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The Password Primeval: some Thoughts on How Poetry Works

by James Graham


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You'd be hard put to read this and say it's not poetry:

'Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and the pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the 'Beale Street Blues' while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.'

This languid, exotic description of Daisy's life in The Great Gatsby has some of the devices that wire the words of a poem together and stop it falling apart: assonances, echoes and subtly balanced phrasing. It has rich imagery and a musicality that helps to ensure that this utterance will not seep away into the dry soil of forgetfulness like the mundane prose of news reports and mediocre fiction. The only thing that makes it not a poem is the fact that the words go all the way to the right-hand side of the page. It's not that it doesn't scan as iambic or trochaic or whatever. Neither, sometimes, does Blake or Whitman:

I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

(Song of Myself: 24)

What a mouthful this second line is - and how 'prosaic'! (But what a declaration!)

Now here's a passage from Blake's Jerusalem, cunningly modified and followed by a quiz question:

Los was all astonishment and terror; he trembled sitting on the Stone of London; but the interiors of Albion's fibres and nerves were hidden from Los, astonished he beheld only the petrified surfaces, and saw his Furnaces in ruins.


(Jerusalem: 46)

The question is this. In Blake's original, this wasn't written as prose but divided into lines of verse; so where should each line end and the next begin? The answer, and a brief explanation of what Blake was on about (for those who are not Blake fans), is at the foot of this article. (Note 1.) The point is that here we have something technically quite close to Fitzgerald, poetry that relies more or less on the dynamics of balanced phrasing, the dynamics of prose, to galvanise it.

There are so many things that can be identified as poetry that it's nearly impossible to say what all poetry has in common. There's a grey area (no, a rainbow area) between poetry and prose. You can have poetry without rhyme, even without regular scansion. You can enjoy your poetry plain:

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records - Bessie, bop, or Bach.

(Langston Hughes)

...or fancy:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

(Swinburne)

There's formal verse - like this Swinburne - so tightly metred and rhymed you couldn't insert a scalpel in it anywhere. There's controlled free verse. There's not-so-controlled free verse. There are concrete poems, typographical objects. So what does all poetry, or nearly all, have in common? What in the name of the muse Erato is poetry?

Well, this is what I call a poem. (Excuse my Spanish.)

Despedida

Si muero,
dejad el balcon abierto.

El nino come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcon lo veo.)

El segador siega el trigo.
(Desde mi balcon lo siento.)

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcon abierto!

Federico Garcia Lorca.

Farewell

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I see him.)

The sickleman sickles the wheat.
(From my balcony I hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!


It's quite well known that this short poem by Lorca can be seen in different ways by different readers. Some take it to be a serene acceptance of death, others as a complaint against death and longing for life to continue. It's like the optical illusion that could be a Greek vase or two faces. Which leads me to my first attempt to pin down what distinguishes poetry from other human utterances. It's the quality of ambiguity - which is not the same thing as difficulty - or to broaden it out a bit, multiple possibilities of meaning, so that another reader will see it slightly - or even radically - differently from the way I see it. Ambiguity is one of the sources of life and energy in poetry.

A subtext runs through your head as you take in this poem. It makes you bring something of yourself to it. Your own intelligence and imagination are set to work. The poem pushes buttons. What does it mean, for example, that he asks for the balcony to be left open after he is dead? (That is, beyond a literal meaning, which isn't really intended.) What's the difference between the first two lines and the last two? Of all the sights and sounds the poet might have represented himself as having seen or heard from his balcony, why especially the boy and the sickleman? (These aren't quiz questions. The answers are not at the foot of the page.) You read these few lines, and before you know where you are you're busy, busy.

The art in this is to be ambiguous, to leave the meaning open - but to be as clear as a mountain stream at the same time. As a Spanish critic puts it, 'to be at once clear and mysterious'. That is, to give a clear invitation to the reader to participate in making the meaning(s) of the poem.

To put it more mundanely, it's a little bit like gardening. The poem is a packet of mixed seeds; if your imagination is the right (well-drained, humus-rich) soil, and you put a bit of work in, they'll grow.

So poetry scatters seeds, in the form of words, phrases and images that germinate in the minds of many readers. And not only big name poets, but WriteWords poets have scattered seeds too - written poems that come to life for the reader, give something to the reader. Jibunnessa  does it with emblematic images:

The maggot got into the apple
Eating through its side
Softening the flesh
It managed
To get
To the centre of its soul.
Pressing its soft body
Against its beating heart,
Against its very microkernel,
So that the lonely apple,
Dangling
From this oddly fruiting tree,
Mistook
The invasion
For friendship.

This is written with a kind of respect for apples as well as for human feelings. As we read, we are just as interested in the apple as in the unhappy person who mistakes invasion for friendship. There's an ambivalence (rather than ambiguity, here) that takes our imagination in different directions at once.

Mike David (Ticonderoga ) does it with flashes of surrealism:

Onion Ode

The wind is draped with omens now,
trees are howling through the window-pane

and sepulchral birds scud nestwards.
A lone piper leads a clattering cow through

the empty basement of his winter brain.
His thoughts turn brown as the onions burn again.

That piper (playing a lament, or a jig?) leading a cow through a basement, lifts a really ghastly state of mind and turns it into absurd comedy. The images take us back into that strange territory, that grey (rainbow?) area between comedy and tragedy.

These two writers, in very different ways, have produced something that doesn't lie lifeless on the page, but starts to germinate.

Hilary Custance  scatters some imaginative seeds in her poem 'Mismatch', in a general way through the poignancy of the whole poem, but in the details too - in single choices of words that immediately start to propagate by self-division:

Exalted
by the benign heat,
I moved around the garden,
waiting for you.
My spirits, like butter, melting, separating,
clarifying.

(My emphasis.)

Distracted at work by the sudden warmth of a spring day, and by 'the soft blunderings of a bee', the poem's speaker has decided to come home early, and now waits for her husband. When he does get home much later, 'laden with weariness and failed trains', the poem ends:

Between us
lies only the distance of
a sunny afternoon.

But it's that 'clarifying' especially that springs to life. Set apart in its own free-verse line, at the end of a section of the poem, it's different from the other things that happen to butter. 'Melting' and 'separating' have ambiguities in them too, but 'clarifying' has a spread of meaning: not only meaning that comes from the context of the poem itself, but meaning that the reader can supply, translating as it were from the situation in the poem into his or her own personal situation. 'My spirits clarifying' - I can never be quite sure what that means for the writer, but I know what it means for me. I could give examples, write my own poem.

(I've listed these poems and authors below, with reference to the WW archive. Readers can look them up and see the discussions we have had about them. See Note 2. There are only three examples here; there are others I could have chosen too.)

Having said all that about ambiguity, the potential in a poem's language to lodge in the reader's imagination and grow there, we have to remember that of course other literary genres - drama and fiction - have this fertility too. But in most poetry, our focus is so much more on the word: choice of words, choice of imagery, the musicality of words. In most poetry, I must stress. In all good poems, I would think, you would find levels of meaning, richness of meaning; but but it doesn't always depend on the detail, the inspired assemblage of words in individual lines.

The anonymous Scottish and English ballads, for example (though they have some cracking lines) work much more through dramatic effect, the often filmic way they cut from scene to scene, event to event. They keep the reader busy too; there are levels and levels in some of them; but the source of this richness is more narrative than purely verbal.

And finally, my simple (too simple?) definition of poetry is only one of many. It derives, loosely, from reader-response criticism, one of many modernist and postmodernist theories of literature, some of which, shall we say, are more illuminating than others.

Hans Robert Jauss and Paul Ricoeur in the seventies and eighties put forward the idea that the reader's experience of reading is important; the reader can gain in self-understanding through contact with literature. Which seems rather obvious, until we remember it's a reaction against the old way of teaching literature, whereby our only responsibility is to discover what the author meant, as if that was set in stone and we were all too humble or too stupid to see something in a text that never occurred to the author.

There's some connection too with Roman Ingarden, who way back in the thirties coined the phrase 'spots of indeterminacy', meaning a word, line or image in a poem - or, sometimes, the whole poem, the totality of words, lines and images - can often be of indeterminate meaning, open to new interpretation, not only from one reader to another, but from one generation of readers to another.

A poem isn't an object, but an organism. Some of these theorists redefine 'meaning' as what the piece of writing meant for its author, and use significance to point to all the possible meanings that readers can bring to it. The 'meaning' of Lorca's poem is what it meant to him; its 'significance' grows with every reader who engages with it. This doesn't imply that it can mean any old thing, because most readers, having large chunks of human nature in common with Lorca, will give it a significance that probably hangs by at least a thread or two to the author's original vision. This way of looking at poetry is, as I say, just one of many. But it's one I find really works in a practical way, one that helps in the understanding of poetry and even in the making of it.




Note 1. Blake's line-divisions: Stone/Of London, hidden/From Los, surfaces/And saw. Los, representing Blake himself, creative imagination and political conscience (how's that for ambiguity!) has just finished his London walk, his imaginative tour by way of Stratford, Stepney and the Isle of Dogs, somewhere along this route passing Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital where, he once remarked, 'the madmen outside have shut up the sane people'. He has seen the 'jewels of Albion' (the London poor) 'running down the kennels [gutters] of the streets and lanes as if they were abhorred'. In England's tyrannical society, he sees 'all the tendernesses of the soul cast forth as filth and mire'. The London Stone - now located against the south wall of St Swithin's, Cannon Street - was thought to have been a place of Druid executions, and it symbolises for Blake all the wrongs and injustices of his time: monarchy, privilege, the 'Satanic mills' of industry, and the war against revolutionary France (to name but a few!). He despairs of his power to comprehend, and write about, the enormity of it all. His 'furnaces' (his, mind, spirit, whole being, the workshop of his creativity) are 'in ruins'.

Note 2. View the WriteWords members' poems and associated discussions:

Jibunnessa, 'The Maggot'
Ticonderoga, 'Misery Cuts'
Hilary Custance, 'Mismatch'.




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