‘Don’t Speak to Strangers’, we have long warned our children. The warning haunts the rhyme: stranger/danger. The risk quakes in our oldest stories, and continues to echo in the shadowed spaces between our separate lives. The stranger may send you on the way to great fortune, or lead you astray from safety to pain. In any case, they are likely to steer you from the path you know, puncture the bounds of your small world, contaminate your certainty. We are still afraid of strangers. Usually it’s the fear that strangles us, not the stranger.
The medium of language can draw its referent near, or push it away – make familiar or make strange. Often, good writing is an entanglement of both directions. Any act of writing, any poem, moreover, is an act of speaking to strangers. It is an act, then, of hope, in acknowledgement but also defiance of an inevitable and speechless distance. An act that is far from uncomplicated, far from without risk, but one that must be embraced if we are to see beyond the wall of what we already know, if we are to light new paths, with and toward each other.
The stranger is weird. Or the stranger is simply unfamiliar. The stranger, then, is a gateway to what we don’t yet understand.
In this project five poets speak into a world that is not only rife with stranger-phobia and all of its hazards, but a world in which human speech – that is, the attempt to communicate, however imperfectly, from the quiet depths of experience rather than outsourcing our communication to a mechanism of the artificial that can only refer to the already said, that has no capacity for experiencing or valuing hesitation – is endangered. In this world, poetry becomes even more important as one of the only means we have of reaching or holding, knowing and not knowing, speaking to and for all that is strange within ourselves.
Susanna Galbraith
********
The poets in ‘Don’t Speak to Strangers’ have all approached the theme in different and imaginative ways. We pick people for our pamphlet series, not only because they are powerful poets but also we believe they can respond interestingly to the given theme. We’re probably more known for our magazines and exhibitions but the pamphlets have become a very important part of our oeuvre, for what of a better word. We’ve been doing them for the last five years or so: The Gospel Of The Swamp Things; The Tower, The Moon, The Gun; Strangelets; Don’t Speak To Strangers. A few series have also had a visual art element. They allow us (and the poets) to expand on our themes and concerns.
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for funding Don’t Speak To Strangers and thanks again to them and The Arts Council Of Northern Ireland for funding our pamphlet series over the years. Thanks to all the poets involved and thanks to our Project Editor, Susanna Galbraith for bringing all the strangers together. The next pamphlet series will appear this time next year and will present The Lost Boys.
Gregory McCartney
Don’t Speak To Strangers is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland
Abridged is funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland
