The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (47 page)

Alone she cuts and binds the grain…

Graves pointed out (with some glee as I remember, I am afraid I don’t have a copy of his essay to hand and haven’t been able to locate it in the library) that Wordsworth tells us the same thing four times in five lines–that the girl is not sharing her society with anyone else. She is
single
,
solitary
,
by herself
and
alone
. A needlessly extravagant telegram, then. Therefore bad poetry. Well, yes. In his callous way Graves is right, of course, but only right according to the terms of his own definition. I could erect a theory that all poets whose surnames rhyme with Waves are dunderheads. Ha! Robert Graves, you are a dunderhead, I have proved it. The fact is, the Telegram Theory is nothing like good enough. We all know that repetition is a valuable and powerful rhetorical and poetical tool. What happens to ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall’ and ‘Break, break, break’? Sometimes profusion and repetition are the very point. That is why we have words like anaphora, antimetabole, epanalepsis, epanodos, epistrophe, palilogy, polyptoton, repetend and rentrement among many other technical rhetorical words for kinds of repetition. Certainly I would agree that in most good lines of poetry the thing said could not be said
any other way
, but that does not necessarily mean that each word or phrase must be semantically different. One man’s pleonasm is another man’s plenty.

Commandments that categorically insist upon contemporary language and syntax are just as open to doubt as Graves’s telegram rule. Keats himself, as I have mentioned, abandoned
Hyperion
because he hated all the old-fashioned
inversions
‘his features stern’ for ‘his stern features’, for example, or ‘For as among us mortals omens drear/Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he–’ instead of ‘For as drear omens fright and perplex us mortals, so he shuddered’ and so on. Wrenched syntax, he felt, is no better than wrenched metre, or wrenched rhyme. Of course, he is generally speaking right, as we saw all too clearly with McGonagall. But here is a line from that definitively modern poem
The Waste Land
:

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives

Why not ‘He, the carbuncular young man, arrives’? It would actually scan better, perfect iambic pentameter with a trochaic first foot, in fact. So if Eliot has not wrenched the syntax to fit the metre, why did he write it the way he did? T. S. Eliot of all people, so old-fashioned? I could not possibly explain why the line is so musical and funny and perfect and memorable when inverted and so feeble and uninteresting when not. It just is. I feel the same about Frost’s unusual syntax in ‘Mending Wall’:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

These are the kinds of lines non-singers like me chant to ourselves in the shower instead of belting out ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Here is Wallace Stevens in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ with a wondrous pair of double negatives:

There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill,

…and then

A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

Poetic Diction is about two things, it seems to me: taste and concentration. The concentration of language Graves talks about in his telegram game, yes, but also the concentration of mind that never gives up on arranging and rearranging words and phrases until taste tells you that they are right. Sometimes, of course, they will come right first go but often they take work. Much as you might walk briskly to work every day to get fit instead of using a treadmill and getting nowhere, so poets can work on their poetic diction every day, not just when they are sitting down with pen in hand practising sonnets.

B
EING
A
LERT TO
L
ANGUAGE

Be always alert to language: it is yours as a poet in a special way. Other may let words go without plucking them out of the air for consideration and play, we do not. Every word has its own properties. There is the obvious distinction in meaning between a word’s denotation and its connotation. For example, odour, fragrance, aroma, scent, perfume, pong, reek, stink, stench, whiff, nose and bouquet all denote smell, but they by no means connote that meaning in the same way. The more aware you are of the origins, derivations, history, evolution, social usage, nuances and character of words the better. Their
physical
qualities are as important to a poet as their meaning–their weight, density, euphony, quantity, texture and appearance on the page. Their
odour
, in fact. And as with odours, notice what physically occurs when words are combined. Not just the obvious effects of alliteration, consonance and assonance (my ‘occurs’ being close to ‘words’ just now is a rather infelicitous assonance, for example. Perhaps I should have used ‘happens’ instead) but be alive to more subtle collisions too: ‘west’ and ‘side’ are easy words to say, but who doesn’t say ‘Wesside Story’ dropping the ‘t’? ‘Black glass’ takes extra time to say because of the contiguity of the hard ‘c’ and ‘g’–this kind of effect, whether euphonious or cacophonous, is something you should always be aware of. You cannot pay too much attention to every property of every word in your poems.

Imagine the intensity of painters’ understanding and knowledge of all the colours in their paintbox. There is no end to the love affair they have with their paints, no limit to the subtleties and alterations achieved by mixing and combining. Just because we use them every day, it is no reason to suppose that we do not need to pay words precisely the same kind of attention. I believe we have to be
more
alert. Colours have a pure and absolute state: cerulean is cerulean, umber is umber, you can even measure their frequency as wavelengths of light. Words have no such purity or fixity. So be alert to poetic diction past and present, but be no less alive to the language of magazines, newspapers, radio, television and the street.

I do not mean that in your engagement with language you should become the kind of ghastly pedant who writes in to complain about confusions between ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and so on. Irritating as such imprecision can be, we all know perfectly well that when we see or hear letters damning them they only make us think how sad the writers of them are, how desperate to be thought of as knowledgeable and of account. No, I certainly do not mean to suggest that you need to become a grammarian or adopt an academic approach to language. Keats and Shakespeare were far from academic, after all. Keats left formal studies at fourteen and trained for a career in medicine. Wordsworth did go to university, where he studied not classical verse and rhetoric, but mathematics. Yeats went to art school. Wilfred Owen as a boy worked as a lay assistant in a church and had no further education at all. Tennyson was educated till the age of eighteen by his absent-minded clergyman father. Browning, too, was educated by his father and left university after one term. Edgar Allan Poe managed a year at his university before running off to join the army. Shelley was expelled from Oxford (for atheism, rather splendidly) and Byron was more interested in his pet bear and his decadent social life at Cambridge than in his studies. But they were all passionately interested in the life of the mind and above all in every detail and quality of language that could be learned and understood.

English is a language suited to poetry like no other. The crunch and snap of Anglo-Saxon, the lyric romanticism of Latin and Greek, the comic, ironic fusion yielded when both are yoked together, the swing and jazz of slang…the choice of words and verbal styles available to the English poet is dazzling.

Think of cityscapes. In London, thanks to a mixture of fires, blitzes, ludicrous mismanagement and muddled planning, the medieval, Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and modern jostle together in higgledy-piggledy confusion. The corporate, the ecclesiastical, the imperial and the domestic coexist in blissful chaos. Paris, to take the nearest capital to London, was planned. For reasons we won’t go into, it managed to escape the attentions of the
Luftwaffe
. It remains a city of grand, tasteful boulevards laid out in a consistent style where, with the exception of a few self-consciously designed contemporary projects, the modern, commercial, vulgar and vernacular are held at bay beyond the outer ring of the city, like barbarians at its gates.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane: each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of
franglais
and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

This is partly what is meant by the
flexibility
of English: it is more than a question of the thousands more words available to us, it is also a question of the numberless styles, modes, jargons and slangs we have recourse to. If by poetry we mean something more than the decorative, noble and refined, then English is a perfect language for poetry. So be alert to it at all times.

II

Poetic vices–ten habits to acquire–getting noticed–Poetry Today, a final rant–goodbye

Poetic Vices

L
AZINESS
is the worst vice a poet can have. Sentimentality, cliché, pretension, falsity of emotion, vanity, dullness, over-ambition, self-indulgence, word-deafness, word-blindness, clumsiness, technical ineptitude, unoriginality–all of these are bad but they are usually subsets and products of laziness. Laziness in prose you can get away with. There are, it is true, Flaubert-style novelists who search for ever for
le mot juste
, but they take their inspiration from poets and try to claim for novels precisely the same linguistic diligence and perfectionism that is an absolute essential in poetry. The real reason why McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge’ is such a disaster is that he did not have the first idea how much
labour
goes into the making of a poem. I do not believe that he was even dimly aware of the extremes of effort and concentration that poets a hundred thousand times more talented poured into their work. Much easier to indulge in the belief that the world is against you, that everyone else is a member of some club whose doors are closed to you because you didn’t go to the right school or have the right parents, than to realise that you
simply do not work hard enough
.

The first Golden Rule you signed up to when you started to read this book emphasised the necessity of taking time with poetry, as a reader and a maker of it. I emphasise that rule again with redoubled force.

I have shown you some techniques and forms of poetry, and discoursed a little on diction, but I am in no position to tell you how to write poetry that will provide you with an audience for your work. Beyond technique, the call to concentration, linguistic awareness, hard toil and the taking of time, with all the benefits of developed taste and judgement that these will bring, there is, of course, such a thing as talent. I cannot give you that and only you can judge whether you possess enough of it to make poems that others will want to read. For me, the pleasure of the thing is enough. Here, though, for what little they are worth, are a few more things to consider before we say goodbye.

T
EN
H
ABITS OF
S
UCCESSFUL
P
OETS THAT
T
HEY
D
ON
’
T

T
EACH
Y
OU AT
H
ARVARD
P
OETRY
S
CHOOL, OR
C
HICKEN

V
ERSE FOR THE
S
OUL
I
S FROM
M
ARS BUT
Y
OU
A
RE
W
HAT

Y
OU
R
EAD IN
J
UST
S
EVEN
D
AYS OR
Y
OUR
M
ONEY
B
ACK

Concentration and total commitment to language are far and away the most important qualities needed for poetry writing. These other pieces of advice I have for you, hedged about with ifs and buts as they are, offer little more than obvious common-sense observations. They may seem too simple to be attractive. A complicated regimen is easy and (for a while) fun to follow, but the plain dictum
don’t eat so much
, while an infinitely better way of losing weight than any diet ever devised, is much harder and usually less fun.

1. 1. C
   ONSIDER YOUR READERS
   : it is only good manners to do so. Are you giving them a good time? Are you confusing them, upsetting them, boring them? Maybe you are and this is part of a deliberate poetic strategy. Just be sure you know what you are doing. This leads to my next suggestion…
   
2. 2. K
   EEP A JOURNAL
   : sometimes only by talking to ourselves do we discover what we are up to. ‘Today I wrote a poem that was confusing and incoherent. But it was what I meant. Or was it? Hm. I must go back to it.’
   
3. 3. C
   ONSIDER THE VOICE OF YOUR POEM
   : who is speaking? You or a pretend authorial version of you?
   
4. 4. R
   EAD POETRY
   : I did warn you that I was going to be obvious. Most popular musicians I know are fans first and foremost, owners of enormous record collections. I do not know of any poets who are not readers of poetry. You are allowed to
   hate
   some poets and be indifferent to others. But get to know as many as you can. Variety is important or you end up as an imitative shadow of your favourites.
   
5. 5. T
   RUTHFULNESS
   : are the emotions (disgust, joy, anger, terror and so on) in your poem
   really felt
   , or are you feigning them for effect? Readers can tell bullshit and pretence as easily as we can detect it in someone we meet at a party. Of course, artifice is a part of poetry but again, be sure you know what you are doing.
   
6. 6. C
   ONTROL
   : ‘All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. Which is
   absolutely not
   the same as saying that
   all
   genuine feeling produces bad poetry, or that all
   good
   poetry springs from
   false
   feeling. But genuine feeling is not
   enough
   in poetry any more than it is in painting or music. Genuine feeling which isn’t pressed into some sort of shape is a tantrum or a sentimental mess.
   Negative capability
   and the
   objective correlative
   are (rather hackneyed) phrases you may want to check out, via the glossary and your own researches.
   
7. 7. E
   NJOY YOURSELF
   : poetry might be a need in you, but it should not be a penance. Unless you believe yourself to be cursed by an unwanted vocation, the labour involved should be one of love.
   
8. 8. F
   ORGIVE YOURSELF
   : everyone writes shit from time to time. Don’t get all hysterical about it. Keep your poetic toys in the pram and start again when you feel better. Write some light and stupid verse to take the taste away. 9 T
   HE MUSE IS CAPRICIOUS
   : the Greek idea of a real, living Muse whispering in your ear is a good one and it works quite well. Sometimes it truly is as if we are inspired. The work flows, we concentrate yet we are supremely relaxed, beta and theta waves are active in the brain. We are in a true creative state–the Muse is at our shoulder. BUT: next morning we may well discover that she has poured not wine but ullage into our ears. You never know with her. Our own judgement cannot go to sleep. It is the same with writing when under the influence of drugs or alcohol: we may think they are giving us poetic nectar but it can turn out next morning to be prosaic arse-gravy.
   
9. 9. S
   AY IT OUT LOUD
   : however much your poetry is meant for the page, most readers will
   say
   it, out loud or in their heads. Read your work to yourself all the time, even as you are composing it.