{"id":7769,"date":"2018-12-03T15:03:34","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T15:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=7769"},"modified":"2025-02-03T11:42:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T11:42:11","slug":"the-rialto-91-whats-in-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2018\/12\/03\/the-rialto-91-whats-in-it\/","title":{"rendered":"THE RIALTO 91 \u2013 WHAT\u2019S IN IT?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So what\u2019s in the new issue of The Rialto<\/em> when it eventually escapes from the Babylon of the Royal Mail and gets itself delivered? Does it live up to the old Poet Laureate\u2019s remark, back in the 1980\u2019s, about being \u2018very full and varied\u2019? I think it does. There\u2019s a good many significant and intriguing pieces of work, notably Yasmine Seale\u2019s \u2018Rainsong\u2019,\u00a0 & the poems of David Swenson, Romalyn Ante, and Megan Arlett for example. (By the way don’t follow what I did when reading Yasmine: the poem doesn\u2019t go down the left hand column and then down the right hand column. Read it from left to right and treat the gap as a caesura). Anyway I was going to say that the poem that sprang back into my mind, as I thought to sit and write, is a short open piece by Maya Chowdhry, \u2018Small Bios\u2019. This is about those minute life forms that we are becoming accustomed to discovering are part of the co-creation that is human life<\/p>\n

i like to\u00a0 blow bubbles with you
\nin you \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 from you\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 stretching your cells
\nbursting the walls
\nspitting and biting\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 cellulose to moist kisses
\nbecoming you\u00a0 \u00a0 and you me<\/p>\n

(lines 9 – 13)<\/p>\n

I like this, it\u2019s exuberant, full of yeasty rage and fury; and the \u2018with you\u2019 \u2018in you\u2019 \u2018from you\u2019 convey how complicit we are with one another. I also admire the ending<\/p>\n

with your genome project
\ntrying to size me up in film\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 gigabytes of data
\nbut as soon as you have the picture
\ni mutate
\ngrow horns and leap species<\/p>\n

(lines 22 – 26)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the comparison between the laboriousness of the human endeavour (the stretched out lines) and the vitality of the \u2018bio\u2019 – \u2018mutate\u2019 \u2018grow\u2019 \u2018leap\u2019; and then there\u2019s the brilliant hauling in of ancient human fears, \u2018horns\u2019.<\/p>\n

By the way, despite what Mr Wittgenstein said about lions and language, I\u2019m not troubled by the fact that the \u2018bio\u2019 addresses us in competently handled English. As I mature I become more certain that planetary life forms share far more intelligence and feeling than rationality suggests.<\/p>\n

Another small life form can be found in Hannah Lowe\u2019s \u2018The Sky Is Snowing.\u2019\u00a0 I\u2019ve admired Hannah\u2019s ability to describe and evoke feeling since my first meeting with her work; I\u2019m pretty sure it was with her poem \u2018Fist\u2019, which builds through 36 terrific lines to the paired line endings\u00a0 \u2018\u2026\u2026.they saved him\/\u2026\u2026..they saved us all\u2019 (\u2018Fist\u2019 by the way is the first poem in Hannah\u2019s 2011 Rialto pamphlet The Hitcher<\/em>, which quickly sold out and which we didn\u2019t have time to reprint before the news was out of her Bloodaxe full collection). Anyway this is a roundabout way of saying that I love \u2018The Sky Is Snowing\u2019. This is also that rare thing, a poem with line end rhymes \u2013 which doubles its value. It\u2019s a poem about Hannah\u2019s young child Rory, and has a companion poem, \u2018Sisters\u2019, on the same page. There\u2019s a third poem by Hannah earlier in the magazine, one of a number of poems in the magazine working with issues of sexual politics.<\/p>\n

There are two other poets who\u2019ve had pamphlets published by The Rialto<\/em> in this issue: Jen Campbell, whose The Hungry Ghost Festival<\/em> was published in 2012. THGF is out of print so you\u2019ll have to wait for Jen\u2019s first full collection, soon to be published by Bloodaxe, to read one of the tenderest love poems we\u2019ve ever published. And then there\u2019s Laura Scott, whose pamphlet What I Saw we published in 2013 and which won the Michael Marks Award in 2014. What I Saw<\/em><\/a> is happily still available to buy via our website, but will soon be eclipsed by Laura\u2019s first collection from Carcanet. Laura has four poems in R91. Her writing has great poise and elegance, clarity of diction, very deft – you don\u2019t quite know what\u2019s happening and then you find your mind is stretching and purring<\/p>\n

\u2018His voice seems to have just arrived here,
\nto have come into the room in the loose slack<\/p>\n

of a pause when the air had nothing to do\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

(from \u2018How to Light a Cigarette\u2019, lines 1 – 3)<\/p>\n

Why am I banging on about pamphlets? Because on the last page of the magazine you\u2019ll find details of our Pamphlet Competition (linked here<\/a>) \u2013 your chance to get your pamphlet published by The Rialto. The closing date is December 31st, so there\u2019ll still be time for you to get your Tax Return done after you\u2019ve sorted and entered your poems. What\u2019s wonderful is how different a poet\u2019s voice is when spread over twenty or so poems when compared to the half-dozen poems of a magazine submission.<\/p>\n

I mentioned poems about sexual politics. A particularly strong grouping of these is on pages 21 – 23. Seni Seniviratne\u2019s \u2018Philomela in Her Own Words\u2019, \u2018\u2026.I should\/ have done better, trusted less, run faster\u2019, followed by Chrissy Williams\u2019 \u2018Signing Off\u2019, \u2018Stay sexy and don\u2019t date men who are trying to kill you!\u2019, and Anna Selby\u2019s \u2018Sea Cucumbers\u2019, \u2018The harbour men\/flick their cigarettes, staring\/starting down the steps\u2019.<\/p>\n

Every time I turn a page there\u2019s a poem I think I should tell you about. Either poems that I\u2019ve found and persuaded the other editors to say yes to, or poems that they, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Will Harris, and Degna Stone, have found and persuaded us all to include. My thanks to them for making this an exceptional issue.<\/p>\n

Can\u2019t quite let go without announcing that the winning poems from our Nature Poetry Competition (judged by Michael Longley) are also in this issue. We will be running another Nature Poetry Competition, but are currently in negotiations as to when and who with.<\/p>\n

As well as the prize-winning poems there are a few poems that I found in the competition long list that I thought demanded a wider reading. They\u2019re not so much \u2018nature poems\u2019 as they might need to have been in the context of the prize, but they\u2019re\u00a0 good poems. I remember being astonished reading Walt Whitman (a poet unknown to our Eng. Lit. syllabus) in the last year of my first degree \u2013 \u2018Song of Myself\u2019, suggested to me by Pete Bavington (odd how a name I\u2019ve not searched for for years comes back). Lydia Kennaway\u2019s poem \u2018Returning to Paumanok\u2019 starts with an epigraph from Whitman\u2019s \u2018Starting from Paumanok\u2019: \u2018And I will make a song for the ears of the president, full of weapons with menacing points\/ And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces\u2019. Divided opinion about the President is no new thing in America, clearly. Lydia has fully absorbed the voice of Walt. If you know Whitman (and I commend him to you) this poem is tremendous fun<\/p>\n

Haste on with me Walt.
\nPoint your beard to Manhatta\u2026<\/p>\n

And also very serious. The narrator of the poem is walking alongside a highway and thinking aloud about her personal history and the history of America, when a car arrives,<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026. Then the hot breath of a car pulling up<\/p>\n

beside me. The driver leans across. We talk
\nbefore he takes his mirrored smile
\nto the horizon. His words slap my heels.
\nYou broken down?<\/em>
\nYou broken down?<\/em>
\nYou broken down?<\/em><\/p>\n

I so much like this astonishment that anyone would choose to walk. And how the lines race back to the epigraph with the inference that something is broken in the state. A poem for us now, as well as for America.<\/p>\n

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

So what\u2019s in the new issue of The Rialto when it eventually escapes from the Babylon of the Royal Mail and gets itself delivered? Does it live up to the old Poet Laureate\u2019s remark, back in the 1980\u2019s, about being \u2018very full and varied\u2019? I think it does. There\u2019s a good many significant and intriguing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":7684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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-7769","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\/7769","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\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7769"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7771,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7769\/revisions\/7771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}