Music That Will Save Them
Review of Fluid Vessels 5, a Poetry Reading by Lorna Goodison, Tanure Ojaide, and Mark Tredinnick
by Lizzie Schulz and Savannah Sguigna
The fifth installment of Fluid Vessels, the poetry reading series of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, took place online on 2 May 2022. Lorna Goodison, judge of the 2022 competition, as well as two members of the jury, Tanure Ojaide and Mark Tredinnick, read several poems from their recent collections.
Goodison’s poetry reverberates with feminine inspiration. Her feminism extends beautifully to the very way in which she describes her poetic technique. In the Q&A session, she likened the constraints of poetic form to swaddling a baby: the form provides the poem its structure, but it should not bind the poem too tightly.
In Mother Muse, Goodison draws attention to the versatility of women. She pays close attention to Sister Mary Ignatius, a remarkable woman who ran the Alpha Boys School in Jamaica. In her position, Sister Ignatius unconventionally taught her students how to box and to play jazz. In “Sister Iggy Deejay,” we see her substituting trumpets and vinyl records for Bibles: “Instruments of brass range row on row / on wooden shelves planed by apprentices. / She has dispatched two of the Alpha boys / to Times Store to buy hot 45’s heard on radio … She helped to make them into men who make / music that will save them.”
Tanure Ojaide followed Goodison’s lyrical work with his contemplations of history and place. He led the audience into a heightened awareness of society, land, and political conditions in his native Nigeria. His works, such as “Remembering (For Ezekiel),” reflect the interconnectedness of all life, inviting the listener to consider the ways in which we respond to trauma in parallel with the earth itself: “The day the farmer lost all his harvest to locusts … The days the news trashed the minstrel.” His final piece of the reading, “If Only They Knew,” satirically contrasted the fleeting fervor of soccer fans with the cries of enslaved peoples from the present and the past.
Mark Tredinnick likewise invokes human responsibility in his environmental poems, which reflect the ecology of Australia. Tredinnick’s work beholds the land as a space of renewal. His opening poem, “Sometimes Peace,” was featured as an accompaniment to an art installation, titled “Shorelines,” which remembers the Tasmanian involvement in the Armistice of the First World War: “You fooled yourself you went / For fun; you said you went for Empire, for Honour, / For six weeks tops. It was for years; for some, it was / For keeps. For war will maim or murder no matter // Why you think you go.” All three poets evoked images of peace, violence, and hope in ways that returned again and again to the fertility and fragility of the earth.
To experience the full meaning and depth of these poets’ works, the Montreal Prize encourages you to obtain a copy of their books: Lorna Goodison, Mother Muse; Tanure Ojaide, Love Gifts; Mark Tredinnick, Walking Underwater. Also, stay tuned for the next Fluid Vessels readings in the coming year.
In the words of the 2022 prize director, Eli MacLaren, the Montreal Prize is meant to be “a glass case in which the gift of poetry can be housed for the world to see.” As poets and applicants expectantly await the results of 2022 competition, we invite you to read the best poetry that you can lay your hands on along with us.
27 May 2022