This isn’t the official party line, and perhaps my co-editor Clodagh Moynan won’t thank me for breaking away from that line, but for me Moloch is above all a conversation between Clodagh and myself.
- Ailbhe Darcy, interviewed in 3:AM
Getting over the giddy fun of quoting Ailbhe’s interview like it’s a Real Thing (which of course it is), I’d never really thought of Moloch (a sporadic but lovely Irish art and literature journal) as this above all. But it makes sense, and in broader terms too. All publications are the product (and in many ways the substance) of the conversations between editors. If there is only one editor, they probably have conversations with themselves. Out loud, too, I shouldn’t wonder.
But poems themselves are conversational too. There’s a certain nonsense about finding beautiful sounds and aesthetically rewarding combinations, chasing some ever-elusive perfect line or stanza. Really, what I’m doing, at least, if I’m doing anything is trying to learn by teaching. Hoping that as I try to explain this thing that puzzles me to you, I will understand more about it myself. The puzzle can be anything, often the puzzle is the poem itself, a half-formed image that seems like it could be made to mean something if only I get the language to work right. If I can worry it far enough into the crack to make an opening. But the crux of the whole activity is the conversational purpose. While WIlliams may have been right that a poem is a machine made of words, I’ve become more comfortable with the poem as a tool made of words.
In all semi-seriousness, I think we need to embrace poet laureate Kay Ryan’s words, as quoted yesterday by @snigdhapoonam: “It’s poetry’s uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. Prose is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs.”
Getting off track a little. But no thank you, Kay Ryan. I may not know what everything in the toolbox is for, but every item in their arose to address a specific need at a specific time. A magnetic offset ratcheting screwdriver’s just going to collect dust until that day you need to get into a tiny space and have a conversation with a screw that you just can’t reach with conventional methods.
Goodnight tumblr.
