Walking Backward into the Future

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua 
I walk backward into the future, my eyes fixed on my past

—Māori whakataukī (proverb)

The past is knitted into poetry’s bones. Often, early poems functioned as oral histories, using musicality to support memorization. From this tradition the historical poem genre emerges. But every poem that engages with something that has happened (most poems) could be folded into the genre.

Given history’s widespread presence throughout poetry, the historical poem becomes less a genre and more a lens through which to better understand how our and others’ poems engage with the past.

But why observe poems from this angle? While some cultures look to walk backward into the future, others—often carrying traumatic recent histories—say what’s done is done, best not keep staring. They might ask, why write a historical poem? Why shake the settled dust about? 

History is heavy. It feeds some stories and starves others. It implies a certainty that is certainly false, and pretends to a nonexistent start—and an endpoint. William Faulkner was right to say “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

To craft poetry from history is to pull the past into the present—where its ghost hovers regardless—and to see anew what was, what is now, and what might be. 

38 and the Present Past

History’s ghost isn’t still. It is water, its form changing with the present it is poured into. In 38, the poet Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) pours the history of the Sioux Uprising (1862) into her debut collection, which was created in response to a more recent event: the 2009 US congressional “apology to all Native Peoples.” 

Each stanza of 38 is a single prose sentence. Line by line, Long Soldier tells the story of the Uprising. Combining prose’s declarative statements with poetry’s interrogation of language and image, Long Soldier questions what histories storytelling mediums like poems, films, and academic writing (and congressional statements) do and do not hold.

Activity 1: When_

1. Recall an event of the past that shapes who you are now. For example: a parent’s death, your friend’s birth, the telephone’s invention. Craft a short stanza describing your personal experience of this event or its effects. Begin the description with the word “When.”
   • Bonus: Use exactly 10 words. 
2. Focus on a person the event made you think of, whom you do not directly reference in Step 1. Perhaps someone known, perhaps someone imagined, perhaps some combination. Not writing anything down, eyes closed if possible, focus on this person: Why did you think of them? What is their relationship to the event? To you? 
3. Return to your first description; add to the end of it the phrase “it made me think of you” (“you” being the person of Step 2). Using your thoughts from Step 2, continue the poem, addressed to the “you.”

Hafez and the Space Between

Sudanese poet Safia Elhillo often deals in distance—between languages, homes, generations, as well as between past and present. Her desire to close these gaps is visceral, as is the grief for the endeavor’s fundamental impossibility. 

In this spiral of inevitable loss, the chasm between past and present reveals the historical poem as an imperfect translation of itself. The original is beyond reach but continues to leak through the present.

Across multiple poems, Elhillo closes the gap between her timeline and that of Egyptian pop star Abdel Halim Hafez’s. And yet, Hafez and what he represents remain distant. In Date Night with Abdelhalim Hafez, she writes 

         i can’t go home with you          home is a place in time 
The wound remains open. 

Activity 2: the lyrics do not          translate

1. “Anticipatory nostalgia” describes the sorrow in recognizing an event’s inevitable future end. For example, melancholy welling up during a trip because the trip will eventually end. 
2. Recall an instance where you experienced anticipatory nostalgia. Using the first line of second quarantine with abdelhalim hafez (“the lyrics do not translate”) as a starting point, describe the instance, focusing on the feeling of it. 
3. Describe the present moment—a time beyond the event’s reach. Use language that parallels or butts up against your first description. 
   • If you described a present moment of anticipatory nostalgia, imagine the invisible future beyond it.