Notes Towards Authenticity

RAW LIGHT: the magazine

NOTES TOWARDS AUTHENTICITY:
poetic aphorisms from Jane Holland

Aphorisms, filled with the hot air of poetry ...

Authenticity, the poet’s most plausible con trick.

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The spirit, rather than the letter, of authenticity is what marks out good poetry. Those who achieve both, or appear to achieve both, are gods.

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Don’t waste time on compromise. Even a botched job is better than a failure of nerve.

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The act of writing poetry is, by its very nature, ironic.

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‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ (John Keats) What could be more authentic? Or more calculated?

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Belief in authenticity is the gateway to Blake’s road of excess (and we all know where that leads).

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The Fool opens the Major Arcana: innocence and an openness to failure breed creativity.

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Good poetry can be written by an idiot. All things considered, it’s probably better to be an idiot.

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Federico García Lorca: ‘The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.’

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Lorca and the duende. Arsenic lobsters. The raw and the cooked. What flies in one language may fall flat in another.

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Trust yourself. You don’t have to believe in angels to hear a bell ring. And vice versa.

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Poetry is hard: it demands energy. There must be an energy to the poem that propels each line toward and beyond the waterfall of the line-break: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (Dylan Thomas).

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Home is where the stress falls.

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The more authentic the idea, the more natural the line.

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A line that calls attention to its own idiosyncrasy can be as authentic as a line that speaks of elegance and tradition: intention is everything.

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Rhythm that springs direct from the personality – however contrary and antipoetic - is authentic. Everything else is based on the way we think we ought to be writing.

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Ergo Mina Loy: ‘Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.'

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An adopted persona is still true to the self if chosen by the self.

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The truly authentic is never the other, only the self: even when disguised, lying, psychotic.

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You cannot steal or borrow or learn authenticity. It’s either there in the work or it isn’t. Sometimes the only way to find it is to stop looking.

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The poem made up of undigested influences is to poetry what a plastic flower is to fresh blossom.

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The poet must believe authenticity to be possible, even when faking it like crazy.

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The poet’s first voice is an amalgam of second-hand fictions.

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If poetry is a fiction, can it ever be true?

Jane Holland

First published at VERSE PALACE, poet Francis Leviston's essay blog, December 2009, which no longer appears to exist. Francis does have a website though which is still online.