I admire Carrie Etter’s approach to posting poems on her blog. She puts up lines she likes from books or whole poems without comment. If I didn’t feel obliged to follow the format of my previous close-reading posts then I’d be happy to only repost this poem by Mona Arshi. What can I add to it, really? But, you’re under no obligation to read my thoughts on it and, in fact, I actively encourage you to ignore my waffling and re-read and listen to the poem a dozen times instead. But that said, I think it’s natural enough for poetry to be set in and around prose, as long as it’s acknowledged that any comments can’t be a substitute for the poem and shouldn’t attempt to displace it.
When Mona Arshi’s poem ‘Hummingbird’ won the Magma poetry competition in 2012, she later, in September that same year, wrote a short piece entitled ‘Hummingbirds, ghazals and pistachio nuts,’ which is as close to an Arshi ars poetica as anything you’re likely to find. Joyfully, she writes, without a trace of hubris, of “the fascination of suspending intentionality” and her love of “[using] language to allow creative accidents to take place.”
Identifying herself as a “latecomer” to poetry, she seems to be an unjaded poet, in the way those who have ‘been trying to make it’ or who self-identify as a ‘poet’ but have had little or no public acknowledgement sometimes are. Perhaps her felt freedom for form (she says of her failure to write ‘Hummingbird’ in a strict ghazal that “the form needed to loosen and give way”) comes from and is rendered sustainable by this outsider identity.
It’s certainly interesting that Arshi has lived a life, was trained as and practised as a Human Rights Lawyer, and was used to, “employing language in a fixed and rule-bound way.” Surely that’s something easy to undervalue in a poet, as if it might be cut away and made irrelevant. Instead, it must function as a point of contrast a locus standi in her public and private identity.
Is this why the poem I’ve chosen to read seems to embody the duality of ‘this was an accident, but no accident,’ in the contrary sense Bishop identifies? The best poems are “lucky accidents” but “aren’t at all — they are … the indication that you have worked hard” and have “managed to create the right atmosphere in your own brain for a good poem to emerge” (1995, 361). I believe there is a similar sympathy for the long-game of language, to the waiter crossing borders with writer, in Arshi.
But if that’s true then so is the reverse. George Szirtes, in his lucid and unpretentious post-Paterson T.S. Eliot prize lecture ‘Thin Ice and The Midnight Skaters,’ talks about poetry as a dance across the ice, and though I can’t paraphrase the superb way in which he unpacks the metaphor here, we might think of it as antithetical to the other half of Bishop’s ‘work.’ It is a spontaneous trust, more reliant on instinct than intellect, and open to the potential freedom of accident, to embracing it as unintended intention.
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| "The Writer", Hampstead Heath, August 2005. tinyurl.com/m3ew8h2 |
But that’s mostly piffle, isn’t it? Interesting enough to me, but piffle. Better to look at the poem, to look at it as an achieved accident. Well, initial scans tell us that it’s made up of seven loose knit stanzas, that it avoids full rhymes, and that, with only a single period (uh-oh, the Americanisms are creeping in!) it represents a single sentence. That bloody paperclip from Microsoft Word circa 2003 would be pretty displeased with a sentence of 96 words (he flags up anything over 60 as ‘wordy’), but, fortunately, we can torture him with a number of right clicks to the head until we find ‘ignore.’ But it is a remarkably challenging poem to read aloud, for me, at least. Arshi, on the other hand, seems delighted to skillfully percolate her voice through the “stops of breath, sparrow diction,” of this poem.
And once you read and listen to it a dozen or so times the sense of its sound starts to coalesce in your ear. The way it delicately drops down the page and catches on the series of -ing endings, “something,” “thing,” and “climbing.” “Mounting,” “diminishing,” and “drilling" all the way down to the final two, “flying” and “flushing.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because at first brush are also the images, “the bird” like “a whirring crocus” a “little thing / of spongy moss” or “like a pebble / being sucked down / or drilling.” And what can you say? That some of these accidents might not be so fortuitous? But the poem is all the better for its oddness, for the voice’s capacity to dilate about where language wants to go. Rowyda Amin, when she said the poems display, “the precision and eerie, alienating beauty of a familiar object viewed via an electron microscope,” put it far better than I ever could.
Though there is indisputably something of the miniaturist in the voice of ‘Different Principles of Enclosure’ there is also an unembarrassed confidence. Evident, I think, in the willingness to let personal memory enter: “unwrap the image of the blue felt hat I / always wore on the heath.” And, in the rhymed lines that truncate from ‘hat’: “flying can be / like that / (like the thing that calls you back).” It feels like the voice has chosen an opportune moment to make an end, has played on an accident of memory, ‘the hat,’ to tie a knot.
The whole effect, of the opportunistic play with language, is one of apparent uniqueness, of it being a true “lucky accident,” which, by its nature, is unrepeatable. And though we can be sure this poem won’t happen again, we can only hope that Mona’s experiments continue to produce similar results.
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