Poetic start

Belinda McKeon on influence and inspiration at the Writers Festival

For the American poet Wallace Stevens, the wellspring of poetry lay in a sense of alienation, of uncertainty, of not belonging; of living in a place "not our own" and "not ourselves". And hard it was, wrote Stevens, "in spite of blazoned days." Last week, however, one such blazoned day for poets - Bloomsday - brought together international practitioners to discuss precisely the question to which Stevens provided this downhearted response.

The result, with vows to write poems to please canines and talk of the micro-electric impact of poetic language, was anything but despondent. "Where Poetry Comes From", a discussion chaired by the CBC arts broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, kicked off this year's Dublin Writers Festival, with contributions from the Canadian and International winners of this year's Griffin Poetry Prize, Charles Simic and Roo Borson, along with Griffin trustee, the American poet Carolyn Forché and the Irish poet Theo Dorgan.

The focus was wide-ranging, with Wachtel posing questions of poetic beginnings, of influence and inspiration, with the more loaded notions of nation and politics thrown into the mix. At moments the exchanges seemed almost scripted, while questions were tokenistic and transitions between subjects often abrupt, but there were, too, some spirited tangents, most interestingly from Simic, who grew up in 1940s Yugoslavia before moving to the US.

"What was it like being a child in the war?" asked Wachtel, in the middle of a discussion about the place of politics in poetry. "Wonderful," responded Simic, to startled laughter from the floor. "My parents were so preoccupied with getting food, with not getting into jail, with the bombing, and I was in the heart of the city, unsupervised, running free. It was the ultimate adventure."

Borson told Wachtel of her first encounter with poetry, in her native California, when her father would cook kippers for breakfast and quote Shakespeare and Wordsworth "whether it was appropriate or not". Much of the first part of the session was taken up with recollections of this kind, with sparks only beginning to fly when Dorgan, having described how his first poem arrived after his wish for a certain "vertical encounter to become a horizontal one", vehemently denied that he had started writing poetry like Simic had, to "get a girl". "Somebody just looked at me and poetry started," he insisted, determined to shield the purity of the impulse. Borson was similarly determined, saying that a love of sound was at the heart of her motivation to write poems.

For Forché, poetry was "a way of having a private life", and of "discussing a being and a place that was possible" in that privacy. What mattered greatly to her now, she later said, was the idea of "holding the past in memory" through the elegy, a form in which she has worked often since becoming a human rights investigator in El Salvador. But the decision to go there, and to write from the experience, did not, for her, mean that she would automatically become a political poet; for others who viewed her work, however, the label became automatic. Forché spoke out strongly against the problematic notion of politics in poetry, advocating instead ideas of ethical consciousness and of an awareness of the human condition. "There's a place for all of this," she said, "but that which troubles you in the night will inevitably flow to the page."

One notion about which none of the poets was particularly troubled was that of literature and the nation. "What is my nation?" asked Dorgan, in a gesture towards Joyce, but doubted that the nation state could be a signifier during the life of a poet or generation of poets. What could reasonably be spoken of, he said, was the distinctiveness rather than the nationality of a poetry, and the big question was whether someone in the future would look back and say "that was the Irish national poetry". To be "one of ours", he continued, was possible not merely of poets of the same ethnic or geographical origin, but of poets, such as Forché, who tapped into shared concerns, shared possibilities, shared language.

"I'm in love with translating," said Forché, when steered toward the subject by Wachtel. "It is to be allowed into another poet's soul." She spoke of the importance to literature of translation, describing it as "a service to other communities, to the past, to other writers". Simic agreed, calling translation "the closest possible reading of a poem". To be, for a time, "a totally different kind of poet" was one of the most interesting and enlivening experiences of the art, he said.

Against this, Dorgan's description of his recent rendering into English of work by the Slovenian poet Barbara Korun, whose language he declared he did not know and would "never know," and of the flurry of e-mails, conversations and "sleepless hours in Ljubljana" which produced the translation, seemed a poor offering, though his depiction of translation from the Irish was fired and evocative. "Language is not commensurate to the world," said Forché. "Something slips in the telling."

The language of poetry was, she said, like a mosaic in its fragments and its fissures. Forché's own language was anything but pointed. But with the banner of the Dublin Writers Festival as her backdrop, with the motif of fractured lines and shards of just such a mosaic, the irony of her comment was striking. A blazoned day it might have been, but the lingering sense was of missed opportunity.