Skip to main content

Russian Submariners

The Russian Kursk submarine (pictured to the left) met its tragic fate roughly five years ago - the anniversary will be next week. Tragically, another Russian submersible is today - in waters of a depth of 190 meters - facing a similarly trying rescue operation; the world can only hope for the best for them at this time.

Five years ago, I was very much exercised by the intersection between poetry and the immediacy of world events as conveyed by the news (and was living in Budapest).

At that time, I wrote a poem with disturbing echoes of today, not least the death of German tourists (then in an Air France crash, this time in Russian bus accidents).

You'll find the poem "Hull Losses" below; originally published in 2002 in my second collection, Cafe Alibi. The technical-actuarial term hull losses refers to plane crashes, but also the hulls of submarines; and by extension, I was thinking of Larkin, who lived in Hull, near a bleak seascape, and faced many different losses in his work.

As such, the poem is, I believe, the only one in English to concern itself with: a) aviation and submersible disasters; b) Internet pornography; c) Philip Larkin; d) murder; e) the intersection of these themes in terms of scopophilia and fragility of structures (including poems).


Hull Losses

First, the Concorde's tire burst, then
the Kursk went down in the Barents Sea,
all hands knocking out Morse
with spoons on bent hulls, the high-tech

surroundings inexplicably silent.
Rescue pods fail. Scan-addicts,
meanwhile, search for HQ babes,
dragging up thumbs from blue depths.

Cold Russian submariners morose
on an Arctic floor; exploded German
tourists in the burst supersonic;
a child penetrated, later dumped in a bag;

the convict injected; the neurological patient
whose eyelid, alone, is what still moves
(fluttering like the flap of a cut thumb).
Each a real presence: but not for all time.

What is our true quality, sly impermanence?
The flaw in us may be like a single hair
scanned in by accident - a stray line
fracturing the collector's perfect jpeg.

poem by Todd Swift

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".