It's only words

 I did my short morning's 'work' on Wide Realm, the Thom Gunn book before meeting one friend for a completely legal afternoon's walk. He benefitted greatly, I'm sure, from hearing the product of my morning's endeavour. I'm making my workmanlike way through Moly, the 1971 volume in which Gunn found some sort of enlightenment through LSD.

It is ideal material for me with my chronic suspicion that poetry is never what it says it is. I suppose I'm forever in thrall to the ideas of irony and subtext. The point is, surely, that the heightened sensory experience provided by the hallucinogens is illusory. It is not a book about paradise or Eden being re-discovered. Once Eden had been ruined there was no getting back to it.

 

The dispiriting thing about any commentary, critique or analysis is that it is a poor substitute for the thing itself and only really of any use when finding fault. It is like Dylan's answer when asked what his songs were about, replying, 'about five minutes' or whoever it was, which might also have been him, who just played the song again. Academic discussion of anything worthwhile somehow takes the life out of it and I wish, in a way, that I didn't feel somehow compelled to 'get this job done'. Gunn doesn't always come out of it as much loved as I've always thought I loved him but it's too late to realize that now. He is a paragon example of one whose very best work is in that special 10/10 category that is reserved for the sublime but, with some 6/10 poems, he is not in the Norman MacCaig, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Mahon category whose books one can't open without finding a good poem.

 

Gunn's career-long attempt to escape the 'self' is, for the most part, a forlorn one although it's a good try. Any effort to overcome the 'dissociation of sensibility' between thought and feeling identified by Eliot is undone by Gunn's powerful intellect which, one suspects, doesn't trust feeling.

And all poetry is, by definition, trapped in its own language which is always going to be its problem. Music and painting have the advantage over it by not being made from the raw material of words that have to 'mean' something, however shifting that meaning might be.

 

The problem with commentary is the need to identify or pin down some definitive interpretation. The 'magic', such as it is if and when it is achieved, in poetry is when it evades that. Whereas that is a grim indictment of reams and reams of vast swathes of poetry and shelf space taken up by it, it does mean that when it achieves the trick of appearing to have 'slipped the surly bonds' of its own medium, then we're excited.

That might be why I don't try very often any more. If I don't think I'm going to be able to fly I don't think it's wise to jump off the cliff.