[author’s note. The Homeless Library
(2104-17) is “the first history of British homelessness. A collection of books
handmade by homeless people, reflecting on their lives and how they connect
with the wider, previously unwritten heritage of homelessness. The books describe lived experience in
interviews, poetry, art.” It was created
by poet Philip Davenport and artist Lois Blackburn under their experimental
arts organization arthur + martha based in Manchester, UK. I first became acquainted with the project
when, at a poetry festival and symposium I organized in Glasgow, 2016 called
“Outside-in / Inside-out,” Davenport and Blackburn exhibited (the books of) The
Homeless Library and discussed it along with the informative and incredibly
moving testimonial presentations of several participants from Manchester. The idea of a “poetry of the outside”
suddenly veered back to a “root” or radical instantiation of its meaning and
power. Phil and Lois asked me to
characterize the poems of The Homeless Library.
Many more can be found on the arthur + martha website. (JCR)]
Although
interviews feature in the Homeless Library, they do not define it. The purpose
of this project, is to recast lives into a wider frame that transfers pain and
trauma into the larger rhythms of life, and simultaneously allows a critique of
society. If "documentary" sets the terms by which life is measured,
particularly when life has been restricted by society, then poetry’s capacity
is reduced (1). The subject is usually the centre of documentary narrative. But
here it scatters itself as poem, among objects and events outside itself, it
swivels between individual and collective, this world and a larger world: “the
dreaming earth”.
Given
the uncentered, unprotected and rootless reality of homelessness, it isn’t
surprising that homeless writing is preoccupied with many “worlds,” and with
space itself. In her 2008 book, The Culture of Homelessness, Megan Ravenhill observes that “the concept of space is far
deeper than a set of sleeping or begging patches . . . space and the ownership
of space creates power, has identifiable purposes and can be political” (p.
176). Space is anything from a safe space to sleep, to the definition of
identity. The Booth Centre is a safe space. But, says Lois Blackburn, the
weekly poetry and art sessions there turn a space for relaxation and physical
recuperation into one of “quality conversation,” discussion of the past, of
now, and of meaning. The poetry and artworks become not only a safe but, let me
say it, a sacred space. In the following, the speaker describes being rooted in
space, but is it that of the Wellspring or of the poem itself, process and
product?—
When you first come here
You are in dire straits
You come to heal at the
Wellspring.
“The
Wellspring” is a homeless resource centre in Stockport, Greater Manchester, and
yet the word is metaphorical as well. “Here” may also be the making of art,
where the world is remade on the spot.
Us; we’re dreaming the same
Hundreds of miles away or next to you. . . .
You visit the old dreams to see
If you’re doing right or wrong.
A rite of passage
A chuckle dream
The stream runs within
Comfort, guidance, warning
My mother, brother,
And sister.
The
world of Wellspring extends past physical care into the unconscious, an opening
up of being, and a meditation on making, as distinct from dream.
Everyone dreams, but
Sometimes we shoot and miss.
Except for this.
Friedrich
Hölderlin is reputed to have written, “To live is to defend a form.” (“Leben,
das heisst eine Form verteidigen.”) The extremity of the statement draws our
attention to the power that formal acts have had on the HL participants. In
blogs, Davenport and Blackburn describe the extraordinary present-ness of The
Homeless Librarians scribing, drawing, printing over published, canonical text,
and making books. For people insecure about their relationship to language,
many of whom term themselves “illiterate”, to turn language into not just
written but also material form is to reclaim power. The poems of the Homeless
Library make sophisticated formal decisions often used by experimental poets,
and the books that contain them recall the work of experimenters with book form
- Dieter Roth, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha. Work on the poems often proceeds from
group discussions transcribed and then given poetic shape by one or more
members of the group, including Davenport and people to locate their experience
in a larger system of oppression. The Library creates its poetry of critique by
layerings, juxtapositions, and translations (that is, the carrying across) of
materials from apparently different domains, transgressing known borders.
woke up this morning not in my own bed
Half a bed it was I fell out of
Fell out across fields, over and out
Over and out to continue
Made my way here. . . .
“Bed”
becomes “half a bed,” to fall out of bed becomes “Fell out across fields,” and
“over and out [of bed]” becomes the pilot’s signal of the end of communication.
Here, however, the poem contradicts, in a Beckett-like way, the implications of
ending: “Over and out to continue.” Language and syntax generate new versions
of themselves that becomes a kind of heroism: “Made my way here.”
Unlike
most HL poems, the following refuses local detail in order to entwine itself in
the received poetic imagery of Shelley’s West Wind. The “Ode” becomes a
spiritual reference point for defining self:
O wild West Wind
I am a system in chaos.
A breathing Autumn
In chaos, I am a system
Leaves dead, driven like ghosts
There is meaning in them unknown to the Traveller
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red
Perfection is not necessarily smooth and orderly
Pestilence-stricken multitudes we
Arrive where we started
My life’s journey
dark wintry bed
winged seeds
I am a system in chaos
A wild West Wind
O’er the dreaming earth.
Formally,
“O wild West Wind” continues the practice of “occupying” words and phrases from
a canonical poem. It rejects Shelley’s sonnet-terza rima stanza along with the
Ode’s movement from emotional burden to revolutionary spring, and speaks in
non-Shelleyan language of a self placed on the threshold of a radical
discomfort: “I am a system in chaos.” Alluding only to stanza I of the “Ode,”
the poem seems arrested there. Everything in Shelley moves forward—winged seeds
imply future rebirth nurtured by the visionary dream of the earth. But the
speaker in the HL poem describes her/himself as a system; does that system
refer at once to the affective system of sadness, anger, hope, poetic
realisation and also to a social system that oppresses achievement; “we arrive
where we started”?
Shelley’s
expansive rising lines are reduced (“Thou, from whose unseen presence the
leaves dead/ Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”) to “leaves,
dead, driven like ghosts”. As with some of Oppen’s late poems, a line slows its
forward movement, turning back to its beginning and at the same time crossing
over to the next one, requiring a pause and deepening of attention. The
line-breaks create another system of chaos, a mirror for the authors. Is it
“hectic red perfection” or “Yellow, and black, and pale and hectic red”? Does
“we” belong primarily with “Pestilence stricken multitudes” or look forward to
the next line: “we / Arrive where we started”?
And
so to a broader question. Are the poems and artworks of The Homeless Library
mired in a hopeless present, spelling out the rules cruelly applied to what
Barbara Ehrenreich calls the permanent underclass of modern capitalist society?
I would argue differently for these poems (and the books of this Library, which
are, essentially, visual poems themselves). They capture moments of empowered
collaboration and construction, they are works of art that shape and reshape
lives, allowing a future reimagined. Shelley said in his Defence
of Poetry, “the future is contained
within the present, as the plant within the seed.” Perhaps this is how to read
the entire The Homeless Library, not just as history, but also as the seeds of
a possible beginning. The final lines of “O wild West Wind,” in which the “I”
escapes, to catapult into a cosmos of wind and dream and earth:
I am a system in chaos
A wild West Wind
O’er the dreaming earth.
seeds
of a possible beginning. The final lines of “O wild West Wind,” in which the
“I” escapes, to catapult into a cosmos of wind and dream and earth:
I am a system in chaos
A wild West Wind
O’er the dreaming earth.
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