Absences, Appearances and Promises

Well! As this is my first appearance in the blogosphere, and poetry is one of my major preoccupations, it seems paradoxically appropriate to materialise with a post about a poet who all but dematerialised from public poetic life at roughly the same age (in the 1970s) as I am now: Rosemary Tonks, whose brief, two volume poetic career ended abruptly, for unknown reasons and has never been resumed. Her poetry - what there is of it - is wonderful: exuberant yet full of ennui, documenting illicit rendezvous in hotel rooms yet expressing an extreme emotional vulnerability to the aftermath of careless passion; redolent of the decadent genius of Baudelaire certainly, yet documenting an intimate series of cityscapes all of her own. Just these books: four short poetic novels, and the collections Notes on Cafes and Absences (1963), and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). Her oft-quoted poetics is encapsulated thus:

"I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys."

She was born and grew up in London but lived for a while too in Karachi and Paris. She married very young and it may have been traumatic divorce which precipitated her withdrawal from public life. Perhaps a question of too much too young all round:

I have lived it, and I know too much.

My café nerves are breaking me

With black, exhausting information.

I've just listened in fact to the BBC Radio 4 edition of 'Lost Voices' which explores her work and what is known of her life - fascinating stuff - though I've known about her for years, reading the anthologised poems in Emergency Kit and The Firebox. The version of her disappearance I've come across most often is that she became an evangelical Christian and that one consequence of this conversion was an abandonment of her poetry. Subsequent stories (and I think, especially after hearing Lost Voices, that they are just stories) suggested that she became a nun - the opposite end of the denominational spectrum, but attributed with just as much moral/spiritual authority to silence a poetic voice. There is something mysterious about her sudden absence which compels. It is part of her myth, just as much as other 'unnatural' endings - that of Plath, for example - become part of the biographical myths of other poets. But it lacks the closure of death, or even of a public 'retirement' from writing, and certainly of a gradual winding down of one's literary affairs. To vanish, to be absent, to go missing, to conjure with one's own biography the uncomfortable concept of sudden erasure - this is both discomforting and intriguing. How does one suddenly become an absence? Perhaps the most discomforting question of all.

On a less absolute note, I also find the idea of religious conversion heralding a cessation of individual artistic creation a difficult one. There have been writers and musicians who have done just this: in 1866, at the age of 22, newly ordained Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins felt that his poetic impulses were interfering with his religious vocation, and famously resolved to write no more, except at the behest of his superiors. Fortunately his writing vocation was restored to him through the testing spiritual times ahead. Closer to our own time Cat Stevens - as he used to be known -converted to Islam in 1977, auctioned his guitars for charity and dedicated himself to religious and educational causes - but returned to music in 2006. Denial of an instrinsic part of an artistic person's make up, or the return of a gift gladly given away, in an unexpected and enriched form? Who's to say. Everyone has to make choices and sacrifices in life, of course. And it's certainly not the case that professional religious engagement necessarily quashes the artistic impulse. Plenty of examples to illustrate this, and I know and occasionally correspond with one contemplative monk who very probably reads and writes more poetry than I do.

But with Tonks, one cannot presume to answer. Lost Voices suggested that she lives as a recluse and is, whatever her denomination, deeply religious - whether she has found a medium for putting her current life into poetic language, however secretive - is not known. Perhaps her gift of articulating decadence, insecurity, exhilaration and transient cityscape simply couldn't be translated into a discourse consciously framed by religious devotion. This doesn't mean that spirituality can't potentially be felt in her extant published work, but that's another question.

At any rate, she has left a small but valuable poetic legacy, and I'm grateful for it for inadvertently kickstarting this blog too. I'm going to try to post regularly on the poetic ideas and voices that come my way, if only to help me articulate my too often fragmentary thoughts. I'm also at an age - or perhaps just a stage of life-busyness - where the ideas and insights themselves tend to dematerialise too, if I don't try and capture their evanescent flitting with a soft net of words; albeit that a net of words is necessarily full of holes, of gaps and absences.