Driving Rhythm

My previous work situation (aka ‘job’) obliged me – for the first time in my life – to drive a considerable distance several times a week.  The subsequent enforced intimacy with the A1(M) entailed by this necessity was made far less tedious by the repeated playing of a double cd of narrative verse, featuring, among others, Goblin Market, The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  Nestled alongside the tremendous pleasure these poems gave me, (powerful enough to counteract the malign influence of The Black Cat Roundabout) was a sense of embarrassment over how little I knew some of these literary landmarks, my ignorance including being unaware of the origin of the phrase, taken by H.E. Bates as the title for a Larkin novel, ‘Fair stood the wind for France’ in the poem Agincourt by Michael Drayton (1563–1631).

One of the selected poems with which I at least used to be reasonably familiar was The Eve of St Agnes, and I began to pay particular attention - as Peterborough alternately reeled me in and flung me back home – to the themes of music and sound in this stunning work.  I offer below a few observations (which I certainly would not dignify by presenting as anything like cogent analysis) that may stimulate you to re-read the poem, and responses to which I’d be delighted to see.

Let’s start with the owl who (to purloin and entirely misuse a Keatsian phrase) practices a little negative capability, in that it is described at the poem’s opening as being ‘a-cold’ despite ‘all his feathers’.  As literature in general and poetry in particular usually dwell upon the sound rather than appearance of owls, Keats’ unusual perspective emphases the eerie silence of his scene, which is also expressed in the mute sheep which next take the stage: ‘And silent was the flock in woolly fold’.

A little later, when the wretched Beadsman, having already demonstrated his chronically inflated sense of empathy by imagining how cold ‘the sculptur’d dead’ must be feeling, is ‘Flatter'd to tears’ by the sound of music, an invitation to gaiety which he must ignore, in order to pursue his literally mortifying ascetic vocation.  ‘Music’s golden tongue’ is therefore an at least equivocal phrase here, and the negative connotations of music and sound are reinforced by Keats observing of the poor deranged chap that: ‘already had his deathbell rung; The joys of all his life were said and sung.’

The ‘golden tongue’ is nicely echoed in what I think is one of Keats’ most powerful and successful lines. ‘The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide’ is extraordinary. The precision of ‘snarling’, to both evoke the timbre of the trumpets and enhance the ominous quality of the setting, is hugely pleasing.  If medieval trumpets were not literally silver, the line also contains an excellent piece of synaesthesia. If they were, I apologise. A subsequent simile that never fails to send voluptuous chills through my soul occurs as Keats describes how Madeline does not hear ‘The music, yearning like a God in pain’, another matchless evocation of how music (and all art) is most powerful when expressing suffering.

On a somewhat lighter note (ahem), Keats drops in a cosy piece of self-reference when he describes the song that Madeline’s suitor plays to the former while she sleeps as: ‘an ancient ditty, long since mute, In Provence call'd, "La belle dame sans mercy”’. But even this has a mournful undertone, with the assertion that the weight of time and history have buried the song.

There is, I am sure, a lot more to observe, and better joined-up-thinking to be done. I’m sure there are racks-full of brilliant theses on the use of music in this poem and Keats’ poetry as a whole, but the joys of this little contribution are said and sung.

Things ain't what they used to be

I have a fondness for literary movements - be they critical or creative - as a kind of book world equivalent to football teams.  I want to see gangs of adherents to rival schools, eyeing each nervously across the floor of The British Library, vicious metaphors and sharpened similes waiting to be launched with ruthless accuracy, with the Cultural Materialists chanting:

'You're a bourgeois product of the class dynamic'

and the Deconstructionists replying, a little smugly:

'Hah! That statement negates its own attempt at meaning'.

There could be scarves, t-shirts, and a whole range of associated paraphernalia; I think, in fact, this could be my route to entrepreneurial glory.

The point is, I was recently expanding my meagre knowledge about the Oulipo movement (from Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; or workshop of possible literature); that merry band of (originally) French pranksters who imposed a range of unusual rules and restrictions on their writing, in order to bother the envelope of form a bit and see what emerged;  (that was a rough distillation of a few slightly more technical explanations).  Perhaps the best-known example is Georges Perec's  La disparition; a novel written without the benefit of a single letter 'e', and translated into English (by Gilbert Adair) likewise, as A Void.

One of Oulipo's recipes for making poetry was to start with an existing piece of verse, select a dictionary and substitute the major nouns in the original piece with those seven nouns along from them in said lexicon. This technique is called, with insouciant Gallic mysticism, N+7 (or, S+7 for 'substantive').  Using this simple formula, you can create brand new poetry in the comfort of your own garret (no glue or nails required).  Here's one I prepared earlier; I used Collins Concise Dictionary Plus, and took the liberty of modifying one verb to agree with the respective arriving noun. The result, I am obliged by truth to declare, is less elegant but much more hilarious than the original first stanza of Ode to Autumn.

Seatbelt of mistress and mellow frump,  

Close botany-frigate-bird of the maturing sundae;       

Conspiring with him how to load and bless       

With fruit salad the vino that round the theatre-ecclesiasticism runs;          

To bend with applicator the moss'd cotter-tree-lines

And fill all fruit-machines with ripple-marks to the coriander; 

To swell the governor, and plump the headboard shelters     

With a sweet ketone; to set budding more,        

And still more, later flue-pipes for the beef burgers,     

Until they think warm daydreams will never cease

For summer time has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cellphones.

Do please Comment or Facebook with your own; hey! we can build an anthology.

Leaves in the lines

Despite being designed, conceived and manufactured in Malta, I have a profound physical aversion to extreme heat.  By 'extreme' I mean, of course, anything over 15°c, so to say this Summer has been a challenge is an understatement of subterranean profundity.  I am reminded, in literary terms, of J.G. Ballard's The Burning World and that sequence in Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant cycle where The Despiser has hacked into the planetary weather system so that each season is exaggerated to acquire deadly characteristics.  It is, therefore, with undignified eagerness that I have embraced each slightly cooler day, and am panting for Autumn to begin in earnest.  One of my ambitions this year is to read Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, which is one of the many yawning gaps in my literary CV.  A few years ago, giddy with the excitement of having purchased an Acme © Home Poetry Kit, I lobbed a lump of Autumnal words into the Sonnet stencil, cranked the attractively-bright plastic starting-handle and produced the following.  I sincerely hope MacNeices's effort is better.

OWED TO AUTUMN

The sunlight is soft with hospitable mystery;

In August it scorched us, expected and bland.

The pavements are crunchy with Natural History,

Where trees are dismissing their leaves out of hand.

It’s scruffy and vague, this shaggy brown season

Each morning arrives with a mist that depletes

All edges and borders – it was for good reason

That autumn inspired some reasonable Keats.

White winter is death, and all of us harbour

Suspicions of picture-book summers and springs,

A frisson of something amiss in the arbour

Is what this benevolent avalanche brings.

So wrap up in autumn, and heap praise upon it,

Season of almost compulsory sonnet.

Maxwell nous

There are certain books which transcend their status as collections of words on paper (or quantum splodges in e-space) and, like kaleidoscopes, benignly shatter and transform their reader's perspectives.  With these books, one is sent on extraordinary journeys of thought, perception and experience, and one's soul is tinged with enduring magic.  This is very much the case for me with one of last year's surprise literary best-sellers, On Poetry, by Glyn Maxwell, which I have almost finished reading (thanks to the estimable Hertfordshire library service).

The book's central theme and plea is that form is the animating essence of poetry, be it in the guise of rhyme, metre or the division of line, and that poetry without any of these elements is a pallid, lifeless imitation of the real thing. Maxwell does not scruple to observe that a great deal of contemporary, alleged poetry falls into this latter category.  The brilliance and passion of the book lies in the way that the author goes about defining and analysing poetry, cleverly using an approach which is at once basically physical and imaginatively sensitive.  On Poetry invites us to view a poem as a method of marking the blank whiteness of the paper with the shapes of black ink (an approach echoed in the strikingly minimalist cover); to examine what shapes the ink makes, how the appearance of the lines varies, and what kinds of new relationships are formed between the two.  From this point, the book goes on to explore how verse structure, rhyme, alliteration, metre and line-endings embody the voice of the poem, and how, at its best, poetry uses these techniques because they not so much clothe, or present, but enact the sentiment, thought or feeling that the poet expresses.  Maxwell's close reading of poems, especially Edward Thomas' Old Man, are both exquisite in their perception and detail and very able demonstrations of his thesis.  Maxwell invites those who proclaim that the formal approach is an outmoded or irrelevant one to consider why it is that poems employing such devices have survived, and makes an audaciously 'unpoetic' comparison to those aspects of human behaviour which have allowed us to survive as a species, yoking together evolutionary theory and poetic quality in a way that not only avoids sounding pretentious but resounds with the ring of surprising credibility.  Another very useful and well-expressed strand in the book is Maxwell's survey of the development of these formal aspects of poetry, whereby he provides an idiosyncratic and engaging potted history of European literature.

The voice of the book is never portentous; a tone of insouciant wit wafts happily alongside the passion and didacticism, and there are good and frequent humorous passages, including a series of brilliant set pieces featuring Maxwell's creative writing class, which (embellished by comic exaggeration) describe some of his ingenious methods of encouraging students to think about and create poetry in fresh and genuine ways, and to wrest said students free of the lazy or cliched response.

I am very conscious that my review - having been constructed using insufficient time and eloquence - has not only failed to do justice to, but practically blasphemed against this book and the pleasure and wonder it has given me.  I can only urge you to acquire a copy and hope that you will be as joyfully educated, enlightened and inspired as I have been to both read and write poetry with a fresh and new appetite.

Cold selling

Hertfordshire this morning lay besieged and helpless, like a county-shaped trembling animal, under the indomitable and relentless grip of winter.  Until it got sunny a bit later.  This meant a slow start to trade in The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, (whose annual 'guess what we sell' competition attracts many correct entries).  During this temporary lull in retail hostilities, I wandered over to the Poetry section and was admiring, if not drooling over slightly, its tightly-packed shelves and strict alphabetical organisation, when I was suddenly possessed by the spirit of John Keats.  This is an occupational hazard in bookshop work, which is why you should never spend too long in True Crime without having an exorcist on standby in the staff room.  In no time at all, I had extruded, like verbal ectoplasm, this version of a well-known sonnet.


When I have fears that books may cease to sell
Before, on Christmas Eve, we close the doors,
And that my till will toll its blithesome bell
No more, because the pestilential claws
Of on-line sales and e-books have embraced
The bookshop in a fatal grip at last;
Then I recall each customer who's graced,
With compliments, our service and held fast
To notions of supporting local trade
And browsing and conversing over books;
To viewing what has newly been displayed
And, as a pilgrim, threading through our nooks.


Should all else fail, and gloom persist, in spite,
I place a book on cats in plainer sight.

Be assured, gentle blogee, that shortly after I had resumed my quotidian identity, trade became brisk and merry, and do look out for this poem in the revised collected works.

Karel for Christmas

I've just finished reading May by Karel Hynek Mácha, a long narrative poem translated from the Czech by Marcela Sulak and published in a beautiful edition by Twisted Spoon Press.  This book is so attractive a physical object, in fact, that you will spend at least as much time gazing at and fondling it as you will reading the text.  Be careful, however, not to drool, as this may be injurious both to your social standing and the fabric of the book.

As the very useful introduction explains, the poem, first published in 1836, marked a watershed in Czech letters as it ruptured the absolutism of patriotism and nationalism as dominant themes, and embraced many of the Romantic ideas, themes and techniques which had already pervaded other European literatures and cultures.  May also broke new metrical ground, and saw the author introducing the iamb into his country.  I can picture the scene now, as Mácha pads around the quieter districts of Prague and the outlying countryside, stealthily crouching to open the door of a small but comfortable cage to usher out another flock of iambs into the wild.  Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM resound their tiny feet as they scatter abroad, giddy with the excitement of freedom and relishing the prospect of befriending the native dactyls.

Anyhoo - the poem remains massively popular in its native land, with new editions disappearing rapidly from bookshops and schoolchildren being able to recite - presumably before they can be restrained - huge chunks of it verbatim. Learning this made me feel somewhat bereft of a poem with similar status in the home life of our own dear nation; I'm not sure Morte D'Arthur quite passes muster in this capacity, and there doesn't seem to be the same unselfconscious interest in and embracing of poetry nationally and across all classes as there would seem to exist in Slovavakia and (in my experience, for example,) Wales.  Discuss.

The poem itself is a rich mixture of melodrama, romanticism and lyricism, and is structured around the last hours and execution of a 'forest lord' who has led a gang of criminals and who has been arrested and convicted for killing the man who ravished his (the forest lord's) lover, this man happening to be his (ditto) father. Meanwhile, his (you know whose) lover languishes and pines by a lake, waiting in vain for her paramour's return.  This rather stark framework is decorated with unusual and arresting imagery, particularly of nature, and the poem is particularly good at weaving together natural description with the portrayal of psychological states and ruminations on mortality.  There is excellent and dramatic use of repetition and an extraordinary interlude in which the spirits, landscape, flora and fauna of and around the graveyard sing a chorus to explain how they will lay the condemned man to rest:

       WASTELAND

"Then I will breathe a pleasant fragrance."

      SETTING CLOUD

"I'll sprinkle on the coffin rain."

    FALLING FLOWER

"I'll make the wreaths for it."

   LIGHT WINDS

"We will take them to the coffin."

   FIREFLIES

"Little candles we will bring."

   STORM FROM THE DEEP

"I will awake the hollow bells."

There is also a very powerful and moving scene in which the surviving outlaws sit on the ground an intone a dirge for their fallen leader, and the very opening of the poem is evocative and compelling:

It was late evening - first of May -

was evening May - the time for love.

The turtledove invited love

to where the pine grove's fragrance lay.

The silent moss murmured of love,

the flowering tree belied love's woe.

I've enjoyed everything I've read from Twisted Spoon, a publisher as interesting as it sounds, and recommend that you buy their entire list as Christmas presents for your legions of pals.

Good, better, verse

It's proving quite the Tennyson-infested winter (see this previous post), the latest manifestation to have swum into my ken being John Carey's delightful review of the new biography by John Batchelor.  You don't need close reading skills to sense that Carey dislikes Tennyson's stab at The Matter of Britain; (while I'm gaily strewing links around, see this post), in that he says:

 'The Idylls of the King....gives the impression of being made out of some high-class decorative material rather than poetry'

and then goes on to assert:

 'However, cleverness is not essential for poets.  What they need is a faultless ear, a gift for phrase and instant access to the human heart.'

before citing some examples.

This struck me as an interesting view of what constitutes a poet, in that it excludes a 
quality - cleverness - that many people would cite as the defining characteristic of the genre.  A reason popularly produced by people for not reading poetry is that it is too 'difficult', which could be interpreted as too intellectually challenging, which in turn is not a condition arrived at in the absence of cleverness.  We hail, it seems to me, many of the poets from the last two centuries (Auden, Yeats, Eliot, Pound) as great because, at least in part, of their philosophical content and intellectual insight. There is also the aspect of 'cleverness' which allows the poets of the highest stature to employ language in a concentrated, precise manner that is not necessarily susceptible to full immediate apprehension.

One can, of course, proceed too far down this road into the unappealing neighbourhood of wilful obscurity, and there is the famous literary joke about someone publishing a volume of poetry and following this with publication of 'the answers'.  I still maintain, however, that we need to keep clear critical dividing lines between great, literary poets and (albeit hugely talented) versifiers such as, for example, John Cooper Clarke or Benjamin Zephaniah, who are among writers periodically presented as representing poetry that is somehow more acceptable (even 'genuine') because it doesn't attempt to embarrass its readers with 'cleverness' that smacks of elitism or cultural snobbery (which seems to me like criticising a racing cyclist for being disconcertingly rapid).

Carey's witty dismissal of 'The Idylls' (apropos of nothing else in particular) reminds me of a typically, brilliantly deranged short story by Richard Brautigan, Homage to the San Francisco YMCA, in Revenge of the Lawn, in which the protagonist decides to replace his domestic plumbing with poetry.  It does not perform well.

Not averse to form

I read somewhere (I have it now - it was in my blog, yesterday) that I had been making a conscious effort to read more contemporary poetry.  Today, therefore, I chose as my commuting companion a pamphlet by Sam Riviere in the Faber New Poets series, and was relieved (and a little surprised) to find that First Capital Connect do not impose a surcharge on the carriage of modern verse.  I had selected this book from my local library because the poet's first full collection, 81 Austerities, has recently won the Forward Poetry Prize in that category.  I thought I'd start in the foothills, as it were, before investing in the more recent work.  

Although I thought the poems were thought-provoking, often amusing and certainly very intelligently written, with one particularly outstanding piece, 'Myself Included' I also found them (as I do much modern poetry) lacking in metrical and formal impact.  I do like a bit of form, and I'm intrigued by what occurs in terms of creative results when writers work within formal constraints; there is an exciting tension between freedom and restraint (or am I getting confused with Fifty Shades of Grey?) which, in the best poetry, produces rhythmical and or rhyming effects that are magical and transcendent.

Everyone, of course, has their top ten poetic forms, and argues about them fiercely with their chums.  How many playground and workplace scuffles has that led to?  I seem to remember that my own knowledge and interest in this subject was fired by a publication called The Poetry Handbook, and I was delighted to discover recently that it is connected with my chief literary icon, Kurt Vonnegut, in that the author's son's second wife was Vonnegut's first (keep up at the back).

Sitting smugly unchallenged at the top of my forms is the villanelle;  the Wiki-link will explain it better than I; suffice to say its best-known manifestation begins:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

and it involves, basically, triplets whose last lines repeat alternately the first and last lines of the opening triplet, and a concluding quatrain which repeats both, while the middle lines of each triplet all share the rhyme of the original second line. When executed well, the effect is mesmerising, often very moving and paradoxically natural in an almost casual way.  Handled badly, however, it sounds contrived and inane.

I'm also very fond of the sonnet, which seems to me to stand like a piece of retrained, classical architecture in the landscape of verse and the limerick, especially where its used counter-traditionally to express real wit or even seriousness, or both: e.g. Maurice Hare's: 
       
          Predestination

          There once was a man who said "Damn!
          It is borne in upon me I am
          An engine that moves
          In predestinate grooves;
          I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram"

or Wendy Cope's priceless rendition of 'The Wasteland' in limericks.

There is also at least one poetic form which I find pointless and irritating, namely the sestina, which involves repeating the end words of the first verse, in different order and according to a precise formulation, as the end words of the lines in each subsequent verse.  I remain open to conversion by having a staggering counter-example wafted under my nose, but this has always seemed to be to be a highly-structured way of writing something tedious.

I feel ashamed not to have gone into, for example, the fiendish Welsh cynghanedd, possibly a unique form in that it is as difficult for non-Welsh people  to pronounce as it is to create, and many others, not to mention the wonderfully crazy lexicon of terms describing metre, which always remind me of the sub-atomic particles menagerie, but I'm sure you'll find them all in The Poetry Handbook.