Excerpts from two articles on my own poetry

From ‘Soundings Along the Lines’, published in Visible Language (USA) vol.XXIII no. 1, Winter 1989, pp. 123-132.:-


A poem begins not from ratiocination but from experience • with a fermenting in one’s mind of something, perhaps overtly trivial, one has in some sense lived through. It may be a landscape, an incident in a supermarket, a gesture or a conversation witnessed or recalled, a personal relationship, a dream, or an attunement to some historical or geographical elsewhere; even such an abstract concept as relativity theory, which has metaphoric suggestiveness. And very often an uncalculated collision and fusion in one’s imagination of more than one such detail, probably scattered in real life, triggers things off. A pressure generates, that nags one into taking out pen and paper • and only the actual writing, altering, deleting, redraftings, verbally exploring possibilities, holding yourself alert to further sleights and glints, discovers what, if anything, can be won into a poem, and what the poem needs to be. The whole process is analagous not to constructing from a blueprint, but to extricating a tenuously conceived sculpture entire from the given mass which is its raw material. • and at the end a rubble of discarded phrases and details litters the draft sheets.

In all this, technique and style are not things extrinsic, respectively applies like spanners and chisels to the matter in hand and spread on the poetry’s substance like jam, but are integral to vision; and crucial to getting a poem under way is sensing its appropriate form, rhythms and movement, voice • vital determinants of its perspective and texture.

[Retrospective note: This was written (shortly) before I got a word processor, the keyboard of which has since been, rather than pen and paper, the instrument a creative nag takes me to. The process remains essentially the same; but (libraries and others interested in seeing manuscript evidence of how a poem comes to be will lament this) the chipped-away details, discarded drafts, deletions and amendments and false tries, no longer litter anything visible but all get vaporised in the course of writing; in some cyberspace limbo, these poor rejects perhaps still whimper for attention.]



Excerpts from ‘Writing Poetry’, published in Critical Quarterly vol. 24 no. 1, Spring 1982, pp. 2-16.:-


'I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity,' wrote Ezra Pound about poetry in his essay ‘A Retrospect’. The impulse to find for something its most precise and telling definition is is a measure of its worth; one’s caring for worth intuited amid life’s disorderly occurrence triggers the effort.

     * * *

Among the incoherences and contingency of daily life we all perforce slide towards lazy, formulaic or over-hasty utterance. I sit here at a cluttered desk attampting this, other awarenesses flickering like fishtails in my mind: thoughts on King Lear for an imminent class; administrative trivia, and letters to write; tonight’s chess fixture’ fragments of lunchtime’s conversation about historical studies; wondering whether I shouldn’t be marking essays instead of doing this now; not to speak of my personal life; and all this within the bewildering sea of life in general. Except that that was then, at first-draft stage, and some of the contextual details would be quite different were I to itemise them as I finalise this essay now.
     Among and out of all which, when possibility shapes itself and one can for long enough retain imaginative perspective, one writes poems…
     Poetry, then, an art expressing human vision and not some mere design of aural or visual wallpaper, utters matters central to life, is not a cosmetic upon it. Doing it, if a special activity, emerges from the non-specialist hankering at the core of everyone to sort from inchoate experience some pattern of significance however incomplete or transient. Writing is a special extension of the distinctive human process.

     * * *

Imaginative literature is not immune to cliché, only more alert to it, aided by its distinguishing feature as utternce indicaated by Wallace Stevens: Apoem is the cry of its occasion, / part of the fes itself, and not about it.’

     * * *

The impulse began for me when I was about fifteen. No thanks to formal schooling, where I recoiled from ‘classics’ prescribed by those who had designs on me… But I had otherwise been an omniverous reader, aged ten a local oddity jaywalking with a ball at my feet as well as a book open before my nose. The lush romantic sensations of adolescence topped things up to a point where I knew I ‘had to write’. And while fragmentary attempts upon my own experience helplesslyextruded lush romanticism, my fascinated discovery of how words variously shaped and coloured the world they apprehended in the writings of Thurber, Perelman, Runyon, Sellar and Yeatman, D.B. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Beachcomber’, and after I got clear of humourists Samuel Johnson’s prose, transfigured my school ‘compositions’ on run-of-the-mill set topics into a serial anthology of loving pastiches. Serious content I had a wise instinct to defer. Wordsworth could not phrase ‘the sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion’ when it was actually doing it in his adolescence. But verbal styles and idioms for escited trying-on presented themselves in richer array than fashions in the Croydon clothes-shops. Poetry came to matter to me intensely also:initiated by my excited discovery of Keats during the summer holidays after GCE O-levels. His ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ (first perused in Ashburton Park, where nightly promise of the arrival of certain girls infused the poem’s languorous narrative of romantic elopement) seemed to consummate our language’s possibilities for sumptuousness, and a line such as ‘And lucent syrops tinct with cinammon’ was scrumptious enough to eat. A hare was started, rapidly leading me through many other and different poetic satisfactions: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone so many…’
          The journal I then kept became a repository for notes on what to write and how. On effects and polarities of light: ‘light/dark; radiant/dull; refracting/absorbing; intermingling/contrasting; indistinct/vivid.’ And: ‘Notice textures, spaces, proportions, notion (Hills push and roll).’ And so forth.
     Meanwhile, to get on with such serious stuff,… and wanting, as I then formulated it, to throw myself into the sea of life to discover if I could swim rather than sink, rather than be conveyor-belted to university I had quit school during my sixth-form course, and embarked on a reader’s equivalent of a solitary pub-crawl, while throughyears of bedsitter life working at a variety of clerical and manual jobs.

     * * *

One hopes also that a poem may digest (just biting off is not enough) more than it chews; that words will be gifted to catch somethong beyond the words’ mesh. Something one cannot calculate, only collaborate with. I recognise such creative serendipity in poems as varied as Stevens’s ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, Hopkins’s ‘Spring’, Larkin’s ‘Money’. It was Shakespeare’s Midas touch. The effect arises from the fact that poetic language is not merely instrumental to theme. Its creative energies can loop out to encompass things beyond the declared content. In his poem ‘Snow’ Louis MacNeice, wanting to state that (a) life is hererogeneous and (b) that he feels exhilarated about this, magically comes up with, ‘I peel and portion / A tangerine and spit the pips and feel / The drunkenness of things being various.’ His phrasing, creating activity as image, fusing concept and response, blazes resononaces.

     * * *

The close affinity I feel with Edward Thomas has its part in the history of my own writing. When I arrived at Oxford to take up a postrgraduate scholarship that had unanticipatedly been put in my way (having just completed a BA degree at Leicester I was working on the railways with no notion what to do), the University sensitively let me spend some time just browsing around while looking for a ‘subject’. Thus I chanced to read Thomas’s poetry for the first time, got intensely involved, and began a critical study of his work for my doctoral thesis. This never got finished. Having hitherto written mostly written prose fiction (shown to no-one, and discarded), I now started writing poems. The first I sent out, to the Anglo-Welsh Review, was titled ‘A Landscape for Edward Thomas’, and was published. At that time, though I was due for a third year at Oxford, having enjoyed a first holiday in Ireland in the summer of 1967, I applied for and was offered my present university teaching post in Coleraine in NorthernIreland. I felt the best justice I could do to Thomas was to follow the example he set (sadly so late in his war-truncated life, and in such different circumstances), and give writing poems priority over prose criticism. I wrote to Oxford and disenrolled myself.
     I used the term ‘affinity with’ for the relationship I felt, and still do, to Edward Thomas’s poetry, not (though I am clearly acknowledging a debt) ‘influence by’… ‘Influence’ is a pet notion of academics,who busy themselves constructiong genealogies of it… But, as often happens withinthe hum range, it may be that poets just have something temperamentally in common with each other. It was a matter of recognition when I read Edward Thomas. I was twenty-six at the time, and already very mush myself.

[Retrospective Note. Some of the foregoing, and the way it is put, might in the twenty-first century strike some as a bit grandiloquent in its assumptions that poetry and its responsibilities are important, and central to our human enterprise. I still agree with its substance. For a long while, since at any rate Wordsworth and Coleridge (I could go back much further), there has been an assumption, among poets and readers, that the essential aim and point of poetry (allowing that light and 'occasinal' verse also have their real validity) was to enact and embody in memorable language exploration into human experience. This might be profound and ambitious, or small-scale; but it has been what poetry is for, and whence its satisfactions derive. Through the great Victorian and twentieth-century poets, strikingly individual and different as they are in their preoccupations, ways of going about poetry, and verbal textures (and of course one doesn’t have to be solemn to be serious), this assumption held, a tacit consensus linking Tennyson and Walt Whitman, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin. It persists, in Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney.

But in the cutural melt-down of recent decades, all this may be under threat. People want instant and easy gratification rather than challenge; often, to be 'performed' at by poets rather than to read them. The ‘poetry scene’ has blossomed with entirely different specimens. The poet as gagster and anecdotalist (but most are no good even at being funny, were they billed as stand-up comics rather than under the rapt-hush-inducing banner POETRY they would be howled off the stage). Then there wa the notion that 'Poetry is the new rock-and-roll’ (won’t the old do?). Poets ‘in residence’ in schools, supermarkets, prisons, banks, here in Norfolk some years ago in ‘refuse disposal’, even on trains. (Now, if on a train I’m deep in Yeats, and someone such creature jabs me in the chest insisting that I attend to him doing his thing…)

A lot of all this arises from craving for audience. I'm all in favour of poetry reaching 'audience' - readers, and also people listening to a poet reading. INdeed, a poem completes itself in communication: its full responsive reception by others attaending to it. But the instant knee-jerk face-to-face reaction 'performers' tend to seek neither courts nor allows that.

Too commonly, at poetry readings/'performances', instead of poetry enlarging or challenging the aassumptions of its audience, the poet sucks up to them, giving them what they want because they know it already. (Poet: 'So there I was sat in Mooney’s in Dublin / with a pint of stout and / a beef sandwich…' Audience (thinking, Yeah, been there, done that, why, this is my life!): ‘You’re a great poet!’ All very nd cosy.)

It is not that such sorts of poets are trying to fulfil the old high aspirations and failing (as poets have always done). They are not even trying anything like that, neither knowing nor wishing to know about such stuff. Theirs is a different enterprise entirely.

Of course, there are current poets still writing the real stuff. One can only trust that, as in the past, Time the great sifter will sort things out, its tides wash the detritus away. Yet our present differs from previous times. 'The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace' - since Ezra Pound published those lines in Hugh Selway Mauberley in 1920, the affliction they identify has become almost overwhelmingly more prevalent, in our own ge of dumbing-down, 'celebrity'-culture, and 'reality'-television. Our new technologies and media enable and foster all this, and on a scale never possible, or even conceivable, before. And it infexts our arts, as well as all other areas of life, pushing poetry towards being just another fashion-driven, istantly disposable commodity.

Yet surely, even in an inimical context, the central human longings, fears, joys, curiosities, the hankering after eternal verities and to clarify particular experience and why certain things have moved us, continue. For that, such things, are above all else what it is to be human. And the impulse to shape them into memorable verbal contraptions, the poetry which matters, will continue.]