I am very pleased to say that I have had my ‘Poem
of the Week’ Guardian poem, ‘Prison Camp Violin, Riga’ anthologised by
Carol Rumens in her Smart Devices: 52 poems from The Guardian, which is
published by Carcanet, and may be ordered here:
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784107796
Carol Rumens has been contributing ‘Poem of
the Week’ to the Guardian for more than a dozen years: that’s more than
624 blogs! She’s a poet-reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new,
but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her
ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up. This is
a book of the poems with her commentaries.
‘A poem is a small (or large) machine made of
words.’ Rumens partly agrees with William Carlos Williams in her fine
introduction, but she develops the conceit, seeing each poem ‘as a more
flexible instrument, a miniature neo-cortex, that super-connective,
super-layered smartest device of the mammalian brain’. I think I agree. We are
beyond mechanical or organic metaphors now and are safely in a cybernetic
connecting nexus.
Her mode, though, is not to operate at this
level of generality. Her close readings pick at the particularities of the poem
(though she does offer some context, where necessary).
There are 52 poets in the book and they are roughly arranged to take us through the year, so I may well read the book that way. I am looking forward to re-encountering work by Fred D’Aguiar, Denise Riley, John Ashbery, Elaine Feinstein, RF Langley, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Ian Gregson, WS Graham, Billy Mills, John Kinsella, Yves Bonnefoy, Anne Stevenson, and all the others whose work I don’t know very well, or who are, indeed, new names to me.
You can still locate all the poems and commentaries online (not just the 52).
You can still read my poem and Carol’s commentary in The Guardian here.
I also say a little more here about the poem and about where it has been published. (It has a ‘twin’ poem too.)
Carol was born in Forest Hill, South London, in 1944. She has held various literary posts, including the Northern Art Fellowship, and poetry residencies located at Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University and the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies, Nafplio. Rumens has published twenty poetry collections, the latest of which is The Mixed Urn (Sheep Meadow Press, 2019). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bangor, Gwynedd. This is where I met her (only the once, so far, unfortunately, when I was also ‘visiting’, as external examiner in Creative Writing). I’d like to thank her once for choosing the poem for The Guardian and even more so for selecting it for this fascinating book.
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| Carol Rumens lecturing |
