A poem is a papier-mâchéd urn of truths, held together by the tricks of lyric and form if left to stand under its own weight, the poem shall only just be porcelain-strong, but it will be real, nonetheless. Though, it must be stated, ‘real’ and ‘truth’ are not interchangeable in the poem’s domain. Poets in the throes of this pursuit, commit decades of their life to the keeping of morning papers-that ablution of the mind-, shun their loved ones and retire to PVC conservatories, spend hours watching the magpie couple pick at the fluorescent moss in the gutter, and perhaps come to the conclusion that these words they’ve jotted down are as close to anything real they’ve experienced. True poetry was, to Milosz, ‘the passionate pursuit of the Real’. Heaney wrote in The Door Stands Open that Milosz called upon poetry to ‘combat death and nothingness’. How does one reconcile this insular right-wing populism with all of its ironies?
I had an unfortunate stint as a soft-solipsist when I was seventeen, after taking a single philosophy module at college: the felled trees were soundless, ‘no relentless onomatopoeia / of footfall and a shush / hissed across buildings’, no need for those chatrooms ‘for the Amish and the Hutterites’. ‘There was a moral.’ Nevertheless, for those factions of society, which believe ‘what we never knew and what we didn’t see / didn’t happen’, history is not something that must be interrogated for bias or illusions, debated, penetrated with empathy, for it is a mere fiction. Blinkered philosophies are the pith of current political discourse, the language of which is ‘shallow and threadbare’, says Armitage, not ‘feeling like it has any truthfulness at all’ and if in 1982 Milosz said, ‘the media are for the mind what too-small slippers were for women’s feet in old China’, I imagine it would be rather close to scaphism now. This century is one of truth debased: we are in Nero’s Rome, the mint has taken a potato peeler to the silver coinage. And I see that in the poems in this issue of Poetry Birmingham-the interrogation of lost voices, of time, of that ether in which the marble floats ‘throttled, violated’-but beyond poetry? Beyond art itself ? Is humanity needling with empathy through the past, or mining it for its most repugnant ideas?
‘Humanity will increasingly be turning back to itself,’ says Milosz, ‘increasingly contemplating its entire past, searching for a key to its own enigma, and penetrating, through empathy, the soul of bygone generations and of whole civilisations’. But the lecture itself, I find, is riddled with a parasite more cunning and more sly than the State: hope. Indeed, and the parasite has undeniably latched itself to the host, taken over. ‘A decline of civic virtues is occurring in the West,’ he says, and later, ‘as the century draws to its close, there is no doubt left as to the parasitic character of any state based upon a monopoly of ownership and power’. The lecture now serves many darkly ironic moments, so much so that my copy of The Witness of Poetry-the book of all his published lectures as professor-is littered with exclamation marks in the margins, an occasional ‘lol’. In 1982, under Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, Czeslaw Milosz concluded a lecture entitled ‘On Hope’ with the above words. every day one can see signs indicating that now, at the present moment, something new, and on a scale never witnessed before, is being born: humanity as an elemental force conscious of transcending Nature, for it lives by memory of itself, that is, in History. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘you’ll have to explain.
He worked as a ticket-collector on Manchester buses, and later on the trains.
His children-three, middle-aged-live in the Wirral, his wife is dead. Two minutes pass and I’m certain he’s scalded his tongue on his tea, given how quickly he sets the mug down, how during the conversation which unfolds, he scrapes his frilly tongue against his teeth, winces. A man approaches-white, elderly, innocuous-he takes the seat beside me. I drink one ristretto at the counter, and I take another to the table to savour.
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