Margaret Atwood Contextualizes Her Poem, 'Dearly'

At The Guardian, Margaret Atwood contextualizes the title poem of her new collection, Dearly (forthcoming tomorrow, November 10, from Ecco Press). "Poems – like everything else – are created in a particular time," Atwood writes. Further: 

They’re also written in a place (Mesopotamia, Britain, France, Japan, Russia); and beyond that, in a location where the writer happens to be (in a study, on a lawn, in bed, in a trench, in a cafe, on an airplane). They are often composed orally, then written down on a surface (clay, papyrus, vellum, paper, digital screen), with a writing implement of some kind (stylus, brush, quill pen, steel nib, pencil, rollerball, computer), and in a particular language (Ancient Egyptian, Old English, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, Haida).

Beliefs about what a poem is supposed to be (praising the gods, extolling the charms of a beloved, celebrating warlike heroism, praising dukes and duchesses, tearing strips off the power elite, meditating on nature and its creatures and botany, calling on the commoners to rebel, hailing the Great Leap Forward, saying blunt things about your ex and/or the patriarchy) vary widely. How the poem is supposed to accomplish its task (in exalted language, with musical accompaniment, in rhyming couplets, in free verse, in sonnets, with tropes drawn from the word-hoard, with a judicious number of dialect, slang, and swear words, ex tempore at a slam event) are equally numerous and subject to fashion.

The intended audience may range from your fellow goddess priestesses, to the king and court of the moment, to your intellectual workers self-criticism group, to your fellow troubadours, to fashionable society, to your fellow beatniks, to your creative writing 101 class, to your online fans, to – as Emily Dickinson put it – your fellow nobodies. Who can get exiled, shot, or censored for saying what has also veered wildly from time to time and from place to place. In a dictatorship, uneasy lies the bard that bears the frown: the wrong words in the wrong place can get you into a heap of trouble.

So it is with every poem: poems are embedded in their time and place. They can’t renounce their roots. But, with luck, they may also transcend them. 

Continue reading at The Guardian.