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EDITORIAL Poetry is not a museum. I woke myself up saying this out loud recently, or perhaps I said it while still dreaming. Either way, I had been for some reason called upon, in this dream, to defend the nature of contemporary poetry against a National Treasure and Public Intellectual, who, it seemed, despised all the English language had to offer in this area, nowadays. He appeared, this Public Treasure and National Intellectual – with his shirt buttoned up tight, his little badge of cultural influence and neatly combed hair – to be decrying the loss of deference to a Great Tradition. Suggesting, as a result, the condition of ‘good poetry’ was now confined to history, memorialised in some kind of fixed and stable, state-funded building. And I was, I think, suddenly being asked, by the Nationally, Publicly Treasured Intellectual, to envision its vast and austere rooms. Or maybe I was there now, being shown by him around its glass cabinets, which housed all the poems of his Canon – airtight and immovable in their finished and perfect forms, and interspersed perhaps with important artefacts – Keats’ death mask, the cigarette ash of Auden, the underpants of Robert Browning. My tour-guide held court and I interrupted, rearranged the furniture and sellotaped poems I considered important to the walls. We spoke over each other – petty, self-important – and on this went, back and forth, as the venue grew smaller and then bigger, depending upon who was speaking.
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Why had the dream arrived? Why am I recounting it here? My interlocutor was an obviously reductive character, built out of straw by my unconscious, and the veracity of his diagnosis, his complaints not worth countering in a wakeful state. But since the Publicly National Intellectual Treasure came from my unconscious, he was also speaking on behalf of some part of myself that believed him, or feared he might be speaking the truth in some way. In my dream, I was challenging my regular self to say something interesting and definite about poetry, right now. It was almost certainly an anxiety dream born from having to write another editorial. Now I’m wide awake, I think this anxious type of bickering, its sense of embattlement, and its solipsism and absurdity, seems itself to be a great poetic tradition, to which I and the National Treasure were definitely deferent. Poets have always worried at the art form, eulogised or rebranded it, partly as a means of locating their place within it, or to bring closer the complexity of the activity of reading and writing it. It takes a cool head and better faith arguments than those I dreamed to navigate beyond absolutes or tribalist, reductionist traditions. Thank goodness, then, for Vanessa Kisuule and Zakia Carpenter-Hall, who have the wherewithal to eloquently move this debate elsewhere, beyond the limitations of me and The Strawbased Intellectual, through astute and insightful discourse. And thank goodness for generous conversationalists, such as Sarah Howe and Monica Youn, who also angle the lens away from whatever room he and I ended up yelling over each other in. And praise be that often a poem’s best recourse for defence its own existence – boldly claiming space for itself, as does the drive and conviction of Fran Lock’s ‘The Language of Flowers’, the emotional truth of Raymond Antrobus’s ‘Resolutions’, as does Ella Frears’ playful negotiation of form, and the joy and gratitude of Kami Enze’s ‘To Live and Shave in New York’. Thank God for the work in this issue, each piece of which is steadfast enough to stand alongside Amit Chaudhuri’s ‘Cold Soup’, and say ‘this, too, is poetry.’ Wayne Holloway-Smith This issue is dedicated to the memory of Gboyega Odubanjo. 6 The Poetry Review

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EDITORIAL

Poetry is not a museum. I woke myself up saying this out loud recently, or perhaps I said it while still dreaming. Either way, I had been for some reason called upon, in this dream, to defend the nature of contemporary poetry against a National Treasure and Public Intellectual, who, it seemed, despised all the English language had to offer in this area, nowadays.

He appeared, this Public Treasure and National Intellectual – with his shirt buttoned up tight, his little badge of cultural influence and neatly combed hair – to be decrying the loss of deference to a Great Tradition. Suggesting, as a result, the condition of ‘good poetry’ was now confined to history, memorialised in some kind of fixed and stable, state-funded building. And I was, I think, suddenly being asked, by the Nationally, Publicly Treasured Intellectual, to envision its vast and austere rooms. Or maybe I was there now, being shown by him around its glass cabinets, which housed all the poems of his Canon – airtight and immovable in their finished and perfect forms, and interspersed perhaps with important artefacts – Keats’ death mask, the cigarette ash of Auden, the underpants of Robert Browning. My tour-guide held court and I interrupted, rearranged the furniture and sellotaped poems I considered important to the walls. We spoke over each other – petty, self-important – and on this went, back and forth, as the venue grew smaller and then bigger, depending upon who was speaking.

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