THIS IS A book for anyone.
There are as many outlooks on poetry, on poets, on poems, on poetics, as there are people who read, but my book is for anyone. So forgive me if I leap as far back in time as possible to find a place where we all agree.
*
This far: alert, curious, more or less naked, without language, looking out over the green savannah. Now that was a leap, that’s an outlook. You see an open space with trees whose branches spread out near the ground and bear fruit. You see a river or path that winds away out of sight, beyond the horizon. You see a few animals, you see changing clouds. You like what you see. Two hundred thousand years later you’ll call this outlook ‘beautiful’ but the word’s no use to you now.
Time after time, in the field of evolutionary psychology, the children of today, from anywhere on earth, in test conditions, point to this picture, choose it over all others – forests, jungles, mountains, beaches, deserts – as the view most pleasing to them. What are they looking at? What are they really looking at?
Well, evolutionary psychologists think they’re looking at this: an open space (we can hunt) with trees (we can hide) whose branches spread out near the ground (we can escape) and bear fruit (we can eat). We see a river (we can drink, wash, eat) or path (we can travel) that winds away out of sight (we can learn), beyond the horizon (we can imagine). We see a few animals (we can eat more), we see changing clouds (rains will come again, we can tell one day from another) and, all in all, we like what we see. What evolutionary psychologists – and I – believe is that aesthetic preferences, those things we find beautiful, originate not in what renders life delightful or even endurable, but in what makes life possible.
*
Art, drawing, writing, poetry – are marks made in time by that gazing creature. Poetry has been unnecessary for almost all of creation. Strictly speaking it still is. But it happens to be my savannah, this strictly speaking, and it may well be yours, so let’s advance together, alert, curious, naked – or at least two of those – into our first landscape, admiring once again what we can’t be without.
*
And, since this is a writer’s book about writing, let’s stop to take with us a leaf from one of the earliest such books to have reached us, Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher observes that ‘practically everything has been discovered on many occasions…in the course of the ages; for necessity may be supposed to have taught men the inventions that were absolutely required, and, when these were provided, it was natural that other things which would adorn or enrich life should grow up by degrees.’
Let’s start again with nothing. Let’s start with poetry’s inventions that are absolutely required – their names are something and nothing – and see what comes of them.
Imagine whiteness, a blank sheet of paper, the white screen…
Ready the black of ink or pixels or you…
Do this if only to remind yourself that the writing of a poem is a physical act, a deed that elbows into its space and time in the day or the night. The passing of the quill, the fountain-pen, the typewriter, the iPad – this too shall pass – never changed anything. Perhaps I’m addressing you whose need to write verse, to score lines into silence, to drum your fingers into the dark, rises in you in a tangible way, like a tonic, an act of self-healing, a way how not to feel inadequate, empty, forsaken, ill. These adjectives won’t seem exaggerated to you I’m talking to. Put the blank paper, or the empty screen, right to one side there, and start to know it.
*
Regard the space, that ice plain, that dizzying light. That past, that future. Already it isn’t nothing. At the very least it’s your enemy, and that’s an awful lot. Poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence, life and death, hot and cold, love and loss: any can be the case but none of those yins and yangs tell the whole story. What you feel the whiteness is right now – consciously or more likely some way beneath that plane – will determine what you do next. Call it this and that, whatever it is this time, just don’t make the mistake of thinking the white sheet is nothing. It’s nothing for your novelist, your journalist, your blogger. For those folk it’s a tabula rasa, a giving surface. For a poet it’s half of everything. If you don’t know how to use it you are writing prose. If you write poems that you might call free and I might call unpatterned then skilful, intelligent use of the whiteness is all you’ve got.
Put more practically, line-break is all you’ve got, and if you don’t master line-break – the border between poetry and prose – then you don’t know there is a border. And there is a border. (A prose poem is prose done by a poet.) More of this later, let’s just keep staring out that whiteness, get accustomed to its face.
*
You want to hear the whiteness eating? Write out the lyrics of a song you love. Twenty years or so back I might have pointed out that the generations of young poets who judged rhyme a thing of the past nevertheless knew off by heart a good two hundred rock lyrics knitted as gaily as Mother Goose. Maybe some quality rap songs made the old cat-sat-mat thing conscious again. But do write something down. Rock, rap, folk, show-tune, anything, but something written for music, something regarded as truly wonderful in its world, loved by you, loved by your world. Let it try breathing in the whiteness I’m speaking of.
Anything you like. I mean love. Say mine is Dylan’s late song ‘Not Dark Yet’. I think that’s a timeless song, as memorable as Robert Frost – but, unlike Frost, it shrinks in the whiteness. Written down it looks amateurish, Hallmark. Try it with the best, really. Cole Porter, Rodgers Hammerstein, John and Paul, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Tom Waits, Tori Amos, Eminem, Jay-Z, try it. If you strip the music off it it dies in the whiteness, can’t breathe there. Without the music there is nothing to mark time, to act for time.
Song lyrics are not written upon whiteness, so the whiteness is alien to them, a corroding air, you can hear it eating those sweet lines away. Song lyrics are not composed to take the form of black signs upon that whiteness, therefore the blackness itself is alien, doesn’t have the blood the sung words have.
I give to you and you give to me true love, true love. Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. How does it feel to be on your own? Let’s get together and feel alright. Do you remember when we used to sing Sha la la, la la, la la, la la, l-la te da?
This feels like wanton cruelty to most beautiful birds, but when you force a creature from its element it dies before you. Nothing’s true anymore, what you have is a bad translation. If you don’t agree, you’re still clouding the thing with the music you love. If you turn it down to silence and still think you’re looking at poetry, you and I can’t go any further. You should probably form a band.
*
The other half of everything for the songwriters is music. For the poets it’s silence, the space, the whiteness. Music for them – and silence for us – does the work of time. I think our gig is harder. Their enemy reaches out, plays chords, goes hey we could be friends if you play your cards right. Our enemy simply waits, like it knows the arts of war. Songs are strung upon sounds, poems upon silence. Songwriters stir up a living tradition, poets make flowers grow in air. Bob Dylan and John Keats are at different work. It would be nice never to be asked about this again.
*
For let’s remind ourselves how singular poetry is – I mean poetry that’s primarily written to be read. The reader’s role in this art-form is like nothing else, owing to the medium of poetry’s creation, and to its relationship with time. In most encounters with art, time is entirely in the hands of the maker, the creator, the composer, the player: this is certainly true for a piece of music, theatre, dance, film, television, and equally so in the rough-edged versions of these – live music, improv, stand-up, performance poetry. So far, so obvious. Only in the visual arts – painting, sculpture, static installation – does the relationship change. Here the experience is not linear: one can encompass things in one’s ‘own time’. A poem on a page is linear, or suggests linearity without compelling it, but time remains one’s own – or, more exactly, voice upon time does.
I always have to remind myself to spell it time not Time. When I say or hear or read or write the word that T towers over me always. The Christian won’t go without his C, or his G. For He is never without his H. But in all cases we are honouring the other, the element in which we thrive and fail, the entity we’ve tried in a thousand ways to render human so it can hear our words. Time can be implacable Jahweh or merciful Jesus, but it’s present to me like those creatures are present. Perhaps all poets are stricken into life by such a presence.
Poets are voices upon time. What makes poetry so giddyingly different from other forms is how naturally and plainly its reader can inhabit that voice. For we all consciously know that poetry is written in the everyday material of language, but at a deeper cerebral level surely it becomes easier to imagine the voice one’s own, that we could be thinking it, living it, saying it. We could have come to just this place. How else could a great poem last so vertiginously long?
And because our inner voice dictates the texture, tone and timing of the reading that we both render and receive, the silence around it and throughout it seems to become ours too. We place it and hear it where we will. We characterise it as we will. A memorised poem can be passed to you intact. I think this makes the written poem unique, in terms of our relationship with its materials – by which I mean the black (something there) and the white (nothing there). The Stalin regime could destroy Osip Mandelstam, but not the poems his widow Nadezhda had learned by heart. That’s something and nothing showing their true colours.
*
Start where we all remember. Pass some time in the great white spaces. What is the nature of the whiteness preceding the line below? Close your eyes, let’s call it a silence this time, one of its other guises. Pretend no one ever thought of this line that’s coming, pretend you think of it! If you don’t like games like this you really shouldn’t have come this far. Maybe you’re too old for exclamation marks. Ha! Close your eyes. Wait… nothing… no… something…
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Remember the quality of the space before. Poetry is an act, and I’m saying be an actor for a while. Wasn’t it warm, sunlit, infused with joy and serenity, that crimson space the words came out of? Sounds like enough to me, a silence one can live with, no need to dip the nib in the bottle, not a time to be choosing fonts. But there is a need, for it’s not enough. The black signs say it’s not enough, because Shakespeare has something even better than how lovely it is and that’s, at this moment, once, upon a time, to say so.
This exercise works best if, having pretended to think of the line, you actually write it down. Feel the power of the line you thought of – passing through you – into the pen, into the keys. Again, pretend you thought of it and look, now it’s in your handwriting, or the font you named it in. But this happened to someone once, in our country, with hedgerows in the distance and a sparrow wittering on. Bear in mind again the actual time and space poetry claws from us, as you see those words appear. This deed should start to suggest to you also – and it’s the slowing down that allows this – the unearthly weirdness of what you’re doing. What on earth are you doing? This is where white goes black, where person becomes poem, where the ears of time prick up – It knows battle’s been rejoined. Your love for the Beloved is now a series of preposterous black squiggles that will truly melt into nonsense if you stare at them too long. This is how you love? With these – doodles?
*
Let’s go to the mountain, let’s do as Shakespeare does, let’s do some comparing, with spin-a-stick famous first lines from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Let’s imagine some moments of conception. Like he says elsewhere, nothing will come of nothing.
The lines below are approaching you. Generate a silence whose ending you’re aware of, play the game again, imagine the quality of that ancient hush, make it yours and now, until, all of a sudden, as if from a blue sky –
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…
This is the opening of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, a plea for sex got up in its Sunday best as a hymn to love. Where the Shakespearean silence is a brimming over of thoughtful joy, vaguely post- as well as pre-coital, the Marvellian one is an unsated thirst, a need that spills out as rhythmic language, a lust so richly felt it tries at first to tickle – ‘I by the tide/Of Humber would complain’ and at last to terrify – ‘worms shall try/That long preserved virginity’ – the sweetheart into bed.
The poem’s most famous lines will help us to hear the whiteness. After twenty lines of winningly ludicrous flattery – ‘An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;/Two hundred to adore each breast’ and so on and so forth – this happens:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
What is the cost of silence to this poem? What’s the price of stopping there? It’s to hear what he can hear: time passing, winged, hurrying, to make a desert of him and her and you and everyone. Now that is one annihilating whiteness. Want to hear how fast time moves? Not with the regular step of, say, ‘The wingéd feet of Time draw near’ – no, the word slams hard to the top of the line: ‘Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near…’ You want to talk about iambs and dactyls and stress and unstress, as if the English language were some binary read-out, then you are missing the big picture.
You master form you master time.
The poem ends, the plea for everything she is ends, but the silence that follows doesn’t sound like the howling wind it rides throughout, it sounds more like the rustle of silk in privacy, the hope spun into likelihood. It’s no longer a plea to her, it’s kind of a plan they’ve made.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
*
You master form you master time. Well, you don’t, but you give it a run for its non-exchangeable money. Form has a direct effect on the silence beneath it, which is to say on the whiteness before and after it and where the lines end. If you have lived a quarter-century and decided, because someone paid to teach you has told you, or because you read it somewhere, that form should be gone from poetry – meter, say, or rhyme, or regularity or pattern of any kind – then you are effectively saying that time is different these days. It’s not what it was. Maybe you think time has been broken. Maybe you think it’s been broken into fragments you can leap around or hide behind. Let’s see you.
You’re still here: play the game again. Skip the 18th century for a moment – time’s so feeble, it won’t defend itself – close your eyes, compose this one:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
Could that silence be any different from the two we’ve just examined? No one else is there. In the world of her poems no one else ever seems to be there with Emily Dickinson, and yet she always seems to have just come back to her desk from her little bed and lit a candle, having seen the whole of Creation.
But here, no one is there. I do expect that both Shakespeare’s and Marvell’s poems were actually written alone, but the world they make – in an instant – encompasses a lady right there listening, with admirable patience, outdoors or in. Dickinson’s world is one lone face in a window, a world seen whole, but from shelter. A ‘Slant of light’ is light indoors, refracted, dusty and filtered: there’s the space established. The plural – not ‘On a Winter Afternoon’ but ‘Winter Afternoons’ – gives us the sense of long observation of the same thing from the same vantage: there’s the time and tone set, the colour and picture made. The concision. You master form you master time. And yes, you don’t, no one does, but that poem isn’t going away, we’re looking at poems that show no sign of leaving. Emily is still coming back to her desk from her bed and lighting a candle.
With the best poets you can play an archaeological game. Take a volume of the work, mist your eyes so you can’t read a word, flutter through the pages, get a sense of the forms the poems take. Dickinson’s are slight and skeletal against the white, like the bones of birds, stanzaic poems of John Donne or Thomas Hardy seem like worked gemstones with patterned edges. Whitman’s line-ends seem like the wild blown edges of a ragged garment. This is the place to begin, peering at shapes. Assess the balance of the black creature and the white silence. Consider always what in this case the creature is, what in this case the silence is. And if they are those things, what pressures do they exert upon one another? To say the very least: a Christian and an atheist are dealing with considerably different creatures and silences. But so are the lover, the philosopher, the malcontent, the madman.
*
The next example, again, sits at a planetary distance from those before. This one has always struck me as the essence of poetry, the distillation. We’ll come to it again when I’m done with the whiteness, we’ll look instead at its blackness, but, meanwhile, the game again: stand in a world in which Samuel Coleridge hasn’t written ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, hear the atmosphere before it, stumble on it, be seared by it, let it out –
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three…
This is the beating of giant wings, the sound of the story that has to be told. It arrives with the day-lit suddenness of a ghost, unheralded, unwarned-of, and with truly frightening inhuman speed its – ‘It is’ not ‘He is’, ‘It is’ not ‘It was’ – Its hand is on your arm. Its hand is on your arm! It just stopped one of three: hope you’re not the one. Three men are on their way to a wedding-banquet, can’t wait to get stuck into the huge old pies and the porter or sack or maypole dance or whatever, you ‘canst hear the merry din’ – but without warning this happens. Not to all three, to one. And now the poem is happening, not to everyone, just to you.
Time could not go on as it was. The story has changed everything. What you could hear in the silence that preceded the voice was the irrepressible boiling-up of a raging need to tell. By the far end of the Mariner’s tale, that odyssey of hell and high water – where the white space is now ocean, now desert, and the black figures now cursed, now blessed – the wedding-feast is over, the merriment foregone, the garden dark again, and the Mariner speaks for the unassuagable thirst of all the storytellers, all the poets:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
*
Now of course we are commandeering time to play like this: retrospectively characterising spaces that, in purely scientific terms, look identical and surely cannot possess character. But time refracts oddly in the vicinity of verse, as anyone who writes it knows already. In any case, to say poetic thought isn’t a science cuts both ways. As well as scorning poetry for being too vague and amorphous to define by law or principle, one may amiably retort that scientific method proves inadequate in the face of it. We know by experience that language itself is inadequate. You can’t find better words for the best words. Just for this sense of whiteness – before we even have a word on our page – we need nine thousand names for white and we have one. These silences are different. What grew in them was different. If it’s obvious that the fibre of the black determines the cloth of the white, it needs to be remembered that the reverse is true too.
Imagine the negative of a poem on a page, white script on black. You’re blundering through arctic night with your little lantern swinging. Think of poetry cold and dark like that: what will it need at least? A heart, a heartbeat, warmth, a place to go.
*
The point of the game we play is to remind us that a poem, any poem, however old or venerable or indestructible it seems, arises from the urge of a human creature, once, upon a time – to break silence, fill emptiness, colour nothing with something, anything. That the above examples suggest so much, give us so many dimensions in so little space, is merely testament to the power of those poets. The principle is the same. It doesn’t help to bend the knee before concepts of inspiration – unless you remember that word’s etymology of the breath. Then it helps, because if some Techie Enchanter long before his time had made audio recordings of the composition of these poems, the scratchy silence would be peppered with sharp intakes of breath.
Talking of scratches, if you want to hear silence and sound and past and future meet at a memorable crossroads, have a listen to Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1890, recording ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ onto a wax cylinder provided for him by a Mr Edison, the very man, that true Techie Enchanter ahead of his time. Or, in the first ever audio capture of poetry, Robert Browning at a dinner party a year before, attempting his ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ for some assembly of thoroughly bearded gentlemen. It goes like this.
I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he,
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three,
‘Speed’ echoed the wall to us galloping through,
‘Speed’ echoed the…
Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest…
I’m terribly sorry but I can’t remember me own verses, but one thing I shall remember all me life is this astonishing… [unclear]… by your wonderful invention! Robert Browning! Bravo bravo bravo! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Bravo!
I love how he shouts his own name. Perhaps he thought for a second of dismay the future was sending its only lifeboat.
Poets were real, walked around, sat down, shouted. Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts, they have sprouted forth in moments like the moments we know, passing beside us now, five-to-nine in the morning, four-twenty in the day, indoors, outdoors, sun and rain, with a king on the throne, with a fool or a child or no one. They get worked on, worked at, thrown out, messed with, but there is a moment, we all know there’s a moment in which the poem (the black signs on white surfaces) takes over from the self, becomes the self for now. I spend my allotted slice of forever contemplating that moment.
Of course, if you devote yourself to the life, them black signs on white surfaces are, by and by, all you’ll be, so you might as well get used to them. If you really stick with this you will end up jealous of your own words. You’ll be your own ghost reading them, secretly delighted, secretly aghast. In your old age the Devil will point at your piled-up volumes of poetry and say There, I made you immortal like I promised, and you’ll croak from the white sheets Damn the work, I meant Me, I meant Me! and the Devil will say I know! Ha! Too old for exclamation marks, eh! And be gone.
But think once more of the white turning to black, of the nib putting down on the paper, or the pixels going dark because of whatever gazillion signals you just cluelessly set in order – think of where person becomes poem. What do you want to send through that portal? Should it not sound like you, act like you, breathe like you? Or at the very least like a human?
What is the poem if it doesn’t sound, act, think, breathe, like a human? What does it know? What can it tell? What are we to it, what is it to us? What could it ever be to us? Because where else could it have come from?
*
Back again with the whiteness. You have to see the whole of a poem to appreciate the field it’s growing in, so here, in white and black, is the whole of a poem. Contemplate the before, the world without this poem, then pretend you suddenly rapidly write it in some elongated narcotic swoon – this is meant to be fun sometimes – but be keenly aware of, or if you like druggily focused on, the white spaces between the stanzas, be clear what they are. This, W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, is the simplest and most beautiful illustration I can think of. Write it. Feel the urge to tell it, feel the air, the weather, the season, try to sound out the silence below it all. This poem has never been written. Write it. Be writing it. Have written it.
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Three stanzas, two spaces between them, not to mention the mists at either end. Stanza is the Italian word for – look it up. Maybe you have Google close at hand (capital G like God) or even a reference-book in some other room? The attic, try. Find the room with the answer.
What’s in these two spaces? What could be simpler? A change of place, a passing of time. The ‘little silver trout’ dangles from the rod over the river, dangles across the void into the next stanza. In the void the poet went away from the stream with his precious catch, out of the hazel wood and home. Now the little silver trout is on his floor by the fire. If you look closely at the line ‘When I had laid it on the floor’ you can tell the fish is not alive. There are verbs that could have let it wriggle a little. This only matters because it’s about to turn into a Vision and change the poet’s world. But we’re still with the whiteness. The next one is heartbreaking. Here it is again, the stanza-break:
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Hear that? See that? All a man’s youth and adulthood went by there, streamed through in that centimetre, that white torrent. In song it goes that way. What Yeats calls a ‘Song’ is only a ‘song’ for me because it floats down and bobs so very truly on the air, like all his early poems, ‘Down By the Salley Gardens’, ‘When You Are Old’, ‘He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven’…
It’s a poem, though, let’s get that straight. If you’re still missing your favourite tunes, you might reflect, in the company of two great Irishmen, upon how Van Morrison’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ is essentially the same sweet mystery as this poem: though the Yeats is otherworldly and the Morrison earthbound, still, love in youth is gazed back at by a man in age, and the imprint left is a sorrow that shines. Well, many songs do this more or less, but let’s dwell only on the best of them.
*
An exercise that is useful and fun to do with any great poem is to write its screenplay. Here’s how to understand the whiteness. This way you can see how some stanza-breaks are cuts, some are fades, some are dissolves. I think the ‘silver trout’ one is a cut and the ‘brightening air’ one a dissolve to white and out again. These aren’t yes-or-no questions, the value is entirely in the contemplation and the fun in the guessing, but what must be exact to the screenwriter can be revelatory to the poet. If in the great family of the writing arts Poetry is the hard-up eldest son and Screenplay the little bro who’s loaded, nonetheless these two are close, enjoy each other’s company, they share longer walks than either shares with Playwriting or Fiction, all the difficult middle children. You have to have tried all of these arts to make hay with the metaphor, to have found this out. In time, if you want to learn about any of them, try your hand at them all. Just as an exercise, run the same little fictional event through all of them: turn a sonnet to a film to a story to a scene. See what changes in the telling, what comes to it, what falls away.
Or you could do this with your whole writing life. No one will ever know who you are, and you will never need to tell them.
*
Take nine sheets of blank paper and pretend the following things about them:
That the first page is physically hurt by your every word.
That the second page is turned on by every syllable.
That every mark on the third page makes you remember more.
On the fourth, less, like dementia.
That God can only hear you if you’re writing on the fifth page.
That only touching the sixth page are you hidden from God.
That every word you write on the seventh prolongs the time from now until the moment you meet that mythical creature known as The One.
That every word you write on the eighth brings that moment closer, yes, but makes your time together shorter.
The ninth page says you have only nine words left in your life.
The nine sheets are nine battlefields. The black will win some, the white will win some, it will be silly as war and bloody as chess. If you get any poems out of it, any lines at all, pin them to your breast. If you get any white sheets, bury them with honours. Remember where you won, remember where you lost. Wonder why.
~