sylvan Wye.” I am struck by the quiet of this place, in contrast to London’s constant hustle, and the lush natural forms, as compared to the barrage of advertisements, the likes of which program all of us, including would-be looters, that if only we had an iPad, we might be happy.

Here, with space and beauty, where even the grass seems content, it is hard to imagine humans piled into housing estates, crammed into tube carriages at rush hour, struggling against each other to get by. And it seems only natural that such unnatural circumstances are kindling awaiting a spark. My heart goes out to London, and all the cities in the UK experiencing unrest.

A fire is flickering in a great stone hearth in our fourteenth-century cottage. The moon is bathing the river and meadows blue, while the trees darken almost to black. It seems to me the peace we feel in such circumstances runs deep within our nature. I wish the peace of the Wye could wash over all of Britain tonight.

I have my own relationship with each of these poems. The first poem in this collection tells a lot about the purpose I have found in writing poetry. That is why I put it first. The Scottish poet Andrew Philip, who also lost his first-born son, says near the end of his poem “Lullaby,” “this is the man you fathered.” Indeed, my experience with the birth and death of our son James was an initiation into fatherhood–that I was “fathered” by him, just as one might be “knighted” by a sovereign. I came away with a charge.

But how to fulfill the charge of fatherhood without a child of one’s own? This is a question I have been answering in many ways. One of those ways is poetry. James did not get to experience this world with me. One of the most difficult aspects of grief is not that he is gone, but that he is everywhere. And so, I have decided to go on “speaking” to him–about the beauty and poignance of this world–by speaking to everyone.

What began as a language for processing grief has become a language for processing the mystery and paradox of the world in which I live, and of sharing it. I experience it as a paternal act, an outlet for everything I would have wanted to show to our boy. More than going through the motions, this “speaking” to him by speaking to others, to myself, and to the world around me, is a reason to keep writing poetry. It is a way of fathering the one I am with, even when I am alone. And that is something that I know will go on–as long as I live.

Neruda is tough to translate well. I imagine similar perils await poets who try to translate Wallace Stevens into another language. Foremost among them is a kind of strangeness that makes linguistic, but not literal, sense. Many of the versions I found were over-literal in places where they should have favored more adherence to tone and theme from line to line. Also, given a Spanish word that resembled an English word, first-language-English translators almost always chose that English word, even if it did not carry the most precise shade of meaning across from its Spanish cousin. This reliance on word-by-word mapping actually introduces more and inappropriate strangeness into the poem, not the least through awkward syntax.

And so, I set out to preserve more of the fluidity and atmosphere of the poem in rendering my own translation.

Walking Around
by Pablo Neruda

As it happens, I am tired of being a man.
As it happens, I go to the tailor and to the cinema
shriveled, impervious, like a swan made of felt
flowing on the waters of origin and ash.

The smell of the barber shop makes me sob.
I want a break from stone and wool.
I want to stop seeing institutions and gardens,
commodities, eyeglasses, elevators.

As it happens, I am tired of my feet and my nails,
my hair and my shadow.
As it happens, I am tired of being a man.

Nonetheless, it would be delicious
to frighten a notary with a fresh-cut lily,
or mortify a nun with a smack on the ear.
It would be lovely
to roam the streets with a green knife
yelling until I froze to death.

I do not want to go on like a root in the dark,
wavering, stretched out, shivering with a dream,
down, into the moist guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, consuming daily.

I do not want such misfortunes.
I do not want to continue rooting to the tomb,
alone underground with a cellar full of corpses
frozen solid, killing me with sorrow.

This is why Monday burns like gasoline
when I show up with my jailbird face,
and howls on its way like a wounded wheel
and takes hot-blooded steps into the night.

It pushes me to familiar corners, damp houses,
hospitals where the bones fly out the windows,
to cobbler shops that smell of vinegar,
terrible, cavernous streets.

There are sulfur-colored birds, and foul intestines
hanging over the doors of these houses,
false teeth misplaced in a cafeteria,
there are mirrors
that should be crying with shame and horror,
everywhere umbrellas, poisons, umbilical cords.

I walk calmly, with eyes, shoes,
rage and oblivion,
step through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards where washing hangs from the line:
underwear, towels, and shirts that weep
slow filthy tears.

"The Sack of Rome..." by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre

Along with poems entitled “Ars Poetica,” essays entitled, “In Defense of Poetry,” or some variation on that theme, have circulated for decades. It occurs to me that the idea that poetry needs defending is as much in error as the idea that the Earth needs saving. In truth, if we humans sully our revolving petri dish of a planet so as to make it uninhabitable, it is not the Earth that will pay the ultimate price. In a small matter of perhaps a few billion years, the planet is likely to recover from its unfortunate little human experiment. So, really, it is ourselves we save by taking care of our environment.

Likewise, I believe that poetry is the natural expression of a healthy society. So, it is not that we need to defend poetry to the society in which we find ourselves, but that we must strive to remember our society to poetry’s importance. And yet, as much as I know that poetry has, in fact, “saved” me in my life, I do not believe that it is poetry’s job to “save” the world in which I live.

I often wonder about the poets who lived in the end times of a civilization. Where are the Roman poets who wrote just before the empire’s corrupt system of taxation and conscription precipitated its demise? Or the Mayan priests who writ large the ancient lore while their intricate and untenable corn bureaucracies starved their people to death? These bards are conspicuously unremembered by history.

Yet, no doubt, they existed. And perhaps, in their way, they made equivalent efforts to bring their people back to an understanding of the beauty and power of using language to transcends language. Before the Visigoths incinerated their scrolls, or their stone inscriptions crumbled, they, too, may have found a kind of personal salvation in the way a well-made poem can embrace human contradiction. Though words alone may have been insufficient to defend them from hostilities within or without, I know poetry is at once an act of courage, and, as Keats said, “comes … as naturally as the leaves to a tree.”

It requires no justification, no explanation, no defense.

The currency of trust

The conversation of poetry takes many forms. The following three types of conversation are metaphors that illustrate some of the trust dynamics at play in contemporary poetry. See if you recognize them–both the actual conversations, and the experience of the conversation, transposed onto the experience of reading certain poems.

The first is a conversation with that friend who is always at the effect of some terrible circumstance. They tell you, in detail, the latest mishap, and with such conviction that it would be difficult not to feel sorry for them–if you were naive enough not to realize, after mishap after mishap, and tale after tale, that with them, the drama will never end. But the more you try to inure yourself to their tales, the more dramatic they become. In the end, you can’t help but feel emotionally manipulated. Even if this person believes their own story, it is hard to trust them not to tug excessively hard, fast, and often at your heart strings.

The second kind of conversation is one among acquaintances, perhaps a group of smart freshmen undergraduates getting to know themselves and each other in uncertain new circumstances. Here wit is the currency of the conversation, a constant repartee. In this atmosphere of intellectual one-upsmanship, conversation is designed to hold the others at emotional arms’ length, never risking anything intimate unless it is couched in a sarcastic tone. Any sense of trust in what is being said is constantly subverted by clever, fast-paced ripostes. I have often left such gatherings with a deep sense of alienation.

Finally, there is the third conversation that takes place among old friends. The group has been through a lot together, has watched each member change over time, knows the good and bad, the essential humanity of each flawed person. The result of such combined familiarity and acceptance is that the conversation can go deep, both emotionally and intellectually, without feeling either manipulative or vacuously clever. Such moments are precious, and I have come away from these rare intimate gatherings, not only with a greater appreciation of old friends, but a renwed faith in humanity.

Since the Second World War, poetry in the postmodern age has veered between emotionally manipulative modes, and intellectually defensive modes of deconstruction. Neither builds much trust with the reader, since ultimately the intention behind either one is to aggrandize the author. Having become disillusioned to ideas of centrality and truth as institutional concepts, these two warring forms of narcissism have taken over much of contemporary poetry. Yet it is this third mode–a return to trust that involves embracing the greater truths of the human condition–that represents where I believe poetry can, and must, go.

If centrality were the thesis, and postmodern distrust the antithesis, in the dialectic now playing out, then the synthesis that our literature, and our world, so desperately needs is an integrative embrace of paradox. To restore our belief in humanity, we must first restore our literature–neither to a position of emotional manipulation nor to an alienating trickery–but to an affirming conversation that can abide contradiction, disillusionment, and doubt without becoming either cynical or sappy. This is the kind of poetry that rewards our trust, not with mere emotional or intellectual sensation, but by transforming our understanding of what it means to be alive.

For more on this topic, please see Post-Postmodernism and Hope.

We come in peace

I curled open the first pages of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry expecting to find an introduction like so many others to this type of book–full of generic exuberance for the editors’ generation. Instead, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (I assume the introduction was written by both) made the following observations in 1982, which still seem directionally interesting nearly thirty years on. They wrote that, “…as a way of making the familiar strange again, they [contemporary British poets] have exchanged the received idea of poet as the-person-next-door, or knowing insider, for the attitude of the anthropologist or alien invader or remembering exile.”

While the enthusiasm for Martian persona poetry by Craig Raine and Christopher Reid seems like a hyperbolic extension of this principle, the idea of poet-as-anthropologist I find not only fascinating, but useful in understanding contemporary poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, it seems to answer “what comes next?” after a glut of confessional writing. They address this, as well, directly:

This development has been antipathetic to the production of a candidly personal poetry. Most of the devices developed by young poets are designed to emphasize the gap between themselves and their subjects. The poets are–to borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Exposure’–’inner emigrés’: not inhabitants of their own live so much as intrigued observers, not victims but onlookers, not poets working in a confessional white heat but dramatists and story-tellers.

Certainly, the danger of deploying an anthropological trope, like any trope, is that it can quickly become what Gerard Manly Hopkins called “Parnassian”–talent operating on auto-pilot along the flight path of the accepted theme. I am thinking, for example, of the parodies of Billy Collins’s poems, where the poet makes clever observation of the elements of his home town as though he were touring Europe.

But this directional shift–from the narcissism of the first-person confessional mode to an anthropological stance–seems to hold through American poets as varied as Mark Doty (excavating gay culture during the AIDs epidemic), Tony Hoagland (dusting off the bones of “meanness” buried beneath suburbia), and Yusef Komunyakaa (retelling his participant observation of the Vietnam war in a language all his own).

In this way, American poets are no less united in the cause Morrison and Motion see for their contemporaries overseas, to “extend the imaginative franchise”–with its power to renew our understanding of what it means to be human. It is in this pursuit that poetry and the actual science of anthropology intersect. At the end of postmodernism, having our ideas of objectivity and centrality blasted to bits by the Second World War, we are beginning to pick up the pieces.

But simply gluing them back together is no longer an option. Having examined our own little fragment ad nauseum through confession, we are finally beginning to relate more inquisitively to our own, and the other, shards. In what I hope history will regard as our current period of “late postmodernism” or perhaps “post-postmodernism,” we return in poetry to the one question a Google search can’t answer for us: what is it, this thing called “being human?”