Nothing to do with reason or philosophy

I'm not halfway through it yet so it's nowhere near time to say anything too definite about John Burnside's The Music of Time. It's not new, anyway, it's 2019 so not necessarily up for review. It's heavyweight without being heavy going. John's broad, deep and international reading is hugely impressive, related as each chapter seems to be to some telling anecdote.

Underneath everything he says there is always the glimpse of the idea of something beyond, an elsewhere, that is transcendental, as there is in his poems, but that is a corollary of another recurrent theme which is the limits of what can be known and so it comes as no surprise that there is an unknown to contemplate. There is somewhat more to it than that, of course, in 450 pages that call up Wittgenstein, Hegel, Soctates, Aristotle and almost as many intellectual giants as one can think of as well as plenty I'd never heard of. Among the poets given close attention are Montale, Ungaretti and Hart Crane that I did know of, several, like Maria Zambrano that I hadn't and William Matthews that I had somehow missed out on so far and was convinced enough about to order the Collected Poems of. It is very much a case of the more you find out, the less it seems one knows about.

But I was gladdened to read that,

...this is where poetry seems to begin too - single words or phrases, or just a rhythm sliding from one train of thought to another, nothing to do with reason, or philosophy or the intensely meant moral or political ideas that, surely, poetry is supposed to 'be about'. 

That seems very much like it to me if I could take that highly selective quote out of the context of the rest of The Music of Time and cite it as wisdom of quasi-scriptural significance in the equivalent survey of poetry that I won't ever write.

It is just the words. That's where the 'poetry' is which is why it 'gets lost in translation' and although one admires John's international outlook, unless one is A.N. Wilson and capable of picking up Italian with so little trouble in order to read Dante properly, the nuances that make good poems good are likely to be lost on anybody not fluent in the poetry's original language. It is the translator that we read. But it would be some sort of crime against humanity, wouldn't it, to dismiss the likes of Yevtushenko, Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam on account of them not being written in English. Even Larkin, who gets short shrift here, who liked to pretend to be a Little Englander betrayed himself with more knowledge of non-English poetry than his philistine pose who have had us believe. 

Already I'm much further into making a manifesto when the first point on my agenda is not to have manifestos. Poetry is the words, their associations and how those words can together become more than the sum of their parts. It makes a change for me to repeat that point week after week rather than argue forever that An Arundel Tomb does not say that,

What will survive of us is love. 

But of course words, and poetry, are laden with and possibly handicapped by meaning, however skilfully or inadvertently the poet makes use of the shifts in meaning that many of them can have. It's not something that music has to deal with. Some poets might want to divorce words from meaning while others give them a welter burden of associations and re-echoes.

Don Paterson's very different but at least as big book, The Poem, left one with the same feeling as this does - how on earth can I write a poem while bearing all this in mind. And, of course, you can't and don't have to. You need to forget all this and just do what comes naturally which is the sort of advice one can benefit from in a number of other disciplines, I'm sure. Cricket, for example.

It's a moot point how much theory one needs in any enterprise. At present I'm short of poems to read and hope that William Matthews turns out to be a find but enjoy reading about poetry, too. But poetry and things about poetry are two different things.

My song remains the same and you're likely to have heard it before unless it's the first time you've found yourself here - all you have to be is any good.