Stillcraic: Tuesday Poem - Polemic by Emma Neale

Polemic

This poem knows a couple of kids.

It wants to go into their homes

and put in insulation, double-glazed windows,

leave a week’s worth of groceries, exterminate the rats,

fix the dripping taps, make the adults come clean, off the drugs,

give them someone who can be stuffed to listen,

pull up all the old neural pathways, lay down fresh trails

so the ancient pain that flares and drives the hand to lash

is stayed, and so their hands are stayed,

and patience comes to them like visitations

of renovating (what-shall-we-call-it-if-we-won’t-call-it-holy?) light.

This poem wants to offer steady work, self-worth,

to sober up the violent drunks,

to unsuffer the little children to come unto misery.

This poem wants to dismantle the conditions

that gave a certain someone the nutrition, genetics, education,

marriage, employment, control over their own fertility and childcare

that empowered them to be a certain someone who mucks around with poems.

This poem wants to radicalise itself

rip itself up and start again.

This poem wants to be an historic poem

that needs footnotes and extensive scholarly apparatus

because very soon after its final draft

the concepts of inequality, domestic violence, child abuse and global recession

meet their gorgeous obsolescence.

But, ah, this poem also wants to be Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo;

ache, deeply unfashionable ache,

what of the urge to forge something beautiful?

Pause here to lift your eyes

to a magnolia

outside an office block

that extends its broad green leaves

to a sudden winter squall of light

as if with mouth and palms held open

to taste the drought split its own dry peel

in a sweet wash of rain…

But of course this poem can only see that

on a full stomach and a history of love.

This poem wants to regenerate fragmented communities.

This poem wants to make the streets safe for a woman to walk

with her eyes on her feet and her head full of inchoate song after dark.

This poem has put the children first:

they’re bathed and fed and now in bed, and that’s political.

This poem has gone for a walk to clear its head

and that’s political.

This poem has agreed to sex with someone it loves

even though it’s tired and anxious and frankly not that interested

and that’s political.

This poem was nearly beaten up when it stopped to write a line of itself

in the light of a street lamp and some crazy, wired, disenfranchised, drop-out driver

thought it was to take down its license plate number

and that’s political.

This poem tells lies now and then for effect

which might be aesthetic but it’s also political.

This poem had some of its lines revised

while its husband cooked dinner and its mother-in-law watched the kids

and that’s political.

This poem would achieve wider circulation

if published in a North American literary journal

than if published in its country of origin

and that’s political.

This poem hasn’t had the time, the training, nor does it have the ability

to learn the latest neuroscience or subatomic physics

and that’s political.

This poem wants to talk higher taxes even if it’s an election year

and whaddaya know, that’s political.

This poem is a poem; it comes from an era

when people still hold out hope for the poem

and that’s political.

This poem agitates.

This poem wants to be all things to all people.

This poem is inherently impossible.

What does this poem want?
When does it want it?

Louder!

What does this poem want?

When does it want it?

This redoubtable poem was the star of the latest issue of Landfall IMHO. I love a bit of well-crafted polemic LOL. No, seriously, but – I was very taken with it indeed and I am delighted Emma gave me permission to share it with you. In case you don’t invest in Landfall, which is worth investing in. It seems to be getting better and better. I haven't met Emma yet, although we are Facebook friends, but we have a link. Her book The Truth Garden won the Kathleen Grattan Award and was published by Otago University Press the year after my book This City got the nod.

Emma Neale has published five novels and three collections of poetry. She has also edited three anthologies: Creative Juices (HarperCollins, 2001), Best New Zealand Poems 2004 and Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood (Godwit, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in UK, Australian and New Zealand periodicals, and extracts of her work have appeared in North American literary publications such as Bat City Review, the Harvard Review, and the website Poetry Daily. A past recipient of the Creative New Zealand/Todd New Writers' Bursary, she was awarded the inaugural NZSA/Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature, and is the 2012 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. Her most recent novel, Fosterling, is shortlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy.