Poems are an expression of the truth: they are the ideal antidote to a demagogue’s hoarse imperatives
What does an anthology of poems do? It lets you – it makes you – experience in words the feelings of others. And then it makes you do it again. Open an anthology and you’re time-travelling. You’re also leaping from body to body, from mind to mind, letting other people speak through you. That in itself is a radical act – though we are fit for it. We’re mimicking animals. We learn to smile by imitating our mothers. And our mirror neurons fire not only when we see an action done, but also when we read about it being done. Reading poems, embodying in words a chain of apprehensions, is to know something of a particular writer’s way of being in the world. It says, “And there’s this.” We experience some part – lexically, chemically, electrically, emotionally – of what the writer felt. What knowledge could be more consoling - or more difficult to bear in mind?
So much for the theory. In practice, an anthology begins as a pile of poems you’ve read over the decades and kept in a file in your drawer, and on your fridge, your bathroom mirror, your study door. When Don Paterson and I began putting together an anthology a few years ago, The Zoo of the New, the criterion we agreed on was whether a poem was “good enough”. As a definition, it’s obviously spectacularly useless. But it allowed us to choose only poems we loved, only poems that seemed capable of shaking us awake to some experience, only poems that were getting it down right in words. The remit had to be nebulous: we wanted to throw the net as wide as we liked. Part of the pleasure was sending poems to each other and finding one’s own enthusiasms (mostly) returned, and often magnified. Having said that, neither of us will ever get back the hours and hours on Skype spent arguing over certain poems and poets, certain stanzas, certain words, but it is done now – and since we only rather slowly and ineptly herded the thing together, I think we can say without undue pride that these are poems of brilliance from the last 600 years of the English language. We wanted a big, baggy book that could range as widely as life does, that changed, like life, without warning. Plenty of poems about the Eliotic brass tacks of birth, sex and death, but also poems about nothing, about being bored, about rubber boots, about hedgehogs and microscopes and gardens and dogs.
Populism claims to love the people but of course it hates the individual, and poetry is one mode of opposing that
Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were
afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with
one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how
impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious
element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards
pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water,
at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested,
That’s all.
I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.
