It’s here

by Lila Matsumoto

from the New Scottish poets feature in Jacket2 Magazine

Poem is here.

This poem recites a well-known approaching, a scene that is readily identifiable – having been put to bed near dusk, you get ready to pretend you’re asleep when your parent(s) check up on you. I want to suggest that the imagery & tone employed allows for a more distressing interpretation.

The title is the first instance of a knowingness – whatever’s coming, the child(ren) know what it is. The title (in conjunction with the first line) also remind me of the promo poster for Poltergeist, & in a way the poem becomes a menu of horror film tropes – glowing “sheep eyes” in darkness, the creak of yellow light as a bedroom opens slowly, the turning of a “sudden corner” towards something “terrible” reminiscent of the Steadicam shots of Danny on his trike in The Shining (see e.g. the terrifying, gliding delay as Danny turns the “sudden corner” the first time he sees the former caretaker’s twin daughters; the camera trailing so languidly and ‘adult-like’ that you barely realise that Danny sees them first; that this is really his terror alone to contemplate).

The first line is a specific prophecy. Tonally it sets a pattern – this is something that the speaker has been through before. The idea of hands cresting a hill also introduces the poem’s imagistic ambiguity. In what circumstances do hands ever crest hills? I can only think of an unwanted pair of hands creeping across the rise of a bedspread or doona. Temporally this makes sense – the poem is about the minutes before the pair of hands actually arrive in the room.

The correct stress emphasis over the next two lines is difficult to pin down. I read it like this: “We’ll know…THEN…when they’ve obscured the gloaming light”. The victims (in the orphans-banded-together third person for support) “know” the time has come for suffering when the “pair of hands” black out whatever light was being provided by dusk through the shutters / blinds. Who else goes to bed in “gloaming light” except kids? Shift workers?

I love the use of “return” in the next line. It gets at the innocence of this kid’s terror – there is almost a normality about the way the natural image of “sheep eyes” ‘returns’ to take up its place in the kid’s imagination as a willow-wisp. The next line’s matter-of-factness about a folklore-ish wive’s tale is confronting – that the barn owl’s call “is really” a child being eaten is expressed as being as certain as the fact Santa isn’t real. The victim is under no illusions, even though he / she surrounds him / herself with them as a means of escape.

I think the imagery becomes more explicit over the next 4 lines. Of course the poem might’ve been intended to describe a kindly visitation, but there is a dankness about the whole unfolding that readily suggests the encroaching, growing phallus; “something small / and terrible is assuming a form”; that thing is “veined and fanged”; it’s also a “cold and wet toe”. “Light follows” this encroachment – again, the language is of a narrative sequence known too well.

That scattering of “dust particles” works as a final idea of abandonment. And that they are labelled as being indifferent is perhaps the strongest “confirmation” that something is about to happen that they shouldn’t be indifferent about.

I’ve dwelled a while on the last line, but I think it works to the extent that it links things back to the poem’s title. It’s here. What’s here? “Something that had been approaching”. Something that is no longer approaching, but is ready to “crest the hill”. The “confirmation” event can only be verbalised as “something”, “it” being too terrible to even metaphorise or describe. The rest is silence.

Emergents

From Overland

By Stephen Nichol

Poem is here.

The poet does well to pack an ostensibly melancholic / possibly sardonic tale of domestic metamorphoses into five tercets. The poem is short enough to examine stanza by stanza, and it’s worth doing so.

1

The opening line is deceptively mundane. There’s a stupid idea going around that poets should be alert to the explosiveness of their opening lines, like they’re writing a mechanised op-ed that needs to rope in clicks.

I like this opening because it nails a few ideas: stasis, patience, and bored domestic anguish. You can imagine the domestic unhappiness that has built to this climax of drudgery: where for years (decades) this bloke’s days have been spent waiting for things like lunch, or dinner, or a tv show, or a chance to masturbate, or bed, things have gotten so bad that he’s conscious of the time it takes for his beard to grow. It also gets at the idea of a guy who is heavily involved with the mechanics of his anatomy (as I’ll suggest as we go along, there’s a chance he’s just a wanker). The poem tracks an escapist fantasy of anatomical metamorphoses.

If you didn’t know (and I didn’t), this guy is clearly a keen fly-fisherman, in that he has enough time on his hands to recreate the emergent inhabitants of minute ecosystems (mayfly & caddis are fly species that are often used as manufactured ‘bait’). I dig the skill & intricacy of fly-fishermen, but most of the ones I’ve met are not unlike this bloke. One queries whether the poet had an acquaintance in mind.

2

The “wife” might be standing next to the guy while he fishes. Or standing next to him at the lights on the way to the supermarket. Or standing next to him in the supermarket aisle. Whatever the case, things are plaintively static, & also a bit sooky. Also note that there is no scarier image of Australian rural lassitude than a hive of midges given a free pass to spread across bare skin.

3

An overgrowth of ivy again suggests stasis, and foreshadows the transformation of the speaker into a rotted Ent in stanza 4. Stanza 2 was about a secrecy of disconnectedness. In stanza 3, secrecy mixes with bitterness to make fantasy. The speaker is become nature-protector, & the wife is now the predator threatening the first metaphor of his re-emergence (“yellow tail finch eggs”). I like the formal subtleties that are starting to pile up by this stage; see e.g. the little rhymes on heads / next / legs / nest / eggs / breakfast.

Aside: the speaker reminds me a bit of the unhappy old man who appears late in this video, & who appears to be mourning the years wasted with the old girl sitting next to him (or he might be on the way home from a funeral; I’ve never figured that bit out). Actually the whole video, being about stasis & redemption, is a neat analogy for this poem. Although I think this poem is kind of taking the piss.

4

The idea that one has become a living skeleton or shell isn’t really a groundbreaker. But I like the introduction of the (again plainly worded) “men in fishing boats” here. There is an element of wilful emasculation about the protagonist’s experience. In becoming one with an ecosystem he’s manufacturing in his own mind, he’s sacrificing the power to ride roughshod over nature itself (“in fishing boats”). Again though, I think the poet wants us to see that there’s something pitiable, even laughable, about that fantasy.

5

The fantasy is fully inhabited. His viewpoint is of the convex inside of a cocoon. He has become the “emergent mayfly” and / or “caddis”. Wikipedia says those species spend most of their juvenile lives underwater, and end up having tiny adult life spans above water (a few hours, or a few days at the most). Which again suggests the poem is a sarcastic allegory about male ambition & the narratives we construct to satisfy our absences. Isn’t this just a disaffected husband re-experiencing adolescence? A bloke who spends the poem drowning in his own corny constructs to such an extent that he when he emerges triumphant above water he doesn’t realise he’ll probably die within hours? The (very) subtle moral of the story is that a mid-life crisis is never an emergent-cy.

Why Are there So Many Poems about Goldfish?

by Fiona Hile

from Cordite Poetry Review 39.0

Poem can be found here.

This is a funny argument for a poetics. The poetic being endorsed involves an element of sensory disordering, but I think the poet here is a bit more conscious of her fascinations and frustrations than Rimbaud. I know I mention him a lot on this blog but I tend to think Forbes is the dominant influence on the way this poem moves through its conceptual positioning. Forbes was great at shaping his poem-arguments around ‘system integrated’ metaphorical conceits (see e.g. a poem like ‘Ode to Karl Marx’). This poem situates us in a life aquatic of aesthetic deliberation.

Argument is probably the wrong word to use to describe the poem’s trajectory. It’s better read as a conversation over beers about what is in and what is clearly out.

What’s out?

Poems about goldfish, for which read poems that have no memory or life beyond the fish tank of one soul. Or poems that are written by poets that assume “I KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE”, that get around like dime-a-dozen “domesticated carp” in “super-ramified orange overalls” emblazoned with capitalised company logos. Poems that try to sell you on their excellence.

“The personal address”. It’s a neat option if you’re good at it, but the poet doesn’t seem convinced. Which again raises Rimbaud, who thought the personal mode was always a lie, or at best a repackaging of the identity of others. Present yourself in a fish tank if you want (see e.g. Thom Yorke), but generally it’s too easy to spot your bobbing about the place for aesthetic sustainability.

“Python Technology”? Sure it integrates our systems of appreciation effectively, in the sense that it overruns our basic instincts with narrative / cliffhanger suspense (the image-conceit used to describe this process is pure Forbes; the cliffhanger working to restore the fight-or-flight instincts in our reptilian carapaces). But are those kind of closed “end-to-end” structures enough? Yes it can result in being besotted (don’t get me wrong, I love action films), but I think of besot in the sense of being made dully or stupidly infatuated. Which is the last thing we want from a poetics. Unless we’re in a mood.

What’s in?

Conscious infatuation with language & linguistic chance & the possibilities of such (“words that sounds similar but are spelt differently”). Fecundity is to be had here, even if it’s unsettling and not the kind of party you want to be invited to (“rotting floorboards and bilge / cocktails”). Choosing this course means the curses and the blessings of James Bond – lots of dangerous productivity but a lack of ostensible allies or close connections or system integration or stability generally (the parallel is with the experience of Bond in Casino Royale, when he’s forced to abandon Eva Green to drown in a sinking Venetian house).

All of which is preferable to being interrogated (“still-/chair”) by domesticated carp “spelling” out to you what you ought to like.

Addendum

See here for a recent short interview with Hile. Note the poet says she regularly harbours petty suspicions about certain types of poetry (also note she says she intends to shortly reread Forbes). Such aesthetic suspicions inform “Goldfish”, but they’re made to seem lively, funny, & human instead than petty.