Poem Talk & time travel
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory 1895. Click picture to see the short film
I forgot to put up my customary weekly post sharing our poem after yesterday’s Poem Talk session. We talked about this new poem by Kit Fan, which is currently shortlisted for The Moth Poetry Prize (judge: Louise Glück). Kit Fan was born and raised in Hong Kong and came to the UK at 21; he is, I think, one of the most accomplished and interesting contemporary UK poets. His third collection, The Ink Cloud Reader, is due out from Carcanet on 27 April.
So what did we talk about? First, we just read the poem and mentioned lines and images that particularly spoke to us. At some point we started wanting to know what it was ‘about’, and established very quickly that it was about the first — or more properly second (as the first had been a 21-second-long scene in a bourgeois back garden in Leeds) — moving image ever made, by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, in 1895, of workers leaving their factory for dinner. We talked about light — ‘the thing you can’t leave behind’ — which is of course present in the name Lumière itself, and time; how the poem recognises the film as a form of time-travel; but we forgot to mention that light, more or less, in a bendy way, is time.
Fan says that in 1895 ‘our world was just/ beginning’. We talked about that, too: the impossibility of our current world without moving images in it. The evocation of that moving world in lines 5-11, and especially the little dog Lumi ‘sniffing/ at the ghost of ham’ on a hand. The cobblestones and carriages and the workers’ ‘machine hands’ that ‘perforated the hours’. But the poem isn’t about our time, just beginning, it’s about theirs — and how, in the film, the people leaving through the gates seem to near, so real, and how they’re ghosts: people, preserved in light. And so that ‘ghost of ham’, itself not even seen in the film, is the ghost of a ghost.
We talked about the change in the final section:
A lot of walking is about thinking
and a lot of thinking heads towards ending
which I guess is like the ark leaving.
Perhaps good things are not everything.
Someone said all the -ing words slowed it down to a walking pace. Those words, that are so frequently objected to in poems, on grounds of sound, or of a distancing effect… ‘It’s if he took all the -ing words from everywhere else in the poem and just put them together in one place!’ But the distancing effect is useful here, because this is the poet thinking, ruminating. We talked about contemplation and what the ending is. Death, the leaving of the Ark, the end of light? ‘Many would have escaped the clocks/ if grief wasn’t guarding the door’. Meaning that those still inside the building missed their chance to become these ghostily preserved imprints? The sound, ing, ing, ing, becomes here like a bell, or like that other -in word, sing.
Of course there is that break: ‘Suddenly, summer’. In three languages: first French, the language of Lyon and the Lumières; then English, the language Fan is writing in; and in the middle, between those two, a reminder that he himself is Chinese. For what that’s worth; you can hardly miss it. Film itself is global. Lyon is very local. (As another Chinese poet, Yang Lian, has written: ‘There is no international. There are only a thousand locals’.) This is a poet stretching himself between three cultures.
That break in the poem, from the time travel to the reverie, is technically a turn, and it’s worth noting that the poem has, not the 14-line length, but certainly the proportions and structure of a sonnet. Which itself is often structured like a train of thought, a working-out.
We talked about the Ark a bit, leaving and arriving, and how the story we’re told never acknowledges the ghastly, visceral destruction that would have been evident when the floodwaters subsided; but that’s not really relevant. The freighted word ‘Ark’ is a decisive point between one world and the next attempt, and it carries this one thing — this luminous entity — that can’t be left behind, and will in fact be crucial in the forming of ours.
Someone said she didn’t quite trust it; she felt it was a bit inchoate. ‘I think it’s probably two two poems’. In an email afterwards she wrote: ‘I didn't know that I was going to respond in the way I did - I liked the poem on the first few readings and still do, and yet I have a disquiet about it and I suppose I want to pin that down for myself… maybe a sleight of hand / pen, but as I said, this is likely my own limitation.’
This is where it got a bit vague. Because we all had our own associations with various words and images, and other bits of our own that we project onto poems. Of course, ‘Poetry is what’s lost in translation’, as Robert Frost said. And that includes from person to person and also any attempt at paraphrase.
I then mentioned TS Eliot’s comment, from his essay on Dante, which is never far from my thoughts when talking about poems, that ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’, and I think this poem is doing exactly that.
This also, by the bye, brings to mind a passage Eliot wrote about Ben Jonson; and I think I’ve slightly misappropriated it for this discussion, but here it is: ‘the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind…’ He isn’t saying Jonson is fatuous, here; what he’s saying is that some poetry rewards study, while other poetry calls up the — to use my group member’s word — inchoate ‘swarms of inarticulate feelings’.
And finally, the little filmy looping time-travel magic of reading the last line — ‘Perhaps I will stop here and see you glow’ — which ends us back up to the first one.
(An aside: they say Eliot is stuffy, and he certainly was, in ways, especially later; but the early Eliot of the essays — that sounds like a Tim Buckley song, doesn’t it? — was really trying to get at things: the essence. He was getting up shockingly early in the morning and torturing these essays out of his mind, trying to arrive at the molten core of poetry before making sure Vivien was all right and then heading off to the bank for a stultifying day’s work. Whatever kind of poems you like, you’ve got to give him that. And he was writing this stuff for actual readers, out in the world, not in jargon for universities.)
So the upshot, then, is that dwelling within the mystery that’s presented to us is sometimes all that’s possible. We have to be happy with that.
And with the image of the Ark, in the shape of a film, or a factory, or a woman in a hat with big flowers, carrying light into the 20th century.
Oh yes.