Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination (Rethinking the Island) - Softcover

Patke, Rajeev

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178348411X ISBN 13: 9781783484119

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018

Synopsis

In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands. An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn. It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation. An island is not a continent; yet it can be an archipelago. An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name. It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate. Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination. Poetry and Islands explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies. It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English. The study of particular poems in which islands figure in exemplary ways is balanced by a more detailed discussion of the poets who have played a major role in shaping human responses to islands on a global scale.

About this title

About the Author

Rajeev S. Patke is Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, and Professor of Humanities and Director of the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. His publications include 'The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study' ( 1985, 2009), 'Postcolonial Poetry in English' (2006), 'The Concise Routledge History of Southeast Asian Writing in English' (2010) co-authored with Philip Holden, and 'Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies' (2013). Recent co-edited works include 'A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires' (2008), and 'Southeast Asian Writing in English: A Thematic Anthology' (2012).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Poetry and Islands

Materiality and the Creative Imagination

By Rajeev S. Patke

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Rajeev S. Patke
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-411-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
1.1 The Real and the Fictive, 1, 
1.2 An Outline of Method, 6, 
1.3 Of Islands in General, 13, 
2 Islands as Symbols, 29, 
2.1 Islands as Figures of Desire and Dread, 29, 
2.2 Islands Lost and Found: Atlantis and Ithaca, 47, 
2.3 Islands and the Archipelagic Imagination, 61, 
3 Islanders as Types, 77, 
3.1 Settling an Island: Crusoe, 80, 
3.2 Demonizing an Island: Ravana and Caliban, 88, 
3.3 Returning to an Island: Odysseus, 102, 
4 Comparative Case Studies, 115, 
4.1 Island Legacies: Iceland and Greece, 116, 
4.2 Island Poetics: Japan and the Caribbean, 124, 
4.3 Island Politics: Ireland and Taiwan, 137, 
5 In Lieu of a Conclusion: Oceania, 153, 
More Water Than Land, 153, 
Bibliography, 163, 
Index, 175, 
About the Author, 185, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 THE REAL AND THE FICTIVE

My aim in this book is to give an account of what islands have signified through history and across the planet as that significance finds expression in poetry. This might sound like a grand claim, impossible of realization; it is proffered here in the spirit of the reflection by the French writer Blaise Pascal (1620–1666): "Since we cannot achieve universality by knowing everything that there is to know about everything, we must know a little about everything" (Pascal 1995, 64–65, §228). I should hasten to add that my aim is more modest than to have read and reflected on every poem about every island on the planet. Rather, it subscribes to an idea voiced in a dramatic monologue from Men and Women, 1855 by the English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) through his fictive representation of the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto, that there is a logic — at once simple, paradoxical, and compelling — to why "a man's reach should exceed his grasp" (Browning 1920, 170).

Thus, it is my intention to point selectively toward the triple interest inherent to all island writing: that it refracts natural environments, dramatizes a continual interplay between the perceived and the imagined, and demonstrates commonalty as well as difference between island cultures. This triple interest enjoins the kind of recognition that the Antiguan poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017) celebrates in "A Sea Chantey" through what he calls "the beads of a rosary," a litany of names singling out islands for all their individual and collective distinctiveness: Anguilla, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Grenada, and so on (Walcott 2014, 44–46). With a somewhat different aim in mind, the Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881–1972) relishes the simple enumeration of island names, unconnected except in how they sound together, bringing dissimilar things into a single series purely for the incantatory power of syntax to evoke a medley of associations, when named thus: Ithaca, Eriskay, Iceland, Tahiti, Crete, Corsica, Mytilene, Aran, and Iona (MacDiarmid 1939, 47).

In this book I have attempted a compound answer to a single question: How does poetry represent islands? The answers are many. Poetry picks out from an island experience that which most calls for articulation and remembrance. It reports on island memories as well as perceptions and reflections. It describes and evokes islands. It mourns and celebrates in equal measure, giving proof not merely that someone existed in relation to an island experience but also of how that existence might matter vitally to those living in other times and places. Island poetry invites us to imagine more than it can tell or show. It dreams up fictive islands almost as often as it describes real ones; it wants you to know what it might feel like to live there, even if only in imagination. It believes in the mind's eye just as much as, or perhaps a little more than, what our eyes can see and what our ears can hear of island sights and sounds.

What's in a Name?

The word island, we are reminded by Joseph W. Meeker, is derived from the "Latin terra en sala (land in the sea)," which "became in English 'isolated land,' then simply island" (Meeker 2011, 197). So, what's in a name? The obvious answer to that question is "everything." The American poet Gary Snyder (b. 1930), for example, would prefer that his country men and women "give up the European word 'America' and accept the new-old name for the continent, 'Turtle Island'" (Snyder 1974, 105). Any place-name is an invention attached to a real place for a time and with a reason. Denis Cosgrove reminds us, in Apollo's Eye (2001):

The globe's geographical naming is necessarily arbitrary and conventional rather than logical or empirical, its apparent order and stability in atlas or world map deceptive: the nominal globe is a space of contestation rather than of concord. (Cosgrove 2001, 12)

In poetic writing, to dwell on a place is to reflect on and resonate to the natural as well as the human dimension of its geography and history.

Consider the complicated history by which part of the Caribbean islands came to be called the Antilles: Peter Conrad, in Islands: A Trip through Time and Space (2009), narrates a line of transmission from a Roman adaptation of the name Atlantis to the invention of a phantasmal pair of balmy islands called Antilia, which came to represent a mythical refuge for Christians in Portugal after the Moorish conquest, and thence to Columbus during his first encounter with the Caribbean, using the word Antilles to encompass the archipelago that he marveled at (Conrad 2009, 75–76).

The French ethnographer and writer Victor Segalen (1878–1919) proposed in 1904, when in sight of the island of Java, that the notion of the exotic might be approached through a parallelism between stepping back in time and moving out in space (Segalen 2002, 13). My method is comparable, except in dissuading us to think of any place as exotic: to balance moving freely across time and space while remaining intent on treating both the past and the distant as present in the moment of attention. The sustaining of such a balance is celebrated by two Francophone writers from the Antilles — Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) and Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) — as the sovereignty of the here and now (Glissant 1997, 37).

The poetry of place makes it a task to name the intuitive being of a place as bespoken by climate and topography; by the histories of habitation, development, and depredation; and by all that a place has been before and after the time of the anthropocene. The result, each time, is an alliance between the real and the invented, between islands as home for the human (and other than the human), and islands as homes for the imagination. These considerations provide the book with a broad strategy: representative exemplification and analysis of the interaction between poetry and fiction, and between poetry and facticity. Islands foreground the relation between the natural — the intricate web that ties geology, geography, climate, plant, and animal life together on any island — and the routines and preoccupations of human existence, experienced in both individual and collective terms. Such relations are articulated by language in a variety of modes, from description and narration through idea and concept to image, metaphor, symbol, allegory, and myth.

A Scatter of Islands

Islands fascinate us: we travel to them, read about them, dream about them; some of us live on them, and a small number of us write about them. They are scattered all over the planet: some by the side of continents, others at great distances from land. Some stand out from the water all by themselves; others cluster in archipelagoes. Their number is large but never easy to pin down. Islands have arisen, and keep arising, from the seas; they also keep disappearing, whether slowly or suddenly, in a process of natural creation and disintegration that is both ancient and unceasing. We also know of floating masses in the seas that barely deserve the name of islands. One sort is known as pumice rafts (the result of volcanic activity on the sea floor). The other is simply trash accumulated over time in the oceans to form what is called a trash island, as in the case of the Pacific Trash Vortex.

There are other, more proper islands that we know as tidal islands. They become islands only when the high tide rises; every low tide shows them bridged to a mainland, making their life cycle a steady alternation between connectedness and separation, a poetic trope for individual identity that is never either truly discrete or isolated. Such islands are scattered all over the globe, serving as reminders of connected islandness: Enoshima (in Sagami Bay, Japan), Jindo and Modo (off the coast of South Korea), Haji Ali Dargah (off Mumbai), Sveti Stefan (in western Montenegro), Mont Saint-Michel (off the Normandy coast), Eilean Donan (in Loch Duich, western Scotland), and Lindisfarne (also known as Holy Island, off the northeast coast of England), to name a few. The Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) showed his recognition of such connectedness with reference to Lindisfarne, in his long poem Marmion (1808):

The tide did now its flood-mark gain,
And girdled in the saint's domain:
For, with the flow and ebb, its style
Varies from continent to isle;
Dry-shod, o'er sands, twice every day,
The pilgrims to the shrine find way;
Twice every day, the waves efface
Of staves and sandalled feet the trace.
(Scott 1869, 71)

The tide is described as girdling the island with water: the image renders periodic sequestration as an activity that is kindly rather than isolating. It ensures that the identity of the land alternates between being an island and being part of a mainland. The human traffic of pilgrims is desired, but the waves erase their signs regularly, restoring solitude to the shrine and washing away human traces as often as it welcomes them.

Some landmasses — like the three-in-one that is Greenland — are large enough to almost qualify as a continent; others are so small as to be scarcely inhabitable. Bishop Rock, for example, situated at the western tip of the isles of Scilly, has but one building, a lighthouse. The islands around Tristan da Cunha, which is one of the most isolated habitations on the planet, became for the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957) an emblem for the condition of profound solitariness:

An island of the sea whose only trade
Is in the voyages of its wandering birds.
(Campbell 1968, 40)

If Lindisfarne provides an emblem of minimal but regular connection, the location of islands such as Tristan da Cunha serves to underline the bleak solicitudes of wind, water, and birds. Solicitude — as much for the land as for those who live on it — has two aspects: one is conducive to solitude (which might be desirable, at least sometimes); the other, to solitariness (for which most of us have only a rather limited level of tolerance).

In the singular, each island is unique. In the plural, islands constitute types based on a variety of factors: location and relation, origin, and history of settlement. Regardless of how they differ from one another, and how we assimilate them into typology, all islands gravitate toward an anthropocene commonalty. In one part, this comprises a sense of what it means for a human to be on an island, regardless of where, when, and for how long, and regardless of whether by choice or chance. In another part, the commonalty is created by the perception of difference between living on an island and living on a continent. This applies even when we grant the partial truth of the recognition that continents are indeed like very large islands, while islands might well be called tiny continents (Schalansky 2010, 13). The distinction between a continent and an island is neither simple nor absolute. Recent geological research about the provenance of New Zealand suggests that the pair of islands adjacent to the Australian continent is the protruding highest ground of a continental fragment now under water, which scientists refer to as Zealandia. Since this fragment is likely to have once been part of the supercontinent Gondwana, scientists feel more comfortable identifying New Zealand as the remains of a continent rather than a set of continental islands (Mortimer et al. 2017). We might say that modern geology comes to the aid of any New Zealander who would like to think that the home islands are no mere geographical adjunct to Australia.

The condition of being an island enacts in a specific sense a more general relationship between land and water that has enabled poets to refract a sense of the intriguingly poetic through the lens of geography. In "The Map" (1946), looking at how land and water are colored green and blue, respectively, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) underlines the degree of interdependence between water and land in circumscribing an island:

Does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself? ...
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
(Bishop 2011, 5)

By humanizing both land and water, the poet makes it possible to assimilate them into consciousness as two entities working together to build a relationship, almost as if, by conceiving natural events in the form of acts of volition, the facts of geography could serve the purpose of a little narrative that is at once fanciful and imaginative: the land willing to lean, lift, and draw the sea around it — like a cape or girdle — which invites us to think of an island as land embraced by water, only for the opposite fancy to peep in: that the land could be tugging at the sea so as keep more than its nose clear of the water. The result is a charming miniature with a double vision of how land and water relate when it comes to islanding.

A similar image, referring to the geography of another coastline, is used by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) in reinforcing a similar codependence in "Lovers on Aran" (1966):

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
(Heaney 1991, 34)

Land and water coexist: each is one-half of a bond, and the bond is at the service of how the human might live amid the collision of land and water. That relation, in its turn, is linked to how humans use words, images, and sounds to make sense of how they live on land and water. That is where poetry comes in.

The English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) described poetry as "Nature to advantage dress'd, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" (Pope 1988, 44). Extrapolating from his aphorism, we might claim that island writing — whether of islands or from islands — is nature dressed, addressed, as well as redressed. How that happens, and why an island might need or get redressal, in geographical or historical terms, provide the occasion for new insights and the pleasure of new recognitions. Thus, a sense of the vital interaction between words and the world is central to all that this book attempts. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) captures a sense of the vital connectedness between language and nature, between the human and the planet on which we live, in "The Planet on the Table," which thinks of poetic inspiration in terms of the character of Ariel from William Shakespeare's island play, The Tempest (1611), and ends with the recognition that "Ariel was glad he had written his poems" (Stevens 1956, 532). The reason for the gladness is simply this: that even in their poverty — and because they are part of the planet — his poems might hope to partake in the planet's affluence. Drawing a cue from this poem, I might describe the spirit in which this book has been written as a desire to capture the lineament and character of nature's imprint upon the human, as fixed by poetry that has islands in mind, both real and fictive. If this book gives back in the reading even a fraction of the pleasure it gave in the writing, I could say, after Stevens, that Ariel will be glad.

1.2 AN OUTLINE OF METHOD

The Fields of Island Study

The literature of, and on, islands is vast, and island literatures are studied by many, generally with focus on a region, a country, a period in history, or a specific disciplinary approach. But attempts to bridge significances, however selectively, across island literatures on a global scale are rare, and bringing the poetic discourses of real island experiences into conversation with those of imaginary island experiences is even rarer. In island studies as a field of scholarship, it is not sufficient to mention just a few of the many remarkable contributions to scholarship and understanding that have been published in the last two decades or so — studies that are general rather than specific to this or that island zone, without losing any part of the specificity that enriches ideas, arguments, and analysis — because insights are scattered in journals as well as dedicated websites. I should add that a focus on poetry and the poetic element to "islandness," as pursued in this book, is distinct from the study of islands in fictional narrative, cinema, and television, or cultural studies, or travel histories, and histories of empire or cartography. Like them, but even more so, the interface between imagined and real islands maps out areas of exploration that are in between conventional literary studies, ecocriticism, and studies focused on biogeography, environment studies, and island histories and geographies.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Poetry and Islands by Rajeev S. Patke. Copyright © 2018 Rajeev S. Patke. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178348411X
• ISBN 13: 9781783484119
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 195