Outside
under the arcade
and the floor-length glass shop front:
a green pop-up dome
flanked by a Burberry
suitcase and a sleeping-bag
a makeshift shelter
for Sai from Stratford
with time to invest
in a four-day queue – he’s first
in line for an iPhone 6s
no-one moves him on
or threatens arrest
as it’s not about where
but why you pitch your tent
Seasonal Disturbances by Karen McCarthy Woolf is a delicately interlocked, formally experimental, almost origami-like collection of poems and sequences. It includes a set of found sonnets, The Science of Life, drawn from the eponymous 1931 encyclopaedia, and responding to “eXXpedition”, the all-women sailing voyage investigating the effects of micro-plastic pollution. There’s also a “disrupted zuihitsu” threading through the collection like a partly subterranean river.
For all its internationalism, McCarthy Woolf ’s poetry engages with the local and the personal. Reading Seasonal Disturbances is like picking up a London A-Z and finding it’s a new map of the world, one which includes the poet’s inner life, her meditations, perambulations and passing thoughts. It seems vandal-ish to pick it apart, but there are some poems that stand singly, forming little pools of calm in the interwoven currents, and Outside is one of them.
The poem is tactically simple: it depicts a young man in a queue for the latest smartphone, and notes his immunity to the harassment usually inflicted on rough sleepers. The tone is resolutely objective, though rising at the end to a wry, summary aphorism.
Brief cultural signifiers position “Sai from Stratford”, a young City type, “with time to invest // in a four-day queue …” In fact, he’s first in the queue, which indicates a certain heroism, even if he’s relatively well-heeled. The repeated “s” sounds in stanza three onwards (invest, first, 6s, arrest) rustle like the notes he probably doesn’t carry.
Sai’s designer (Burberry) suitcase, lodged outside the “green pop-up dome” advertises his affluence and guarantees his rights of residence on London’s (or any western city’s) “charter’d streets”. He is covered by that charter, in fact. Another person would be designated by law a vagrant or trespasser but he’s a wealthy consumer. And so he’s left alone.
I had to do some research on the iPhone 6s, being of the generation for whom 6s meant the very decent childhood sum of “six bob”, and who therefore can never entirely erase an association of shillings with saved pocket money and birthday gifts. The treasure Sai covets boasts 3D Touch (“the next generation of Multi Touch”) and a 12 megapixel iSight camera, with Live Photos and Retina Flash. It opens up “new possibilities for how you interact with your content”.
My earlier reminiscence wasn’t sentimental (or only partly): it was a reminder to self that materialism is nothing new and probably not wholly wicked. It’s the potency of the purchased material that is new – and the potency it confers on the individual. As its name suggests, the iPhone’s focus is egocentric. It wraps up users’ brains in a feedback loop no analogue device could achieve. It presents a miniature world, and appoints its owner emperor. It lets you delete all the rough sleepers from the streets.
I also looked up the name Sai (pronounced Sah-yee). According to my search: “Sai means saint, master or lord in Sindhi and Marathi.” In naming her protagonist Sai, McCarthy Woolf has evoked the sacrosanct, suggesting the possession of so-called “iconic” goods confers nearly godlike power. Sai literally means “shade” and it was a “poetic way” of referring to the Sufi mystics, associating them with “the protective and influential”. Sai from Stratford may have become an outsider to his own tradition. But he is still protected, even when queuing for four days outside “the floor-length glass shop front”, because, in terms of Western values, he is an insider.
“[I]t’s not about where // but why you pitch your tent.” The poem makes its point and stops. A writer of less subtlety than McCarthy Woolf, wishing to make a similar point, might have chosen to depict a vagrant in all his or her misery, or to contrast the two urban figures, neighbours but worlds apart, sleeping out on a city street. McCarthy Woolf zones in on the more fortunate figure. But she also holds back. No blame attaches to him for buying into the values that surround him.
Society isn’t directly blamed, either. The poem seems to skip sideways into neutrality: “no-one moves him on”, “it’s not about”. Authority remains unnamed, as if part of the air people breathe. In its offhand way, it’s a frightening poem, a reminder that there are unwritten rules made by unnamed legislators, obeyed unintentionally. How can someone be outside their own society? How can anyone who makes it work for themselves be held responsible for those for whom it doesn’t? The poem slips past, leaving a guilty shadow. We look down and see the shadow is our own.
