By Ian McDonald, ContributorWHEN PEOPLE are worrying about the rising cost of living and how Government will perform, who, for pity's sake, has time for poetry? When water out of taps is a small miracle in many communities and floods a constant threat in others, who cares a tinker's cuss for poetry? What can airy-fairy poetry do to reduce the deeply demoralising wave of brutal crime? I know the questions by heart. Can I eat poetry? Can I drink poetry or wash with it? Can poetry turn on the lights? Does poetry drive me in my crowded morning minibus to work? Can poetry turn a dollar in this hard and scrounging world?
And yet deep down in a nation's life poetry is as important as food or water or light or financial success. A nation is not halfway whole or mature until it seeks to rediscover its forgotten poets, encourage its known poets, and look out for its potential poets. Who remembers the moneylenders of ancient Greece or the tradesmen and cut-throats of Elizabethan England? But who will ever forget their poets? And who can doubt that long after the whole enormous paper-mill and infinitely hard-working bureaucracy of CARICOM has tumbled into dust the writers of the Caribbean will be remembered and will serve to bind us together into one community of spirit and perhaps some day a nation?
NEGLECTING POETRY
There is a passage in the celebrated book New Bearings in English Poetry by F.R. Leavis which spells out what happens in a country that begins to neglect poetry:
"Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means. But if the poetry and the intelligence of the age lose touch with each other, poetry will cease to matter much and the age will be lacking in finer awareness."
In Guyana and in the West Indies as a whole in this generation poetry has ceased to matter much, if at all, and surely at the same time in the West Indies and Guyana the age indeed is lacking in finer awareness.
This neglect of poetry is something very strange. The fact is that the achievement of Guyanese and West Indies writers in the last 60 years is remarkable by any standard. There is a good chance that long after the contradictions and traumas of our post-colonial societies have been forgotten the books produced by writers emerging out of these societies like C.L.R. James, Arthur Seymour, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Edgar Mittelholzer, Sam Selvon, E.M. Roach, Vic Reid, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Martin Carter, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid and Lorna Goodison, to name a very few, will have found a place among the valuable, enduring works of man. It is remarkable that countries which have produced writers of universal significance and standing remain so indifferent to the art of writing as a whole. It is as if we produced our great cricketers and yet despised the game. If for no other reason that a shrewd awareness of the international kudos that comes with outstanding literacy and intellectual achievement one would have thought that the establishment at least if not the mass of people would have fallen over themselves to find and foster our Caribbean writing talent. That does not seem to be the case. The Guyana Prize for Literature is an astonishing exception to the almost universal habit of ignoring the importance of recognising the influence and status of writers.
MAIN JOYS OF LIFE
For as long as I can remember, poetry has been for me one of the main joys of life. I have therefore always been puzzled why poetry is so often considered either as an irrelevance in the ordinary course of life or as the exotic indulgence of a peculiar few. A few years ago, in an issue of The American Scholar, Karl Shapiro made the point:
"There is no poetry audience, only a great population who claim the title of poet. In my experience nobody in this country reads poetry except poets, writers and teachers of poetry."
As a West Indian and Guyanese that is the sad bell I hear tolling too. One can only hope that it does not toll too hard or too long for, as Osdip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet, once wrote out of fervent love for his country:
"The people need poetry that will be their own
secret
To keep them awake forever
And bathe them in the bright-haired wave
Of its breathing."
Yet, in the end, come to think of it, poetry cannot be mobilised or directed in the mass. You do not have to join a crowd to celebrate it. It is therefore left for any man or woman who loves poetry to pick up and read alone, or think about alone, what writing he loves best. For myself, this week I will read for the hundredth time, Hopkins' magnificent sonnets and 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' or the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, the best writer of songs the world has ever known, or the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, which I have come to think, are among the very best of this modern age or, very likely, my stained and dog-eared copy of the greatest of all West Indian books of poetry, Derek Walcott's Another Life. Each of you who loves poetry will do your own choosing. And I hope you enjoy private, quiet reading and find as I always do that poetry puts into right perspective the tensions and the stresses, the humdrum and hurly-burly, of the daily rounds of life.
Most days I read some poetry. Many of the poems catch in my mind, to read again to capture their full meaning. Last night it was a very short poem by Michael Longley.
WATER-BURN
We should have been galloping on horses, their hoof prints
Splashes of light, divots kicked out of the darkness,
Or hauling up lobster pots in a wake of sparks. Where
Were the otters and seals? Were the dolphins on fire?
Yes, we should have been doing more with our lives.
Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
