I was watching local tv recently and saw a paid feature, sponsored by a financial institution, featuring images of sick and underprivileged children with a voiceover narration describing how sick the kids were, and how great the institution was for helping them.As I listened to the "spoken words" which, I gathered from the lead-tongued American accents, and the smug "take dat pow-yeh-tree in you pwefm" expressions worn by the poeteers, were intended to be poetry (sort of), a whole other level of horror emerged.
Listening to the voiceover was like pouring motor oil in the ears. I can't remember any of the words, but I remember they were terrible and unbearable.And since the kids had to be commissioned by somebody, I had a sinking suspicion that people at large really think this is poetry and began to wonder about the consequences.What, for instance, might be the consequences if there were an event where things like this were recited for the unsuspecting and notoriously gullible general public?
It also occurred to me that if the sponsors of the advertorial, who control millions of dollars of other people's money (you know, like Clico), couldn't tell the difference between this slobbering auditory assault and poetry, what else didn't they know? So for one column only, I'm going to help the young poeteers with free advice they don't want and won't understand.
Some years ago, Lexicon Publishers published a volume called The Armour of the Ridiculous, featuring six Trini poets, introduced by Gordon Rohlehr. (I should disclose I was involved.)It was published at the last Carifesta, because Ken Jaikaransingh (of Lexicon) agreed with me that some kind of gasp of protest for literacy should be emitted given what was happening in literary circles.
The contributors all agreed on the following: poetry isn't deep feelings given shrill voice; "spoken word" is another way of saying "louts' shouting"; and no poem should ever start with the phrases: "I am a Black/Indian/(ethnicity of your choice) wo/man," or "I sit/stand/lie here and wonder/think/yearn," and should never include the words "soul," "loins" or "fecund."We were able to find six talented and promising poets, all of whom agreed with the compact.
I have space to quote three here. The first is On the Rue St Dominique by Alex de Verteuil:
I saw a black man
eating oysters
on the Rue
St Dominique
and wondered if
he might be filled
with pearls.
The second is Third World Master-Mind by Luke Jorsling:
He had a tyrannical cast of mind
which gave him, to many of his countrymen,
a strong and engaging personality
but also made him very dangerous.
He watched with knowing eyes the Poet go
through one locked door that led
to another unlocked door and each door utter
the same word: "What?"
And he, with the tyrannical cast of mind
and knowing eyes, with one hand stroked his chin,
while held the other hand behind his back
in a tight fist.
And the third is Poem in April by (the late) Winston Hackett:
Burnt earth tufted green
by recent rains near the highway's edge,
but the rust of a long drought still rules.
In the fire-charged fields
a pond in whose dull mirror an outhouse leans
neighbours an open scrapyard. Skeletons of speed
Clutter this square. In the wake
of the tractor-drawn ploughs, herons forage.
Saharan, a haze blues the northern hills.
These, little poeteers, are poems. Read them again. But poems are only half of poetry. The other half is how to read them.The first poem seems innocuous, more like an idle, amusing thought. So what makes it a poem? Symmetry and breath. The poem opens with black (man) and closes with white (pearls). The poetic intent is balanced throughout among aphorism, epigram, and irony. The poetry is in the brevity; the short line-breaks remind you it's constructed.
The second poem is riskier, with long lines which could easily slide into prose. What delivers it are the repetitions "tyrannical cast of mind," "locked/unlocked door" that draw the stanzas into auditory/ideative relation, and the sly discursive movement of the poem from abstract to material, ie, from mind to hand, chin, fist. A transition occurs at the centre of the poem, via the figure of the Poet mediating mind and fist, and delivers its big statement about art and power in the Third World.
The third poem is more conventionally poetic. Sound devices like alliteration and internal rhyming draw the auditory curiosity as the cinematic array of images leads the visual sense. Ideatively, the poem also moves from the industrial to the pastoral, from a highway and scrapyard to the panoramic Saharan haze in the mountains. Quite an achievement for nine lines.
Much more could be said about these poems, but what is evident is that the poets arrived at the economy and precision with language and sound through careful, patient practice. The intellectual depth also evidently came through reading great poets, like William Carlos Williams and Martin Carter. A little thought, some humour, and some self-effacing silence might have also been involved.
So what does this say to poeteers and word speakers? Well, the best poetry is polysemous–capable of meaning many things at the same time. If I had to give an opinion, I'd say these poems are saying to the word speakers I heard and saw reciting the voiceover in the video of the suffering children: Silence is good. The world needs ditch diggers too.