Junction
(From iungere in Latin to join, in turn from yeug a Proto-Indo-European root meaning join.)
Poets – people – are foreigners. We cross micro-borders all the time. Arriving in new settings or places, forming new relationships; we look for cues, in-words, currency. Either that or we find ourselves staying put but never feel at home, at odds somehow with what’s going on. If like me you have crossed a literal/geo-political border you have that sense of looking around at your new surroundings in wonder/disbelief. Is that really what other people do/think?
I arrived as a child in the UK from behind what was then the Iron Curtain and lived in between my exile/migrant community and the English-speaking worlds of leafy West London suburbs. I soon lost all trace of accent and white skinned looked like most of the people around me but in my head everything was different from food to songs, traditions. More layers added to that. Coming out as a lesbian, dealing with illness. New compass points. I probably haven’t changed much, still trying to communicate each time what I see and know.
Difference, diversity is the heartbeat of poetry – communicating from within our own worlds across difference, across borders. Poetry thrives on paradox. If you can convey the most particular, catch some tiny detail, paradoxically you have a chance of getting to something universal that other people might hear.
I’m not long back from Ledbury Poetry Festival and my head is still spinning. Like many people I’ve been to hardly any events in the last few years and suddenly I was being welcomed at the Poetry House (as well as in my host’s home) with cherries and strawberries and going to 3 readings a day. Poetry flags hung in the still summer sunshine on the high street. Peter Arscott (Chair of the Trustees) calls it a watering hole for poets. It’s a good description. As though we had all come down from our garrets, ivory towers (?) our isolated beavering away…suddenly there were poets everywhere…
When other poets spoke sometimes I’d think hey that’s my line! or wish I’d come up with what someone was saying – but mostly it was gratifying to see we are grappling with similar issues. I wanted to jump up and down when Victoria Abukwei Bulley was talking with Kayo Chingonyi about the importance of history and digging deeper (like archaeologists, she said) rather than just pushing forward regardless. Capitalism exploits and perverts our enthusiasm for the new. I’ve always believed we ignore our histories at our peril and history forms a big part of my new book coming out this autumn*.
Like a lot of the audience I just cried when Ukrainian poet Iryna Tsylik read her stunning poems about fear and love as part of a Versopolis event. She was sitting in a car in a forest linked in by zoom because of how impossible the UK (unlike other European countries) have made obtaining visas and she’d been unable to come in person. She told us she was visiting her husband who is fighting the invasion. She was in conversation with the Finnish poet Johanna Venho who read us intriguing poems of landscape and childhood and Chloe Garner (Festival director). The internet connection went down as she was trying to speak and Chloe kept on making space for her with a promise to get her over in person in the future.
Other highlights included Caleb Femi reading from his new collection about the North Peckam estate Poor and his insistence on finding joy and beauty there. Seni Seneviratne and Vidyan Ravinthiran read their own beautiful poems (including gorgeous love poems!) as well as poems from a forthcoming anthology of Sri Lankan poetry – the first of its kind – which they are editing along with Shash Trevett to be published next year by Bloodaxe. How ignorant we are about those voices in our insular ‘West’ and how brilliant to have a door opening on that world!
Em Strang and Alyson Hallett read with passion, poise and verve and talked with Iain Galbraith about how to find gladness in the face of what is going on around us:
Logistics meant I missed a fabulous Polish translation duel with Modern Poetry in Translation where you can find its delicious fruits, Natalie Haynes, the incredible Michael Rosen and Sasha Dugdale on Irina Ratushinskaya. There were countless other incredible events – too numerous to name here. Last but not least I got to be in conversation with Jessica Mookherjee and Sarala Estruch. It was wonderful to hear Jess’s powerful poems. It all went by in a flash but I think we talked about home and history and precisely this business of being foreigners. And the legacies we have come by – in all their horror and their richness.
Small Odysseys (Waterloo Press) is out this autumn 2022