Sea Harvest Island Poets & the Poetry of Islands
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Sea Harvest Island Poets & the Poetry of Islands a source book D a v i d A n n w n The I sl a n d Poet Series Ynys ~ Ilha ~ Island ~ Øy ~ Insel ~ Isla i.m. George Mackay Brown 1921- 1996 This is the rune for sleep. This is the rune-tree for resurrection. Safe landfall, warmth and light I pray For your star-drawn prow, Orcadian. All parts of this document, aside from the work of other acknowledged authors are © David Annwn, 2003-2010.. Acknowledgement Very many thanks to Lucy Prinz of the Atlantic Monthly and to Peter Davison for permission to quote part of his online essay: 'Island as A Foreign Country...' Also to Professor Rajeev S. Patke of the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore for permission to reprint part of his online essay: ‘The Islands of Poetry’. Grateful ackowledgements are additionally made to: Katrin Andresen of the Estonian National Library, Harry Bell, Dale Butler, Eric Chock, Peter Curman, Tom Eckerman, Bo Erikssson, Dr D Gorter, Ad. & Jenny de Haan, Erik Hedin, Hollie on Sanibel Island, Gwyn Jones, Joy Kobayashi-Cintron, Neils Larsen, Georgia Lee, Professor Helder Macedo, Ilse Mangelsdorf, Paula McCarron, Philip Mead, Ellen Okuma, Bolethe Olsen, Iain Orr for his personal island-library, Michael O’Shea, Fiona Owen, Roy Philbrow, Dean Tarrant, Francis Van maele, Betty Van Wonderen, Pastor Eckhard Wallmann, Laura Watson, Ketut Yuliarsa of the Ganesh Bookstore, Bali, Dr Robin Young, Margaret Daniellson, Eva Gustaffson-Lindvall & Camilla Persson at Mariehamn stadsbibliotek, Åland, without whose generous assistance this research would not have been possible. This work is written in memory of George Mackay Brown and dedicated to all the receptive and encouraging individuals named above. Greatest gratitude must go to Dr Lesley Newland, my wife, whose patient forbearance and hard work at all times allowed the search to continue. In Search of Poesislands, Poesis lands, Poesy islands, Is Lands …there’s that Irish [autobiography] called Twenty Years A-Growing by a young man, is it The Blasket Islands off the south-west of Ireland and he’d never, well he went across to the fair, but you know it’s a beautiful book. (Scottish Writers Talking) The words quoted here are those of George Mackay Brown, Orcadian poet and novelist, talking about Maurice O’Sullivan’s book, originally published in Irish. From the earliest centuries of writing, poets have been fascinated by islands. Witness The Odyssey or the edenic isle in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Icelandic island of Drangey in Grettir’s Saga. Further, bards and makers have always been fascinated with island-poets. For poets of the mainland countryside, suburbia or cities, island-poets have often been perceived as the artist as other. That otherness has been conceived variously, sometimes as the grounds of an exotic culture ripe for exploitation, a savagery open to domination or a pre-Adamic innocence, a resource which endows such poets with an elemental vision set apart from Western consumerism. Island poets are fascinated by islands. As Esther Nirina of Madagascar has written: L’ìle Et les ìles Fruits nourris des océans Island And islands Fruits nourished by the oceans Furthermore, poets born and raised on small islands are often curious about poets from the next island, other islands nearby or further far-flung islands: do these island-poets see things, write things, speak things differently there or are there connections between our art and theirs ? On my way to interview George Mackay Brown, just such a poet, my feelings on stepping off the ferry at Stromness, Orkney, in 1976 were extreme. It seemed to my Anglo-Welsh sensibility as if I were approaching a treeless rock at the top of the world. It had not entered my consciousness yet how central the Orkneys had been to the islanders themselves. Even at that stage I knew other islands: Anglesey, Bardsey, Caldy and the Isle of Man in particular. But I was yet to visit a crowd of other insulae: Rhodes, Crete, Madeira, Cos, Peaks Island off Portland, Maine, Kalymnos, Symmi, Capri, Sicily, the Skelligs, Corfu, coastal areas like Holy Island, Lindisfarne, (only a part-time island), and land-locked ‘islands’ like Sunk Island and the Isle of Axeholme. Still, apparently, all unbeknown to myself, an obsession was forming. In his essay: ‘Settler Calibans in John Murrell’s New World’, Mark Houlahan has written: …“knowing” such islands or their literatures is always mediated,…we are constrained to read islands through the lenses of other island texts. In particular, islands that were or remain colonies are read and read themselves through lenses provided by the metropolitan, imperial centre from which those colonies descend This constraint, overwhelmingly sensed in the past, is no longer as powerful as it once was and many of the writers cited below have chosen to jettison such refracting lenses in order to fashion their own. As a reader too young to sense the blatant imperialistic ethos through its rollicking brotherhood of adventure, as a boy I’d preferred RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island , (and even Robinson Crusoe), to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island which for some reason, probably curricular, was forced onto us three times at school,. Isle of Cats Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands. I’m sure that for many readers of these pages, whatever their culture, books about islands read in childhood will remain some of the most vivid primal stories which they remember. Why is this ? If one’s home is or was a small island it is easy to see the reason. But why is this also true for the rest of us ? There’s no space to answer such a question convincingly here but it’s worth recalling that individual consciousness is itself, firstly, an island. The thirst for that we might consider richly exotic, magical places, a topos away from ‘here’, is also strong. Clear outline too has something to do with it. The notion of complete isolation, (psychiatrists might read this as solipsism or withdrawal), of shipwreck on a remote island is terrifying for a child because such a scenario speaks so clearly to their deepest fears of parental desertion and consequent vulnerability. When isolation isn’t complete and the island sustains several inhabitants, their distinctive characteristics seem larger than life. When the struggle to live on the island is a harsh one, the personalities of the different protagonists are even more clearly-delineated.This is clear from Robinson Crusoe and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Mass culture and its media also share this obsession with islands: witmess the success of TV shows like Shipwrecked where two teams based on two small islands compete for prizes or, more recently, the very popular Lost. Yet and moreover, this clarity of outline is all the more visible because it can be set against the backdrop of the unknown: the exotic, the strange and the savage. This at least is the pattern of the traditional Western novel and poem of islands in English, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe onwards. Ironically, in the English novel, the small island isn’t usually seen as the reader’s home, (even if in tales of the 20th century like Swallows and Amazons where lake-isles seem to be part of a homescape), and the protagonist is either a shipwrecked merchant, a tourist or a visitor. Such a paradigm of one or a few individuals set against that elemental, sometimes hostile, microcosm of nature which we call an island probably exerts such an endless fascination for the human imagination because it hints at that which was, in phenomenological terms, a primal condition. Yet the above comment is no longer true – even that which one might call ‘English novels’ are plural and many-voiced and multiple in their insular topoi. Perhaps part of the appeal is also found in the notion that one can view macrocosm in microcosm, the whole within a reifiable smaller part. To be able to walk round a land in a day, to be able to gaze across one’s home and community: these are desires associated with a sense of human span, of completion. Of course, as Derek Walcott has reminded us, the world’s continents are, in the last analysis, islands, and the world itself an island in space. So: a Gazetteer of over two thousand poets from islands all over the world. Why indulge in such a patently insane or, at the very least, rareified enterprise ? After all, we mustn’t forget that most habitable islands must have been the subjects of oral poetries for hundreds of thousands of years before writing evolved on or visited their shores; in all but a very few cultures, this very early island poetry has vanished with the generations of anonymous makers. We only have to imagine the pre-Homeric oral poets of the Greek islands or the unknown bards of the builders of Maeshowe on Orkney to realise this. So why even attempt such a scheme ? I must have asked myself that question a hundred times or more as I assembled the following array of island poets. On hearing of my self-inflicted project the Sheffield-based poet Geraldine Monk could not contain her incredulity: “What ? Any poets from any islands ?” Why? Surely I couldn’t be serious. And, as my wife asked: “What if you write this whole study and you’ve missed out the most important island-poet in the world ?” I replied: “I won’t” which gained the quick rejoinder: “But you wouldn’t know if you had, would you ?” Point taken with salutary shame, head cradled in hands.