The Poems Man
Look, look, she cried, the poems man,
running across the frail bridge
of her innocence. Into what house
will she go? Into what guilt will
that bridge lead? I
the man she called out at
and she, hardly twelve
meet in the middle, she going
her way; I coming from mine:
The middle where we meet
is not the place to stop.
Martin Carter
At this time every year the Guyanese nation celebrates Martin Carter, hailed in local English as the ‘Poems Man,’ known further afield as Guyana’s greatest poet, even as ‘national poet,’ but acknowledged as “one of the finest poets to have emerged in the Caribbean region,” placed among “the first rank of world poets” (Ian McDonald, Introduction to Selected Poems, Demerara Publishers, 1989) and, in any international language, the quintessential poet.
In the middle of each December, either in the private acknowledgement of writers and readers or in public events, tributes are offered to that acclaimed public and profoundly private poet. Very special efforts are made to offer tribute every year since 1997, and particularly this, the tenth year since then. The Minister of Culture hosted a public celebration at the Umana Yana last week, and today we revisit “the galaxy of poems” that Carter produced, “the clusters and constellations that have emerged from a lifetime’s work” (Vanda Radzik, Preface to Selected Poems, Red Thread). The work with “overall metaphysical import” which “conjured up forms” for Stanley Greaves (letter to publishers, 1997).
Over a decade ago these poems had once again gone out of print before Red Thread reprinted the Selected Poems in May 1997. Since then there has been much greater accessibility to both the poems and the critical work that they have generated. Stewart Brown edited The Art of Martin Carter published by Peepal Tree in 2000 and more recently Brown and Ian McDonald published another collection of the poems. Gemma Robinson produced The University of Hunger and David Dabydeen edited another volume which included Spanish translations.
In 1997 Radzik hoped the Red Thread collection would be used as required reading in schools and universities. But it was already happening before then, and has certainly accelerated. Carter has been studied at several universities. A few that spring to mind are Warwick, all three campuses of UWI, Miami, Birmingham, London Metropolitan, Ibadan, Cambridge and the University of Guyana. The work has produced at least two PhDs – Robinson and Calvin Holder.
Today we pay brief attention to two of these great poems, one of the earliest, The Poems Man and one of the last, The Conjunction. They allow reference to some interesting observations about Carter and his work. These include his preoccupation with poetry and politics, but more with poetry; his preoccupation with balance and antithesis, the way so many of his lines join opposites, or balance them against each other; his public and private personae; and his love of writing about language and poetry. Carter said that he does not like publishing single poems; he prefers poems to be surrounded by other poems, and he always wrote and released poems in groups (Interview with Al Creighton, 1989). Yet both Poems Man and Conjunction do not quite seem to have been kept in any group and appeared outside of whatever group they might have been written in.
The Poems Man is dated circa 1960s but was published in a set of “new” poems supplied by the poet himself for inclusion in Nigel Westmaas’s edition of A Martin Carter Prose Sampler (Kyk-Over-Al #44) May 1993. The first observation about this selection is the language and the way it places the poet among the people; the people in unsophisticated, working class semi-rural communities through which he walks and is popularly recognised as a poet. ‘Poems man’ is Guyanese language for a man who makes poems. It is Creole and proletarian and at the same time the linguistic construct of a little girl of those communities, who is not familiar with the standard English and more educated middle class word, ‘poet.’ Carter is known for his occasional insertion of Creole syntax in a standard English poem, as he does in University of Hunger and Black Friday. He takes it a bit further in Poems Man.
This selection is a meeting point between the poet/poetry and the people, age and youth, the future (“she going her way”) and the past (“I coming from mine”). They meet on a bridge that is “frail” and “not the place to stop.” Carter expresses these things in his peculiar ‘poet’s way’ of opposite, parallels, paradoxes, parables and riddles. He once expressed in this same way how he thought and wrote as a poet. He said people who use words in a prosaic way, according to their meanings in crossword puzzles “approach words and go so,” gesturing with his hand in a straight line; “but I approach words and go so,” gesturing with his hand in a crooked turn (Interview with Al Creighton).
Also, in explaining the difference between poetry and prose, Carter said “prose begins to continue, while poetry continues to begin” (Interview with Al Creighton). Certainly, these conundrums are articulated in both Poems Man and Conjunction. The latter is dated 1989, but appeared in the same small set in 1993. This is what Carter says about the poem:
“The word ‘and’ is very important to my way of thinking, that is to say, something and something, not something and then something else… I wrote a poem that I called Conjunction. That is the idea. Things must be joined. There has to be conjunction.” (Interview with Frank Birbalsingh, Kyk-over-al 46/47, 1995)
He explores the many permutations of meaning in the concept of the word in the poem, which is like many others with the balance and antithesis. Roopnaraine describes Carter’s poetry as the work of a “master” in which “thought is sensuous and lyrical.” Surely in this poem, as in Watch My Language, Black Friday 1962 and University of Hunger, there is another Carter trait, viz, his recourse to subtle sensuousness and even mild eroticism. It is a poem about language, poetry, politics and almost everything else. One is not likely to find a better articulation of it than that provided by Vanda Radzik. She calls it a “Dialectic between language, thought and reality that has engaged Martin Carter, as it always has the truest of poets
