In the expansive and marvelous new conversation between Valerie Witte & Aidan Semmens (now complete), Witte’s first poem is funny and tense, putting minor and major disasters, including the threat of flood, alongside one another in the form of a missive. In his response, Semmens introduces 18th-Century natural philosopher Allesandro Volta into the conversation (whose experiments into muscle contraction in response to electric currents led to the invention of the battery – see picture courtesy of Wikipedia above).
Semmens’ short, latinate lines are then expanded to a paragraph by Witte, who spins them into a speaker’s reminiscences. “An Experiment in Galvanism” could be a disaster itself (lightning strike?), a religious experience, sex…all of which becomes, in Semmens’ response, Likestarlings’ first sestina, if I’m not mistaken, and a brilliant one. It is a form appropriate to the overlaying of repeated elements, which are now video games, muscle memory and the still-present natural disasters. The poem draws together virtual realities, learnt behaviours and violence.
Witte’s response mirrors Semmens’ poem in its stanzas, but discards the repeated words. And again, the poem turns to the personal, to memory, but in a way which seems to me uncannily consonant with the impulse of Semmens’ poem. It is wonderful when poets seem to have got under each other’s skin – each seeing into what the other is doing and extending it, making it their own.
Current events appear to seep into Semmens’ final poem, which ends in just as unsettled a place as Witte started them off. But this is somewhere neither poet could have got to without the other. These lines, from “The age of insecurity”, might apply just as well to the process by which poems are transformed in the back and forth, too:
blurring the continuities
we take one element for another,
water for breathing, plutonium for fire,
catastrophism as a way of life
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