Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In Presiding Spirits we ask a contemporary poet to write a new poem which draws upon a poem from the past, and then we ask about the relationship between the two, and about the poet's work more generally. This time, David Constantine wrote a poem with the same story as Paria, written by the German poet Goethe in 1822, in the later part of his life. Until a few years ago David Constantine taught German language and literature at Queen’s College , Oxford.

Paria is a narrative poem too long to print here, but this is the story of the central section on which David Constantine's poem is based:

The pure wife of a holy Brahmin goes each day to get water from the river. She needs no jug - her virtue is such that she can carry the water back in her hands. But on this day she sees reflected in the water the shape of a young man, created and sent by god. She is filled with confusing emotions. She finds she can no longer carry the water. When she gets home her husband realises she has lost her purity, drags her to the Hill of the Dead, and beheads her. But his son comes to upbraid him, saying the sword itself still runs with blood. The husband takes this as a sign of her innocence and the son rushes to follow up the miracle by attaching once more her head to her body. Only there are now two corpses and two heads at the place. He attaches his mother's head to the wrong body, that of a common criminal. Thus resurrected, she says that her seduction came from God, so that she, though her head aspires to heaven, must also feel the earth's downward drawing power; God cannot but pity such a creature, and that may be to the benefit of them all.

And here is the new poem:

Legend

There is one story that has run and run
And we fish a meaning from it the best we can
About a wife so pure in heart or steady
And sure of purpose she could carry
The day's water from a running stream
For ablution and refreshment into her home
In her bare hands, in nothing at all -
No bucket, no jug - but as a crystal ball
As shapely hard and rounded as her will,
Pure as her heart, dead still.

I imagine her rising and sleepwalking through
The waking garden delicately as though
She were the vessel and by a deed of mind
Must carry in her a thing always inclined
To slop and spill in a necessary dream
Spellbound every morning from home to stream
Intact through all distraction to where she knelt
Over the water, blue green, ice melt
In it like corpuscles and, going to waste,
On it apples that had an aftertaste
Of nuts. She put in her white hand
And the water meeting with that demand
And feeling no way in between her fingers,
Denied itself, submitted its self to hers,
Hardened against her palm, grew to a sphere,
And rather as some can walk on coals of fire
Barefoot and do the ticklish flesh no injury
As though by force of dreaming she
On her white palms bore the globe of water home
And loosed the spell only in the master bedroom.

Her fall is usually told like this:
She had no inkling, she had dreamed nothing amiss
But went as always to the apple tree and knelt
Over the water, dipped and felt
For obedience but under the fast surface
Began to see things, pale shapes, a face
Not hers but as though at last someone
Had appeared for her in the mirror without question.
And then, only looking, the will gave,
She clouded inside, she felt her hand behave
Like a poacher's, tickling
The water for some warm and kindred thing.

Equally the water and her fingers refused:
It would not harden, they would not be closed
But leaked and spilled and the shaking cup
Of her two white hands could not lift up
Enough of the cold stream for her drought
But she burned in terror and then in delight
That water was water and she was freed
From obeying and having to be obeyed
And could thirst and lap and let the water run
Its way. She walked home woken.

In the old outcome there's a strict husband
Who saw at a glance - her wet dress - what
                                        had happened
And did not speak or ask her for a word
But obeyed the law and reached for the old
                                                    sword
And parted head and heart. One detail:
Blood ran and ran from that bare steel
Long after he had made the sleeping place
Be without spot the pure steel would not cease
Bleeding and bleeding. But this severe
Husband, if I told it now, would be no more
Than herself in waiting, waiting for the fall
That she held off as long as possible
By force of purity and steely will
Carrying playful water as a crystal ball,
No slop or wet, in a diamond hard dream
To an alabaster urn in the master bedroom.

In conversation with David Boll, David Constantine said what had drawn him to writing his poem, and then went on to talk about his work more generally:

What interests me is transmission, the way texts shift along. I like the idea of re-writing something that's already had an existence of its own. I have been doing a lot of translating, for example a translation into English of Brecht's 1948 adapation of Hölderlin's 1803 translation into exceedingly eccentric and radical German of Sophocles' Antigone. So I've translated the adaptation of a translation. Antigone is  perennially topical in some sense or other - the issue of civic demands versus private conscience -  and Brecht had his own decided view of what to do with it, coming back into a Europe basically ruined.

Goethe's poem is a reworking of an Indian legend - in the late 18th Century a lot of these things were coming into European consciousness through translations. I first read it when I was at school, and the central ability of the woman in it, the faith that she could do what she did, is something that stayed in  my mind and which I have used once or twice before. Promptings from outside, like the proposal from Magma, work if they coincide with something already actively present in you.

Goethe framed the story into a trilogy. A Pariah, an outcast, prays at the start that there should be  some creature, some amalgam, able to intercede on behalf of the lowest order; then there's the  story, then at the end a prayer of thanks. Goethe was attempting to develop a humanistic religion, comprehending the totality of what it is to be human. I find that attractive, but what I was mainly  interested in was the psychology of woman. I ignored the religious superstructure, omitted the son and reduced the husband's role to that of mere agent of the wife's own will. True, I retain a context in which women are subjugated by men and the laws devised by men; but the woman's discipline, in my poem,  is more a thing of her own devising, against herself. Perhaps it seems to her that in such a context she  can have no other authentic life.

As for the form, Goethe's is unrhyming trochees which, like Hiawatha, thump along too much in English. What comes easier for narrative is blank verse or rhyming couplets, so I've chosen the second. The  great liberation is being able to use loose rhymes. It means you no longer find yourself twisting the  sense to fit the rhyme.

You ask about other German writers and my work, particularly Hölderlin because of my books on him.  He was born in 1770, the same year as Wordsworth and Beethoven - that revolutionary generation  with enormously idealistic hopes. He was terribly disappointed, as were many people, but for him the disappointment was also personal, in his own life. So he's a poet of disappointment. But he's also in  a curious way deeply religious, although his basic premise is the absence of divinity. You're looking  at a world which seems to have been evacuated of religious sense, a world from which the gods have  gone, so the effort of poetry is somehow to render it sacred again. Then he's a great Hellenist. When  he tries to imagine a fulfilled life it's in the imagery of Greece - Periclean Athens is the pinnacle of human achievement. A lot of people thought the same and hoped the French Revolution would recover that achievement, that democracy. So he's a democrat.

The aspiration and the disappointment matter to me now because of the feeling that life matters and in some secular sense is sacred, and that it's under threat. A great deal of recent politics has actually gone to the reduction of the value of individual human life. In fascism, communism and also in capitalism at its worst, there is a reduction of the citizen to a unit. That's why I easily connect with both Hölderlin and Brecht - with what Brecht calls finding a life worthy of human beings - and with a politics that derives from 18th and 19th century aspirations for a more humane existence.

You ask me about my collection Something for the Ghosts , and say that certain types of location strike you in that - marshes, the sea and so on. I do have strong attachments to particular places, to the north  of England where I was born, to North Wales, to Greece or the Scilly Isles. Brecht said truth is concrete, and my poems have come out of particular places which constantly supply me with concrete imagery -  the Scilly Isles' geology and huge tides for example.

As for the theme of the ghosts, it originally sprang simply from the fact that at my time of life there have been more deaths, and so more poetry which is necessarily elegiac. But also I'm obsessed by the idea  of poetry as an animating activity. Poetry is speech. Ghosts can't speak till they drink blood, and then they can. So the premise is that you provide the means of speech. I don't mean that very ambitiously,  just that the poems are there for people who can't speak for themselves, and there are lots of them.

You point out that the poems are mainly about people other than myself and ask how far I too am  present. I have to write out of what I myself have experienced - it's one of my limitations if you like - so I am physically present in a lot of my poems and they may derive from individual biography. But I feel  that biography itself - what one is - is fluid and unstable. A poem cannot fix it and should not try to.

I have a horror of the association of poetry and nebulousness. Poetry is an exact and rigorous  business. I loathe sloppiness of any sort - in syntax, structure or observation. Poetry is about looking as closely as possible at something and getting it right. There are various ways of getting things right -  one of them could be going out and measuring them - but there’s a getting it right in the sense of saying  as exactly as you can what it feels like being in the world as a human being. Poetry is about a truth  which is not that of mathematical accuracy.

In form, several of the poems in the collection are actually sonnets, traditional or Meredithian, and do rhyme - quite irregularly at times, but the discipline lies in being sure of the rhymes. In rhythm,  I'm usually playing with the basic iambic pentameter. I roughen it, loosen it, conceal it - yet the lines should somehow have a feel of regularity as well.

Three longer poems are different - Streets, Fields and Fulmars. I wanted to write free verse where the breaks would have to do with pauses in reflection or something like breath. You watch and watch fulmars and get some idea of what they actually fly like, then it's not as though the poem mimics the flight, but I'm looking for a way of doing justice to the birds and at the same time being able to move from one reflection to another without having to put in all the connexions - more abrupt.

I find writing is often about being open to certain circumstances. It feels as though the imagery is offered you, and if you reflect long enough there's a chance it will shape itself. What one hopes for then is the feeling of a rhythm, of this shape and not that, and words, and then one is some way towards a poem. It takes me hours of concentration - I'm sceptical of just writing things out. For example, the last poem in  the book, Orangery, which you say gives you something of the feel of Hölderlin's secular sacred - I just happened to be in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris when they were bringing the orange trees in for the winter, something I'd never seen before, a ritual, done every year. There are certain occupations I find moving, and attending to a garden is one of them - innocent, to do with caring for things, and having a certain dignity, human. Orangery fits the whole book as a bringing in of things to be linked to one another, and there are the two lovers and the laurel-rose, and her torch that will see them through the winter.

I have a view of poetry which is wholly democratic in that I want it to dignify ordinary life. Just to see and write about a woman in a queue or a charity shop - that’s how the social meaning comes in . It seems to me the chief moral drive of poetry lies in giving readers the opportunity of sympathising with experiences beyond their real selves, of entering into other existences, so that on reading they are enlarged.