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In one of her early editorials for Poetry London Pascale
described the first sighting of a poem submitted for publication, as if
the editor, out on safari, had come across ‘a new animal all alone
in an immense landscape.’ Wanting to keep this puzzling creature
under observation, ‘I put it in a box and wonder how it will behave
when I next read it. I find myself going back to peep at it just for pleasure.’
Everything the successful poem does strikes her as ‘unique and fully
alive’(Summer 2000).
This was how Pascale introduced readers to the editorial vision which
has been essential in transforming Poetry London into a leading international
poetry magazine. What she demanded of a poem was that it ‘create
its own world’ - an imperative that differs significantly from the
one familiar within empirical traditions in British poetry which demand
that a poem should, above all, ‘create the real world’. But
different in what way? A ‘belief in a restrained language and the
transforming possibilities of description and metaphor’ (to quote
from The Guardian’s recent enthusiastic review of a new collection)
seems to take for granted that ‘the real’ is the ground to
be described or transformed. How is this different from a belief in the
kind of poetry that produces the small moments of overwhelming astonishment
Pascale Petit evokes with her creature in a box?
The poems that have found their way into Poetry London may often bring
with them an accompanying mixture of contradictory states of mind –
a sense of rightness, but also a sense of shock, a sense of newness, but
also of recognition, of something never seen or known before. So the poem
is experienced as an invention, but paradoxically also as a discovery.
As we know from its first definition in Aristotle, metaphor is a conceptual
error: the assignment of a name to something to which that name does not
belong. The phrase ‘Juliet is the sun’ is an absurd proposition
- one that is totally impossible from the point of view of rational thought.
Its author is saying, in effect, that Juliet is no longer a person –
she has become one of the stars of heaven; and the sun also has been annihilated
as an astronomical entity and now, somehow, walks on the ground. But as
Juliet and the sun and their contexts in the real world fade from view,
something else comes to take their place.
Aristotle again. In his Rhetoric he says that metaphor has the
power to set a scene before the eye, to make it visible, to make us ‘see
a thing’. It produces an iconic moment. But, unlike evocations of
the visible through descriptive language, that places before the eye images
which are bounded by what we already know, metaphor makes us see an image
in a new way - without boundaries.
Readers of Poetry London will be familiar with the wide range of international
sources from which Pascale has drawn a distinctively visual poetry: for
example - Australia, China, Russia, Mexico, Chile, Hungary, Lithuania,
France, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and Ireland as well as from poets within
the UK.
These poems have been exciting because they use the image not as a terminal
point where our attention comes to a halt within the recognition of ‘the
real’, but as a point of departure. They demand of thought that
it begin to think more, and of feeling that it begin to feel more. This
is also a poetry that is literally transgressive. It releases in the mind
the movement and energy to travel across the boundaries by which ordinary
language has mapped out its well-trodden, too familiar territory.
I will end by saying that Pascale is the sun. She was one of the founders
of this magazine and under the 15 years of her editorship the poetry pages
of Poetry London have grown and flourished. We wish her a shining future.
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