Hurricane Watch: Olive Senior
This week's blog is written by Olive Senior, whose New and Collected Poems, Hurricane Watch, is published this week! Use code JANBOOKS for 20% off RRP and free UK P&P when you buy the collection from our website. Register for the book launch next Wednesday, February 2nd, with Dr Denise deCaires Narain here.
This handsome volume, Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems, is summoning me to flip the pages and revisit poems written over many decades. Conceptualizing each poem as having a visual footprint, of how it sits on the page, is an intuitive part of my practice. The first contact with the poem is what is visible, after all. I like to think of each poem as an island, waiting to be eyed. By friend or foe? Like Crusoe’s Parrot (p.100) we have to wait and see.
Seeing poems as islands might appear fanciful. But seeing, eyeing, watching, are themes that run through these books. And the fundamental truth of islands is the distinction between what is seen by explorer, exploiter, or modern day tourists and what is visible to its inhabitants. Islands – like poems – teem with life unregistered by the passing glance – of nature and humanity, voices and memory. It is this bounty that I, as an islander, wish to excavate and present, ever mindful that nothing is fixed, for we are on constant Hurricane Watch.
The sighting of Caribbean islands one fateful day in 1492 by Christopher Columbus is the foundational myth for me. One that first inflamed my curiosity as a child, and went on to inform many of the poems in this collection. What has haunted my imagination ever since are the lacunae – what have been left out. In the case of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the Taino and Kalinago (like many others), a genocidal erasure that our history books never spoke about. Columbus met some simple primitives called (in English) ‘Arawaks’ and ‘Carib’ that soon vanished, we were told. But how can a people simply vanish, I took to wondering. I believe I have been subconsciously in pursuit of the missing, the disappeared, the hidden, the drowned, the buried, ever since.
It is this pursuit, and acts of recovery, that haunt this collection as it ranges over the Caribbean islands, following the thread to the so-called New World of the Americas and back to the Old World of Europe and the East where the written history begins. Because the history of the Americas was not written in a recognizable Alphabet, the people could be written off as not human, and therefore ripe to be “civilized”. What 1492 ushered in was a fracturing of human relations; the establishment of profound inequalities among peoples and nations that we have been contending with ever since, a theme that runs like a thread through this collection but which is most explicit in a poem such as Meditation on Yellow (p. 191) and much of the Gardening in the Tropics sequence.
This same spirit of enquiry informs the poems from my very first book, Talking of Trees. Here, enquiry begins where poets most often begin, with an interrogation of the self and home and belonging, the impulse to stay or to go. Even then, I wanted to reach out, beyond the small rural Jamaican farming district on the edge of the remote Cockpit Country in Jamaica in which I felt ‘islanded’, to places and ideas beyond the mountains that were drawing me on like a thread. This world outside, I was to discover, was also part of my psychic inheritance. By doing the foundational work to discover ground truth, link the threads, do the digging and uprooting required in planting new gardens, I found my Gardening in the Tropics filled with strange new beings and voices we had never heard before though they have always been there, before time, embodied also in the succeeding volume, Over the Roofs of the World.
For me, the words spoken in the poet’s voice are not enough to unearth what lies beneath. We must write it slant in order to put things right way up. Allowing what we tend to think of as the ‘object’ of nature to speak is my way of subverting received notions of history and humanity. My graphic presentation of Gourd (p.187), for instance, reinforces the notion of a simple object loaded with power, container of our mythologies and histories, in a way that words alone cannot convey.
Like animals, plants have agency, with colonizing tendencies (Plants p. 245), or imperialistic notions e.g. the sugar cane plant that calls itself Sweet Bwoy (p.52). Allspice (p.123) as a graphic illustration of the destruction that results from the exploitation of natural resources has an impact, I believe, beyond mere words.
I’ve been happy to give equal opportunity to all voices – plants or birds or vanished indigenes, Yoruba gods or Greek mythological figures and to all visions - ghosts, memories, floating in the air, waiting on their moment to materialize through the instrument of the poet. What interests me is not writing about so much as writing through and into a new reality (in the same way that artists today are inscribing their own revisioning of classic iconic images). The way a poem presents itself, through considered elements like line or stanza breaks, punctuation or lack of it and in some cases shaped images are all strategies that reflect or reinforce or undercut the content while offering visual cues to the reader. My thinking of the image, the poetic footprint as I write, is as important as finding the right words.
Looking over this collection again, including poems I have not read in a long time, I am surprised at how consistent my vision has been. I called the most recent set of poems Eyed. It does include several “eye’ poems, but the idea of sightings, of vision, of the camera’s eye, the needle’s eye, circulate throughout the collection. Above all is the poet’s roaming and interrogating eye. Moving past, for example, the pastoral to see the reality behind the picturesque images of 17th and 18th century plantations. This is what the book Shell is about: the shell left behind by centuries of enslavement on the islands, the wealth extracted to build up the Mother Country, the temples to vanity and ostentation.
I chose to use some actual pictures in that book, the shell of Fonthill Abbey as signifier of how time is the great leveller. I wrote Shell in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. Despite the dire subject matter, the tone is essentially celebratory for the bounty of resistance despite genocide, the horrors of the Middle Passage, slavery, indenture, poverty, exploitation and globalised neo-colonial economic systems. Shells emptied of the detritus of the past enable new voices to resonate (especially in Shell Blow, p.39) and Gastropoda (p.15) that warns “brace yourself for whirlwinds coiled at my heart”.
My own stance is subversive and therefore, at times, playful, for I learnt, as a child of my culture, humour as a form of seduction. We are in inheritors of a powerful tradition of subversion through voice. A subversion that can be loud and threatening or subtle, soft, and subterranean. The people I grew up with were poor but were never voiceless, carving out ways of expressing themselves through signifiying and symbol, gesture or ‘throw word’, criticism of their so-called betters and complaint craftily hidden in song, sacred or profane, or the thousands of proverbs or sayings that were part of our upbringing. Assertion through language that is ours – whether standard English, the creole languages that evolved over centuries, or something in between – traces a direct trajectory from the songs of derision sung on the slave plantations through reggae, dance hall and other popular music forms. It is this play between the written and spoken that I want to capture, hence my frequent use of voice to lift the poem from the page, forcing aural shape through short lines, for instance. I also like to use line breaks or stanza shifts to show graphically shifts in conversation, in tone, between past and present, reality and the imaginary (e.g. Hook p. 429).
The poems in this book, written over the course of nearly half a century, might appear like isolated islands. I like to think though, that they are constantly talking to each other, signalling via drum beat or conch shell, transatlantic cable or computer. Beneath the buttoned-down exterior, the shape of islands, you can make out endless chatter, discern subversive voices, the murmurations of sorrow, glimpse the citadels of laughter erected as Hurricane Watch in these brave New Worlds.
Watch the launch of Hurricane Watch