Poems are islands. We hope the scenery of each one has its own lush vegetation, perhaps its own unique flora and fauna – that it stands up as a thing to be examined and explored from many angles. But islands can also form archipelagos, where volcanic matter has hardened and set into linked characters, individual, yet still redolent of their shared source. And in an archipelago there is always the idea of a journey. Once we’ve crossed one island we turn and scan the horizon for the next.
These chains of poems work in a similar way. We trace the steps of the poets as they lead and follow. We expect the new poems arising from the blank page or the quietly whirring screen.
Vivid places urging us to explore them makes me think of one of my favourite imaginative activities – the idea of going for an evening stroll, a paseo if you will, with Wallace Stevens. He delights in the material world. But every given thing is also a lens through which to view existence, and whatever next thing that arises in the fertile scenery of the route. His poems feel like objects, often enigmatic, things to be picked up and examined again and again. From ‘Les Plus Belles Pages’:
‘The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight
Was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself.
The moonlight seemed to.
Two people, three horses, an ox
And the sun, the waves together in the sea.’
The craving for colour and excitement is always there. Philosophical concepts in Stevens usually arise in the most natural way – while never quite giving the feeling of being stumbled across, but sought out and observed with delight, like wild birds, like the prismic swarming of starlings. The feeling of deliberate, measured chaos inhabits his careful ordering.
Poetry is an intimate activity. To share that process with another mind and writer is akin to turning the pages of your diary open as you write them. The speed with which a Likestarlings chain is formed (a week for each link) encourages candour and spontaneity, an immediacy, a delight in the process of writing in sequence. We begin to recognize those individuals paving the way for, or kicking against, their partners. Whichever way it appears, they are writing more together.
This question of balance is the reason we’ve decided to shift the length of chains up to six poems – three from each poet. Now things feel very open, spiralling off into whatever possible future.
So it is with pleasure I can also announce a new chain fresh up on the site: Katrina Naomi and Sue Wood. This really has a momentum I think, flowering splendidly in the final two poems.
David