Reviews
A unique and warmly recommended anthology
DM Black enjoys reading the responses of contemporary poets to poems of the past
Carol Ann Duffy (editor)
Answering Back
Picador £12.99
For this anthology, Carol Ann Duffy has had the interesting idea of asking nearly 50 poets to write a ‘reply’ to a ‘poem from the past’. The past is interpreted generously to include a huge range of poets from Propertius to Tomas Tranströmer. The contemporary poets who responded positively to Duffy’s invitation are similarly various, and include, by my undoubtedly inaccurate count, two Americans (Billy Collins, Linda Chase), one Pakistani (Imtiaz Dharker), four Irish (Paul Muldoon, Paula Meehan, Tony Curtis, Sean O’Brien), three Welsh (Robert Minhinnick, Owen Sheers, Paul Henry), three Scots (Robin Robertson, Liz Lochhead, Duffy herself), and a very wide range of English writers.
It would be interesting to know how this selection of poets was arrived at. Duffy in her introduction tells us rather breezily that she invited ‘the best of our contemporary poets’ to contribute, and has published those who chose to respond favourably. But surely, if she had really invited ‘the best’, there would be many more Americans? And how did she decide who are ‘the best’? It’s not obvious.
And it matters, because the idea behind this anthology is potentially a very fruitful one. Most good poetry is born out of a profound immersion in the poetry of the past – not of course ‘the canon’ as a whole, but a few individually chosen poets or some individually conceived line of tradition. Many of today’s poets whom one might expect to find listed among ‘the best’, such as Heaney, Longley, Wilbur, Kinnell, Rich, Hacker, etc (none of whom is present in this collection), would certainly demonstrate the truth of this. In many ways, one’s sense of the bigness and spaciousness of a ‘major’ poet has to do with the depth and seriousness of his or her dialogue with other writers, both traditional and contemporary. This anthology invites such reflections, and Duffy’s rather minimal introduction is too self-effacing – the reader could do with more information and discussion which would usefully provide more material and take one’s thought further.
That said, however, there is a great deal here to admire and a lot that deserves attention. There are many different ways in which a poet can respond – or, as Duffy prefers to put it, ‘answer back’ – to an existing poem, and some of the best responses here do so without making any direct reference at all to the source poem. Instead, they use the emotional territory the source poem has opened up as a resource in mapping a new situation that the poet is currently engaged with. Paula Meehan, for example, courageously chooses Elizabeth Bishop’s brilliant villanelle, ‘One Art’, to be her source poem – one you would have to be Shakespeare himself not to fall short of. Meehan, however, uses it as a sort of template for her own urgent meditation on ‘quitting the bars’ – giving up alcohol – ‘not sure if the self is cell or warder’. Bishop’s astonishing vitality, as she plunges deeper and deeper into her memories of loss, is beyond Meehan’s reach, but the source poem’s intelligence and truthfulness
communicates itself to Meehan and enables her own excellent and honest poem.
Colette Bryce produces another sort of unexpected and yet accurate response, in her case to Louis MacNeice’s ‘The Suicide’. MacNeice skilfully describes the small, unremarkable details of his life that the suicide left behind, when he threw himself out of his office window, and allows them to add up to a touching and appropriate poignancy. Bryce describes another sort of leaving of an office, this time by a manager who, for reasons unexplained, has stayed on late at work until night has fallen. The atmosphere conveyed is both familiar and eerie. Like MacNeice, Bryce manages the descriptive detail brilliantly:
A sudden sweep illumination:
the swift cloth of headlights
wiping the walls,
then gone.
In Bryce’s response, as in Meehan’s, the poet has been liberated by the source poem, not into overt admiration or homage, but into an exploration of her own mind and new experience.
Perhaps an even more surprising response is Craig Raine’s to Ben Jonson’s ‘Echo Song’, which ends:
O, I could still
(Like melting snow upon some craggie hill,)
drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a wither’d daffodill.
Raine’s poem is entitled ‘Marcel’s Fancy Dress Party’, and is a very moving comment on an old friend, a translator, known in vigorous youth, and now old:
How does it feel, Jan,
to be translated –
so quickly, so brilliantly,so unfaithfully,
into old age?
Into this convincing,irresistibly plausible
eighty-year-old
everyone is persuaded by?
Raine’s account of the shock of meeting the ‘fancy dress’ of old age is moving in its own right, and doubly so when we remember Jonson’s poem, which expresses openly the grief and the sadness at the passing of time which Raine only implies.
The poems I have discussed so far exemplify what is perhaps the most creative use of the response format that Carol Ann Duffy has devised: where the responder is inspired to occupy more completely his or her own experience and emotion by the form and emotion of the source poem. I can’t forebear mentioning one other exchange where this happens: Clare Shaw’s ‘The No Baby Poem’, which I think describes a very early miscarriage, and is in response to Lucille Clifton’s ‘the lost baby poem’, which describes a later miscarriage or an abortion. Both poems are deeply sad, very courageous, and together they seem to give a meaning to that overworked cliché of the ‘sisterhood’. Penelope Shuttle’s response to Emily Dickinson, and Imtiaz Dharker’s response to Rumi, are further examples of this living, creative use of a source poem.
Duffy tells us that one of her contributors suggested that Answering would have been a better title for the anthology than Answering Back. It’s an interesting point. Answering Back has its merits, but it can be heard as implying a sort of juniority in the responding poet: ‘answering back’ in one of its meanings is what cheeky children do to would-be responsible grown-ups. Quite a number of the responses here do ‘answer back’ in this sort of way, and just as with children, sometimes one sympathises with the grown-up, and sometimes one feels the child has a fair point. Carol Rumens responds to Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’ (which begins: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’) with considerable impatience and perhaps with some contempt:
Not everybody’s
Childhood sucked:
There are some kiddies
Not up-fucked,
and ends: ‘Sad non-begetter,/ That bean’t the verse.’ I dare say many people have felt like Carol Rumens about Larkin’s resolutely Eeyorish poem, but as a response her retort remains on the same level as the provocation: ‘answering back’ like jeering in the playground. RV Bailey does something similar (and with rather less provocation) in relation to Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (‘The beans got blackfly... I’ve had it with lake water lapping on shore’). There is a danger here that the response becomes little more than a spasm of irritation.
Deflating responses are not necessarily diminishing to the deflater, however. There are several here that are thoughtful and illuminating. Owen Sheers responds to John Donne’s ‘Elegie: To his Mistress Going to Bed’ by adopting the persona of Ann More, whom Donne married when she was 16 and who died in childbirth of her 13th pregnancy at the age of 32. Sheers’ Ann doesn’t reject Donne’s witty and charming seduction of her, but she does remind him sharply that it wasn’t all such a game for the woman:
Life must be lived or else the reaper reaps all,
so our nakedness is no sheathing of a sword
but rather a storming of his dark citadel –
– a fine response to Larkin, as it incidentally happens, and a nice example of how the challenge of responding to a great poem raises the game of the responder. Sheers manages very well the difficulty of writing in a style that reminds one convincingly of the seventeenth century, without becoming pastiche.
Another deflating response, also to John Donne, is by the late Vernon Scannell, who chose Donne’s Holy Sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’, as his source poem. Scannell responds: ‘Death be not proud! Why not? You’ve got good cause’, and in his likable, colloquial and very competent sonnet he makes no pretence at all to being able to maintain Donne’s triumphant posture. He ends his poem:
You frighten me to death, old sport;
If I had half your power, then I’d swank too.
Both Sheers’ and Scannell’s responses are fair criticism, and they enrich the poems they respond to. It is sad, and no doubt not a coincidence, that Scannell must have written his poem only a few months before he encountered death’s power in person.
I have touched on just a few of the many lively and idiosyncratic interactions contained in Duffy’s anthology. It would be tempting to comment on many more. In addition to being inspired or liberated by the source poem, or being tempted to puncture its pretensions, there are other sorts of response on show here: one or two of the poets seem to compete with their source, and one, Wendy Cope, oddly, having had a warm response to Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, then seems to retreat from it into a rather old-fashioned English embarrassment at finding herself in tears.
Duffy’s own contribution, if I read it correctly, demonstrates what I take to be one of the fundamental lessons of the anthology: that responses work best when there’s at least some real affection for the source poem or the source poet. She chooses to respond to Kipling’s ‘If’, a superbly skilful poem which is often patronized for representing so unashamedly its particular set of values. Her response takes just one brief section of the poem, the four lines that begin: ‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings’ – and imagines what it would be like if someone did in reality exactly what Kipling describes. The result is funny, gently mocking, and (I think) affectionate.
All in all, this is a very interesting and imaginative anthology, with many potential uses in teaching or in discussion groups. I warmly recommend it.
DM Black’s translations from Goethe, Love as Landscape Painter, is published by Fras Publications and is available from Atholl Browse Bookshop, Blair Atholl, Perthshire PH18 5SG.
Page(s) 31-33
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