“Destiny”

[Notes written for Jordie Albiston’s poetry class]

Poems seem to arise, in my experience, when one observation (or notion, or event) sparks a sudden connection with another. In that charge of energy between two disparate things the poem takes shape. I wrote “Destiny” a long time ago, in 1986, but as far as I can remember, that was how this poem arose.

I do in fact own an LP called La Flûte indienne by a group called Los Calchakis, from Peru, I think, and one of the tracks is called “Destino”, destiny. It is, on first hearing, a rather thin, even trivial-sounding, melody to bear such a grandiose title, but I don’t think I would ever have written a poem about it if I hadn’t seen a documentary on television which included footage of an underground chamber of Inca mummies. The camera gliding past mummy after mummy, each with its dried mouth gaping in a rictus, was quite disturbing, but impressive, and it did look as though they were all screaming, or emitting some sort of note. This must have caused that connective spark to remind me of the flute tune on the album — Peru being the country for both mummies and musicians. I had my poem.

It was then a small step to the poem’s conclusion: the implication of the silence behind all sounds, or if you like, the nothingness underlying existence.

In terms of technique, the poem is written in a kind of sprung rhythm, or accentual measure, which I wrote quite a lot of during the early to mid-eighties. I had abandoned the syllabics that I had used for many years, but didn’t, at that time, want to write either metrical or free verse. So I experimented with a measure in which main stresses were counted, but the number of unstressed syllables in a line was unrestricted. I eventually abandoned this kind of verse because I came to the conclusion that I could never be sure that the reader would read out the same number of stresses that I had written in. I also came to want a smoother rhythmical effect. For this reason I have become dissatisfied with most of the poems I wrote at that time. The poem also uses half rhymes rather than full rhymes: flutes/notes; ranks/chinks, etc. The pattern is abcbadeced.

“Destiny” appears in Ancient Music.

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