I used to think there was a divide between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry. I was clearly in the later camp and didn’t think I liked much poetry for the page, except perhaps Sylvia Plath. But Ashes in the Air by Ali Alizadeh was part of showing me that it’s just a matter of finding page poetry that you like, understand and can connect with.
I’m not exactly sure how you read a poetry book, let alone review. I suppose everyone is different. I basically read it cover to cover, perhaps like you’d read a prose novel, with a pause after each poem to think and breathe. I stopped at a few poems in particular, either to read them over because I was really moved by them or because a first reading was not sufficient and it took me a few more to gain full understanding, or at least enough to get something out of it. I think perhaps you read poetry books a few times and keep coming back to it. Or that’s how I intend to approach it.
But I think reading poetry collections in general can feel a little foreign, to even spoken word poets like myself. I was force fed a bit of poetry in school, but never really made it a habit, beyond being struck by Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and ‘Meatworks by Robert Gray. They are two poems in particular that I remember as moving me. I was introduced to spoken word much later and found it accessible, much more than some of the poetry I read in various literary journals and so my opinion about the page and stage divide began to form in my head.
This is important for readers to see where I’m coming from with this review. I have often felt that page poetry requires an advanced education to gain full understanding, which is very much the opposite of something like slam, but Alizadeh’s collection Ashes in the Air really impressed with me with how accessible it felt to me, even though I had to read a couple a few times over. Is that how you read poetry? Is there a right way?
I bought the book after meeting Ali at the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May. In one of the ‘Embassy sessions,’ one of the issues that came up was about the poet’s persona and whether that was important. I feel like it is, and that meeting the poet in question helped to gain an understanding of his work. It’s just a matter of knowing some basic biographical details, perhaps how he speaks and the issues he’s concerned about outside of poetry that allow for this. Does it allow a poet to get to the heart of creating the imagery and poetics without having to labour over explaining details to put the poems in context?
His poetry deals with issues of travel, migration, coming from Iran and living in Australia. The poems that struck me the most were ‘Shut Up’ about an Iranian asylum seeker in detention (I’m always on the look-out for affecting poetry about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia) as well as ‘The Guns of Northcote’ which talks of gentrification and poverty in Melbourne.
Often the choice of how the lines are placed, and where there are line breaks are not obvious to me, with all page poetry, but in this case, it does not prevent me from that simple level of understanding and from there, the more subtle. The form does not force you to live or die in making sense of it, but it allows you to focus on the content of the poems, and the images, which to me seems the most important part. You can write nice sounding poetry, but if it fails to mean anything then it leaves the reader wanting. Alizadeh does not leave me wanting.
Benjamin Solah 
Poetry is everywhere, poetry is nothing, poetry is not limited to form and rules and performance spaces and sanctioned journals in which we publish our works if the gatekeepers let us in. The misconception of written poetry as inaccessible actually enables these gatekeepers to keep ruling on what poetry “is” and “isn’t”. Twitter is also a form of written poetry – poets like @TriciaLockwood and @samuelherd and @redfivetwo, who are writing some of the most exciting, hilarious, and achingly beautiful work today. Even the acclaim for @NotTildaSwinton by non-poetry reading members of the public demonstrates how accessible written poetry is. Also check out the philosophy of Steve Roggenbuck. Steve has made poetry a living, interactive document and performance. His readers also have part ownership of his work through their love of humour and image macros and poetic words and encouraging each other’s creativity.
I read poetry collections in a similar way to you, usually cover to cover, re-reading the ones I love immediately, and then I return and dip in and out of the book.
You say, “I have often felt that page poetry requires an advanced education to gain full understanding, which is very much the opposite of something like slam”. This is a misconception, and insulting to the poets I know who have little or no higher education at all, but who write brilliant poems. Your subtext is written poetry is bourgeois, spoken word is working class. Neither are true. You also forget Australia’s tradition of bush poets, not all of whom were classically educated. I haven’t completed any higher education, the degree I’m enrolled in has nothing to do with writing. I’d like to learn more about poetic form and structure, but I don’t need that knowledge to appreciate or write poetry.
Accessible poetry is right in front of you. I am dismayed as a poet that you haven’t found other poetry collections that are accessible to you, because I spend a lot of time dismantling the MYTH that poetry is inaccessible. I’ve introduced so many friends to poetry after they’ve said, “I don’t understand it” and subsequently they become lovers of poetry. I usually start by giving them work by contemporary poets, emotional and evocative words, hand picking poems on themes they’ll relate to.
Your poetry is also “page” poetry, if you write it down before you perform it.
The more time you spend reading poetry (which I think is important for all poets, no matter what form their poetry takes), the more the subtleties of line breaks and placing will make themselves known to your eye. The same way a spoken word poet might pause in performance, or say some lines or words at different volumes. The page performs too.
This is your experience and not a criticism, I’m just disappointed for you that “page” poetry so far hasn’t been something you’ve been able to relate to. I hope Ali Alizadeh’s book is the first of many collections you’ll discover and love, exploring and opening up avenues of poetic expression and understanding for you. The more we read other writers or soak up art or music or sensualism and even horrors, the more our poetic imaginations are stirred. Words are a game, and we learn a lot from how other people play with them.
I’m going to duck into a bookshop in the near future and pick up Ali Alizadeh’s collection, as it sounds really interesting. I’m glad for this review and your account of meeting him. As a reader of the review, I would have loved to have seen some of the lines that really moved you, quoted here.
Thanks Kathleen for your comment. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you need an advanced education to read or perform page poetry. It’s just an impression I got from reading a limited amount of stuff for the page and feeling like it was something wrong with me for not ‘getting it’ but Alizadeh’s book I think is the start of breaking this down and I’m curious to find more. Amanda Anastasi’s ‘2012 & other poems’ is also an excellent collection, with themes I can also relate to, but I became familiar with her work on the stage first.
I agree that my poetry is still page poetry if I write it for performance, though a lot of what I write isn’t received well by journals and they tell me it works better spoken because I might use repetition a lot, but I’m getting better with my own ‘page’ poetry.