Personal and Political

When three College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences poets met in a pavilion on the Lawn to discuss their art, at first the poems they read seemed to be unrelated. What revealed itself over the course of their conversation was that this poetry emerged from similar experience: crisis. 

Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Instructor Charlotte Matthews, who won the 2007 Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry for Green Stars (Iris Press, 2005), was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in 2005. Harrison Undergraduate Research Award winner Amro Naddy (English Language and Literature ’08) explored the Middle East conflict by translating Palestinian and Israeli poets with the Virginia Quarterly Review. Award-winning poet Ted Genoways, under whose leadership the VQR has won numerous National Magazine Awards, moderated. 

What follows is an excerpt from their discussion.

Ted: What I’m curious about is, as a starting point, how you balance those issues of what’s personal and private and what necessarily has to be accessible and communicative about the poem. 

Charlotte: One of my teachers, Marianne Boruch, said a poem is human inside talking to human inside. It might also be reasonable person talking to reasonable person. But if it’s not human inside talking to human inside, it’s not a poem. 

I’ll read one called “In the Movies.” I’m trying to talk about the wildness of going out into the regular world when one is going through treatment for cancer and feels … I felt so sick. It’s also very frightening to be invisible. And when you’re really sick with cancer and going through treatment, not only does the world not recognize you, your own children don’t recognize you. And so at this point, this is about a ghost in a way. 

A ghost can step through
glass, even while holding an actual object. 
This of course defies logic.
And is why we remember it:
so otherworldly yet utterly real. 
Like this morning at the grocery store
after treatment, when I hear
the girl at checkout
ask if the cilantro is parsley
and I remember being nine again
hiding in the tall grass waiting.
It’s August by the lake and voices across
the way have become so faint
as to be sound without meaning.

In optical art, the negative after-image is what matters most:
all those contiguous 
black boxes pulsating seconds
after you turned your eyes away.
When you have cancer, what makes
people whisper is what’s too real to see. 
Don’t worry, I’m here in the summer grass, 
pretending to be covered with snow,
so cold it blazes in midafternoon sun.

Ted: The thing your poems so exquisitely balance is this careful attention to what’s real, what’s concrete and in front of you, and getting the language of that precisely right. But then how those things can move very suddenly from that concrete world into this other world, whether it’s something internal or something transcendent, something that is somehow more than just what’s in front of us.

Charlotte: I’m like a scout. I’m always looking out for what object or moment could possibly say what is unsayable, and, of course, that’s going to rely heavily on images. It’s that moment where it’s the inside talking. 

Ted: Amro, obviously, your project looking at Israeli and Palestinian poetry is quite different. A lot of the poems walk this really interesting and fine line between being personal poems in the way that we’re accustomed to in American poetry and poems that then will turn to very public and often political issues.           

Amro:  Sure. Nathalie Handal is an interesting poet in that regard. It’s easy to read her poems, like “Listen, Tonight,” as a simple interior discussion of romantic love, dissatisfaction with it, but then it blossoms out into something else, an accessibility to land and having a space that you belong to:

             Listen, tonight
            To the leaves murmuring in the yellow fields,
            To the aches of a peasant, the pain of an abandoned child.
            Look at Tiberia, disguised in shadows,
            At the minuscule footsteps of stars,
            Feel the starving touch of a beggar.
            And speak to me why we pretended when we measured the earth,
            And there was no space for both of us. 

 

The romantic love aspect of it doesn’t come out when you see that poem in isolation, but it came in suite, the narrator addressing the lover. You see that it starts out like a bit of rumination of a landscape, and the individuals within it, and an empathy for that landscape. And then draw back, “why we pretended when we measured the earth, and there was no space for both of us.” The Palestinian struggle in a lot of ways, that they are a nationless land in a sort of post-national world. But I think that is what we’re talking about, internal and external dealing with crisis. 

 

Charlotte: In some ways, one’s personal life, or the interior world, has to be a reflection of what’s going on in the larger world because no man is an island, and we’re affected by what goes on around us, and by the world. In order to write, one needs to pay very close attention. And whether it’s what’s going on in a political realm or an arthropod walking across a rock, it’s paying close attention to the world that surrounds us. 

Ted: That close attention is about saying, “I’m not going to just accept what everyone else is saying, and I’m not going to just do as I’m told, but I’m going to look at these things for myself.” This idea that you can somehow access things, things that on some logical level we know are inaccessible but reaching for them anyway. 

Charlotte: And maybe they’re a balm to the political, or to when we get completely chagrined and crestfallen. Maybe that’s an answer.  

Ted: Recognizing that a poem will almost certainly have the smallest possible audience, that there will be a wide range of people who are perfectly capable of understanding what’s on the page but will insist, “I don’t get it, I don’t.” Given all those obstacles why poems? 

Amro: You sound a bit like my mother who says, “Amro’s working on a poetry project for the Virginia Quarterly magazine, and I don’t understand any of it.” I just find it fascinating that writing is that portable. When you look at the media portrayal of Israelis and Palestinians, you tend to get this sometimes whitewashed and sterilized but also very formulaic exposure. I just think that’s an important way of humanizing who these people are, that they’re not just these images on the screen. And that can be done in 200 words. 

Ted: As soon as the poet stands up and says, “I’d like to reassess this,” there’s something that’s small but wonderfully dangerous about that. And inherently political, whether that’s just by saying, “I want you to focus your attention over here instead of over there,’ or by opening up into larger issues as with the poets that you’re looking at, Amro. In a sense, those poems of theirs, although they read as political poems to us, they’re poems of the everyday from their landscape, and again they’re asking the reader, “Don’t accept what you see elsewhere. Look at these things afresh. Look at them anew.”