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.

Letting it all hang out

I suffer from a major conflict in my poetry writing, between the in-built compulsion to be neat and tidy - to an almost anal extent - and a desire to stuff all that prissy nonsense and just bloody well write.

I was looking a few nights ago at Vidyan Ravinthiran's excellent article on Ted Hughes and Poetic Embarrassment at Frances Leviston's Verse Palace (over a year old now, I think, but well worth a revisit) and thinking, YES! What the hell am I doing, shaving lines to a bare minimum, fussing over commas and spaces and 'poetic tone' in what must ultimately become heavily engineered poems?

I should be writing poems whose truth and meaning are just as important as their look on the page or their sound on the air - if not more important.

It's easy to forget, when lost in the idea of crafting a poem, of being a poet, of not only publishing each poem you write but actively expecting to publish it, that a poem exists for a reason beyond careerism and craft. Or it should do.

In his article, Vidyan describes what I call just bloody well writing the poem as humiliatingly akin to 'heading out to a party with your flies deliberately left undone, bra straps on show, then doing drunken impressions of David Brent. Not fashionably mussed and crumpled – just wrong, embarrassable, vulnerable.'

He then compares the cringe-making but raw and startling electricity of some of Ted Hughes' wilder work with what we tend to see in the better magazines and on well-bred publishers' lists these days: 'so many finicky, unambitious, slightly self-regarding poems, whose aim seems simply to get from the top of the page to the bottom without tripping up, without using any excess adjectives, without putting themselves on the line, being photographed from their less flattering side.'

Vidyan hits it right on the head. I thought about all this at the TS Eliot Prize readings the other night, where the work on show was beautifully-written, resonant, polished, poetic, yet rarely gave me a glimpse of the sheer urgency and violent poetic drive and power that one gets from even the slightest of Ted Hughes' poems. (With the exception of Brian Turner's work, perhaps - though I'd like to see him achieve that sledgehammer effect without having to use the bodies of unknown civilians to do it.)

So, what does this mean? That I should write poetry with my breasts hanging out and my hair unkempt and a slightly Ancient Mariner look to my eyes? Well, maybe I should.

It can't be any worse than writing poems in the mealy-mouthed, cold-sweat fear of the embarrassment of 'getting it wrong'.