Freedom Rules

Freedom Rules edited by David Hart.
Flarestack: Birmingham. 2004. £3.00
ISBN: 1900397722

Freedom Rules, a slim booklet of poems edited by David Hart and produced with all the finesse of a parish magazine, at first glance looks to be a rather unprepossessing affair. This is not a book that could be accused of the vice of style over substance. The unassuming appearance of this book, however, is a reflection not of lack of substance, but rather of a commendable modesty and lack of pretension. For those who actually venture further, this is a bracing read. Collections of poetry are not often as compelling as is this.

Hart asked his contributors to write works in newly invented poetic forms of their own devising, and to supplement their contributions with notes on the form that they have invented. This recourse to new forms is born out of Hart’s protest in the introduction of the book that contemporary poetry in English is ‘not playful enough, not serious enough, not surreal enough…’

The voices collected here range from the well-known to the emergent: from Debjani Chatterjee and the weirdly talented renaissance man Peter Blegvad, poet, rock musician and deviser of the Leviathan cartoon strip, to lesser known voices such as those of Rowena Hulton and Pauline Gould. All, however, impress by the fearlessness, zeal with which they take to the task in hand. If this were merely a collection of poems, it would hardly be such a striking collection. There is no single poem that could be singled out as great or memorable; but this is not the point. It is the interplay between the poems and the accompanying notes that makes this collection fascinating and exhilarating.
Will these new forms catch on? Will poets of the twenty-second century find themselves, after the model of Charles Johnson, writing Greenbergs as well as sonnets? Perhaps not. The contributions to this book are dispatches from the road, postcards sent home from journeys in progress, even from dead ends, records of vibrant, divergent attempts to make the crazy play of word and meaning, of sound and image, do something new and surprising; they are testimonies to risks taken and whims pushed through to their conclusion. It is a call for the reader to break with preconceptions about what language is and what it does, and to strike out again for fresh territory.

Hart says in the introduction, ‘I’m thinking perhaps the whimsies in this book will be taken up by writing groups, courses and workshops as well as by individual writers.’ Few readers will come away from this collection without wanting to rise to this challenge. And what more could you hope from a collection of poetry?