My poetry trawls on PoetryFoundation.org earlier in the week pulled up nothing very satisfactory. It's largely U.S. poetry (as you'd expect), and though there's plenty of modern American poetry I love, there's also a great deal that I can't quite connect to. I've been here for a decade, but it still feels foreign and I think always will. It's a difficult thing to explain. Neither Japan nor Germany ever felt like this. I think because the differences in language and culture were so pronounced in those cases, and also because I approached them from the beginning with a desire to learn, it was easier to carve out a place of my own and a particular way of relating to the world around me. In the U.S. it's felt from the beginning superficially just like home, but at the same time not - as if someone moved everything a little to the side while you weren't looking, or like the feeling when you wake up in the dark and don't know what room you're in, even though it's the same room you've been sleeping in for weeks or months (and with three moves in the space of a year, I can tell you that I've been suffering from this a lot of late).
I remember a student who took one of my classes several years ago making a remark to me about Japan being so completely different and not understanding the Japanese at all - I can't remember his words, but it felt very much along the lines of how he could read the works prescribed for the course, but Japan would remain forever an inscrutable other that he could only marvel at from outside. At the time I was very much taken aback, since we were dealing with works of modern Japanese literature that on the contrary should have showed him just the opposite - and indeed, I think for almost all students did just that. It seemed like the problem was his own mindset - determined in advance not to understand. Well, perhaps I suffer from that mindset too - yet here I am in a country where I find people generally pleasant, friendly to strangers and outsiders, less prone (on the public surface at least) to the mean-spirited have-a-laugh-at-someone-else's-expense culture of so much of the UK; and yet a place where references to god are rarely ironic, a substantial proportion of the population thinks that letting people carry guns is an inalienable right that makes us all (or perhaps more importantly just them individually) safe, that they live in the freest country in the world in spite of the proportion of the population actually incarcerated, where there is so little sympathy for and understanding of people who do end up on the wrong side of the system, and where a substantial number of people seem to believe that electing a megalomaniac businessman/reality TV freak to be U.S. President might not be an unreasonable proposition. Not that the people I meet from day to day are these people, to be fair, and I could rant just as much about attitudes to immigration in the UK, or look up the comments of any newspaper article about the subject to make me want to bang my head on the table; but to get back to the point I was aiming for, I found this week that abandoning PoetryFoundation.org and heading instead for the Scottish Poetry Library brought me immediately back to my intellectual home.
One poem I stumbled across there kept me busy for the rest of the week: "I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964", by John Burnside. It has everything I could want in a poem: incident, patterns of repetition, a folding-in and folding-out upon itself, reflections and surfaces and hidden underground tunnels - I do have a weakness for underground tunnels - and an enigmatic ending that I could tug at and gnaw on for the rest of the week. More on this one later.
