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Who is going to read your poems, now or ever? Who reads
them when you send them to Poetry London? Hundreds of poems arrive
through the letterbox each week accompanied by variously chatty, pleading,
or reticent cover letters from poets hopeful of acceptance. But I’m
reminded of Emily Dickinson’s address to the unknown reader —
‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you — Nobody —
Too?’ The surprise contained here is that the exalted editor/reader
is no more a ‘somebody’ than the poor punter who is pushing
his or her poems out into the world. Rather than seeing the poet and reader
in separate roles marked by differences in authority, power or status,
Dickinson proposes a common sense levelling — placing the reader
and writer side by side on the same undistinguished plane. This is, of
course, true as far as Poetry London is concerned in that the
editors are themselves poor punters pushing their own poems out. We, too,
are among the ‘delicate monsters’ invoked by Baudelaire: ‘Hypocrite
reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!’
We, too, have to negotiate that painful transition between the reader
in imagination to whom the poem may be consciously or unconsciously addressed
— an ideal reader with the same understandings and sympathies as
oneself (who is in fact an aspect of oneself) — and the unknown,
anonymous editor, and further, if one is very lucky, the faceless and
multiple readers who may read your published poem out there in the world.
The workshop is often a useful half-way house in which to test the poem
in its transition to the ‘other reader’. I know only too well
the mixed feelings that accompany the typing of the cover letter, the
placing of the SAE in the envelope, the sticking of the stamp, and the
trot down to the postbox — it’s as if these simple tasks assumed
monumental proportions. It’s as if I’m faced with the struggle
to scale an enormous mountain, or perhaps to descend into the depths of
the Underworld. And there is a truth in this in the sense that the poet
has somehow to get past the paymasters guarding the Gates of Hell —
the hell of rejection.
The best text I know, and yet also the most mysterious, for understanding
the relationship between poet and editor/reader, and the dynamic of acceptance
and rejection, is to be found in Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven
and Hell’. One of his ‘memorable fancies’ begins: ‘I
was in a printing house in Hell.’ He goes on to describe his passage
through a series of demonic chambers containing dragon-men, snakes decorating
caves with gold and precious stones, lions on fire, eagles with feathers
of air and eagle-men. All of these vivid energies wind up in captivity,
taking the form of books arranged on library shelves.
Blake then says that these giants of energy are kept in chains by the
cunning of weak and tame minds, a class of men deluding themselves about
their own power — ie the editors. But then what follows is the most
disturbing and mysterious passage of all. It is also an about-turn away
from the pleasurable paranoia of the previous images.
‘Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring.
To the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains... But the
Prolific would cease to be prolific unless the devourer as a sea received
the excess of his delights.’
When poet and reader meet, the prolific in one cannot give unless the
devourer in the other is waiting and willing to receive. Please continue
to send your poems to the ‘delicate monsters’ at Poetry
London. We look forward to receiving the excess of your delights.
In fact there is nothing more thrilling than to receive these from ‘nobody’
— that is — from ‘somebody’ whose name is unknown.
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