I've had a couple of poems published in the latest issue of Shot Glass Journal, an American journal produced by Muse Pie Press and specialising in short-form poetry. (They also published me last year.) You can find my poems on this link: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/issue9/clarissa_aykroyd1.html
'Krakow' was written about four and a half years ago, after my visit to the city, and 'Battersea Park, December' is only a couple of months old. The photograph above was partial inspiration.
I think the two poems work quite well as a pair, as they are both poems about place and displacement, in different ways.
The quotation "How do poems grow? They grow out of your life" is from American poet Robert Penn Warren.
It's just hit me how, despite Skype and Facebook, distance is still very real for someone so far from their original home. It's also hit me that my geography is not as good as I thought: I had some notion of Victoria being in Eastern Canada! I've just looked at the map and am fascinated with how you could (possibly) look across at Seattle. Both poems are richly moving (to coin a phrase!): Krakow reminds me of feeling very alone at a party in Hamburg where I couldn't speak German and nobody else could speak English.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David! That's very kind. I wouldn't necessarily expect everyone to know where to find my hometown in the very very large country that is Canada. ;) Frankly, I sometimes feel like Canada is...too big. I've only been "out East" three times, I think - and that was Ontario and Quebec; I've never been all the way to the East Coast (though in the US I have visited New York.) Seattle isn't quite close enough to see, but where I grew up, I could walk to the seafront in five minutes and look over to Port Angeles, which is also in the US.
DeleteI think 'Krakow' was partly about how the isolation of not understanding a language can be lonely, of course, but also sort of freeing. At least when you're just visiting a place, it sort of absolves you from responsibility, if that makes sense. Of course, I have only lived in English-speaking countries. So far at least, I can only imagine how hard it is for people who move to a country where they don't speak the language, or only a little. Very daunting.
'Battersea Park' is definitely a homesickness/distance poem but it's also just about those strange moments when a place you know reasonably well (Battersea Park is near my house) becomes foreign, by some sudden, almost magical emotional slip.
Both poems are remarkable. 'I have seen the Thames like a cold canal on a Dutch day, sharp bright houses in Chelsea-on-Amsterdam': this is like a Dutch landscape painting hanging serenely on a museum wall. Your 'lost in a bleaker Tivoli' is something I wish I had written myself, but I'm so glad you did. Most importantly: the few lines with which you conclude the poem from which the verses above were taken seize me most strongly. Perhaps they simply express the feelings of anyone who has lived through the expatriate experience. In 'Krakow' I find the correlation between the whispering of the blossoms and your own peculiarly memorable.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for the kind comments! I'm flattered indeed by any comparison to Dutch paintings. :) I think that regardless of different backgrounds, different places where people choose to live, etc, there are likely to be certain emotional commonalities to the expatriate experience; an old friend who has now lived in Italy for years commented much the same thing on one of my London entries.
DeleteClarissa, I loved the poems, they are so beautiful and delicate.
ReplyDeleteSeveral images spoke directly to me, like "if only I could name this the world, then I could squeeze the Atlantic". As a foreigner, I know far too well about this feeling. And when I murmur something in Portuguese in a public place and neither Americans or Hispanics can understand me, I'll quote you and say "Only God can know what they and I say".
Congrats, I second David: the poems are very moving. xx
PS: I can see our buddy I. A. Richards bugging me because I'm reacting to poems based on personal memories. He's such a drag...
Thanks, Paula! That means a lot to me. It certainly seems that those who have the expat experience, or at least who have a good degree of sympathy for it, really understand where I'm coming from with these poems.
DeleteAs for I A Richards, well...believe me, I'm all for close reading (I learned so much from it) but as you've probably noticed, something like 99% of my blog posts are somehow about the relationship between poetry (and other literature, and art, etc) and personal memories, so... :)