For this week's New Poetries VII blog, Helen Charman introduces her selection for the anthology and shares her poem, 'Agony in the Garden', which you can listen to a recording of below.
Helen Charman was born in 1993. She is writing a PhD thesis on maternity, sacrifice, and political economy in nineteenth-century fiction, and teaches undergraduates at the University of Cambridge and primary school children in Hackney, where she currently lives. Her critical writing can be found introducing the short stories of Mary Butts for the ANON series (Hurst Street Press, 2017), in Cambridge Humanities Review, King’s Review, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2017, and her first pamphlet of poems is forthcoming from Offord Road Books in 2018.***
Sandeep Parmar wrote recently of her belief that poetry must ‘rise to the collective challenge of our times, not merely be a curio of intimate experience.’ I believe this too; I’m trying.
The poems in this selection were written between 2016 and 2017. Many respond or allude to other texts: I think the ongoing work of reconsidering the historical ‘canon’ can help to clarify the challenges of the present. In general, I don’t think it is necessary for the reader to know where these references are; ‘Agony in the Garden’ is an exception to this rule. The poem embeds a quotation from the statement made by John Ruskin during the annulment proceedings of his marriage to Effie Gray in 1854: ‘It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion.’ Later, Ruskin based the ideal of femininity presented in 1865’s Sesame and Lilies on Rose La Touche, whom he subsequently proposed marriage to. When Ruskin and La Touche first met, in 1858, he was nearly thirty-nine years old. She was ten.
Agony in the Garden
The poems in this selection were written between 2016 and 2017. Many respond or allude to other texts: I think the ongoing work of reconsidering the historical ‘canon’ can help to clarify the challenges of the present. In general, I don’t think it is necessary for the reader to know where these references are; ‘Agony in the Garden’ is an exception to this rule. The poem embeds a quotation from the statement made by John Ruskin during the annulment proceedings of his marriage to Effie Gray in 1854: ‘It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion.’ Later, Ruskin based the ideal of femininity presented in 1865’s Sesame and Lilies on Rose La Touche, whom he subsequently proposed marriage to. When Ruskin and La Touche first met, in 1858, he was nearly thirty-nine years old. She was ten.
Agony in the Garden
Why are you walking around my garden, John Ruskin, these
are Prestige Flowers and you are gnawing like the worm. Why
must pleasure be a catastrophe? I have dedicated this sleep life
to statuary I have laboured joyfully for my base wet daughters
and you and yours have no place building nations here in the
name of purified water. When will my attention span return
from the war? Desire, hooked again, there is no inverse relation
between my dislike for you and the embarrassment you cause.
She didn’t want to fuck you either her person was not formed
to excite passion I thought there was no such thing as bad
weather? Splendid, her skin was luminous, every blood smear
every hair-like feather. When will my attention span allow me
to achieve more? Saved for the nation, her fat tongue is full
with splinters, saved for the nation she deserved, as usual, more.
John, like sesame, like lilies, you manipulate what you have never
grown. Constant though unlessoned, stoic in the face of pleasure,
may we only tread with patience the path we have been shown.
***
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
