on the ropes or rope-a-doping
O POETRY, WHERE ART THOU?
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
Poetry
is not a mere hobby or an esoteric pursuit with a boutique flavour
meant to appeal to the tiny sodality of the cognoscenti. It
is not a word game to be enjoyed by the higher Scrabblers or
a display of bibelots relished by a clan of rarefied connoisseurs.
On the contrary, poetry is meant to be used, like any created
or invented object that changes how we live, feel and think.
The word “poem” derives directly from Greek poiima,
“a thing made,” something palpable. Interestingly,
the word is translated in Ephesians 2:10 as “workmanship”
and Romans 1:20 as “creation.” Plainly, the word
connotes both the creative and the pragmatic, a material inspiration
that has a purpose.
Most
of the poetry written today, however, is neither visionary nor
useful. It does little to enhance our lives, prompt us to love
the language, entice us to commit phrases to memory, or shed
light upon obscurity. It is like a scribbled irrelevance on
the world’s real business, resembling graffiti on freight
trains. It tends to read mainly like a private reverie on the
nature of insignificance or like a versified blook.
The
language of poetry should reverberate in the imagination. It
is a unique form of expression, cadenced, precise, compelling,
registering as beautiful even if the subject is not. This is
not to say that poetry should be florid, magniloquent or ornate;
as Ezra Pound deposes in his “A Few Don’ts,”
“Use either no ornament or good ornament,” that
is, language which does not detract from the poem’s momentum
or treat the page as a catwalk for strutting its verbiage. In
addition, good poems or parts thereof should be memorable, by
which I don’t mean memorisable in toto, but that lines
and passages are memory-friendly. They sum up aspects of one’s
experience, are recitable, and useful, too, in the sense that
they are portable. We carry them subliminally and find they
can give point and concision to our responses to the world.
This,
I have learned, is now a minority opinion, something like a
dissenting legal brief. I recall the astonishment I felt when
I was poet-in-residence at a Canadian university and taught
a mixed undergraduate/graduate Creative Writing class as part
of my departmental duties. Almost none of my students had read
much poetry, apart from the fashionable drivel of Frank O’Hara,
Charles Olson, John Ashbery and Al Purdy, poetry that oscillates
between the irredeemably prosaic and the proudly indecipherable.
Some had a passing acquaintance with Robert Lowell’s Life
Studies, a volume which accelerated the drift toward confessional
banality. Of the classics, they were sublimely ignorant. When
I reeled off the names of poets I expected them to be familiar
with, at least in passing, and asked them to recite just a few
lines from one or another – Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth,
Keats, Whitman, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Larkin, Wilbur,
Layton – I was met with blank stares.
Their
referential range extended almost exclusively to their poetry-writing
friends, their contemporaries and near-contemporaries, a fallow
field in which to harvest a crop of edible verse. When I recommended
that the best way to learn their trade, to become poets, would
be to go back to the Anglo-Saxons and work their way up to the
present, experimenting with every form and genre native to the
English-language literary tradition – no matter how “archaic”
they might regard these – until one acquired a degree
of disciplinary competence, my students would grow distinctly
nervous, even rebellious. After all, wouldn’t their undeniable
personal gifts, burnished by a little practice and a couple
of Creative Writing seminars, more than suffice?
Politely
suppressing my skepticism, I would then steer them to W.H. Auden’s
Foreword to Joseph Brodsky’s Selected Poems:
“One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be
a well-made verbal object that does honour to the language in
which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant
about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique
perspective.” Sadly, I was tilting at windmills.
Picking
up one or two foreign languages, I suggested, would also be
helpful to them as poets, in at least two ways: seeing how language
influences thinking, and renewing the sense of surprise in how
one’s own language works, its singular capacities for
expression, its idiomatic playfulness and its substratum of
lexical roots to be exploited for meaning. To take one example
from a myriad: When Milton in Book II of Paradise Lost
has his Beelzebub refer to earth’s new inhabitants as
“puny,” he was not only thinking of mankind as paltry
but of the French puis né, “later born,”
created after the angels and the world. Clearly, knowledge of
the language, its borrowings and tributaries, expands creative
opportunities. This is what Montreal poet and critic Carmine
Starnino in an important article on translation sees as an “invigorating
surplus,” as “shadowy accents from a large palette
of foreign vernaculars.”
Similarly,
familiarity with the history of poetry – its origins,
its varieties, its metrics and techniques, its multiple prosodies,
its formative theories, and the work of its best practitioners
– is indispensable, for anyone with serious poetic compulsions.
The anxiety of influence, in Harold Bloom’s coinage, is
a beneficial aspect of composition, forcing the poet to deal
with his or her “strong” and intimidating precursors
in the struggle to achieve an independent voice and presence.
Ancestry is an essential part of identity.
As
with any other complex discipline – consider painting
and music – learning what came before and interiorizing
the rules, intricacies and possibilities of the craft constitutes
a pretty tall order, one which few of us can wholly fulfill.
Excellent poets do not always produce first-rate work. Good
poets can write bad poems. But the desire to achieve true mastery
(to hitch one’s wagon to a star, as Emerson urged in his
timeless essay American Civilization) is an ambition to be respected.
Unfortunately, the material I regularly receive from publishing
houses and poetry journals, consisting of work from first-timers
as well as celebrities in the field, has served only to confirm
my jaundiced view that the state of the art is not state of
the art. Carcanet Press, for example, which bills itself as
the largest poetry publisher in the world, inflicts a new volume
of forgettable verse upon us practically every week. Poetry
itself is hard put to survive the onslaught.
One
wonders why these bearers of an ectopic muse bother to write,
except from a conviction of their own pre-eminence as sensitive
souls endowed by nature with special talents. My folders bulge
with these supposedly luminous productions, very few of which,
to cite Auden from the Introduction to The Poet’s
Tongue, exemplify “memorable speech [that] must move
our emotions or excite our intellect,” or even the attempt
thereat. Admittedly, Auden also wrote in his elegy for W.B.
Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen” –
which it plainly does or can, or he would not have penned these
lines.
To
cite some of my own vade mecums, instances of what poetry can
do when it is not diced prose, selfie-type indulgence or featureless
prattle, and how it can exert a kind of foveal influence on
experience, sharpening one’s perception of meditative
detail and lending lustre and modulus to one’s conversation:
“Then
it is wisdom, as it seems to me,/ To make a virtue of necessity”
(Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” –
an adage Shakespeare pilfered in Two Gentlemen of Verona
); “I could not love thee, Dear, so much/Lov’d I
not honour more” (Richard Lovelace, “To Lucasta,
Going to the Wars”); “But at my back I always hear/Time’s
wingèd chariot hurrying near” (Andrew Marvell,
“To His Coy Mistress”); “A man’s reach
should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?”
(Robert Browning, “Andrea Del Sarto”); “Ah,
love, let us be true/To one another!” (Matthew Arnold,
“Dover Beach”); “I could turn and live with
the animals, they are so placid and self-contained” (Walt
Whitman, Leaves of Grass); “I have been faithful
to thee, Cynara! in my fashion“ (Ernest Dowson, “Non
Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” – a faint
echo of which sounds in Leonard Cohen’s song “Bird
on the Wire” where he sings “I have tried in my
way to be free”; incidentally, the famous movie title,
“Gone with the Wind” comes from Dowson’s poem);
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”
(T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”);
“Ho hum. I am for wit and wakefulness” (Richard
Wilbur, “Ceremony”); “A quiet madman, never
far from tears” (Irving Layton, “The Birth of Tragedy”);
“The soul waits unexplored” (Willis Barnstone, “Night
without Love,” From This White Island); “it pinches
place/From peripheries where places cannot be” (Eric Ormsby,
“Mullein”); “memory/spins like rear wheels
in mud” (A.B. Jackson, “Time,” The Wilderness
Party); “to see himself as the appointed amanuensis/Called
upon to take a lavish dictation” (David Barber, “From
a Burbank Catalogue,” Wonder Cabinet).
Lines
and pericopes from other languages will also become part of
one’s inner anthology. Québécois poet Saint-Denys
Garneau’s Je veux ma maison bien ouverte (“I want
my house well open”), for example, or Greek laureate George
Seferis’ Opou kai na taxidepso, i Ellada me plegonei (“Wherever
I may travel, Greece wounds me”) are cameo epiphanies
expressing sentiments that are variously apt.
These
are fragments that have personal meaning – “fragments,”
as Eliot writes in The Waste Land, “I have shored against
my ruin” – and that arise from time to time on appropriate
occasions. There are innumerable others. Robert Frost and Emily
Dickenson are quotable mines of memorable utterance. As for
Shakespeare, who is the quintessence of the English language,
he could fill an Encyclopedia Poetica.
Of
course, it is not only a question of aphoristic memory that
is in play. Sometimes a long poem will exert a powerful, almost
orchestral effect on one’s mind and spirit: Homer’s
Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Pope’s
The Rape of the Lock, Eliot’s The Waste Land,
Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Berryman’s The
Dream Songs, Merrill’s The Changing Light at
Sandover, or even a more facetious production like Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark. Sometimes a talented jeu
d’esprit will have a similar if less profound effect,
like Philip Terry’s revisionary performances, Dante’s
Inferno and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Readers
will possess their own almanacs of imperishable resonance.
The
point I am making is that real poems have an aura of inevitability
about them, as if they had always been there. Great or good
poetry offers solid content, is impeccably made and lovingly
phrased, will or can become an integral aspect of one’s
being, and remains always useful in how one captures and formulates
the often elusive nature of one’s own experience. And
as Wallace Stevens puts it in his poem with the self-fulfilling
title “It must give pleasure”:
