Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1.
May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
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| Image Courtsey: Mark Etter |
Each of us carries multiple legacies. I
reflect on my personal history: ancestors from Germany, Scotland and England
who travelled to Australia by boat seeking better lives. In this way, I am part
of a broader legacy of English colonisation. My place and opportunity living on
unceded Wurundjeri country has come at the cost of the Boonwurrung and the
Woiwurrung peoples who are the custodians of this land. I am part of a
generation that is grappling with how to reckon with the violence of this
history; seeking ways in which non-Indigenous Australia can make meaningful
restitution with First Nations peoples, and, importantly, learn from the legacy
of these ancient knowledges.
I reflect on the legacies I have
inherited as a writer. My education was in the Western poetry, literary and
dramatic canons. I was taught Shakespeare, Chaucer and Chekhov and learned most
of my playwriting heritage came from men. I further learned, from other
teachers and my own reading, about Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Judith Wright,
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Caryl Churchill, Ntozake Shange. I began to get a much
broader sense of what a rich heritage I was part of.
The sense of poetic inheritance plays on
my mind. What does it mean that the written foundations of my craft were laid
almost exclusively by men? How much do I need to wrestle with this? Like many
female writers I enjoy taking these inherited stories and structures and
turning them over to find what other narratives and possibilities they might
hold. I deeply value the works of poets such as Dorothy Porter, Claire Gaskin
and Anne Carson who take old stories and reimagine them, retell them, turn them
over.
I step into the work done by writers and
thinkers such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva who spent painstaking years
examining what new ways of writing and uttering might emerge when women
exploded foundations and proposed new ones. I am thrilled by contemporary
writers who continue these explorations of what new forms are possible and who
take the exploration beyond gender, across race, class, place and language.
Poets like Claudia Rankine and Solmaz Sharif, Kay Gabriel, Bhanu Kapil and
Alison Whittaker.
My own feminist sensibility awakened as
I developed as a writer and wanted to question the structures and forms I had
inherited, both literary and worldly. Feminism complicates and is complicated.
The term continues to evolve and be argued with: intersectional feminisms,
white feminisms, liberal feminisms and global feminisms. Where am I placed
within these shifting sands and how does my own poetry contribute something to
the grappling?
In these ways, the question of legacy is
one that writers and poets are deeply engaged with. Sometimes this is overt, as
they use language to test ideas and push social change to the forefront. For
other writers, the relationship with the past and the future is more subtle: they
step into a stream and carry on in a similar direction or they hold ground,
letting history jostle around them as they try to listen quietly for their own
voice.
In reading the submissions for this
issue of Teesta Review, I was steeped in the ways that other poets consider
these questions. It was a pleasure to roam through reflections that ranged from
intimate family memories through to meditations about the vastness of the
universe. I could feel the urgency with which poets pull at issues of social injustice,
how they try to make sense of things by their careful selection of words, line,
stanza and form. I was reminded of the painstaking craft of the poet and of the
profound value of this simple, yet sometimes enormously difficult act: to
render something of human experience in words.
Each poem in this issue, along with the
two essays, takes the task of writing and the concept of legacy and attends to
them both with integrity and care. I appreciate this so much and am grateful
for the opportunity to steward these works so that their language and music may
find new eyes and ears with which to resonate.
An equally important part of legacy is
that which we will leave for others. I don’t mean this in a grand or
egotistical sense but rather, in the ways we consider how we operate in the
world, how we are in relation to each other and to the earth itself. In regards
to poetry and writing, I want to acknowledge the work of people who teach
writing and mentor others, those who edit journals and run events. The people
who don’t always earn the brightest public profiles but without whom there
would be no legacy for new generations of writers to inherit and step into.
I would like to thank Teesta Review for
the opportunity to guest edit this journal. It has been an honour and I note
here, beautiful words written by Zinia Mitra about the notion of legacy: ‘We
all are bearers of legacies carrying information packed in our DNA from our
ancestors who talked to the forests, segments of the great rhizome, part of our
knowledge and experience is conscious, part unconscious, while that living
rhizome tries to communicate vital information to us through dream fragments,
visions, images.’
At the time of writing this editorial,
Covid-19 continues to wreak enormous trauma and change in the world. It
confronts us all with prescient questions about the structures we have built,
the values that drive us and how both of these things may bear the kind of
urgent, careful attention that poets bring to their work. How we use language
matters. How we attend to our histories, our selves and our societies matters.
Thank you to the poets and writers in this issue who spend their time and
energy attending to thought, word and expression. This in itself is a legacy to
cherish.
(Guest Editor)
Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry