Magma Poetry

In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”:

reflecting every colour and none,
playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind

‘Caw Poem’ contains everything we might justifiably look for in the début work of a poet of promise. Darcy’s ear is pitch-perfect, as displayed in her deft imitation of the magpie’s movements:

I cocked my head,
hopped a little, hopped a little closer,
love become a scrum, a scuffle,
a ruffle of feathers

The opening is arresting, and cuts straight to the chase:

Not atriums and ventricles that cup and pour

Finally, imagistic and linguistic innovation is at a premium, both effortless and bang on the money:

a solitary magpie
beats cricked wings

“Cricked” is the mark of her ability as a wordsmith. Yet the poem offers much, much more, and it’s this that sets Darcy apart from the ranks of capable word-turners and puts her in that special place reserved for the very few – for poets who matter, have something to say that’s worth the hearing. You can’t matter as a poet if you don’t have style, but neither can you if it’s all you’re equipped with. Darcy’s poems have style and substance; indeed, in her work, they are one and the same.

‘Caw Poem’ enacts a kind of bricolage which recurs throughout the collection and recalls both MacNeice’s plea for “an impure poetry” and Muldoon’s baffled and baffling sense of random interconnection and segue. Early in his career (and, one suspects, with more than the tip of his tongue in his cheek), Muldoon said something to the tune that he’d love to be able to write simple poems, pure poems, ‘lovely little lyrics’, but couldn’t do it. ‘Caw Poem’ closes with the conditional urge to “plunder some bright thing, / learn to sing true”, but Darcy, like Muldoon, is astute enough to recognise that “truth” doesn’t come in pebbles of quartz, and that conviction is frequently culpable. Many of her poems are (in a good way) about poetry, the working through and questioning of her own aesthetic – ‘Terminus’, for example, which both yearns for and dismisses the knack of “lay[ing] it on the table”, or ‘Socks’, which toys hilariously with Terry Eagleton’s pronouncement on “the inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language…[which is] in a broad sense political”:

I wear my socks odd, queer
bags a couple of feet from my

knees…

…I believe
that’s right – the way you can’t tell
what colour my knickers will be.

The fun of this shouldn’t, however, (and doesn’t) obscure the underlying seriousness of poems which themselves invest in the concept of the “unfinished” and the “political” in language, but are justifiably sceptical as to its force. At the heart of Darcy’s writing is a desperate desire for poetry to measure up, have real value in a world of “parataxis” and “bodies degraded / in mixed media” (‘La rue est rentrée dans la chambre’); for it to function as a means by which, if not to make sense of such a world, at least to challenge it. One of the most likeable and convincing things about her, though, is her irrepressible tendency to self-question, revert to “doubting / [her] own innocence” (‘Terminus’) at every turn.

While ‘Stump’ gives a fair indication of what Darcy isn’t about – the organically whole poem that finishes with a resounding, self-satisfied “Whump” – ‘Panopticon’ and ‘Umheimlich’ explore the inevitable and ultimately necessary “anaesthetic” role of “an aesthetic”. Both are addressed to suicides – those who couldn’t or wouldn’t indulge in the lie of systems, “do the awful maths” – and who chose silence rather than the “the noise” which “circles us” “at the centre of a shrinking globe”. So vigilant is Darcy her vigilance extends to this painful understanding that the very means by which she hopes to rock the boat is the means by which ‘world’ is coped with – systematised – and thus made liveable to her. ‘Panopticon’, incidentally, performs a characteristically brilliant inversion on Bentham’s original application of the term – in Darcy’s hands it’s the watcher who’s imprisoned, not the watched. And from this dinning mélange are culled the poems.

The title of Imaginary Menagerie bespeaks diversity, the mixed bag of the first book in which the neophyte tries his or her hand at this and that without yet knowing where to go or why. In this sense it is impishly misleading, for Darcy has, as Kevin Higgins remarks, a clear sense of “purpose” and the book is utterly coherent. On the other hand, diversity’s the turf these poems tread, from metamorphoses to poly-linguistic stews. There are, in any case, few better collections to carry with you “at the eye of the panopticon”. The mix is daring, and never off the mark.

Miriam Gamble
Miriam Gamble’s first collection is ‘The Squirrels Are Dead’ (Bloodaxe 2010), which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Imaginary Menagerie by Ailbhe Darcy is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95

for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s point about short poems not winning competitions makes me ask, why not?  Do judges somehow feel short-changed, reckoning that poets don’t put as much work into writing a short poem as a long one?  I don’t think this is true – a short poem where every word counts is just as likely to have uncertainties, weaknesses that need working on as a .longer poem.  But I suspect it’s what most judges feel deep down and it’s a prejudice that will continue.  In this case Magma’s new poetry competition is long overdue, joining the Plough Poetry Prize with a competition which poems up to 10 lines will definitely win.

I’ve been trying to think what makes a really short poem good and, at first, there seems no answer – great short poems are as varied as longer ones.  When the Magma team decided on the 10 line limit, we thought of some famous short poems – Blake’s The Sick Rose, Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal, Herrick’s Upon Julia’s Clothes which Eavan Boland had written brilliantly about in Magma 48.  And we could all think of very short poems in recent collections which we’d enjoyed, though they tended to be exceptions among longer poems or arranged in sequences.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” – Walter Pater

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.” – Gustav Mahler

In June this year, in celebration of 50 issues of Magma Poetry magazine, and in anticipation of more to come, Magma Poetry launched a new competition.

The entry period for both the Judge’s Prize for poems of up to 80 lines, and the Magma Editors’ Prize for poems of up to 10 lines is NOW OPEN and runs until end November.

I am going to start this article with a statistic. No poem under 10 lines has won the National Poetry Competition since (online) records began in 1978! The website shows winning poems only prior to 2000, but between 2001-2010 you can see all the shortlisted poems and only a handful of them were under 14 lines and none under 10 lines. The shortest is Frank Ortega’s eleven line poem Searching for An Affordable Crossbow which was commended in 2009.

I use the National as an example, as they keep very comprehensive records online, but this trend bears out. Mslexia shows the last seven years with no short poem winners, while the Cardiff International Poetry Competition offers the exception in 2001-2 with Joan Newmann’s commended Carrageen Mousse and the Boy from Nepal which surely must have been a contender for the title alone.

Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he writes a lot of poems and sends them out into the world, and isn’t afraid of over-production. I find this refreshing myself: but inevitably, it means that among the books, pamphlets and collaborations he’s sent forth over the years, there will be some poems that work for me and others that don’t.

Like Ashbery, his poems are basically about his life and times; unlike Ashbery, though they sometimes use cut-n-paste techniques and are sometimes humorous, there’s none of the odd angles and non-sequiturs of the New York poet. These poems are often in plain, simple language, often conversational and personal, with a kind of resigned grace to them that is very appealing to me:

Magma’s launch readings have been hosted by Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for many years.

Knowing many Magma readers are also Coffee-House regulars, we would like to bring to your attention the Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

I’ve been around Magma since before it was Magma, a name chosen “to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions”.  Magma began not so much as an eruption but as a slow burn.

It must have been in the summer of 1992 when Laurie Smith and several of his City Lit poetry class decided we wanted to carry on reading and discussing our poems after the end of a shorter-than-usual summer term. So, we spent the summer bringing bottles and poems to a different flat or house each week. I remember helping wash up in the small kitchen of a flat in a Vauxhall and feeling enormously excited about the idea of starting a poetry magazine called Urban Fox.

I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s ‘The Barking Dog’ and Chase Twitchell’s ‘The Language of Dogs’. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days. However, the dogs of the aforementioned poets appear as energetic Buddhas; cheerful, deep, embracing the ‘now’ that contemporary writer-owners find elusive: “This shining bark// a Zen master’s gong, calls you here,/ entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow” (‘Golden Retrievals’ in Doty’s Sweet Machine). Gregory Woods does not present dogs in this way.

The title poem is, after all, ‘after Kakfa’. This dog chases an ambulance and then turns off: “the bystanders reconcile themselves/ to knowing / it was just an ordinary dog.” This disappoints: don’t we want the dog to follow its injured owner all the way to hospital? We already know that life is bleak, don’t we want the poet to transfigure the ordinary dog? But Woods might be right to deliver such a poem and he avoids (even comments upon?) the sentimentality of other poets who rely on emotionally manipulative story-telling. Yet Woods does not restrict himself to a purely plain-speaking or realistic stance.

For years we debated it, balked, retreated, re-visited, shelved and returned to it, until eventually we decided the time had come to launch our first competition. It’s been a long road: Magma is run democratically and each of us on the board has strong opinions and part of the work was the inevitable round the table discussion about what we planned to do and how we planned to do it. We’re never ones to shy away from a debate (it’s half the fun), and much argument was had as we discussed how to go about running the competition and how best we might reflect Magma’s personality and aspirations. Many of us have been on the other side of the fence, entering competitions rather than running them, and we tried to use our own experiences to help us design a competition that we ourselves would want to enter.