‘Everywhere needs its creation myth’. Reflecting on Rishi Dastidar’s (2020) Saffron Jack Rugby, Nine Arches Press.
…those of us from backgrounds where poetry writing is not a common way of spending time … are more familiar with the whisper, the critique, the rejection that, while the work is good, it is in some way lacking in some aspect (often not articulated) of craft. And it can be a way of excluding people from the art, through suggesting ideas of standards that are unclear to beginners – and even to those who have been writing for a while.
Dastidar, T. (2019) ‘Foreword’ in Dastidar, T. (Ed.) The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century Rugby, Nine Arches Press, p. 11.
Determining your place in the world, that named space in which you claim an identity, is a relational matter. Saying that you should be recognised in the way you wish to be recognised does not guarantee that you will be thus recognised. Claiming entitlement to the qualities you wish to be seen to possess does not itself validate that claim. There has to be a negotiation with others. And, when those others have established priority to that identity or well-recognised claims to qualities, they can use the power that status gives them to exclude the incoming suppliant from entering the space in which they wanted to be included. This is precisely the situation Dastidar shows us to operate in claiming the identity of a maker of poetry. He shows that, often unarticulated and perhaps inarticulatable, issues arise to prove the validity of a beginning poet’s exclusion.
I want to return later to the significance to Dastidar’s achievement of this theme of being perceived as alien to cultural traditions and being or feeling (often to the same effect as being) excluded from them. The theme will correlate to the poem’s adoption of the persona of a king to characterise its narrator’s illusory world, nominally attributing the source of that theme to Rudyard Kipling. Since there is no evidence of the author’s connection to Shelley that I know of, I’ll leave to the end some speculation about Dastidar’s project shadows the language used to characterise the role and duties of the poet, even in the darkened context of the pre-Victorian nineteenth century, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Nevertheless ‘the crafting of style’ is an important theme in the poem’s treatment of how authority and authorial entitlement is established. WE need to look at authority more generally then before we come back to seeing the poem as a peculiarly poignant poem about a latecomer’s entry into the world of poetry in English.
The poem itself does much to query its own generic nature. It opens and closes with something that appears to be in the form given to stage directions, with words shared between each, that describe a visual scene, with details of the space, including its external and internal boundaries, ‘stage properties’ left within the space, such as a mattress and rucksack and prompts for sound effects and the actor’s response.
A loud hailer speaks as one of the sound effects but in three languages on the next page: Dutch, French and finally English. This is followed by more stage directions but ones only applicable to guide the actor’s more minute gestures and perceptions and which become increasingly unreal, even to the fantasy of ‘cuticles on the end of pipecleaners’. And then the main character speaks:
1. You polish it every night.
1.1 No, not that.
1.2 The crown.
1.2.1 Every night.
Dastidar (2020: 14)
We can come back to the formal aspects of the writing but this speech clearly is about the actor’s enacted recognition of the ‘it’ he holds, which has been described to us as a ‘clunk of a metallic open-top hat-band’.[1] To know a hat by its ‘clunk’ is to know it by sound and this is only one of the disorientating effects in the world of language and translated languages, encountered in this opening.
After all the first line quoted above is a kind of smutty masturbation joke, that the speech suppresses as if it were a response to a double entendre in ‘it’. What a man might ‘polish every night’ is after all not usually a ‘crown’, but the effect is to make it clear to us that ‘to polish’ is a word whose meaning depends on context. To polish is to a metaphor of stylistic craft – a making something crude, and the crown is surely that, something more refined, akin to the ‘polished’ manners of a more refined class of clothes-wearers or language-speaker’s. Hence the poem opens, once it indicates it is mimetic of human speech, by reference to acts of claiming, whether that be of symbolic power or of the attributes of class, status, and an attributed quality of ‘belonging’ to those classes.
In an important sense the underlying theme is nationality and nationhood and the contradictions thrown up by this idea since the eighteenth-century, as the poem itself notes. Dastidar points usefully to the requisite reading in this theme through two useful blogs in the ‘Notes’. In particular the ideas of Neal Ascherson:
there were a number of “less durable spaces” – for instance, the “parallel but unlicensed institutions” of Solidarity-era Poland. He points out that, “in the early 20th century, there were a number of spaces which were not absolutely unpopulated but whose allocation to empires or nation-states was undecided.”
Manaugh, G. (2008) citing Ascherson (2001) in BDLGBLOG ‘The Akwizgran Discrepancy’ available at: http://www.bldgblog.com/2008/07/the-akwizgran-discrepancy/
It’s an idea that ought to be known in British history better than it is in relation to the vacuum of power between the Scottish and English border that created the ‘Debatable Lands’ as a series of semi-tribal or clan states.. But I don’t think this is my theme here, however important for a full understanding of the work and its political significance.
We can summarise then briefly, and perhaps reductively, ideas that are complex and contradictory in the poem. The act of belonging is exemplified in the making of a country inside its chosen boundaries: it involves a ‘creation myth’.[2] And this is a place that is created in the imagination, even if in the ‘quixotic ideas’ of an island society,[3] though an impossible place according to Donne whom the speaker of the poem contests (’93.1. Yes, John Donne, you heard’),[4] of a single man in a single-room in a single shack. Myth replaces the need to be justify one’s own existence in relation to others, relationally:
100. Here is the really crazy thing. You don’t need to be recognised
100.1. by anyone else – …..
ibid: sec 100, p. 66
Once it is established as what philosophy calls a foundational truth, the idea of self-gratifying nationhood of self-belonging, this country attempts to find its analogues, starting from the land of Cockaigne.[5]
But with creative analogy comes the need for further embellishment, and through that embellishment, in professed absence of need of recognition, a vacuum in Jack Saffron’s state is created to measure himself against others. This is done in a poignantly remembered need for inclusion most often imaged in its opposite: rejection of one’s claim to belong and exclusion as a migrant in a land others want to own for themselves.
This is perhaps the most moving and painful part of the poem. Jack asserts his unity and autonomy only to recreate the divisions he was hoping to escape but now within himself. This self-alienation may be a reflex of the fact that all nations exist only by being imagined. But if so, it brings with it the correlative truth that imaginary countries exist in, and are are only sustainable by, conflict, whether admitted or denied. A country of undefended borders is prone to an invasion, even if only invasion by want of the otherness that persists outside:
193. All the sun and the cool kids are next door. They always will be
ibid:130
If there is no country or nation but that it is imaginary, there is no country though, ‘real’, with all the ‘accoutrements’, or imaginary (without them) that can exist other than in relationship to another, ranging from the ‘other’ who is next door to what is ‘foreign or alien’. Simultaneously there is no country that in fact does not defend the boundaries of relationship by exclusion. Hence we have the problem of a poem that ends with contradiction not a unitary statement of authority or a ‘moral’.[6]
How does this relate to the craft of poetry? It relates because a poem is in itself an imagined time-space, beating out the bounds of some pretension or other:
126.2 An anthem for starters
126.2.1 A little tune to let everyone know you are coming
…..
126.2.3 No lyrics though
ibid: 83f.
This quotation comes from Jack’s list of the possible accoutrements to his country and his kingship which include, as well as a national anthem, as above, a ‘passport’. The anthem has to be guarded, however. It is merely ‘for starters’, which I read as also meaning a poem for beginners such as those mentioned in the opening quotation. It too is under potential attack from those opposing it to standards that the author lacks, that challenge their entitlement.
A new poet will struggle to find a voice, even a form and language. Amongst the other useful hints at he sources of the poem in its Notes is an acknowledgement that the form is taken from another poet’s poem, Mónica de la Torre’s How to look at Mexican Highways. This poem is, indeed superficially like Saffron Jack in form, but is not I would argue a form that has been adopted without significant changes in how it is used.
The Torre’s poem, establishes from the start the conventions of a hierarchical list – one most used in contemporary report writing, in which sub-sections are numbered hierarchically to show subsets in the handing of meaning. Thus section 2 of her poem is ‘about’ looking at ‘things you don’t see when you’re indoors’. The sections 2.1 to 2.4 is a list of different specific items within that category. Some of those items form categories which can be sub-divided into sub-categorical items, as ‘2.2 Cables’ and 2.4 Empty cans of food’. There is a playfulness in the adoption of the form. It is subverted by stanza 5, in which the relation between category and sub-category becomes, in being harder to categorise simply, more poetic.
This last point is where Dastidar starts. His use of nested numerical hierarchies can sometimes list hierarchically but can also and without warning lead to other possible meaning, such as qualifications of a higher-level statement or narrative progression. There is unexpected transformation that occurs in this usage. For instance let’s look at a section on the establishment of personal or national boundaries:
119. This is beating the bounds.
119.1. Your bounds.
119.2 The human equivalent of pissing on the ground if you are a wolf.
119.2.1 Territory marking. Nothing more sinister than that.
ibid: 79
This is not strictly like Torre’s form. The slip from category to sub-category seems to have less to do with a further definition of the category at a lower level than an accidental slippage of thought into a new domain in order to amplify the meaning of the category of ‘boundaries’, that gets more tenuous and self-questioning as they precede down that hierarchy. It is a means not of ordering the poem but of disordering it into further ironic self-questioning of the narrator by himself. This is so much so that when we reach the word ‘sinister’, it rebounds back associatively on the lines above, seeking the sinister in words like ‘beating’.
There is much more that can be said of the ‘craft’ of the poem. What I want to establish is that it too is based on fear of rejection, of not fitting a standard, precisely because it wants to question the validity of that standard, expose its roots in solidified imagination. Solidified imagination is what we call convention.
Earlier I said I thought that this poem is, in my opinion, about the role of the poet. I can only do this because I feel, with no evidence but that feeling, that the poem rehearses themes that first saw light in English Romantic poetry. Those themes were a way of framing a world in which the loss of a specifically social leadership for poetry and poets was acknowledged. They became reflexively the elegiac meaning of all poetry, performing acts of metaphoric political resistance to the society whose value-systems made it so.
Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ imagines the origin of poetry in the role of a civic leader, writing not only poetry but law, religion, and morality. It discusses even how utilitarianism in the nineteenth century was one of the forms in which, ‘poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists’. Shelley’s faith lies in the fact the poet remain both prophets of a higher power driving history and of wars that will throw down false kings and establish, in their own form, good ones:
…. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Shelley, P.B. “A Defence of Poetry” (1840, written 1821) in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments London, Edward Moxon. This from text Available at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry
The elements of Shelley’s final paragraph are certainly present in this narrative and/or dramatic poem by Dastidar. Within it the metaphor of war is realised, external and internal, prophecy and law-making are dramatised and made problematic. At its very heart, whether conceived of a drama or a poem, is a pasteboard-crown we have discussed which the poet tries to polish into a social icon for power.
And it is a poem in which ‘words which express what they understand not’ is central. The beginning poet, marginalised by standards that are elitist, racist, and based in no small way on class and status, is flexing their wings. It will sing of the boundaries which separate us that their source in imagination is made clear and the role of the new migrant poet, the ‘tramper’, is made central to the unacknowledged legislation of the world.[7]
Steve
[1] Dastidar (2020: 13)
[2] ibid: sec. 118 p. 77
[3] ibid: sec 117, p. 77
[4] ibid: p. 61
[5] ibid: sec 122ff., pp. 80f. And see Breughel illustration here too.
[6] ibid: 130
[7] ibid: p. 11. The theme of the migrant is from Salman Rushdie’s Shame cited p. 9.
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