Stella Pierides

Murnau is a small market town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. It is the place where Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, and Franz Marc, inspired by the landscape, created The Blue Rider movement.

This is how the tourism office describes Murnau:

In Murnau nature, art and culture form a special bond. World-renowned artists like Kandinsky, Münter and Horváth lived here and found inspiration in the picturesque landscape at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps with its romantic lakes and unique moorlands.

The moor, Murnauer Moos as it is called in German, right next to the town of Murnau, is an enormous nature reserve, the largest in Central Europe and, surrounded by the Bavarian Alps, benefits from a micro-climate that supports an extraordinary range of animals and vegetation.

Meadows, marshes and mires; bog and creeks invite and nourish butterflies, insects, and rare birds. The light is translucent, the air uplifting, and the colors of the wild orchids, irises, grasses, and innumerable other plant varieties are thought to “sing.” Painters, photographers, art, nature, and bird-lovers make their pilgrimage to the moor to hear these songs.

Whenever I can, I go for walks there. My poem Murnau, published in escarp.org on the 8^th of August 2010 is a twitter-sized attempt to condense the experience of walking on the moor without losing sight of some of the cultural associations of the area.

Anuradha Vijayakrishnan’s poem “Suicide Note” was published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

This poem is a suicide note addressed to a number of unusual addressees, leaving the content of the note to the reader’s imagination. It puzzled and haunted me for the last few weeks: its exquisite, lyrical tone, its mysteries and the ways it brings nature alive through its lines.

A Critical analysis by Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen appeared recently in A Cup of Fine Cha. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both, poem and analysis, and kept them with me for weeks, chewing on words, mulling over the subtle allusions.

Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen’s analysis of the poem, as well as the comments, provide a beautiful and multi-faceted context to the poem. There is whole list of addressees in this “Suicide Note”: “frog, cicadas, rain clouds, gardens, worms, grass, deer, curtains, noise, lights, glass trails, heart, hands, ink, bruises, rivers, summers, monsoons and thunderbolts,” which the analysis and the comments fully and thoroughly explore.

I have nothing to add, except one question: Where are the people? Where are the relationships with people? The nature described in the poem is giving, generous – though providing what is usually offered by humans: warmth is offered by glow worms, for instance. And as if to emphasize the point, neighbours and strangers appear only impersonally as in “the shining lights of the neighbours and their last ashen cigarettes.”

So, for me, there is so much loneliness and sadness in the persona pouring out every time nature stands in for the human touch: friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, or even kind strangers. What could be more indicative of sadness, and indeed despair, than the need to use “broken glass trails that will show the way to strangers”?

From this perspective, what if, in a well-encrypted way, we are led to ask: does the poem take the line of praising nature instead of criticizing fatal failings of the human heart?

In this beautiful and haunting poem, Tammy Ho offers interesting answers to this question. The poem is part of a project in which she writes poems on demand. She asks that those interested email her something about themselves – an incident, a piece of information, a photograph – and she will then write a poem dedicated to them, inspired by the material they sent.

The poem “Where were you last night?” was written for a photographer friend; his photograph of a pair of bedroom slippers with the words “Her bedroom sippers,” used for inspiration.

The poet rose to the occasion, a difficult one, since it does not simply involve writing in response to a photograph, but a picture by a photographer and friend. How close is the friendship, one wants to ask, how much information is one not privy to, why bedroom slippers, what is the artist’s intention? And yet, on reading the poem, these questions lose their urgency, as we enter, or rather are led into, a world we feel we know, which however appears magical at the same time. From a book launch, to fairy tales, to Moscow, to Chelsea, to hotels and linguistic stops, we are taken round the world and back into the poet’s arms.

There are so many things I like about this poem that to single out one thing would do injustice to the rest. Nevertheless, I will pick out a theme which resonates particularly strongly with me.

The first stanza gives a clue that serves as an entry point. The narrator might be asking herself the question “Where were you …?” The book launch she attended was a boring event, too many writers’ egos, neat piles of books and lots of wine on an empty stomach! But we know you can’t judge a book by its cover. This leads the narrator to crack open the book pile, and the stories, fairy tales, metaphors, characters come tumbling out in the subsequent stanzas. The writer is never bored, or alone… and the reader is certainly entertained and amused, but also puzzled.

At the same time, a sense of longing and loneliness comes across in the poem. “Where were you last night?” might also be a question asked of the “you” in the poem – as if the narrator wished the “you” had been with her. The repeated question suggests feeling excluded, or left; and all that within the context of closer intimacy claimed by the words in the photograph “Her bedroom slippers.” In asking the “where were you” question, the narrator implies “you” could have been with her, “at home,” in her own arms, with her wearing “her bedroom slippers.” Perhaps, the fact that “you” were not is just as well, as one might imagine that, had that “you” been at home with her, the poem might not have been written!

In this sense, for me, this poem also explores the source(s) of creativity: is the feeling of a lack, of longing and of loss an essential ingredient of creative work? What other ingredients are there? And why is inspiration and creative effort so often experienced as capricious, and fragile, needing to be nursed and safeguarded? There is a powerful hint in the poem at our anxieties about the fragility of the creative process: one snowflake and we can be blinded for ever… There is a display of poetic force in this poem which transcends and transforms the longing into a poetic journey well worth embarking on.

Disappearing Act, Eleanor Ross Taylor’s poem can be read in The Guardian by clicking http://bit.ly/c98Rhi

It is a brilliant self-reflective poem, based on experiencing the human body as a thinking as well as a feeling person.

Winner of the 2010 Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly award, she made the news at a time when she was almost forgotten.  Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman, commented on her “sober and clear-eyed serenity,”  and her strong reserve. “We live in a time when poetic styles seem to become more antic and frantic by the day, and Taylor’s voice has been muted from the start,” The Guardian reported.  Others, commenting on her award, made strong references to her age.

Her poetry, though, speaks for her talent and originality; her making us see the world anew – in this case, our own body.

George Szirtes defends poetry: Poetry conjures the presence of things, their physicality… it is experienced through the body as much as the mind. “…but the chief use of poetry to sense the presence of the toad in language, without which sense nothing happens, without which the language enterprise is all imaginary gardens in which only ghosts can live.” Read it by clicking here: George Szirtes blog Then, go find that toad, say, by reading one of his poems: “Say“