Two New Poems and a Commentary by George Messo

The first poems I read by George Messo were in a meticulously produced chapbook from Oasis Books, In a Station House. This refined booklet struck me for its meditative, musical and formal qualities, as well as its wonderfully disquieting images. This was not traditionally formal poetry, rather a different kind of sensibility and musicality that had me going along with, what the poet himself describes as, a ‘liquid skip: / a sizzling saltarello.’ I have since gone on to read, delight in (and review) George Messo’s subsequent books: From the Pine Observatory (Near East Books), Entrances and Hearing Still (both Shearsman Books), as well as translations of the Turkish master Ilhan Berk, and the younger Turkish poet Gonca Özmen. I included some of his work in my anthology The Allotment (Stride), admiring his lyrical maturity and the almost 'still life' quality of his poems: controlled syntax and form, an individual ear, and  a unique way with exquisite images and pace, that leave time and space for the poem to resonate, shaping both writer and reader. An interview follows, but here are two new poems by George Messo.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Winter. Fox And Hawk

for Tina Peace

Frequently near, the summer months pass

and even here we speak so often of you

now, coming like a spirit these years

as the short-winged hawk, too light

to lift his kill, rests by the frozen river.

I have carried you, and brought you to this

far cold north, through moveable snow,

bewildered. You were my poowogan,

dream walker, soft-footed, while I,

mute and dumbed-down by frost,

whitened beyond my age by rime,

stalked you through aspen, willow and pine.

And here, where forest entrails spill

into winter light, you find me, straying

out from the forest’s dark memory:

your racing heart, heat to my tongue.

Morning At Midnight

A moment ago is a marvellous way to make a memory,

of a past so recently here like a lingering scent

or a body-shape left on a bed, she said.  Our history

says once and means in a time not now; reticent

but faithful to our fragile need for mystery.

*

When the time is right we find what’s absent

— or does it find us? — tucked surreptitiously

where it’s least sought: the past in the present.

Enduring but reducible. That, she said, is the poverty

of life in a present where the future’s already spent.

A few years ago I began a conversation with George, intending to publish a collection of interviews, but the project was overtaken by other things and never completed. What follows is George’s initial response: I find his descriptions of his own processes, his sense of sound and form, and his reflections on the influences of the languages that surround him, quite fascinating:

George Messo:   “I was never able to separate form and sound. Form was just a way of orchestrating sound in the poem for me. A lot of what I heard in poems were sounds and patterns of pauses and silences that I didn’t very much recognize as those I had in my head. I suppose like many other poets my sense of my own music – or at least a desire to make it – was strong, and so I wasn’t interested in mimicking other peoples’ music.

I did this, of course, for a while, playing with traditional metres: sonnets, sestinas, ottava rima. I think, though, I became a bit obsessed with sound, with music, and that whole enterprise of manipulating and controlling the breath. I tried, as far as I thought it might be possible, to formalize or pattern or score what I took to be pre-eminent: the music. I even had ideas at the time that I could imagine the sound of the poem before I’d written it and I would sometimes write a kind of diagram, a skeleton of how the stray lines, phrases and words would come together in the final poem. If you can picture a few random words and sentences surrounded by blanks, and the blanks overwritten with marks for stress and syllable count. That now seems absolutely crazy to me, but I understood it at the time as a way of stretching the formal possibilities of the poem as much – I thought – as the music of my own language required.

And then when the language around me changed, when I moved to Trabzon, my whole notion of what sounds meant changed a great deal. My first reaction was silence, the cultural and linguistic isolation, and the adjustment that followed, the learning of a new language. I didn’t write for two years. Being away from English books also had a silencing effect.

I knew I was going to be here (in Turkey) for a while, so I set myself some goals. Things really began to change for me by the third year when I was able to read poetry in Turkish for the first time. Oktay Rifat was a revelation, as profound as my first readings of Christopher Middleton, Derek Mahon, W.S. Graham and Tranströmer. There was an almost unsupportable simplicity in his poems, as if he were balancing everything on a phrase, a nuance, a kind of verbal tick. But with it an imaginative power that opened the poem to a large and abundant landscape, to ways of speaking I’d never heard before. And it all sounded so beautiful, so simple. There were many other poets I read after that: Hikmet of course, Asaf and Anday (both of whom I translated at length), Ilhan Berk, Cansever, Süraya, Uyar – too many to mention.

All of this reading caused me to think very hard about my own practices, and in particular about the dialogue I’d been having with myself about form and sound. There really are no parallels in English for much of what happens in a poem by Rifat, for instance. And I began to ask myself, well, why not? I guess the new poems in Entrances were my way of responding to that question. The openness, the verbal simplicity, the emphasis on syllable over formal metres, the use of internal rhyme away from end rhyme, all of these things I put down to the Turkish influence – and I mean that in the broadest sense. I really can’t exaggerate what it’s like for someone who learns the language and suddenly finds himself in a vast library of hitherto unknown – and to his culture still unknown – voices.

What encounters in poetry always occasion for me are forms of engagement with the self and others that I’m unable to imagine myself. A poem that I could have written isn’t interesting to me. I know the kind of thing I would write if someone asked me to write a poem called ‘The Contours of a Tree’s Grief’ or ‘The Interior Life of Mold’. And that’s one reason why I don’t write often. I have to somehow take all the “me-ness” out of the draft and start again, and it’s the re-start, the revision, the de-centering which forces me to see the poem creating me, rather than me writing the poem. That kind of de-familiarizing of the self gives me what I so much admire in others: engagement, renewal, awakening. If my poems are moving differently now it’s because I think I know more about myself, I know more about my own poetry. And a lot of that I put down to being here and having a foot in two cultures."

George’s blog is available at www.georgemesso.wordpress.com