Editorial
In “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” William Carlos Williams says that poetry has no news to deliver, nothing sensational or glamorous to advertise, “yet men die miserably everyday/ for lack/ of what is found there.” Poetry doesn’t make things happen, to use Auden’s words. It doesn’t stop wars, feed the hungry or stop the earth from being abused. Yet it is perhaps precisely of its non-utilitarian value that we need it so much, every crust, every scrap of it. In a world where everything is measured in economic terms, poetry is essential because it resists being calibrated, reminding us that the seemingly most useless things are the most vital to our being alive.
That is what poets do each day, paying attention to what seems insignificant and worthless. Being attentive, observing Pound’s imperative to making it new again and again, and making connections, wiring the different parts within themselves and also awakening hidden connections to the rest of the world. Images, events, thoughts are inexplicably related, brought together in a significant but not immediately comprehensible conjunction. In “Hamid Ramouz” (1818-1906) Raymond Carver experiences a moment when two disparate things meet:
This morning I began a poem on Hamid Ramouz –
soldier, scholar, desert explorer –
who died by his own hand, gunshot, at eighty-eight.I had tried to read the dictionary entry on that curious man
to my son – we were after something on Raleigh –
but he was impatient, and rightly so.It happened months ago, the boy is with his mother now,
but I remembered the name: Ramouz –
and a poem began to take shape.All morning I sat at the table.
Hands moving back and forth over limitless waste,
as I tried to recall that strange life.
The poem is a wonderful example of how two individuals from different countries and cultures meet. The subject of the poem is ostensibly Hamid Ramouz, but the deeper theme is the fact of the poet’s present condition, his loneliness. We are not told much about the Hamid, but his career and suicide are somehow relevant to Carver’s own life. The connection deepens the tragic chord in the poem.
Poetry is about waiting, listening for these connective chords. It is about uncovering the vast networks of bloodlines linking the poet to his immediate world and the wider world out there, weaving threads between cultures and languages.
This little poetry stand aims to do just that, share a bit of what is found there, the connections we discover as we encounter the world anew each day. Mascara is interested in the way poems locate individuals, and how they connect cultures and languages. It welcomes poems from Australia, Asia and the rest of the world, poems from different ethnicities and cultures that offer new ways of seeing and being. The word “mascara” derives from mask, and it is about putting on a different mask each day, Yeatsian or not, and seeing with different eyes. It is interested in the way Australia looks out and upwards, to Asia, and way Asia and the other regions return the gaze. It hopes that the poems and essays on poetry and poetics will arrive to challenge the way we position ourselves, the news from the different quarters renewing the way we imagine ourselves and the world.