|
|
The moon, the poet said, has to be torn to pieces. Too
much exposure, too many cycles. Once
it is splintered
we can use it
again. But other poets continued using the
moon as it
was: whole, tarnished and withered
('Spacism')
There are plenty of lunar splinters in The Erotics of Geography. I read the collection (perhaps 'absorbed' would be
a better word, allowing for the impact of multimedia audio and visual
elements) in conjunction with a thorough perusal of Smith's 2005 Allen &
Unwin textbook The Writing Experiment - a great text and highly recommended for any of us who teach or
like to consider creative writing at any level, not only for its lively,
well-explained, and practicable exercises, but also for its clear and
accessible applications of critical theories and their terminologies.
This double dose of Smith was an interesting experience (in no way a
pejorative comment) in that I was experiencing Smith the theorist and
educator in parallel with Smith the playful, inventive practitioner, with
some marvellous experimental pieces which, at first glance, seem the
untrammelled expressions of an adventurous creative mind. Of course, the
boundary between these two Smiths is extremely porous. 'The Writing
Experiment' contains plenty of Smith's own poetic work as well as her tones
of voice clearly detectable in the more theoretical passages. And The
Erotics of Geography likewise makes good
use of the various strategies suggested in its more pedagogical sister
volume.
I was grateful for my double vision, because it informed my reading of Smith's
collection without detracting from my enjoyment of it. And I can see where
certain Experiment techniques
have lead to or helped to 'grow' particular texts. But there is much in The
Erotics of Geography to surprise and
elude categorisation even of the experimental kind. There's a fresh,
accessible start with 'The reader of my book', whose narrative line documents
a bus-awaiting reader who 'opens the book and flicks the pages' without
logic. He throws the book as he mounts the bus and the poem ends with the
neat 'I can only keep my eye on it and catch'; a neat switch of the first
person from authorial narrator to me, the new reader.
The line also celebrates a nice sense of uncertainty in poetic composition -
a trusting of that combination of intuition and serendipitous encounter which
makes for a good poem of any sort, whether the encounter is formally or
subject or language generated. It is, as named in another poem's title, a
'Poetics of Uncertainty'. Thus in
'Emergences' the poet-narrator declares:
when I write I don't want to create
what I
already know
or even what
I can imagine
and in the ending of 'What it would be' there is also an acknowledgement of
that necessary walking of an unknown path, though there's a shiver of
regretful ambiguity here too: 'When I started this poem I didn't know what it
would be about./If I had known I wouldn't have written it'. Imagine
substituting 'relationship' for 'poem'.
This is not to dismiss the usefulness and fruitfulness of formal
restrictions: 'borders prod the unexpected' ('The Ethical Turns'). But
sometimes too much 'to-do' mentality creates a stasis of its own, and Smith
addresses this too, in 'Ought to do' and in 'Acts of Omission'; I identified
rather strongly with this one:
Her days are
full of writing lists, inviting acts which are
never
performed. Each day the list is transferred to a
new one, and
at the end of the month she tears the list
up. Sometimes
not-doing scores over doing.
The ending of this one feels ambiguous too: 'every day, at every moment, she
toasts to the lack that fills her life, her acts of omission'. Is this a real
celebration or more of a grimace? And what does it matter anyway even if one
has indeed 'produced work, though neither well nor often': surely poetry
makes nothing happen? But this is a collection that reflects both on the
wayward creative processes of poetry and on uncomfortable political issues
and how they may be acknowledged, sometimes critiqued, by a poetic text.
Particularly, here, in 'Priceless', a carefully and experimentally laid out
piece of what The Writing Experiment would, I think, classify as ficto-criticism constructed in the form
of discontinuous prose and poetry fragments.
Because of its collage-like format, with text juxtaposed against text in
different fonts, formats, and size, the piece works intermittently on a
micro-level but much more as a resonant whole in itself. Difficult to give
you a sense of it here therefore. I thought some segments interesting in
their own right as well as attracting metaphorical inferences: did you know
that 'The @ sign is actually a 500 yr old sign. It represents an amphora - a
measure of capacity based on the terracotta jars used to transport grain and
liquid in the ancient Mediterranean world' (perhaps poets do something similar, transporting sample grain and
liquid within our own time and place zones, where we are 'at')? Other
segments are more politically and socially hard hitting but unfortunately
risk a lack of subtlety when excised from their context: '6000 children die
everyday because of lack of clean drinking water. And what do poets do about
it?' feels crass as a fragment on its own: better embedded in the whole.
There is much to think on here,
and in similar texts in the collection such as the powerful (and academically
on-trend) 'The Body and the City' and also my favourite, the 'Erotics of
Gossip' - I'd never really considered the functions, philosophy and sexual
frisson of gossip before, so this really got me thinking. But these large
works are contrasted with the slimmer and ostensibly slighter poems which I
sometimes met with a slight sense of relief - perhaps with those blocks of
large bold capitals on the page in the sustained collage pieces, I felt
shouted at, just occasionally. I particularly liked the quirky and thoughtful
homage to Kenneth Koch in 'Talking with Kenneth' which follows 'Priceless':
it narrates a perfectly believable encounter where we learn that 'silly ideas
can make sassy poems'. They can indeed.
Geography is in the title, and place, space and topography are certainly
leitmotifs in the collection. Not in a straightforward way (who would want
that?) but as poetic concepts such as this nice nugget from 'Priceless':
'Poets do not remain in one place. They migrate with the traces of all the
places they have inhabited and imagined. The poet who writes is the poet who
travels'. Smith writes in The Writing Experiment about (cyber and textual) time-space compression
and this concept is detectable too in 'Spacism' and 'Time the magician' where
all sorts of premises are condensed and unravelled. And in 'The Body and the
City' history, location-based treasure and trouble, and an ebullient sense of
happenstance again evoke mix of 'freedom and control' which make up a poetic
life:
She never
really read the map, but half-read and half
guessed at
it. She would walk down a street and only
then would
she check that she was walking the right way.
Sometimes she
had to turn the map upside down. It was
good this
balance between freedom and control, though
it meant
walking further than was really necessary.
She didn't
want to check herself too much.
Finally, don't forget the audio and audio visual pieces which are quirky,
entertaining, disconcerting, and textually refreshing by turns: it's been
exhilarating (stimulating, even) to turn the moonlit map upside down with
this expert collection which lets you feel like a fellow traveller.
©
Sarah Law 2008
|