Balzac on Poetry

 It's always amusing to see the way poetry's role is portrayed beyond the confines of the poetry world in fiction. Not so much the sort of thing you'd get in Hermann Hesse where the poet would be a precious thing prized for their profound outpourings but the sardonic view of it as an outsider activity of neither use nor ornament to anybody much.

Balzac's Lost Illusions is one of his more memorable efforts with Lucien, the young provincial poet trying to make his way in Paris. Published from 1837-1843, it was still possible for Tennyson, Byron or Victor Hugo to make a living from poetry but they had other income streams, too. However, Lucien is told by one publisher,

'You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, if you reckon to live on what your poetry brings in, you have time to die half a dozen deaths before you make your name.'

Publishers are wary of accepting 'nightingales', books that sit on high shelves in dark places in bookshops and are never seen. One berates his assistant for taking a poetry manuscript to read and tells him the first question you always ask is whether it's poetry or fiction and if it's poetry, you simply don't.

While many poets bemoan such a situation, which hasn't diminished at all in the last 180 years, and look for strategies to promote poetry and improve its marginal status in the highly competitive book market, I embrace the underdog, maverick, amateur standing. That's presumably why I support Fulham, nominate Dietrich Buxtehude as a favourite composer and have never ever voted for any party, or referendum campaign that won a national vote. I really thought I could end that losing run a few years ago and my confidence cost me a respectable wad of cash but, like Andrew Marvell, I've managed to spend my whole life in opposition.

My devotion to the avoidance of any sort of commercial success with poetry has extended to hardly writing any. 11 poems in the recent Collected pdf represent the last three and a half years, none of which went to magazines. The two I supported minor competitions with came out with an honourable local win and some sort of runner-up consolation but I hope that does constitute trying to make a name for myself at this late stage of my desultory career.

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I was taken by surprise by a book delivery today. If the time lapse between ordering something and its arrival is more than a week or so, I've forgotten all about it.

Oh, what a lovely surprise. I wonder what it is.

This time it was Search Party, Collected Poems by William Matthews (1942-1997), prompted by the good impression made by John Burnside's mentions of him in The Music of Time. Firstly, it makes the same point as my own Collected by reducing the oeuvre to more like a Selected, much more so in this case which collects 165 out of more than 800 available.

I couldn't quite remember what it was about Matthews that made me think I needed this and so could treat a first look at it as an enquiry into why it had been recommended. Recommended by me, in effect, more than John Burnside. In such circumstances, the first poem (usually the earliest) is where to start because that must be where the editor thought the poet became the poet they subsequently became, after the juvenilia and any abortive efforts that had set off in the wrong direction. And especially with Matthews because the first poem here gives its title to the book. It has all the appearance of a statement of intent, maybe a little bit too conscious of its self-proclaimed status as 'poetry',

I'm just a journalist

who can't believe in objectivity.

He might yet provide examples, maybe both good and bad, when the time comes to finalize some thoughts on 'free verse', which is the subject I've put forward and thus will present my annual little essay on for this year's Portsmouth Poetry Society programme. Get there if you can on 2/2/22.

I've already found things to like, like,

To say "one" is in love

means to me, hero of all these poems, 

in love as in a well

I am the water of.

('Old Girlfriends', which probably means his 'ex' girlfriends rather than that he had a penchant for older women)

That mixes what looks like some linguistic ingenuity with more self-regard than was necessary. Would it have been any the worse without  ', hero of all these poems,'. That might become the problem I have with Matthews but it's early days with him and it could go either way. He's no Elizabeth Bishop, it's possible he's a bit Frank O'Hara without being so dispirtingly and deliberately throwaway, like the last line of the threnody to Coleman Hawkins,

I hate it that he's dead.

That can't be ironic so I'd like to know why that shouldn't be on the short list of worst lines of poetry I've ever read.

The jury's out.