Hybridity wins, uncertainty prevails, the plural is the new normal: the new black* generation of three jobs, three zeros of debt, relatives from here, there and another where, speakers of this language, that code, coming from and going to a multiplicity have begun to set down their poems.
Effervescence, zeal and invention are here. The voices are more tangential, reflective, a zig-zagging individuality displacing the more uniform rhetorical black poetry legacy of the 80s and 90s, the latter’s dub and steady four line rhyming poem after Maya Angelou, its avowedly public, avowedly black audience. And the Caribbean/Pakistani/Indian inflected poet personas have been superseded as the second generation becomes the third, becomes the fourth and absorbs and re-sounds the super-diversity that has created the multi-polar, multi-referential, profusely tagged, diverse communities of today.
The espousal of rational ideology is almost vanished: whether Black Lives Matter or black unemployment or discriminatory structures of public institutions, the mute is on, the vol turned down low. The apprehension of discrimination, that anxiety and insecurity – that troubled black psyche – is still there of course, it sits at the bottom of the stomach, nibbling, but mostly it features obliquely in these poets’ work, you have to hush and listen carefully to its nuance. They are more concerned, at least on the surface of their poems, with habitus – with the day to day events of their lives. (There is an irony in this of course: the very reason for the assembling of the ten under the rubric of diversity is due to the discriminatory practices of the publishing/literature world that has blocked progress for such writers in the past. But irony is one of the key flavours of this age.)
All ten of this cohort have been mentored by an impressive bunch of outstanding poets and, in the book, their mentors take a page to introduce their mentees. There are probably plenty of other stories in the mentor-mentee relationships – which pairing went smoothly, which proved difficult, how the mentors felt at the end of it all, the dramas, the tears, the late night phone calls (no doubt banned under the contracts but…?). All that is speculation. What isn’t in doubt is what a fine result has been achieved. Each poet has an approx ten page section in the book. Let me attempt to describe their poems, as succinctly as I can, in the order each poet appears in the book. To each I’ve added tags, for fun.
Warsan Shire
Tags: Moving, vernacular, ordinary language, loose structural
Some great poems that show both a bold, inventive approach to structure and unusual settings or subjects eg a poem on family grief called ‘Backwards’ in which time runs backwards ; ‘Men in cars’ on first sex, both forced and consensual. The poems’ immediacy spills out off the page, often through the use of present tense dialogue: ‘spits on his fingers’ ‘make the blood run back up my nose’ and vernacular language: ‘fuck if I know’. Shire is casual in form, searing in content: portraits of friends and relations are sharp and ring true; there is humour, a bleakness, and a dash of crazy. ‘Everyone laughs. They think I’m joking.’
Eileen Pun
Tags: funk, channelling, veering, offbeat
We visit strange places, fairy tale settings in these poems, places inhabited by offbeat people: the truffle hunter and his dog is one such poem – a celebration of idiosyncrasy, and single minded passion even as it thwarts the hunter’s human relationships. The poems have a funk at times and a strong narrative bent, the larger pieces border on flash fiction, and pick up the complex emotional interplay of the seemingly mundane. Then in the ‘bird’ poems, in the ‘Whitethroat’ chit chat acid poems, the page becomes a channelling typewriter, scattering bird words. It reminds me of the ‘drunken monkey’ kung fu technique –the seemingly erratic and chaotic that yet has effect in surprising ways. The sum is a joyous energy that slips here and there into zen like mode. This is all I am.
Adam Lowe
Tags: Rigour, charge, party, restless, wrestling
A formal rigour to the (generally 3 line verse) structure of these poems holds the ring as the poems sing & dance of nightclub life, protest demos, the fizz of new relationships, the seduction of the devil, a reworking of a Saphho poem; there is a touch of Anthony Burgess in the Polari* language of ‘Vada That’; these shimmering lines are a burst of bling, in a classical shell. For all that joy, there is a restlessness within the verse, a wrestling with borders and a lust for connection. Smart poems, they exult and glow.
Sarah Howe
Tags: Haunting, morph, brushstroke, inheritance
The poetry here all ostensibly takes its cues from Chinese text/s and references. In ‘Tame’ there is tragedy in folk tale, the harshness of rural life, the despair of an unloved child who pines for her mother, that child’s transformation into a goose and a death that brings unification with the mother though in the most gruesome of ways (something consistent with the folk tales’ early iterations). The most chilling line: he ‘flogged her with the usual branch’. The poetry is in plain language, the text is allegorical in feel.
Other poems look at the natural morphs and resonances of Chinese language which allow it to connect in one small brushstroke such unlikely bedfellows as ‘plum blossom’ and ‘regret’; and look at obsolete words that speak of the concerns of other times and the inheritance of those words, how they conjugate today, language’s origin and nature; the poet brings together things as disparate as a midge trapped and dried out in an old book and ‘a glyph in a strange alphabet’. A linguist’s swoon of poems.
Inua Ellams
Tags: deft alliterative terror halcyon tethering
Paints school days in private school in Nigeria with its colonial striations, US and pop influences. Inua celebrates and unpicks the camaraderie, the yearning, the terror of those paradoxically halcyon times in a deft, delightful confident voice; layered over (or under) this is the numinous, the text primarily delivered in a driven, alliterative verse. You sense a provisional phenomenological tethering in the West allowing the poet to float over eg the urban poor of Nigeria where he can write eerily and urgently of the ‘born-troway boys’ and ‘the oil drum fire flickering in their eyes’. It is in this oscillation between worlds that you sense the best stuff lies.
Edward Daegar
Tags: exactness, deeply felt, ambiguity, honesty, reflection
Solemnity, seriousness, moral purpose abide in this poetry, an awareness of the inescapable, infinitely problematical moral ambiguity of situations, relationships. The poems avoid simplification, chart exactingly the nuances and infinite shadings of emotion: loss, pain, death, misunderstanding, metamorphosis; there is a scorching honesty for the vagaries, the often ‘inappropriate’ wanderings of the mind in times of deeply felt crisis. All worked out through a panoply of means: flash fiction, couplets, epic verse…
Rishi Dastidar
Tags: postmodern, portrait, looping, mirrors, cut
A poet of the cut up and multi references, if there is a post modernist in the bunch it is Rishi – he zings along the timelines of then now tomorrow with fun, pulling in references to the Met Office, to Dresden, to stuff hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, to physics, to Noel’s House Party and to the plain idiocy of the phrase ‘gunmetal grey’. It is someone having fun with the looping digital plurality, hall of mirrors and information load shedding of the 21st century.
Kayo Chingonyi
Tags: urgent, freeze-dry, casting, chafing
Here is an urgency, a consciousness, an awareness, by turns dissecting, freeze-drying, ironical; some brilliant flipping of terms, iterations, in settings that range between the campus, the casting agent and the school nativity play. He writes of The N Word, ‘lounging in a Pinter script’, and in that nativity play how, ‘in lieu of a third we were the two Magis’. The poems speak of a chafing at labels, impositions, assumptions, and the neat logical side steps of all this. Their form is mostly 11 line verses of an engrossing, beguiling beat (this cut of the poems being so startlingly good by being so unobtrusive).
Jay Bernard
Tags: jolting, big dipper, shifting, dysfunction, trauma, dissociation
Buckle up for these poems, it’s a jolting, scary ride. There is the plunging charnel house imagery of the phantasmagorical narrative poem, ‘Song of the Strike’, the casual violence of ‘Fake Beach’ where the shifting point of view – You We They all in the same poem – pulls us in (particularly with that ‘you’ address, that then spins us off to her friend: the ‘you’ dissociating from us, the reader). It’s an effective, vertiginous approach that destabilises, forces us to read closely. Elsewhere, there is a world of violence, of dysfunction; the child witnessing harshness, experiencing brutality wrapped in dysfunctional love; there is anxiety, desperate love and a clinging. It’s a world where any beauty always shifts: “the big dipper / acting through the dark- / is not a funfair ride, but a question mark –”
Mona Arshi
Tags: polished, gentleness, observation, feather, stark
Her poems are a highly polished lens that sees beyond the physical, giving consciousness to the beating heart of things: a mayfly, the rain, the night sky. Gentleness mingles with a stark beauty, pain is filtered, reflected through the array of mirrors, that is time and the soft mediation of verse. Death shuffles, alongside life, the details of each noted; and the intensely personal is written with a feather light touch. The ordinary is a source of joy, an aviary of the imagination opens: gifted, clever spirit daughters, mother birds: the lightest of touches traces these things, traces grief, love, loss.
Conclusion
To become a UK Northerner for a paragraph, Ten had me reflecting on the black literary culture of the North. There are two North based poets in Ten (Adam Lowe and Eileen Pun). The North West culture of words (the Cultureword) has fostered many more over time: Nii Parkes, Shamshad Khan, John Siddique, Anjum Malik, Lemn Sissay, Cheryl Martin, Mark Mace Smith, Segun Lee French… A similar, growing list is being nurtured (and published) by the Inscribe programme across at Leeds in association with Peepal Tree press. This multi-polar development is important as it promotes diversity intra black voices. It’s also true also, as The Complete Works II director, Nathalie Teitler puts it herself at the very end of the book, that we must remember our extended family, pay our respects to those who are working completely off radar, to “all those artists who write outside of the mainstream and follow their own path.” Ten is a joyous and brilliant achievement. Get hold of a copy!
*Footnote: The Ten back blurb states this is a gathering of “diversity and quality in poetry”, the poems are “culturally rich” and “will open up a new landscape.” It appears nobody wants to mention the b word – black. Perhaps Black = “lacks quality” in poetry buyers’ eyes. Perhaps the term or any of its substitutes is uncomfortable for some, or is felt, with some justification, to be inadequate. Either way, it requires some knowledge of UK cultural semiotics to get at what the collection brings together.
Post-script
Congratulations to both Mona Arshi, Sara Howe and Karen McCarthy Woolf, all associated with Ten and all shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection 2015.
Sawn Off Bibliography
For habitus see for eg this summary: http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/bourdieu-and-habitus/
For hyperdiversity see for example this Conference guide: www.smo-ume.org/file/3
For Polari see for eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari or more specifically http://www.polari.org.uk/