Editorial

Martha Kapos, Assistant Poetry Editor The Lessons of Laputa

Arriving at the country of Laputa, Gulliver discovers that the new Academies are reinventing the sciences and humanities according to the latest principles. The most innovative project involves the abolition of all words whatsoever. It is argued that since words are only the names for things, in the interests of brevity, a man should simply carry a bundle of things on his back (unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him). A conversation would merely entail the laying out of objects and implements on the pavement.

A course at the Laputa Academy could have certain advantages for poets. Amongst the arts, poetry has had to suffer the handicap of possessing the most elusive and least tangible medium. Compared with the solid properties of sound, colour, texture or mass, words seem to offer an unresisting transparency. For all the gravitational pull of rhyme, metre, lineation and the various formal strategies at the poet’s disposal, we are still impelled to speed off in pursuit of meaning away from the words themselves. In Laputa this situation is turned on its head and Swift proposes a form of anti-dictionary: an index of things that has to serve as an index of words.

If Swift’s perverse exercise is instructive to poets, it is because the thingness of words runs counter to their use in practical language: a reason modern writers have also consulted the anti-dictionary. In Remembrance of Things Past Proust’s troubled narrator discovers his vocation as a writer. But the act of imagination that produces the novel is not pushed along by a plot, or any conventional verbal construction. Instead, a series of sensuous encounters – the musty smell in a lavatory, the noise of a spoon against a plate, the unevenness of two cobblestones in a courtyard in Venice, the taste of madeleine dipped in a cup of tea – are some of the crucial experiences which, occurring at turning points of the story, help him to achieve his objective: the creative release that enables him to write.

By way of explanation, Proust cites the Celtic belief, common to stories of quest, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in an animal, plant or some inanimate object. In one of the most ancient of these, retold by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, Psyche succeeds in finding Cupid with assistance from a kindly river, a whispering reed, a team of ants, an eagle and a tower. It is also through the help of such agents from the material world, familiar from folklore and myth, that Proust’s narrator achieves the object of his quest – which is his novel.

But what if we were to transpose the notion of a quest, one of the paradigms of folklore, to the composition of a poem? The poet sets out to write a poem having to make her way through the troubling and uncertain terrain of language. The journey is fraught with dangers. She meets, for example, the vowels.

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
One day I will tell of your secret origins.
A, black hairy corset of dazzling flies
Which boom around cruel stenches.

Even if the alliteration of sounds and colours has no equivalent in English, the buzz of noir is nevertheless still translatable. Rimbaud’s version of the anti-dictionary treats elements of language not as transparent carriers of meaning, but as opaque intractable beings with their own personality, identity and behaviour. Even at this molecular level, the material textures, sounds, and colours of language present the poet with a series of challenges and decisions: shaping, pacing, hiding, revealing, conveying. In negotiation with the sensuous properties of the medium even its smallest voices come to the poet’s aid and, like a team of ants, enable her to reach the object of her quest: to create a living poem.

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