Postscript to Epic Poems (& 'The Lyric Principle')

While tidying my study yesterday - yes, the annual clean-out has finally occurred - I found a note I'd made and lost some months ago of a superb quotation from 'On Poetry and Poets', a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot.

The quotation I'd noted down is from 'The Music of Poetry' (see how closely Paterson follows in the great man's footsteps?) and is relevant to me in connection with my last few posts on Alice Oswald and the writing of a long poem and on the structure of three modern epic poems. The following should serve rather well as a postscript to those entries:

'It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. Some poetry is meant to be sung; most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken – and there are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur of innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms. Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place: just as, in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole; and the passages of less intensity will be, in relation to the level on which the total poem operates, prosaic – so that, in the sense implied by that context, it may be said that no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is a master of the prosaic.'

Plus, the footnote accompanying that last point:

'This is the complementary doctrine to that of the 'touchstone' line or passage of Matthew Arnold: this test of the greatness of a poet is the way he writes his less intense, but structurally vital, matter.'

Now, you have to admire Eliot's mastery of prose - let alone the prosaic - in the passage I've just quoted. For a start, it's highly Latinate, in a way we rarely see anymore, not merely in his word selection, but more interestingly in his sentence structure, with its elegant asides, caveats and micro-clauses. But beyond that, his ability to make good solid sense, even with all that scaffolding in place, is what allows his criticism to stand out from other twentieth-century critics and to continue in its relevance to poets today.

This, of course, is the crux of that whole passage, at least for the purposes of my own earlier discussions on the writing of long or epic poems: in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole ...

This seems to indicate that epic poetry follows the same pattern as other works of literature of any length - i.e. novels, theatrical dramas, screenplays - and that this is done, not simply to accommodate Eliot's nod to musical rhythm, though that is hugely important in the overall scheme, but also for our comfort as readers/listeners. Unending conflict and other excitements begin to be unpleasant, and eventually ludicrous, if suffered at length. (You often see impossibly manic sequences in comic films, for instance, to great effect.) So in a longer poem, a poet needs the quieter movements to recover from and prepare for the heights.

Assuming you have any heights, that is ...

On Don Paterson's 'Lyric Principle'

Last night I found myself reading the second part of Don Paterson's controversial essay, The Lyric Principle - having found it impossible to wade through when it first appeared (in Poetry Review Vol 97:3 Autumn 2007) - and decided to blog about it.

I had read Part I of The Lyric Principle and enjoyed it (though not as much as Paterson's equally controversial 'Dark Art of Poetry', the 2004 T.S. Eliot lecture, which struck many chords with me). I did try to get into Part II when the magazine came out, but at the time the prose felt torturous and impossibly weighed down with abstruse detail, along with voluminous footnotes worthy of a spoof academic essay. So I gave up the effort.

But last night, flicking through some of last year's poetry magazines in search of a particular poet, I came across the essay again (Part II) and began to read it.

This time, for some reason, the difficulties I'd experienced back in the autumn were no longer apparent. Everything, in fact, made good clear sense.

Indeed, his remarks made such good sense that, aware of the various outraged 'letters to the editor' that had appeared in the wake of their publication, I couldn't work out why The Lyric Principle was so very controversial. After all, what was there to argue about?

Paterson's main point in Part II, very basically, is that good poetry works because it takes account of our innate preference for pattern and surprise. Which is just another way of saying what all good writers know instinctively, that we should 'give them what they want, but not the way they were expecting it'.

I can't recall, and don't have the earlier Poetry Review to hand, how Part I was controversial, though from reactions in the subsequent issue, I suspect the furore may have been caused by claims that poetry should work in the same way as music, and/or that sound can't be separated from sense. I can't see anything to get upset about there either. But perhaps I missed the point ...

I can understand some people being more sceptical about all this, and perhaps feeling ruffled by the occasional note of hubris behind Paterson's writings, but I'm naturally excited by anything that combines the two great obsessions in my life: language (i.e. linguistics) and poetry.

I can't overstate that position, really. I am, and always have been, hugely resistant to anyone setting themselves up as a figure of authority. It's a knee-jerk reaction on my part to distrust whatever they might say, regardless. But to be given carte blanche by an acknowledged expert on contemporary poetry to continue doing precisely what I've been doing since I first started knocking out my own doggerel at c. 9 years of age, i.e. turning the dial until I can't hear the hiss of the static anymore, is both a relief and a great pleasure.

But not only that. Paterson's detailed list of which consonant and vowel sounds complement each other rather than clash in the poetic line leads neatly into my own personal observations on the similarities between languages, those startling correlatives you come across once you start looking in-depth at a number of different languages - even between languages not belonging to the same 'family'. And once you've been working with a heavily stressed medium like Anglo-Saxon poetry for any length of time, you do tend to respond favourably to the idea that some vowel sounds in some words - though this can also vary according to whether they are in a stressed or unstressed position in the line - are simply 'filler' and should be avoided; the poetic equivalent of fish paste.

So if anyone out there has a good idea why so many people seemed to react poorly to The Lyric Principle, perhaps they could enlighten me?

Back to the Wanderer

Re my recent post about Don Paterson and losing the thread of my Wanderer translation, I'm pleased to report that all the controversy has been absorbed into my bloodstream now and I'm translating the poem again.

Though perhaps I should say versioning, since although many parts of my poem are a straight translation from the Anglo-Saxon, I've taken one drastic step away from the original, with the result that it can only ever be a version now.

Please note though, I haven't changed my opinion of Don Paterson's views on translation. I've simply revised my opinion. Which is entirely in keeping with my character.

Meanwhile, in my capacity as Warwick Poet Laureate this year, I've been commissioned to write a poem on the history of circus elephants in Leamington Spa.

Beat that for sheer randomness.


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Now playing: Julius Katchen, Georg Solti; London Symphony Orchestra - Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, I. Moderato
via FoxyTunes

The Controversial Art of Translation

As I'm currently translating The Wanderer, a tightly-constructed poem in Anglo-Saxon of some 120 lines, I turned to Don Paterson's 'Orpheus' this weekend for some inspiration, as the last few pages of 'Orpheus', his free version of Rilke's famous sonnet sequence, are taken up with notes on the difference between translating and versioning.

At first I was impressed, almost mesmerised, by his highly intelligent and persuasive prose. But as I began to see how his opinions were negatively impacting on my confidence as a poet-translator, I became annoyed. Paterson freely admits that his argument is almost wholly a defence of those who - like himself - 'translate' poetry without a strong understanding of the original language. But that doesn't prevent him from becoming overly-rigid and dogmatic about the issue.

Paterson believes that you must either translate a poem - which is ultimately pointless in verse because it's almost impossible to get the sense and the spirit of the thing down in poetry - or write your own version of it - i.e. essentially a new poem - without bothering too much about being true to the original.

'If, through naivety or over-ambition, both translation and version are attempted simultaneously,' Paterson writes, 'the result is foredoomed.' (p. 81, Orpheus, Faber 2006)

This is over-simplifying the translation issue to the point of nonsense. Anyone who has ever attempted to translate a poem into verse knows that it's impossible to do so without making your own choices along the way, some of which will not be a straight translation but must necessarily be your own invention - or reinterpretation - of the original. The only way to translate a poem without independent choices of that kind - i.e. poetic acts of re-reading - is to translate into prose.

And even the wildest version must, at some point, pay homage to the original sense, otherwise why bother choosing that poem at all?

Influenced by his thoughts, I quickly realised that my own version-in-progress of The Wanderer was part-translation, part-version, and therefore, in Paterson's view, 'foredoomed'. I started tinkering with it, first to bring it back to a straight translation, then - frustrated by the resulting woodenness of the lines - to shift it more boldly into a version, abandoning all pretence of honouring the original.

Having done that, I have found - not surprisingly - that I've completely lost my bearings. I am no longer writing with that strong, sure-footed certainty with which my translation began. The poem feels like a chore to be finished, in whatever faltering voice I can manage to dredge up from the depths of my lost confidence. As the poem itself exclaims: 'All that joy has perished!'

I shall now have to put The Wanderer aside for a few days, and see if I can write something else in the interim, to get my focus and my confidence back - before I continue with my 'foredoomed' translation-version.

The Act of Making

There's been some ping-ponging discussion online in recent days about 'the act of making', thanks to a post on poet George Szirtes' blog where he's been responding to a controversial essay serialised in Poetry Review. The essay in question is by poet and Picador editor Don Paterson and is called 'The Lyric Principle'. Basically, it discusses how poetry is written, not so much in practical terms as in terms of our initial inspiration and the deep well-springs of the craft.

One of George's main objections - and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him here - is that he feels Don's attitude towards the craft to be too 'mysterious' and more like that of a high priest at times than a practising poet. I know exactly what he means by that, but at the same time, I don't see that it's such a bad thing to import a little more spiritualism and mystery into poetry in an age where poetry is being constantly sold to workshoppers as little more than a hobby or some sort of do-it-yourself therapeutic aid.

George Szirtes' excellent and discursive writing blog can be found here, along with links to other fascinating responses by bloggers and forumers to both his comments and the original essay by Don Paterson.

Thanks to Angela France for bringing this to my attention, by the way, via the Poets On Fire forum where she has been inviting others to comment on this too. You can view that topic as a non-member, but you do have to be a member of the forum to comment on it. (However, it only takes a few minutes to apply to join. Theoretically!)

Books Just Arrived

Having a little spare cash after putting down the required deposit and whatnot for our new tenancy - starting next week - I decided to treat myself to some new books.

Well, I say new, but only one of them is genuinely new and that's Common Prayer by Poetry Review editor, Fiona Sampson (Carcanet Books, just out).

Some are copies of poetry books I've had out on loan from the library and want to actually own, like Don Paterson's delicately written Orpheus (Faber, 2006) and Vicki Feaver's The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006).

Interestingly, The Book of Blood was one of a number of possible titles for my own second collection, which eventually became Boudicca & Co. Vicki Feaver got there first on this occasion, but since I consider Boudicca & Co. an inspired choice of title, there can be no hard feelings!

:wry grin:

Also in this category is Paul Farley's excellent Tramp in Flames.

Yet another book, Peter Dickinson's Changes, is not poetry at all, but science fantasy: a trilogy of short fantasy novels I loved in my teens, now published as one volume by US publisher Dell. Merlin re-awakens and 'changes' Britain back into the Dark Ages, a land where modern machines are considered the work of the devil and those who try to use them are treated as witches. I'm looking forward to re-acquainting myself with the Changes trilogy this summer - as a break from the deadly serious work of poetry!

That only leaves two other books: Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk (Faber, 2003) and Ian Duhig's The Lammas Hireling (Picador, also 2003). I've read neither of these before, though I have browsed Duhig's book in a branch of Waterstones, intrigued by the superb painting of a 'Hare' by Albrecht Durer on the cover, and put it down mentally on my list of books to be bought when I'd got enough in the bank. Me and hares ... suffice it to say, we go way back.

I haven't put links up for any of these, as I wouldn't have wanted to leave anyone out and there are rather too many for a quick blog entry. But I hope you google at least one or two of them, if you're interested in contemporary poetry, and maybe buy a few yourself. Unless you own them already, of course, in which case do leave a comment below to let me know your favourites or the most disappointing reads among those books mentioned here.

Packing up the house recently, I discovered that I own several hundred books of poetry published over the past few decades. I haven't managed to read them all, of course, though I've sampled most. Some I know intimately, and those are the books of poetry which have gone into my OPEN FIRST boxes during the packing process, the poems that sustain me both as a writer and as a person.

But it's an odd thing. The more contemporary poetry I read, the less I seem to know or really understand about poetry.

In that respect, at least, poetry is like the TARDIS in Doctor Who. It's bigger on the inside ...

Areté 22

I imagine that Craig Raine still receives visitors and students in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford, seated immediately beneath a strikingly realistic painting of Craig Raine seated in his airy front parlour in New College Lane, Oxford. It's a postmodern experience, gazing from the real writer to the framed one above, and suitably surreal too, since you're in conversation with the poet who invented 'Martian' poetry.*

In 1999, I was among fifteen or so students at Oxford who attended Craig Raine's yearly ‘poetry class’ that Trinity term. Once a week, we would meet at his place in New College Lane to discuss poets and poetry, a few of us adjourning afterwards to the college bar to continue our - often very lively! - discussions there. Sometimes Craig would come with us to the bar. He’s the sort of tutor who likes to mix with his students, to chat about poetry and perhaps influence some of them towards his way of thinking.

So what is Craig Raine’s way of thinking?

Well, his ‘Arts Tri-Quarterly’ magazine Areté may hold some clues, edited by CR with Deputy Editor Ann Pasternak Slater (his wife). Still being based in Oxford when the magazine was launched - around the millennium - I bought the first few issues and found them a difficult read, full of worthy but obscure articles on literary figures whose works I had yet to encounter. Last week, I sent off for a copy of the recently published Areté 22, with its smart red cover, and was pleasantly surprised to find myself not merely understanding it - in places, it has to be said - but enjoying it too.

There are quasi-comical pieces here, including an article ‘On Being a Film Star’ by Susan Hitch and a poem by John Fuller, ‘My Life on the Margins of Celebrity’, plus a poem extract (from a verse novel?) entitled ‘The Broken Word’ by Adam Foulds, which is so lengthy it would have taken me several hours to read. So I'm afraid that I've not yet attempted that. The whole book is due to be published by Cape in 2008.

There are also two hefty essays on contemporary poetry, one by Craig Raine, entitled ‘Little Big Man: The Poetry of Don Paterson’ and the other by Areté Assistant Editor, Adam Thirlwell: ‘On Bad Poetry: Daljit Nagra’. The magazine holds other delights - it covers Fiction, Poetry, Reportage and Reviews, over some 150 pages - but I will only be dealing with the two poetry articles here.

CR’s main objective - in his Paterson essay, at least - seems to be that of discomforting the reader. And not only the reader, but the poet under review, I should imagine, as the article contains such astringent observations on his poetry as the following, which comes after an unfavourable examination of his 1994 Arvon prize-winning poem ‘A Private Bottling’: ‘Worse than any of these specific flaws, though, is a general disposition to annex mystical territory, a grandiose pretence, a self-aggrandising weakness for talking things up. In a word, exaggeration, a kind of immodesty that relies on no one calling your bluff’.

When I first started to read Raine’s essay on Paterson, I certainly felt uncomfortable and was prepared to disagree with his findings before I had even read the whole article. Landing Light is among my favourite new(ish) collections at the moment, and I found many of Paterson’s observations in his 2004 TS Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, highly apposite and credible. In that much, therefore, Paterson is a poet I trust.

But I soon found myself having to reassess my knee-jerk reaction to the icy bucket of water Raine throws over Paterson’s oeuvre. He isn’t so much indulging himself in critical vitriol as making some salient points about lazy writing and unintended humour in DP’s work. By the end of his essay, in fact, I had been brought to a point where I was able to agree with Raine on several points, even concerning some of Paterson’s better-known poems which I had previously admired. As you can imagine, having my own judgement challenged in this way was a difficult but salutary experience for me.

It’s important for poets - and poetry critics - to have scant respect for accepted wisdom, beliefs and authorities, and to rely instead on their own instincts when reading poetry. Craig Raine, in his role here as critic, is like the little boy in the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the one who refuses to go along with the charade, not because he has superior intelligence or keener eyesight than the rest, but because he has strong instincts and has not been cowed into ignoring them.

Correspondingly, his analysis of Don Paterson’s poetry is about exploding rather than exploring the man’s reputation. Let me be clear here. His essay is unnecessarily personal and is even guilty of wilfully missing the point on occasion in order to send up Paterson’s style - often hilariously. But that doesn’t mean CR is wrong on all counts. It just means he’s rude.

It becomes easy, when moving in particular circles on a regular basis, to fall into a pattern of responses to contemporary poetry which may not bear much resemblance to your earliest instincts as a reader. We call this process education, a useful by-product of reading a great deal of a certain sort of poetry and criticism, but it can also become indoctrination: one party imposing their beliefs on another, this latter usually less experienced and therefore more open to influence.

I consider myself open to influence on various levels, though far less than when I was just starting out in poetry. The most useful thing I learnt at Oxford was to question everything, regardless of appearances or reputation. This has bestowed on me a certain fearlessness on the one hand, but on the other a constantly shifting scale of literary values which can be confusing at times, liberating at others.

I enjoy Don Paterson’s poetry. At its best, it lifts and inspires me to write. But Craig Raine’s essay has shown me weaknesses in the work which had been obscured for me by that sense of enjoyment.

And since all things lead back to one’s own work - for poetry is the most self-obsessed literary form and poets the least interested in each other’s current work, beyond ambition or necessary politeness at parties - I am also indebted to Raine’s essay for highlighting weaknesses which exist in my own poetry too: ‘opaque syntax’, ‘sentimental and clumsy’, ‘verbal incompetence’, and even this sideways swipe at W.B. Yeats for similar crimes against poetry: ‘Padding, confusion, reprise. Usually in Yeats, the flaw is the separation of subject and predicate by unwieldy parenthesis. To be in such exalted company might cheer Paterson. It shouldn’t. A fault is a fault.’

But I'm not entirely swayed by CR's invective. There are a number of mistakes here, misreadings and misunderstandings. I don’t agree, for instance, that ‘the pearl sits knuckled in its silk’ in 'Letter to the Twins' is a poor description of a clitoris. CR may examine his own knobbly fingers at this point and fail to see the comparison, but let me assure him, a woman’s knuckles are not only far more petite, but an excited clitoris does protrude like a knuckle on a clenched fist. Not on the same size scale, of course, but enough to make the comparison allowable. Trust me, I’ve seen this.

: wicked smile:

And while it may seem a tenuous stretch to CR, if we use Paterson's own theory of a network of words and meanings suggested by the interplay of sounds within a word or line, the justification for 'knuckled' becomes stronger, reinforcing the sexual imagery here by hinting at: 'nuzzled, 'fucked', 'sucked' and, when taken in conjunction with 'silk' further along the line, even 'licked'. Craig Raine's own preference for the exact metaphor rather than the allusive, suggestive one hampers his ability to enjoy the range of Paterson's imagery here.

There are also flashes of delightful malice in this essay where I simply had to stop, read something out to my husband, and wipe my eyes before reading on. This, for instance, describing an unfortunately phrased line, again from Paterson’s poem, ‘Letter to The Twins’: ‘That last line is a minor miracle of ugliness. You want to take it to Lourdes.’

Overall then, an accomplished piece of critical thinking and sheer braggadocio from Craig Raine. Adam Thirlwell’s piece on Daljit Nagra’s debut collection, by contrast, is heavily defensive in tone and suffers from not really having understood the poet’s intentions. I’ve reviewed Look We Have Coming to Dover! myself, so have a fair grasp of the book’s style and contents, and I felt Thirlwell had decided on a theme for his essay first - in this case, ‘Bad Poetry’ - then tried to fit that theme to the collection in front of him, apparently oblivious to any mismatch.

There are also frequent bizarre echoes between Thirlwell’s phraseology and that of Craig Raine, as here when discussing ‘Bibi & the Street Car Wife!’: ‘I can ignore the hamfisted beefburgering: I can’t ignore the ugliness of these two lines’ (my italics). At another point, he uses exactly the same phrase Raine applies to one of Paterson’s poems in his own essay, describing Nagra’s work as ‘an allegory of deracination’. Thirlwell also throws the same complaints of ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘imprecision’ at the younger poet, complaining of similarly incompetent writing.

For Paterson’s extensive oeuvre to be attacked is fair enough. As an experienced poet with many accolades under his belt, he’s perfectly able to rebuff such critical attacks and probably expects them as a matter of course.

But to launch this entirely negative and thoroughly hostile 10 page rocket assault on a debut collection is, to my mind, unacceptable behaviour. To raise doubts may be a necessary thing, especially when a new poet has landed a contract with a publisher as internationally renowned as Faber. But it’s one thing to raise doubts and quite another to steamroller a debut collection into the ground.

This sort of nonsense smacks of vindictiveness and is in very poor taste. Besides which, it’s simply not effective criticism to pick at every line for its supposed obscurity - most of these poems are deliberately written in pidgin English, for god’s sake - and then end with a pronouncement as painfully sententious as ‘bad poetry is the mausoleum of language’. The same, I'm afraid, can be applied to bad criticism.

Not that I would use that particular phrase myself, bowdlerised from Baudelaire; I’d be too embarrassed.

***

* 'Martian' poetry is a phrase coined by James Fenton in a review of Craig Raine's first collection A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. It refers to a way of writing which assumes no prior knowledge of everyday items and so employs unusual and striking metaphors and other tropes to describe such objects, as though the narrator is a Martian. As an entertaining aside, Martianism is an anagram of Martin Amis, also known to have employed this peculiarly vivid writing style.