The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (45 page)

I suppose ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’ qualifies as
CONCRETE POETRY
, a term that came out of a movement in São Paolo in the 1950s. Its manifesto states that

the old formal syllogistic-discursive foundation, strongly shaken at the beginning of the century, has served again as a prop for the ruins of a compromised poetic, an anachronistic hybrid with an atomic heart and a medieval cuirass.
¹⁹

So there. Ezra Pound and the Imagists were concrete poets
avant la lettre
: Pound was influenced by the writings of T. E. Hulme and by Ernest Fenollosa’s pioneering work,
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
Pound (Fenollosa’s literary executor) found himself inspired by the idea that the Chinese ideogram, rather than displaying its meaning
syntagmatically
(rolling it out phonetically and phonemically in sequence as this sentence does) actually
contained
meaning, held it in one visual unit. This tallied with Hulme’s idea of reality being
process
. ‘There are no nouns in the universe,’ he had declared, ‘only verbs.’ The upshot of this–and academics will forgive my blithe generalities–was to attempt poems that were kinds of ideogram. The best-known example is ‘In a Station of the Metro’ written in 1911:

Pound went into some detail concerning the composition of this poem in an influential article called ‘Vorticism’. He had been overwhelmingly moved by the sight of a succession of beautiful women and children on the Paris Metro, ‘and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion,’ he wrote, until

…that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation…not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that–a ‘pattern’, or hardly a pattern, if by ‘pattern’ you mean something with a ‘repeat’ in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour…. I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

The new poetics suggested by Pound’s thoughts on colour, image, quiddity and ideogram engendered a new kind of ‘iconographic’ poetry which culminated in his cantos, most especially
The Pisan Cantos
, notable for their use of hieroglyphs and ideograms and, so far as most of us are concerned, their almost total unreadability. There is huge gusto and bravado in their best moments, but much to make the reader feel foolish and unlettered.

I am not here to attempt a history lesson, nor am I qualified to do so, but I mention all of this as a background to the concepts that have propelled much modern poetry, most of these ideas being osmotically absorbed by succeeding generations of course, not acquired intellectually: but that holds true of our grasp of, for example, gravity, evolution, the subconscious mind and genetics. Our understanding of much in the world is more poetic than noetic. We let others do the work and take their half-understood ideas for a ride, all unaware of the cognitive principles that gave birth to them. That those principles and their corollaries would have shocked and perplexed us had we lived in other times is interesting but irrelevant for our purposes. You do not have to understand Faraday’s and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories of light to operate a light switch, or even to become a professional lighting designer.

The upshot of Imagism, Vorticism, Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Constructivism, Acmeism, Futurism, Dadaism and all the other -isms that flooded art in the twentieth century was to allow a new kind of poetry, of which concrete poetry is one, the work of cummings another. Such practices now inform the works of thousands of poets around the globe. Since, unlike traditional metrical poetry, they descend from conscious ideas rather than techniques evolved (by way of music and dance) out of the collective unconscious of three millennia, their genesis did seem worth a small excursion.

The point that seems to me most relevant is the notion of
quiddity
or whatness. I mentioned this when we were looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had been deeply influenced by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus and his concept of
haecceity
, or
thisness
. Novels can develop stories and character and much else besides, but poetry uniquely gives itself the opportunity to enter the absolute truth of a phenomenon (whether it be a feeling, an object, a person, a process, an idea or a moment) through language itself. How many times will you, as poet, look at a fly, watch a tap dripping, examine an inner feeling, listen to the wind and grow immensely frustrated at the inability of language exactly to capture it, to
become
it? All the stock phrases and clichés enter your frantic mind, all the footling onomatopoeia, rhymes and rhythmic patterns that we have heard before and none of them will do. Painters, too, look from their subject to the tip of their paintbrush and their palette of paints and despair.

That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all.

So poor J. Alfred Prufrock whines, and so do we.

Aside from Pound, the works of H. D. (Hilda) Doolittle are perhaps the purest conscious attempt to adhere to the imagist project: here is her ‘Sea Poppies’:

your stalk has caught root

among wet pebbles

and drift flung by the sea

and grated shells

and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,

fire upon leaf,

what meadow yields

so fragrant a leaf

It fascinates me that a medievalist like Hopkins and a modernist like Doolittle could both arrive at so similar a poetic destination from such utterly opposing points of origin. Doolittle’s technique and effect are wildly different from those of Hopkins, of course, but I am sure you can feel the same striving to enter the identity of experience.

S
ILLY,
S
ILLY
F
ORMS

Enough, already. There are ludic and ludicrous forms, a world away from ideology and ideogram, which play on syllable length, shape and pattern, some of them bafflingly specific. What is the point of
RICTAMETERS
, one is forced to wonder? They are poems in the shape of a diamond.

In stricter versions (as if there is any reason to be strict about so childish a form. I mean
ferrankly
…) the diamond is structured by a syllable count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2. A variation is the
DIAMANTE
where the purpose, as in some absurd weekend puzzle magazine, is to go from one object or phenomenon to an opposite or complementary one, by way of a succession of related words.

wolf

grey shaggy

slavering howling ripping

violent hunter innocent quarry

frisking grazing bleating

white woolly

lamb

The ‘rule’ is that the second line is composed of related adjectives and the third of related
participles
; the first two words of the middle line are nouns or nominal phrases connected to the top of the diamond, the next pair connect to the bottom. You then repeat the process symmetrically down to your end-word. The whole thing is daffy and hardly qualifies as a form for poetry, but I include it anyway. Something to do on long train journeys.

Another bizarre form, bizarrely popular if the Internet is anything to go by, is to be found in
RHOPALICS
. A rhopalic line is one in which each successive word has one more syllable than its predecessor.
This sentence cleverly exemplifies rhopalicism
. There are variations, like increasing each word in a line letter by letter (
I am not sure about trying variant rhopalics
) and decreasing rather than increasing the count (
stultifying staggering tediously complete bloody waste, fuck off…
). Or there is this kind of thing:

My feelings and emotions

In their restless motions

Seethe and swell like oceans

Of the kind a Stoic shuns,

Better find some calmer ’uns

The dwindling but aurally congruent rhyme-returns yielded from
emotions, motions, oceans, shuns
and
’uns
constitute
DIMINISHING RHYME
, which may seem arid and futile, but George Herbert, the deeply religious and verbally playful poet whose ‘Easter Wings’ we have seen, used them with great seriousness in his poem ‘Paradise’:

I bless Thee, Lord, because I grow

Among the trees, which in a row

To Thee both fruit and order ow.

Certain other pointless forms demand a prescribed diminishing or ascending syllable count. The
TETRACTYS
asks the poet to produce five lines of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 10 syllables. Where’s the
tetra
in that, for heaven’s sake, you may be wondering. I believe it may be to do with a ‘mystic tetrad’ in Pythagoreanism and kabbalism and some arse-dribble or other connected to Tarot card layout and the four elements. 1+2+3+4=10 is the sum on which Ray Stebbing, the form’s inventor, based the poetic tetractys. No doubt he meant well by it. Tetractys, appropriately enough, is pronounced to rhyme with
wet practice
.

who choose

to compose

tetractyses

are welcome to them, far as I’m concerned

and I really cannot see the virtue

in flipping them:

too heavy

on top

no?

Mr Stebbing is a serious and accomplished poet, and if he believes his form to be the new native haiku then I wish him well. An even arsier form is the
NONET
:

death

to those

who compose

such wastes of breath

they have no graces

at least in my poor eyes

they suggest useless traces

of ancient forms more pure and wise

when people start to count, true verse dies.

The syllabic count starts at one and increases until it reaches nine. Mine, in desperation, rhymes. Syllabics? Silly bollocks, more like.

A
CROSTICS

A
CROSTICS
have been popular for years; nineteenth-century children produced them instead of watching television–those who were lucky enough not to be sent down chimneys or kidnapped by gangs of pickpockets did, anyway.

S
o you want a dedication then?

F
or you I’ll do my very best

R
ead the letters downwards, darling, then

Y
ou’ll see I’ve passed your little test.

What is going on below, you might wonder?

age is a

real bugger

so few years

ending up white

wrinkled weak as straw

incontinence comes and i

piss myself in every way–stop

eternity’s too short too short a time

That is a
DOUBLE ACROSTIC
, both the
first
and
last
letters of each line spell out the same defiance and physical disgust. I haven’t highlighted the letters; you can trace them down yourself. In case you are wondering, I have not reached that stage yet–it is an imaginative leap, we are allowed those from time to time: all functions working smoothly last time I checked. You could in theory spell words down from the middle of a line–this is called a
mesostich
and is just plain silly.

The French seem to be the people most interested in acrostics and other poetic wordplay. Salomon Certon wrote a whole sonnet omitting the letter ‘e’: this is known as a
LIPOGRAM
.
Not
the same root as liposuction, as it happens, despite the apparent similarity of meaning. These days, you might feel, a poem that never uses an ‘I’ would be a real achievement…

P
ARONOMASIA
is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these: ‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.