Poets need not
be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.
And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded
for the love of trying to nail the disembodied
image with that one plain word to make it palpable;
for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable
of carrying the thought that’s not thought yet?
The pursuit’s its own reward. So you have to let
the poem come to voice by footering
late in the dark at home, by muttering
syllables of scribbled lines — or what might
be lines, eventually, if you can get it right.
And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train,
the biro, the back of an envelope, and again
the fun of the wildgoose chase
that goes beyond all this fuss.
Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops,
the light-bulb goes on and tops
the not-good-enough idea that went before?
No, that’s not how it goes. You write, you score
it out, you write it in again the same
but somehow with a different stress. This is a game
you very seldom win
and most of your efforts end up in the bin.
There’s one hunched and gloomy heron
haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin
and it wouldn’t if there were no fish.
If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash,
a gleam of something, made that quick stab.
That’s how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab
at that anything and this is food to you.
It comes through, as leaves do.
All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen — even rarely —
crown them with green.
by Liz Lochhead
Scotland has a woman makar (Poet Laureate) , announced this week in Guardian Books. England has a woman Laureate in Carol Ann Duffy, though that took some considerable period of time to achieve. The first woman mentioned in connection with the laureateship was indeed Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that was in jest, and at the time that William Wordsworth died ! In real terms for these women writers it means acknowledgement, and it means that their books are a part of their national fabrics of language, linguistics and thought, this can only be a good thing for the 2011 literary lists, given the scandalous lack of women writers in the 2010 editorial lists. I am adding in here a poem by Liz Lochead , from the Scottish Poetry Library as a small celebration of women and literature this saturday.
“Her poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, 1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (Polygon, 1985) Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991), and The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 (Polygon, 2003).
Her plays include Tartuffe (Polygon, 1986), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (Penguin, 1989) and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award-winning Medea (Nick Hern Books, 2000).”
Chris Murray 