I AM GOING TO venture to make some observations based on my own experience, which will lead me to comment on my intentions, failures, and partial successes, in my own plays. I do this in the belief that any explorer or experimenter in new territory may, by putting on record a kind of journal of his explorations, say something of use to those who follow him into the same regions and who will perhaps go further.
*
T. S. Eliot said that to me in November 1950, in the form of the First Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University. No I wasn’t there, I couldn’t make it, but still he said it to me. He was explicitly imagining a poet of the future writing plays in verse; he was giving advice, encouragement, words of warning. There’s no sign of the hieratic lectern-bothering Eliot in this piece: this is the log of a craftsman, humble and thoughtful: ‘Well, I had made some progress in learning how to write the first act of a play’, he says cautiously, then claims of The Cocktail Party (perhaps debatably) that he avoided ‘poetry which could not stand the test of strict dramatic utility.’ He tries to learn from experience: ‘no chorus, and no ghosts’, and rather relishes his past discomforts, as when he recalls trying to make dramatically convincing the Furies in The Family Reunion:
We tried every possible manner of presenting them. We put them on the stage, and they looked like uninvited guests who had strayed in from a fancy-dress ball. We concealed them behind gauze, and they suggested a still out of a Walt Disney film. We made them dimmer, and they looked like shrubbery just outside the window.
This is the poet stuck in the chaos of theatre, as three girls in crinkly Fury costumes giggle in an empty row, the ASM turns the air blue and the lighting man tries just one more thing; this is the director asking a poet what he means then telling him what he really means, the whole mess of scripts and sets and coffee and revisions, as the isolated maker sweeps a red biro like Excalibur through a lovely line he thought of when out walking, and sighs and contemplates the spot-lit rubble of what’s left.
So consider Eliot’s generous sentiment received in the right spirit. I’m also, if nothing else, a ‘writer who has worked for years’ and who has ‘achieved some success…in writing other kinds of verse’ – by which Eliot meant lyric or comic or narrative poetry as opposed to verse plays – and who has spent most of his writing life trying to write verse that can live on stage. And, though Eliot doesn’t say this in the Harvard lecture, we do also have the following in common: the taking of a draught of a certain dizzying cocktail: high praise and low derision, sometimes for the same play, often for the same performance – and therefore cancelling out to little but a wry perspective on the business, a genial but total contempt for those munching bystanders who risk nothing, and a brand new blank slate.
*
What I know about the making of a play, the arcs, the aesthetics, the character-journeys – I was going to say that would take a different book. But it wouldn’t, it would scarcely fill a page, what very little I’m sure about on that score. You learn you know nothing, my teacher said once, and that’s where I’m headed. This is a poet’s book and a book about poets, so its ‘Space’ chapter is primarily about utterance, about verse on stage, about how a verse-line relates to character, situation, style. The blackness and the whiteness in this chapter are always – whatever else they are – speech and silence. The chapter is about what poets think they can bring to the theatre (which they’re wrong about) and what they actually can (which I hope one day they will.)
I’m not alone among the poets of today in having ventured into theatre, but I’m close to alone, and sometimes I wonder why. I’ve told you all I know, that poetry is creaturely, that creatures move in space and time and collide with others gladly or sadly or avoid them altogether. There is nothing you can write about speaking or silence that pertains only to poetry. If you can compose lines that breathe, an actor can say them. In fact, there is no single thing a young poet can do that is more useful than letting his or her lines pass through the mind and lungs and throat and lips of a well-trained actor. If you know your blackness and whiteness, your line-form and line-break, your meters and measures, how to ride and not be ridden, then you’re in – literally – good shape. You can deploy the breath and silence in ways prose writers (99% of playwrights) never learn to. All you need beyond that are good stories, and you can swipe them from anywhere, as Shakespeare did. So there’s nothing to stop poets writing and staging plays but fear and economics. And if you’re writing poetry you’ll have put those two in their place years ago.
*
Some things are so manifestly true they can’t be budged. So in time they get called clichés or freeze to jokes, but they stay true. So it is with the actor asking plaintively: What’s my motivation? But this is no different to my interrogation of the poem: why is that word there? Why that line-break? Why that metaphor? For what reason does obscurity take precedence over clarity? Or saying take precedence over silence? The trained actor is a first responder to language. He or she receives the language before the director, the audience, the critics. The approbation or otherwise of good actors is more telling than notes or applause or catcalls or cheers or tears or reviews, because whatever shape the story’s in, the production, the event, at least it’s clear the characters are creatures, and without that one has nothing.
In the chapter called ‘White’ we cast great song-lyrics into the blancheur and they shrivelled like film in fire. You bring bad lines to good actors and you can meet that devouring force at first hand, as they respectfully (usually) and seriously (always) say I don’t think I’d say this. I wouldn’t say that to her now she’s said that to me. He’s standing too far away for me to say it like that. My character wouldn’t listen any longer to her. I don’t think I’d say anything at all.
This last one happened lately. In my play After Troy, the desolate Hecuba confronts the tribal chief Mestor whom she thought was her friend, but whom she now knows has murdered her youngest son. Mestor doesn’t know she knows. I wrote numb, twisted, strangled lines for her in her masked rage and grief, but the actress, having gone where the words took her, came back from that dark place, found me in the pub after rehearsal and said I don’t think she’d say a word. When actors ask for fewer lines you know they’re dead serious.
And if you’re new to this, and you think you’re the only maker here, you try to stare that down: it’s not your character it’s mine, so I know, so there. But you don’t, because, poet, now that the words are passing through the souls of actors, you’re new to your play too, and someone who has trained about a thousand times harder than you and in the company of some of the best English ever written is telling you what she knows, what he knows, what their bodies know about English. Know as much as they do; only then you can stare them down. I cut all Hecuba’s lines in the scene and we got a silence of absolute ferocity as she stared at Mestor gibbering his bullshit. Then she gouged his eyes out.
Actors are hungry for verse because it’s creaturely. They know when it’s true or false. They hear it in the gut, the lungs, the windpipe. Lines of the classics are creaturely, which we know because they’re still speaking to us, so the best actors have travelled far beyond that clump of shrubbery from which dull voices ever burble verse isn’t natural, meter’s not authentic, rhyme isn’t real. Perhaps people who think that way somehow believe that four hundred years ago we really did speak in high pentameters and complex metaphors dreamed up on the spot, or rhyme as we left the room, leaving some vagabonds and clowns to clatter in and swap incomprehensible prose riddles while we powdered our noses.
*
When I was about fifteen I first encountered this.
| Regan. | Witness the world, that I create thee here |
| My lord and master. | |
| Goneril. | Mean you to enjoy him? |
| Albany. | The let-alone lies not in your good will. |
| Edmund. | Nor in thine, lord. |
| Albany. | Half-blooded fellow, yes. |
| Regan. | Let the drum strike, and prove my title thine. |
| Albany. | Stay yet; hear reason. Edmund I arrest thee On capital treason; and, in thy attaint, This gilded serpent. |
These lines of King Lear set things ablaze for me. Not a great tragic monologue, not a deep rumination, not the knockabout comedy, not the songs, not the spells, not poetry as I understood it at that age, but this nasty spat between two poisonous sisters, a malevolent schemer, and a decent sort getting the big picture too late. I was staggered by the sense of multitude, of creatures rubbing and bristling past each other. Goneril and Regan both want Edmund, but only Regan can have him, because she’s been widowed whereas Goneril’s stuck with Albany. She thinks he’s useless, he’s figured out she’s vile, he despises the ‘halfblood’ Edmund, Edmund thinks he’s a weed, Albany pulls rank. Mostly they’ll be dead soon. Time is dragging them bodily behind it. The meter is the world turning.
One thing I found so exhilarating here was unlocked for me by the words of a poet, Yeats, one of the few to have written compelling drama in the last century. (I mean, I venerate Frost and Auden to the moon as poets but in their theatre writing they never get themselves off the stage.) Here’s Yeats:
The Shakespearian Drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the subplot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight…Lear’s shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond shadow until it has pictured the world.
I craved that sense of multitude in my writing, and it drew me to the theatre.
*
The meter is the world turning. Look at this again:
| Edmund. | Nor in thine, lord. |
| Albany. | Half-blooded fellow, yes. |
These men hate each other. But they share this line.
Nor in thine, lord. Half-blooded fellow, yes.
Nor in thine lord half blooded fellow yes.
The textual indent before Albany’s words is misleading – there’s no space there at all, it merely indicates it’s a half-line. What it’s actually saying is leave no gap. You can outright kill Shakespeare – let alone kill me and I have died many times – by pausing in those half-lines.
Imagine this quarrel scene without shared lines, without versification.
| Regan. | Witness the world, that I create thee here my lord and master. |
| Goneril. | Mean you to enjoy him? |
| Albany. | The let-alone lies not in your good will. |
| Edmund. | Nor in thine, lord. |
| Albany. | Half-blooded fellow, yes. |
| Regan. | Let the drum strike, and prove my title thine. |
| Albany. | Stay yet; hear reason. Edmund I arrest thee on capital treason; and, in thy attaint, this gilded serpent. |
Hideous. Bogged down. And not composed like that. Verse playwrights write like composers: the lay-out is musical score. When actors don’t understand that, or aren’t interested in anyone else’s Method, they mix the black and white like amateurs and wonder who turned their lines grey.
The form fuses creatures, bonds them, shackles them. Albany’s ‘Half’ jumps in indignantly, can’t even wait for one unstressed instant. The meter is the world turning, day passing, grass growing. Silence costs too much to these beating hearts. Think of the price of nothing in Shakespeare: Cordelia’s silence when Lear asks her to compete publicly for his love is what sets the disaster in train. Again, something and nothing, blackness and whiteness, showing their true colours.
Cordelia will be silent again in time:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
These are effects of form, and in this playwright effects of pentameter: the absent line, or the broken, the split but essentially whole, length-of-a-breath line, expressing life as lived by fractured creatures drawn together at the feet of passing time.
Here, by contrast, to lift the dark mood, are rhymed pentameters expressing ecstasy:
| Romeo. | If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. |
| Juliet. | Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. |
| Romeo. | Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? |
| Juliet. | Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. |
| Romeo. | O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. |
| Juliet. | Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. |
| Romeo. | Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. |
Sonnet? Yes. Over? No. Exception to the rule, in sonnets as in certain other things that two can share: if you’re making the thing together you can go on as long as you damn well please.
| Romeo. | Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged. |
| Juliet. | Then have my lips the sin that they have took. |
| Romeo. | Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. |
| Juliet. – | You kiss by the book. |
Or as long as you physically can. Notice how, as soon as the sonnet-length has passed and the clock struck fourteen, all they can talk about is lips. Try speaking those lines with another and only one thing’s going to happen. No need to thank me. Effects of form.
*
Two hundred years or so earlier, a nameless playwright depicts the Crucifixion as part of the York Mystery Cycle. Four Roman soldiers nail Christ to a cross. The town’s nail-makers – ‘pinners’ – have been cast to do this, just as early this morning the water-drawers gave their Noah’s Flood and the goldsmiths stepped in about lunchtime for the Adoration of the Magi. The play has 300 lines, of which a mere twelve are Christ’s, addressing His Father. The rest of the action consists of these four professional pinners talking as they work, taking real time to measure and cut two lengths of wood, hammer them together properly, then pretend to nail a man to it:
| 1st Soldier. | Sir knyghtis, saie, howe wirke we nowe? |
| 2nd Soldier. | Yis, certis, I hope I holde this hande. |
| 3rd Soldier. | And to the boore I have it brought Full boxumly with-outen bande. |
| 4th Soldier. | Strike on than harde, for hym the boght. |
| 1st Soldier. | Yis, here is a stubbe will stiffely stande; Thurgh bones and senous it schall be soght. This werke is well, I will warande. |
Effects of form: the work cannot stop, the talk cannot stop. The meter turns the earth beneath four men doing what they do with their lives. Rhyme and alliteration combine in rhythmic four-beat lines: whatever else it is in the great scheme of things, it’s a work-song. Primarily it’s a work-song. It takes the time it takes. And for this reason, regardless of the highly-wrought and artificial form this play takes, the writer is known to us now as ‘The York Realist’.
*
Realism, naturalism now? Many talented playwrights make fine work out of prose, and some – a very much smaller group – have the skill to make the voices of their creatures actually sound different from one another. It’s alarming how many don’t. But verse ought to do this better than prose. As with so-called ‘free’ verse, voices will, without the pressure of line-end or meter or rhyme or pattern, say exactly what their maker wants them to say next, which is why so many rather successful playwrights write characters who sound the same as each other, while either agreeing with the playwright in an attractive way or disagreeing like fools. Mind, if the characters combine to voice a world-view the crowd is happy with, you have instant genius in the house, which we’re lucky to have quite often.
In a poem, you can render – in fact you must render – a coherent and consistent voice that doesn’t have to be you – in fact isn’t you, for you are a creature, and not black ink or pixels. If you extend that principle to characters in a play – this character knows x much and says things in a y way, while this one knows z much and says things in a w way – verse can heighten the effect, because you are putting into action manifold ways a particular creature works with the white and black, the nothing and something, the warmth of the spotlit blaze – the line’s length – and the horror of the shadowy soundless wings – the line’s end. What are my words, my ambit? How wide is the ring around me that contains what I know or what I believe? What does it mean to me to be here in the light? What does it cost to speak? What does it cost to be silent? To be gone? Verse is, in comparison with prose, a measurable and governable way of creating distinctions in voice.
And how to make your creatures? Well, the following applies to any play, a poet’s or not, but is so delightful and insightful a passage it deserves an appearance. It’s Yeats again, at first quoting the poet and playwright Goethe:
‘We do the people of history the honour of naming them after the creations of our own minds.’…One day, as [Shakespeare] sat over Holinshed’s History of England, he persuaded himself that Richard the Second, with his French culture, ‘his too great friendliness to his friends,’ his beauty of mind, and his fall before dry, repelling Bolingbroke, would be a good image for an accustomed mood of fanciful, impractical lyricism in his own mind.
If you’re a poet, now you’ve made another. You awaken a north in you, a south or east or west or any magpie mess of these. You tilt the mind that way. In my work I sometimes feel myself physically changing posture as I write for character x (sit upright and frown), character y (slouch and smile), character z (slouch and frown). They are not I. Find them in the language.
What is the black utterance to Richard II in particular, and what is the white silence? How many words does he have, and how does he love them? He will grow away from you, and so will she, and they, and it, and all the creatures you made, because they were born not only of you, but of your will in love with your language, and shored against silence. They are wrought by pressures of form and story into unique identity.
*
The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres, for fascinating reasons that mattered earlier but don’t right now, arrived at the pentameter as the dominant mode of speech. This became the form of expressed life. This line became the sound of breathing creatures passing through moments of time. It is no less natural, and no more arbitrary, than the following conventions of ‘prose’ theatre, all the way to the most ‘naturalistic’ – that is, all the way to television – that characters speak in turn; that everything they say is clear to the audience; that everything they say is either clear to each other, or significantly obscure; that everything they say matters to the story. These are conventions. If you want to see some interesting first steps away from some of those, you could do worse than look at The Wire.
*
Journeys start in ignorance, and for several years, as I started corralling my friends and family into outdoor spectaculars in a space called my garden, I couldn’t really see beyond lyricism. I believed that what a poet could bring to the theatre was beauty, heights and flights, a late 20th-century shot at Marlowe’s mighty line. But this narrow concept of beauty, poetic or lyric if you like, is precisely what poets should dump at the stage door.
Eliot could have told me this in 1950, had I been listening: ‘the self-education of a poet trying to write for the theatre seems to require a long period of disciplining his poetry, and putting it, so to speak, on a very thin diet in order to adapt it to the needs of the drama…’
For his plays may seem less than his poetry or his criticism, but in the macabre fragments of Sweeney Agonistes you can see tiny seeds and nuts of Beckett, Pinter, Monty Python, Caryl Churchill, Bryony Lavery:
| SWARTS: | These fellows always get pinched in the end. |
| SNOW: | Excuse me, they don’t all get pinched in the end. |
| What about them bones on Epsom Heath? | |
| I seen that in the papers | |
| You seen that in the papers | |
| They don’t all get pinched in the end. | |
| DORIS: | A woman runs a terrible risk. |
| SNOW: | Let Mr Sweeney continue his story. |
| SWEENEY: | This one didn’t get pinched in the end |
| But that’s another story too. | |
| This went on for a couple of months | |
| Nobody came | |
| And nobody went | |
| But he took in the milk and he paid the rent. | |
| SWARTS: | What did he do? All that time, what did he do? |
| SWEENEY: | What did he do! what did he do? |
| That don’t apply. | |
| Talk to live men about what they do. | |
| He used to come and see me sometimes | |
| I’d give him a drink and cheer him up. | |
| DORIS: | Cheer him up? |
| DUSTY: | Cheer him up? |
| SWEENER: | Well here again that don’t apply |
| But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you. |
*
Without a playwright’s instincts a poet can bring nothing at all to the space. But the poet who mines, sounds, cultivates the black and white of the page to their fullest extent is learning much the same as what a dramatist learns about presence and absence, time flying or grinding by, nearness to a heartbeat, distance from any, and the helpless tendency of ordinary life to sigh, put down its tools, and give in to story.
*
A great Irish poet once chuckled to me that he hadn’t done much work in theatre because he found it tough to get people on or off the stage. I thought that was a profound understanding and equipped him perfectly. Poet or playwright, you embrace the reality of the artifice: entrances, exits, stories, stanzas, rhymes, lines, writing at all. Whatever the story you’re telling, something in the make-up of this character wants to get into the light, be lit by the blaze, be heard, be remembered. Here’s Yeats in Lapis Lazuli:
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
*
When a play of mine is coming on, the only thing I say to – or rather, beg of – the publicity people is ‘Please don’t say it’s in verse.’ Verse drama, while it goes by that name, wears that costume, looks like a fool in the marketplace. But he’s more Lear’s Fool than yours, that verse drama, because those plays are everywhere. Our national theatre is Shakespeare Etc. By and large, the drama critics of our marketplace wait for two things only: to see the next famous lovely face have A Crack At The Bard – an Olympics we’re truly trapped inside forever – or to cry out that someone, that young new Etc, ‘makes Sarah Kane look like Alan Ayckbourn.’ That is, to be the meerkat who fixed his little eyes longest on the future.
What if theatre doesn’t come from the future?
*
In his 1950 lecture, Eliot asserts that audiences should be made to hear verse ‘from people dressed like ourselves, living in houses and apartments like ours, and using telephones and motorcars and radio sets.’ And bullet-trains and iPads and facebook, and of course he’s right. But as long as audiences associate verse with a golden, heightened, improbable past, and poets lug the glittering cart of their poetry into the space with them, and new playwrights reflexively associate the present with ugliness and fracture and the false real of TV, and critics keep a spellbound guard on the Great or a frozen watch for the New, this forward shift can never be made.
The Modernists brought the bric-a-brac of the Now into poetry: that’s half the work accomplished; we’re at home in detritus. For the other half, the undone half, the unessayed half, a way to sound it, let’s go back to Edward Thomas.
The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow.
So have I heard, and do in part believe it.
Or do I mean Robert Frost?
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
So have I heard, and do in part believe it.
Actually it’s neither.
| Marcellus. | It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is that time. |
| Horatio. | So have I heard, and do in part believe it. |
This was Robert Frost’s favourite line in all Shakespeare. And of course it wouldn’t jar in a poem by Frost or Thomas. It’s a passing of time – an effect of form – and, as Mandelstam said of the lines of Dante, saturated with thought. At first glance the line looks almost colourless, featureless, one a fool would cut for sure, but to me it’s contemporary poetry, and it will one day bring us back into theatre, because it tells us the pentameter can breathe right now as it breathed back then.
*
The liberal, educated Horatio lets the blue-collar soldier run on with his superstitions, his ‘some say’ and his ‘they say’, and Horatio would, to the ears of Marcellus and the other watchmen, appear to concur. But he probably doesn’t concur at all: out of politeness he chimes with the soldier but can’t resist the softly qualifying ‘in part’. He has of course seen the Ghost at this point, but is perhaps processing the sight, rummaging for a rational cause. He’s not ready to shatter his reasonable world-view any further by embracing the superstitions of every man jack. The point is that the pentameter gives him that ‘in part’. It’s the sound of the mind passing through the moment and helplessly revealing character: ‘So have I heard, and do in part believe it.’
And here’s some actual Thomas, beating a path to contemporary dramatic utterance, stretched over heartbeat, helpless in the face of light, verse as a mattering breath:
‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more… Have many gone
From here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes: a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved that tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different, for it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good…’
If the meter is a constant, and I mean the bars behind the music, I mean the ghost of the metronome, then character can be infinitely played against it, across it, along it. For example, characters like Horatio, Hamlet, Beatrice, Hal, Rosalind or Prospero have wide vocabularies, rich word-hoards, and the lines go by at the pace of thought. Comic or rustic characters have great vocabularies too – we are talking about Shakespeare, after all, who either won’t or can’t write the inarticulate, only sometimes the tongue-tied – but those folks tend to tumble into prose.
Whereas, whereas – what a constantly shadowing meter can do is reveal the voice of the helpless-inarticulate, by sounding its inability to move at the pace of the lines, sounding its not-knowing against the relentless turning of the earth. Samuel Beckett and his inheritors bring some of this – the sounding of the helpless-inarticulate – but they don’t bring it in verse. And that’s what I’m thinking of, and what I continue to try for: verse, the contemporary pentameter preserved and deepened in the 20th century by the likes of Thomas and Frost and those who follow, the sound of light arriving in the moment, growing at creaturely rate into thought or feeling, the earth turning beneath the feet of the happy, the sad, the virtuous and vile, the rude, the polite, the bright and the clueless, the ruined, the rewarded, the blessed and the doomed.
So, in the spirit of T.S. Eliot and all poets who have ventured or will venture into the dazzling bright and awful dark of theatre, I pass on what I did, what I found, what I learned. I stand beside it; I stand by it. It’s been a lonely row to hoe, so, to echo the master who began this chapter, I’ll call out across the fields in all seven directions: north, south, east, west, up, down, and after.
*
In After Troy, the imprisoned Andromache is glad to see the courteous Talthybius, who will take her to visit her little boy Astyanax in the children’s prison. But the Greeks have hurled the child to his death already, and left the aghast civil-servant to tell her. In the end he doesn’t need to.
*
The next and last chapter of my book on poetry is called, of course, ‘Time’.
I was going to call it ‘Poem’, as I wanted to pay tribute to poet-teachers from Coleridge to John Hollander, who’ve illustrated forms by showing them in use. But it isn’t a poem, it’s not inscribed on whiteness, it can’t breathe independently of all that’s gone before. Really it’s a cacophony, but it should be, there being, as I said at the outset, as many outlooks on poetry as there are readers of it. It’s a pandemonium, all the little creatures let loose in daylight. It’s my workshop on a holiday, its doors all open.
And I know our culture is book-ended – either side of where knowledge ends – by folks who believe anything and folks who believe nothing. In between are many who believe what they read for sure, as long as it’s in prose. Many of these write poetry, oddly, but go to prose to learn about it. If they want to drop out here, I won’t fail them. When I first taught in New York I was interested to see that while my students’ examination of me ran to three printed pages of thoroughly candid observations, my judgment of them was confined to a choice of two pictograms: P (they showed up, semi-circle complete) or F (they didn’t, semi-circle broken.)
But I hope you show up to this, to the Wedding Feast, and leave the poor Wedding-Guest behind to hear the Ancient Mariner all day and all night forever, I hope you’ll come with the evolutionary psychologists and me to the Wedding Feast, where – what can we see?
A garden (we can hunt) beside a house with many rooms (we can hide), a great banquet being prepared (we can eat) and a thousand bottles of wine (we can escape). We see people (we can laugh, learn, love, fight), we see the sun high in the sky (we have all the time in the world) and we see a dance-floor (we will prove we’re fit for anything). All in all we like what we see. A wedding-day but not yours: time at its brightest, sharpest, and strangest.
So I hope you’ll come with me, and the evolutionary psychologists, and Ned Stowey, and Bill Porlock, and Byron and Browning and Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot’s three giggling Furies, and some boring professors I met along the way, and Dante’s Nimrod and Yeats’s Wandering Aengus, and a Riddler from long ago and a Taxpayer from now, and Helga with her a/e language, Cliff with his i/o/u, and my imaginary and imaginative students Ollie and Bella and Mimi and Wayne, and of course the dear radiant blushing bride Miss Angela Fackenham-Tray and her hungover husband-to-be, good old Edward HeffendenDedley, and I hope you’ll accept the invitation in the spirit in which I give it. Frost wrote that poetry ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. I think the wise poet is always beginning, always – where the black meets the white – delighted to be at it, and the rest I’m more than happy to render up to Time.
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