THE POETICS of national identity proven by poets of genuine quality — such as the North Americans Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsburg, Gary Snyder, Leroi Jones/Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Jorie Graham, Dianne Wakoski, or the Tang Dynasty Poets, the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Cuban Roberto Fernandez Retamar, or the Guyanese A.J. Seymour — has nothing to do with a narrow rhetorical glorification of political nationalism, but everything to do with perceiving and revealing how, by paying close attention to one’s local and immediate environment or situation, and one’s subjective relation and reaction to it, national identity assumes its true micro/macro scope and vision, where what is written does not serve to shrink our human identity to the size of a fragment of life, but expands it towards its undefined potential for unprejudiced feeling.

Outstanding debut

Instead of poetry being an a priori, readymade system of adopted language and metre into which human experience and observation are asked to adjust, it is this same experience and observation which ferments or distills a poetics from language in its informal state, re-emerging ahead of any academic restriction on the evolution of poetic discovery.
Seymour emerged as a startling new Guyanese poetic voice in 1937 with a collection of over two dozen poems, titled ‘VERSE’. The title immediately notifies us that he is aware of another form of poetics which borders on prose-poetry.
A discovery of such poetics is experienced rather than adopted to writing in the styles of Anglo poetry taught in all the schools and colleges in the colony of British Guiana. In 1937, indeed up to today in Independent Guyana, the average student’s conception of poetry is defined by the formal stylized language of Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Pope, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Eliot, Larkin, etc. In other words, poetry is a convention known in advance of the experience of WRITING as an exploratory experience, which really should not be confused with the platitudinous term ‘experimental’.
Seymour’s ‘Verse’ startled with its divergence from this standard convention before any other local poet, including the talented 19th Century Guyanese poet, Egbert Martin. Yet Seymour did not totally escape the dominant standards of the day set by an imposed British colonial education, or its definition of what is poetry, and what is not.
Like numerous works of local Guyanese poets of today, we notice in Seymour’s ‘Verse’ the absence of references to local streets, neighbourhoods, specific locations, etc, as we quite normally find in countless American, British, French, Latin American, Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty, etc.
Colonial education inhibited pride in one’s local colonial environment. Normalcy was elsewhere, in great foreign nations. This topic, of course, has been touched on by West Indian writers like V.S. Naipaul in his essay, ‘Jasmine’, and Jamaica Kincaid in her essay, ‘On seeing England for the first time’.
Seymour’s ‘Verse’ was criticized pertinently by a local critic in 1937 for not exhibiting things recognizably Guyanese. But in fact, Seymour had referred to his local environment in an amazingly sophisticated and cosmopolitan manner that elevated or integrated his national identity with the cosmic nature of continental America.

Amazing first poem

In the introduction to his Collected Poems, Seymour relates how he came to write his first poem, ‘DANCE’, in 1936 Georgetown while working at the then British Guiana Post Office building, a giant wooden affair in that exquisite Georgetown fashion of huge spacious white-and-cream wooden mansions on wide tree-lined avenues and shaded awning sidewalks, which made Georgetown once the most distinct and beautiful city in the region.
As mid-afternoon sunlight streamed through a window, Seymour heard an old piano playing a sentimental type of Mantovani instrumental in one of the neighbourhood’s nearby then Radio Stations, and words began to sound in his mind.
This is the first stanza of that two-stanza poem:

‘Give me a polished floor, with you, Dear in my arms,
The fragrant scent of you rising like rare perfume
And floating round me in a cloud of sweet incense.
Whether we tread the slow graceful paces of a gentle waltz,
Or pulse to the quicker rhythm of a lilting tune
Your nearness and your warmth as we drift on music,
On crests and hollows of its surge and flow
Will be the charm to change the world
Force Time, and Space to a standstill in an unutterable ecstasy.’

The polished floor his poem begins with is a strong local objective reference to Guyana’s national identity rooted in the pleasant traditional customs of Georgetown’s cosmopolitan life, where the children of households took turns waxing and polishing those floors on Saturday mornings before they could seek recreation.
Seymour begins his poetic career in the least secular manner, where the human pleasure of dancing, of male and female bodies sensually touching suddenly leaps and becomes linked to the universal ‘Charm to change the world’, where limitless concepts like ‘Space’ and ‘Time’ and ‘Music’ are part of a micro/macro human identity contained in national identity.
Seymour’s first collection, ‘Verse’, would lay the foundation for an ever-fresh contemporary Guyanese poetry to evolve, exploring national identity. That is no mere ‘learned’ beginning for a local writer to achieve in 1937, in a lone English-speaking British Colony in South America.