 |
| NICK LAIRD |
Authour, Authur
Nick Laird on the physicality of language
Satuarday 14 June 2008
Y
ou should put that in a poem. A thing to say to the people who write poems; the offering of some strange coincidence or anecdote. Poets, if they're like me, sip their drink and agree, privately certain it won't give rise to anything at all. You can make fiction and drama from reported stories, from hearsay and incident, but not poetry. Here is Edward Thomas, chastening the Belgian symbolist Maeterlinck: "Anything, however small, may make a poem; nothing, however great, is certain to." This explains why the job of poet laureate could be described as an exercise in technique rather than talent.
So where do poems come from? Michael Longley has a witty, slightly exasperated response to that FAQ: if I knew that, I'd go there. For me, a poem cannot be willed, and it usually starts not with a story or image but words. But maybe each poet proceeds differently. Thomas thought so, as he explained in his study of Maeterlinck:
"Wordsworth writes a poem in the hope of making it give the same impression as a certain hawthorn-tree gives to him; Keats because he cannot dismiss from his mind the words, "Dost thou not hear the sea?"; Burns because a girl pleases and evades him."
But we might notice that for Wordsworth and Burns these poems sound like exercises - in the case of Keats, there's no aspect of choice. He is preoccupied (from the Latin, praeoccupare "sieze beforehand"). In noticing something, he has let himself get stuck. Yesterday afternoon I came upon two phrases that hung around: Invisible from space and Bloodsports with lapdogs. Hardly Dost thou not hear the sea?, and they went no further than a few notes. But yesterday, for much too long, they seemed near enough the kind of thing that might have bothered Keats. This is another trouble: which words are worth your preoccupation?
Like Mr Micawber, a poet is always open to the possibility of something turning up. Grubbing and intent, he's a bottom feeder, obsessively going through the refuse of his awareness to check he isn't chucking anything of value. A glint among the peelings. It could be a sprocket, a washer, a locket, a ring. He rubs some of the tea-leaves off, rinses it in the sink. It's a strange shape, but maybe he could fashion something from it. In Dream Song 29 John Berryman puts the moment like this:
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.
Three hundred years earlier, George Herbert described inspiration in similar, olfactory terms: "I once more smell the dew and rain, / and relish versing."
That "odor", that "little cough", can be almost anything: a rhythmic, plangent turn of phrase (Dost thou not hear the sea?); a phrase turned to a light beyond the usual spectrum (Seeing Things, God's Gift to Women); something self-evidently resonant and strange (Quoof, Blizzard of One). It can even be the rich suggestion of a real name or placename (Pan Cogito, Samarkand, Minsk). When I was younger and impatient in my pew in church, after bending my fingers back as far as I could, after examining the half-eaten ear of the policeman who sat in front, I turned, finally, to my Bible (a blue leather-bound version commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana). Bizarre and glorious names: Nebuchadnezzar, Methuselah, Ham, Shem, Japheth, Meshach, Shadrach, Abednego. Christ's words on the cross in particular - Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani - they seemed an event in the mouth.
Though appropriate for Herbert, inspiration smacks a bit too much of something divine: I prefer Berryman's terms. The right words are little coughs from off-stage, promptings, triggers, intimations of something near and distant and - since poetry is an art of analogy, and thus an art of integration - finally connected to you, right to your skin. Jorie Graham lists the desired chain of links, the platonic ideal of oneness, and the necessary shortfall, when she writes, in "The Age of Reason": "For what we want / to take / inside of us, whole orchard, / color, / name, scent, symbol, raw / pale // blossoms, wet black / arms there is / no deep enough." A poem is an attempt to experience. It's a form of compensation for having just the one life.
Once the sticking point, the prompting, is given over to Wallace Stevens's "blessed rage for order," the poem is worked and grows, sometimes organically, and sometimes even through a Goldilocks process of trying on different forms until it finds the one that suits. Since the poet, more often than not, sits down to write about nothing, the content, the subject matter of a poem, rises to meet the words. Sometimes even the original phrase is edged out. It is not a wholly intended process, and requires trust. The poem comes, if it comes at all, from a place below volition. Still on Maeterlinck, Thomas insists that "concentration, intensity of mood, is the one necessary condition in the poet and in the poem. By this concentration something is detached from the confused immensity of life and receives individuality ..."
To believe, in the polyphonic era, that words in a certain order induce sensation, which is another way of saying that they cast a spell, must be classed as a strange, atavistic faith, but this is exactly what poetry affirms. In Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West", it is the singing of the woman that imposes order, that makes it seem as if the lights in the fishing boats are "arranging, deepening, enchanting night". The internal patterns of sight and sound and sense in a good poem, all combine to form something tangible and ordered and equal to the world. Something, "however small", is taken and clarified.
Sometimes this clarification, this receipt of individuality, can be a sonic effect, and notably physical, like that eloi, eloi in the plea of Christ. In Seamus Heaney's poem "In Iowa", from District and Circle, the opening "In Iowa once," a phrase which recurs near the short poem's end, forces the mouth to work all the way from the back to the front, through the vowel sounds. If you say it again, aloud, you'll note how your tongue and lips trip down through the words. The three middle aspirated endings are a musical scale. At the start of the poem the phrase works as a kind of tuning up, but by the time the words are repeated the poet has travelled through a snowbound, desolate landscape and seen a mowing machine "abandoned in the open gap / of a field". But now the words denote not a moment in the poet's history, but a moment in the history of the land. The shift in sense is from I was in Iowa once and ... to In Iowa there once ... By the time the phrase reoccurs the musical scale has been recalibrated to a deeper range, and sounds very different. I wonder if those three words were this poem's "little cough".