Poems of Succession and ‘The When Time’

with colons to produce emphatic punctuation, to his continued concerns to produce a poetry located within, but not confined to, Guyanese society and topography. ‘In the When Time’ (a title poem of sorts) Carter uses the phrase to refer to a particular period, but this is not an easy reference: “In the when time of the lost search / behind the treasure of the tree’s rooted / and abstract past of a dead seed: / in that time is the discovery”. Locating yourself in time and place in this world is no straightforward matter. To search and discover within Carter’s worldview is to spend time with metaphors of time, place and loss.

In A Georgetown Journal (1972) Andrew Salkey describes the ministerial Carter, but his assessment of Carter’s relationship to ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘ministerial responsibility’ stands equally well for his relationship to poetry:

“[Carter’s] words were tellingly chosen; his person, a gentle, tall, big man, a poet who may yet do a very serious injury to the sterile vocabulary and syntax of bureaucracy.

“I felt, then, that, if he did succeed in giving something new to the style of his particular ministerial responsibility, not only would it subvert the standard image of the other ministries, for the better, but he would have emerged as the pioneer re-discoverer of the long-lost beating heart in anybody’s politics.”

Salkey suggests that Carter had the potential to alter Guyanese, and regional, politics. Georgetown Journal was published in 1972 by New Beacon, and by this time Salkey would have known the outcome of Carter’s political career in Burnham’s government. The poet who could injure the vocabulary and syntax of bureaucracy did not change it, and Carter resigned.

After his resignation, Carter’s return to Bookers made front-page news in the Sunday Argosy. The period also marked a return to publishing poetry. The first poem was ‘Occasion’, which many of us know better as ‘A Mouth is Always Muzzled’. First published in Georgetown’s Sunday Graphic in early 1971 and then again in Savacou, the poem was quickly interpreted as a statement on Carter’s resignation. He consistently denied that there was an intentional link, describing it as “a general statement”, and arguing that he “had written it before, a long time before” his resignation. Adding to the story Al Creighton writes, “the poem, which is dated [in Poems of Succession] as being written in 1969, was not published at the poet’s instigation at all, but by journalist Ricky Singh acting quite on his own initiative.”

Here is an instance where the publication histories can show how a poem can gain a political urgency. It is also important to see that this poem has multiple published lives: as a stand-alone poem and also as part of ‘The When Time’. Thought of as a ‘when time’ poem, it reverberates with the time of its composition and publication, and with every moment of its reading, including this one and those to come in the future:

In the premises of the tongue dwells the anarchy of the ear; In the chaos of the vision resolution of the purpose.

And I would shout it out differently if it could be sounded plain; But a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live.

Rain was the cause of roofs. Birth was the cause of beds. But life is the question asking what is the way to die.

The neat appearance of the three stanzas, with lines of equal length, highlights the poem’s aphoristic aspirations. Carter’s poem continues to reveal the applicability of Wilson Harris’s statement in Tradition, the Writer and Society (1967) about the writer’s task: “the truth of community which he pursues is not a self-evident fact: it is neither purely circumscribed by nor purely produced by economic circumstance”.

‘A Mouth is Always Muzzled’ faces squarely the economic impediments to truthful or ‘plain’ poetic expression: “a mouth is always muzzled / by the food it eats to live”. However, Carter’s poem goes further than these issues of pragmatics. In exploring apparently clear-cut causal links (“rain was the cause of roofs”), Carter ends with the recognition that thinking about causes will not always offer straightforward systems of relationship. Needing to eat will not always explain why we do not speak. The final sentence is devastating and beautiful: “But life is the question asking / what is the way to die”. On a strictly temporal understanding of causality, life causes death. The lines also allow us to read causality in the opposite direction: the inevitability of death causes us to live asking ourselves how to accept that death.

Carter keeps all these readings open, but what seems most pronounced in the poem is not the causal links between life and death, but the twinning of life and death within a continuing present tense that speaks both of the past and the future. Rereading Carter’s 1977 Poems of Succession, we might conclude that even if we can’t define ‘The When Time’, we can recognise that we are always living within it, anticipating it and remembering it, even as we are straining to understand and define it. The phrase reminds us, as Salkey recognised in Carter, that we can be the “re-discoverer of the long-lost beating heart” of the times we have squandered. And how fortunate we are that Carter found his own ‘when time’ to write these poems.