When I teach the below poem by the Canadian poet Sylvia Legris, I’ll often remove the title and ask students to guess what the title of the poem could be. The first few lines are:

This is a cheeky and sneaky way to teach, because it feels like revealing something backwards. Without the title, a reader is maybe groping towards association and pulling together clues slightly more haphazardly than they would with one. And a poem like this perhaps relies on the plain instruction of its title, which is ‘Hummingbird’, to hold meaning. Suddenly, the three-gram refraction, the buzz note vocalisation, the nickel’s weight of a charm has a visual and visible, soft and small humming body to land in, a necessary rudder or anchor. Once titled, the misty riddle of the poem clears, or maybe reassembles into the shape of the creature you see when I say the word ‘Hummingbird’.

I try to resist thinking about poetry or a poem as a map of things to figure out, a question to be answered. Yet often when I teach poems that could be seen as complex, or even when I’m teaching poems that aren’t as linguistically and syntactically playful and dense as Legris’s, I will hear the comment – sometimes complaint, sometimes complement – that poems appear as a set of codes and tricks that need working out. I also read many poems that feel as though they are written with this codification in mind, that to keep the truth of a poem obfuscated from the reader, that there’s a truth to be uncovered, is paradoxically the point of the poem. Poets, through language play and sound-sense, will give a set of clues that lead towards a story, or a narrative, or a feeling, without necessarily employing plot or story. This mode of reading and writing leads us to believe that there is an answer lying within the poem that we must access to ‘know’ the poem, or figure the poem out, that the perhaps obstructive or abstracted language will, through patterning, through rhyme, through line breaks, reveal the story or plot, or moment of transcendental or romantic or personal or spiritual awakening, the epiphany of the poem. Yet I have liked to read and write under the belief that the radical and sensational and truly utopian thing about poetry is that each poem, no matter how formally wedded to a set of structures, metrical or measured sound, or stress rules, will always and only be the commander of its own logic, in a nicely ungovernable kind of way. Each poem is its own weird captain, it creates its own unrepeatable shape, as the language and mystery punches around inside it.

In the Karen Solie poem, ‘THAT WHICH WAS LEARNED IN YOUTH IS ALWAYS MOST FAMILIAR’, after a hilarious rumination on the speaker of the poem’s conversations with children, ‘expecting a load of nonsense’ about cartoons and trucks and half-truths, the speaker is struck when her nephew picks up a clump of earth and theorises that there are two kinds of shapes in the word, ‘replaceable’ ones, like triangles and squares, and ‘irreplaceable’ ones like the clump of earth he holds in his hand,. The child says of the shape that the earth makes, that ‘this will never happen again’. Alongside the ringing influence of the innocent and theological querying of a child in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ who asks ‘What is the grass?’, as Whitman continues, ‘fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he’, I felt Solie here to be talking about everything – mortality, people, the chaotic universe, of course, things come into being uniquely and then they are gone – but also, the poem itself; each poem is its own unrepeatable shape. Poetry doesn’t need the approach of logic or reason, it actually does not function as a question that needs an answer, instead, it relies on an untethering of usual responses to the world, that it breaches the linear and also can somehow bend time and space, it is close to the most imaginative and powerfully radical feelings, a place where we can live out fantasies and altered states and new ways of being, it is the highest and most ancient art form in the garden of imaginaries!

Still, the feeling remains in my students and also me, of the human urge and desire to plot or map a story in a sequence of associated words and sounds and visuals, the way we want to draw a linearity through a space, to hone in on a relationship that might be known or familiar. Is this a poem, my students will ask me, about love, or about a love breaking down, is it about a mother dying? A country at war? Is it then that poetry is so utopian exactly because the brand-new and irreplicable associative logics it accumulates from the material world bring us back to the same places: those most confining and universalising and bonding human experiences that we hunt for community when we experience them: loving, dying, being born, being from somewhere, knowing animals, knowing people?

I discovered the Exeter Book while I was scouting for Anglo Saxon texts about ecology. The Exeter Book is, as outlined in a sublime translation of it from Old English by Kevin Crossley-Holland, ‘one of the four great surviving miscellanies of Old English Poetry’ It’s history recounted as a bequethal to Exeter’s Cathedral library by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, who describes it as ‘one large book in English verse about various subjects’, which, as an aside, as an editor, thrills me as a catch-all blurb we could start applying to the metadata for just about any upcoming poetry publication. This anthology of Old English verse, with one riddle in Latin, consists of various poems, some harder to relate to, like those about being an exiled travelling soldier, but also lots of thinking about god and animals, and most famously, about 100 surviving riddles, many of which have never been answered, but are also about god, and animals, and weather and also tableware and sex.

This idea of the riddle has started to appeal to me, as it seems to intentionally lean into the idea that the poem is a binary thing, that it sits in opposition to my utopian rendering of it as a model to be thought through openly and playfully with or disregarding rules and regulations. Here, the poem functions very intentionally and almost performatively as a game or a piece of play. With the riddle, you have to get somewhere, to one definitive answer, and everyone who reads it has to get there with you. To return to Legris’s poem, I have never taught it without at least a few people in the room guessing the correct title, but I also notice, repeatedly, people have the same ‘wrong’ answers. I like this little fated way of being in the world, it shows me that our brains are probably basically moving in the same direction, the grey matter has preordained routes. The riddle holds all the wild ways a poem can offer up interpretative potentialities, but effectively plonks us all in the same bin of meaning at the end – well, we’re told, as it happens, turns out this poem is definitively about this thing – and these routes of knowing, or not, are primarily made through the paradoxically expansive yet retractive power of metaphor.

But metaphor, too, is riddle. One of the sweetest and most generous communications I believe poetry offers is through metaphor, as we are asked as readers and ask readers when we write poems: Do you also feel that this thing could look like this thing? A poem in this way creates a bridge for understanding, it asks, do you see what I see, and in this way do we both feel seen, in this roundabout way that I’ve constructed for us. It asks, do you hear me? The riddle is the most contained and formulaic, perhaps obvious iteration of metaphor. What thing, through other things, am I describing here?

One of my favourite riddles in the Exeter Book is Riddle 57. It has been translated in many ways, but a favourite version is below:

The answer is thought to be either gnats or swallows. The clean modernity of this poem, the likening of the little swifts or insects to be ‘buzzing black coated bold little people’ has a visible and filmic power, a little jaunty and robust configuring of boisterous flies knocking about the air, or dive bombing swifts, such that as soon as I know the answer to the riddle, I feel I have come to know the body of a bird, or indeed, the body of a gnat, in an entirely new way, which ultimately is the necessity of metaphor, and poetry. A poet I love, William Peskett, who is also a naturalist and teacher, is one master of these riddling kinds of animal metaphors, without positioning them as such. He describes a wasp floating into a room as ‘an angry colonial in a strange domain’, birth and death as ‘my strict parentheses, like two old friends in a crowd, you are struggling, tending to meet’, and perhaps my favourite, a crayfish’s shell ‘like crackling’. I particularly liked this final collision of things, as the body of one consumed animal becomes fused with the body of another consumed animal, membranously, as a forging of associations that feel self-reflexively, inescapably, human. The knowledge of the animals is positioned only as we know them to eat, the monstrosity of how we are most familiar with the crustacean and our familiarity with the pig are banded together by their crispy cooked skins.

This feeling around how we create, present and describe the animal body shifts with the various translations of Riddle 57. Where in some translations, ‘tell me their names’ is, ‘they name themselves’, and thought through by Megan Cavell on her commentary on the riddle:

I am reminded of how I teach ‘Hummingbird’, how this poem leads to a feeling of agency that Legris gifts the bird in the poem, we think about how we are led to our naming of an animal via their functions. The poem-bird hums itself into being. The metaphor is the name itself, embedded in the line through sound sense, through the noise of the animal, and our knowing of that noise. All our guesses are joined by our similar bodily knowledges.

I also like how demanding the riddles are. They ask things of the reader, as in my favoured translation of Riddle 57, there is the fantastic statement of direction in the final line, ‘now tell me their names’. I think of a Ben Lerner poem, a sonnet that features in his first collection, The Lichtenberg Figures, which features a sequence of declaratives, moves through a series of desperate self-inflicted queries, and ends with a sequence of demands:

The command here, as in Riddle 57’s topic of gnats, or swallows, is actuated, commanding and erotic. Lerner’s poem, like many of the riddles, create a sense of the brattish and naïve. Tell me what I’m about! They cry. While they are both silly and not, they speak to a love of games and knowing at an almost innate level, of having the answer to something, of solving a quiz. I like the resistance and resilience of the Exeter Book, that feels to me to map the resistance and resilience of the riddle, and the metaphor, itself. Metaphor is as old as the first cave drawings, and if we are to believe John Berger, metaphor is the foundation to language, as he recounts on Rousseau’s note that ‘[a]s emotions were the first motives which induced man to speak, his first utterances were tropes (metaphors). Figurative language was the first to be born, proper meanings were the last to be found.’ Berger continues, ‘If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms – man and animal – shared in common revealed what differentiated them.’ (1) I go back to Legris’s poem, and the ‘Hummingbird’ guessing game, the way we can know and love things because of their differences to us. Kevin Crossley-Holland recounts in his introduction to his translation of the Exeter book that it has sustained damage over its nearly 1000-year life, from fire, and also ‘appears to have been used as a cutting-board, perhaps a sort of bread-and-cheese board, and as a beer-mat’. While I lament the damage, I like the idea of this log of the daily being utilised as such, both materially and linguistically, like someone’s old sudoku magazine left on a train.

I am writing some poems in response to the Exeter Book, which are not quite, but nearly riddles. Turns out, they’re incredibly hard to write. But I have been enjoying leaning into the shape of the expectation of this style of poem. So, tell me their names!

A promise
to kill the insect
is actually a promise broken
hit the table
hard enough
with the insect poised on the side
balancing as she does
on the tips of her toe
webbings on her bud-back
nothing like, but perhaps a little like
feeding the geese on the lawn,
part fear, part silliness
what at the world’s end
does it mean
when a
pattern splits apart
on the back of an insects back
opened at the accidental touch
of a shoe’s sole
there goes another little one
but at the end of the day
you’re bigger and stronger
so why not –
the insect will become
the shape and form of an angel –
an amateur angel nonetheless –
the insects splayed body
the little smear of blood
the smashed and purple schedule
of its body, pinned to the walls
like a calendar
is a spiritual starter pack

The warm evening air bears the inflamed wasps up
like the hands of priest holding a squalling baby
they float like drunks
looking for a fight
like they have their own tunnels of time
to move through, and they pound repeatedly
over the tired head of someone
grieving, walking the edges of the field
with his dog, making up songs
in his head

The same that creates the kind of madness committed to the young man
his name was sweet Gummo, who lived in a stone dwelling on a dark moor with a wife
and seven daughters for the whole length of his unnaturally long life
and he did live three score years and ten with his wife, who now that I think about it
must have had some issues with living inside a stone within a stone, was she climbing
the walls as I would be climbing the walls, did she proffer her many babies up to gods
in the dead of night and ask for them to be taken while they slept, God help me,
she might have said, I didn’t know there would be so many, just take one or two.
I cannot be measured to within an inch of my life and my shape is not as hers,
and sometimes I fill you with disdain, and at other times I drive you home.
Let me in. I’m at the door. I won’t let up, like a man who stalks, I’m never done.

I remember the story of two women who lived on a moor
they were mother and daughter or they were sister and sister or they were lovers
or they lived on an island just near to where I grew up
or they lived in a small stone house at the bottom of a lane
and they held get-togethers with the local people who were tenants or family or lovers
and these parties were so raucous they’d go on into the night
and their guests wore drag and would wander down the dunes
drunk to get close to the sea’s edge
and sometimes they would fall in and be swept away
or these women were never seen by the villagers they lived within and between
and they were the source of much discussion and disparaging
or they were called on often for their knowledge of herbs and foraging
or they were punished for their knowledge of herbs and foraging
either way the story is one that makes me jealous
as I think often of how they’d hold hands, or hook their arm in arm
and stride down the lane, and how they’d talk in a language
I certainly couldn’t understand, it being the language of my country
which is no longer spoken, or they speak in such a dialect that only other villagers
could have known what they said
I found out later for a period they lived in the home I’d lived in when I was young
a house so small I could only squeeze my arm through the door
they had divided the space in such a way as to create a warm but informal divide
close enough to touch, separate enough to leave each other alone
and a while later I heard that when one of the women died
the remaining woman shrivelled up like a diseased tree, a broken little ash,
like the dead woman began living in the living woman
or they were just so in love, so close, there was between them the umbilical cord
of connection and within months the living sister joined her dead sister
because if you’re bound to something dead like that, its toxicity
will just flow right back into you 
on a very grey day, when the sun was low and overpowering, and the wind bit,
I went to their funeral, or I didn’t, It was small, and it was big, there were many mourners, but there were just a few, the food was good, but it was bad.
There was no food, unfortunately, because there was no funeral,
and of course, there were no women.