{"id":3694,"date":"2015-12-09T13:15:35","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T13:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=3694"},"modified":"2025-02-03T12:01:22","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T12:01:22","slug":"rialto-84-editorial-aldeburgh-and-some-poems-in-the-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2015\/12\/09\/rialto-84-editorial-aldeburgh-and-some-poems-in-the-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Rialto 84 Editorial: Aldeburgh, and some poems in the magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rialto 84 is out! Subscribers\u2019 copies arriving around now. Otherwise you can get it here<\/a>. Here\u2019s our editorial, on this year\u2019s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (written before the sad news about the Poetry Trust) and on some of the poems in this issue. First Michael, then Fiona.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Peter Everard Smith<\/p><\/div>\n

The Rialto sponsored the Friday evening Conversation at this year\u2019s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. It was originally to have been between Richard Mabey and John Burnside but Mr Mabey was unwell and his place was taken by Helen Macdonald (aka H is for Hawk). I was very taken with John Burnside\u2019s comment that what most people see when they look at the countryside (most often through a car window I suspect) is landscape<\/em> \u2013 they see trees, fields, hills etc., and assume all is as it should be: they don\u2019t see the absence of life, the missing plants, insects, birds. Helen Macdonald joined in with an anecdote about taking a twelve year old to Wicken Fen. Having seen the rich variety of bird and insect life the child asks, \u2018where do they get all these creatures from? do they get them from a zoo?\u2019<\/p>\n

I was glad to hear two speakers, certainly younger than I am, articulating a persistent anxiety I have that I belong to a vanishing generation, one that still recalls abundant nature. As a child (a proper little Fotherington-Thomas) I ran through fields of clover crowded with butterflies and bees: even as a student I remember meadows in Dentdale packed with orchids and other species, with a ring ouzel singing in a nearby wood. It\u2019s pretty much all gone. Worthy organizations like Birdlife International and Plantlife chip away with their silver teaspoons at the iceberg of indifference and greed that lumbers along sinking every attempt to alter the constant degradation of our planet\u2019s biosphere. Humankind might quite quickly go extinct. As Burnside remarked the planet has been a ball of fire and a ball of ice, it won\u2019t lament. We might become a footnote in cosmic history, a rapacious creature that drowned in its own effluent.<\/p>\n

We are, of course, capable of redemption. Poetry is a symptom of that capacity and quality, though it\u2019s hard not to feel that poetry, like nature, is being pushed to the margins of our culture, the small Reservations that are dotted about the earth.<\/p>\n

\"MM<\/a>

Michael selling poetry<\/p><\/div>\n

But enough of that for now. One of the passers-by at The Rialto\u2019s stall at the festival (and I was sincerely surprised and delighted by the number of people who told me how important publication in the magazine had been for them \u2013 thank you) spoke to me about the eclecticism of the magazine and how successfully the different types and styles of poems were fitted together. John Wakeman and I used to claim that we were \u2018deliberately eclectic\u2019. In the fields of counselling and psychotherapy the \u2018eclecticism\u2019 of the late twentieth century gave way before the more rigorous \u2018Integrative Theory\u2019 of the oughties. This issue certainly has considerable varieties of poetic form and practice. It prompts me to wonder if what we are trying for with The Rialto<\/em> is an integrative recognition that all poetry holds together, that the aims and affects all link up and that no matter how variously the practitioners present their work we, the readers, can experience a frisson, a click in head and\/or heart that is enlivening and moves us on.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d like to know more of what you think. We\u2019d like you to tell us which poems work for you and which ones don\u2019t. I suspect you might want us to explain some of our choices instead of taking refuge under umbrella sentiments like \u2018so long as a poem works in its own terms\u2019. Challenge us, please.<\/p>\n

Michael Mackmin<\/em><\/p>\n

Michael emailed to say he\u2019d found an interesting poet. He doesn\u2019t say such things lightly. My reaction was envy (this poet had turned up in one of his folders, not mine), curiosity, and then excitement on reading Zeina Hashem Beck\u2019s \u2018Ode to my non-Arabic Lover\u2019 \u2013 the way it embraces its own contradictions, love\/not love, dark\/noon, forgetting English (in English), all that in the first three lines and resurfacing, changed, at the end; the relationship\u2019s lurking Orientalism, which may invite readers to examine their reaction to the poem itself; the speaker\u2019s tone of sweet, light sadness. There\u2019s a journey poem with the same lover and a long poem \u2018for refugees\u2019 containing a chain of images: surreal, brutal, despairing, beautiful\u2026 Zeina reads this one, \u2018Naming Things\u2019, on YouTube, here<\/a>. Such poems play out against the horror of recent weeks, months, years, and straight after them Anton Rose\u2019s \u2018Blood on your Hands\u2019 takes the longer view of us, the street-thronging crowds.<\/p>\n

Those first four send echoes bouncing through the issue. Arabic reappears in unexpected form in Ed Doegar\u2019s \u2018Underground\u2019. Borders, kingdoms and language change, are displaced or decay in poems by Raymond Antrobus, Peter Bland, Cristina Haraba, Cami Garcia and David Sergeant. Human and geographical extremes are charted by Amy McCauley in \u2018CaNToS of JoaN\u2019, Lucy Hamilton, Alice Miller and others. Elsa Fischer counts improbably large piles of the dead and Sam Gardiner of cash.<\/p>\n

\"Aldeburgh<\/a>

Aldeburgh beach with one seagull flying<\/p><\/div>\n

Each of the sixty or so poems carries an untold story of how the writer \u2018caught\u2019 it. Then there\u2019s the editors\u2019 story in my head \u2013 who read it first, what she\/he thought, whether we agreed straight off or one of us needed convincing, whether the poem brought immediate delight or worked on us more slowly. Readers, now it\u2019s your turn.<\/p>\n

Fiona Moore<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rialto 84 is out! Subscribers\u2019 copies arriving around now. Otherwise you can get it here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5917,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3694\/revisions\/5917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}