Today we shine the spotlight on Rowland Bagnall, the next contributor to the New Poetries VII anthology in our series of blog posts. Below you can read his poem 'Jet Ski', as well as his introduction to his poems in the anthology.
Rowland Bagnall was born in Oxfordshire in 1992. He studied English at St John’s College, Oxford, and completed an MPhil in American Literature at the University of Cambridge. His poetry has previously appeared in various magazines, including Poetry London, The Quietus, and PN Review. He currently lives in Oxford and is working on a first collection, in which the poems printed here take part.
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Many of the these poems are constructed from the bits and pieces of experience – loose words and phrases, persistent images and thoughts – that decided to stick around, for whatever reason, after the party. Eventually, a group of them will draw together and become a scaffold, which can then be used to make a poem. I’m interested in glitches, particularly when language, sense, and memory go wrong, and in the different ways of using/abusing these malfunctions. I also think a lot about the images we keep, and how we can’t really control the way those images relate, or what can happen to them once they’re set loose in the Jungle Gym of our imaginations. It’s possible that my writing has something in common with collage’s particular species of vandalism, although this hasn’t been a conscious choice. I do find lots to write about in visual art and film, however, which I suppose will be apparent here. More often than not, the shape of a poem tends to determine itself, so I usually end up paying closer attention its sounds, its rhythms, and its repetitions. Occasionally, during the process of writing, a poem will begin to feed upon itself, biting off its fingernails, which I expect relates to glitches, too; something like this is happening in ‘Hothouse’. I like to think of these poems as having nothing to do with me personally, but get the feeling this is not the case.
Jet Ski
Emerging switch-eyed from the undergrowth
into an evening that has just arrived but where there’s still
and mainly light, at least for now, withdrawing like receding rooms,
the trees losing distinction like the faces in a crowd that’s running
to or from an incident you haven’t yet heard news about,
or single voices drowned out in a vast simultaneity of voices,
we see a guy pass on a jet ski, and I wonder what
he’s thinking, if he’s happy, where he’s going, or whether
he’s forgiven himself, truly, of the thing he’s most ashamed.
Each thought feels like the answer to a question that
I’ve not been asked: the images of solar flares; religious
martyrs’ final words; the knowledge that you’re not where
you’re supposed to be; another world, a bit like this.
As if to say, Well, what did you expect?, shrugging off
each revelation like a soothsayer who knows he’s right,
the jet ski rider disappeared into the mists across the bay
from us. I felt an urge to drop my things and go, to follow
him and start a new life in the sun, hearing his voice say,
That’s what I did, Baby, and look what happened to me, the wake
waves of his jet ski gently lapping on the pebbled shore.
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New Poetries VII is available to pre-order now at the Carcanet website, and will be published in April 2018.
