Martha Kapos, Assistant Poetry Editor The Poet’s Double

I have always been intrigued by the nightmarish Hans Andersen story about the man who becomes the servant of his own shadow. A learned man from a cold country goes to live in the south where the sun casts such long shadows that they can leap across surprising distances and even climb walls. The man finds himself living opposite the house of a beautiful woman whose balcony, across from his own, features the most delicate and mysteriously illuminated flowers. He finds that his shadow can reach across to this balcony, and fantasises that it could actually enter her house. In the manner of the fatal wish, it does so, and is never seen again – until, years later, an extremely thin person who, judging by his distinguished appearance is very prosperous and successful, knocks on the door, and introduces himself as the man’s former shadow. They exchange accounts of the intervening years: the life of the learned man, dedicated to writing about the good and the beautiful, has been a failure, whereas the shadow reports that the woman whose apartment he entered, turned out to be ‘the loveliest creature in the world – Poetry!’ There, rather in the manner of Rimbaud, he ‘saw everything’ and ‘learned to know everything’ – even his ‘innermost nature’. He proceeds to persuade the learned man to enter employment for the rest of his life as his shadow.

The double is a familiar figure in fairytale, but he also crops up as the ‘other’ to the literal factual self of the writer – a theme that has its origins in ancient ritual. Masks made of leaves or the bark of trees were worn in early classical drama to show that the gods had been brought down to earth to take possession of the wearer and transmute his identity. The voice projected from the open mouth of the mask came from a source not to be identified with an actual person. ‘Poems appear to come from the self’, as Jane Hirshfield has said, ‘only if you do not write them’.

I recently attended an unusual poetry ‘event’ at Kings Place in London, devised and produced by Julia Bird. Neither a reading nor a performance, ‘You are Here’ staged three well-known poets in a loosely theatrical setting, as if they were neither poets, nor actors, but somehow ‘real people’ reading their poems in conversation with each other, or directly addressing the audience. Describing his own poetic development and his ‘discovery of a voice’, Seamus Heaney wrote of how ‘you get your own feeling into your own words’ until they have the ‘feel of you’ about them. But the surprising effect of this production was to question the identification of person and voice. Conventional poetry readings with little snippets of autobiography introducing each poem foster the illusion that the poet’s voice is spoken by a ‘true self’ outside of the poem. But instead of seeming to emanate from the ‘real’ Daljit Nagra, Jo Shapcott or Colette Bryce, these poems took on a startling new resonance and life of their own, quite independent of their authors.

In another context Heaney seems to suggest that a poet’s bare factual self may be too poor a thing to credit with the possession of a poetic voice. It has to come unbidden and unforeseen from another dimension of the writing ‘I’. It is able to give form to something about ourselves that we almost know, or are on the verge of knowing, and even then only in conjunction with the musical qualities of language:

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Martha Kapos, Assistant Poetry Editor

The poems in this issue were edited by Martha Kapos; the reviews and features by Tim Dooley.