On Poetry

Glyn Maxwell is one of the diminishing number of poets whose new books I look out for. He can be relied on to be worthwhile. Like most such writers, absorbed in his art and craft, he has thought about it deeply and, like many, decided to share the results of what he thought.

On Poetry goes back further than most do, to the primordial savannah before there was poetry. Also to the white of the page before there was a poem or before the poem begins, where the lines end, in between stanzas or where the poem ends. The bit in between is the black, the poem or at least that part of the poem that is made up of its words and punctuation because the white silence is part of the poem, too. So it's profound and much is extrapolated from that beginning. Poets, especially perhaps professional ones, can have highly evolved ideas about what it is they do. Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin's books of close reading found poems echoing with any number of other poems, Joseph Brodsky's analysis of Thomas Hardy engaged with every word, including the most basic conjunctions. John Fuller solved poetry like a cryptic crossword. Don Paterson was so exhaustive on the subject even he suggested at times that the reader could skip fifty pages in certain places without missing the point. For each poet, poetry is a different thing as I dare say God is for those who make that idea central to their lives. James Fenton's guide sets out the territory in more standard classroom fashion but while their adventures take us down some alleyways worth visiting it can all be a bit much.

I almost read these books out of a need to see what I don't need to know more than to find what I do need to know. Glyn is clever if not sometimes even a bit cute. There's not much I like better than finding my own belief (or maybe 'prejudice') confirmed by someone of higher standing or reputation, like a professor, and so was glad to see him not concerned about dactyls, spondees and trochees, agreeing that 'free verse' is not as free as it likes to think, that enjambment is not quite the skill that some think it to be when they do it and how he implies, I think, that poetry is formed by the language it's in and the fashion of the time it was written as much as its author who is also formed by them. His account of how at different times alliteration, rhyme and then not rhyme were the prevailing orthodoxies of poetry is useful for taking us out of our very specific time and place.

What is bad, and gloomily 'professional', about On Poetry, though, is Glyn's imaginary creative writing workshop. Inevitably it will be those who earned a living from teaching that are most likely to produce such books, those for who it is in their interests to go along with the idea that being a creative artist is something than can be taught. He has a way of using a pack of cards in which the suit and denomination of each card generates a situation and a number of people to use for a poem. For me, generating poems that didn't need to be written is a bad idea. While the world is exponentially over-populating itself with people, universities and the creative writing industry are also crowding the place out with more poems than are needed. A better exercise is suggested for poets under thirty to do what Gerard Manley Hopkins did and throw all their poems away.

Perhaps the art of poetry is better served by reading and study in order to see how not to do it, to avoid bad practice and write less. Nothing at all, if necessary. 

For Glyn, poetry is 'creaturely', a living thing in time and space, and perhaps good poems are but there's a danger that the reverence accorded to Edward Thomas, Auden, maybe Robert Frost but I'm glad Hopkins gets some coverage, might be unwittingly extended to bad poems. Like any subject, the philosophy of it becomes a self-regarding, endless thing enjoyed as a sport in itself. I'm not convinced it's a good thing although I'm too far down the line by now to ever escape from it. As happened with the Don Paterson book, The Poem, so much thinking about writing poems leaves me paralysed and unable to write any, so at least there's that to be grateful for. It's four months since I wrote one as it is but I can easily wait another four months as long as if and when I do produce something, at least I'll be satisfied with it. But one needs to clear one's mind of all these ideas before that's possible. It's a bit like cricket was - all the coaching telling you to move your feet, get in line, eye on the ball, play forward, play back, cover the spin. By the time you've remembered all that, the stumps are all over the place. No, if you're a natural, just do it but whether you are or not, enjoy it.

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Meanwhile, Norman MacCaig that I keep for bedtimes. 

I thought Arkle and Foinaven were racehorses famous for quite different reasons. But they'd been mountains for a long time before they were that. It took me 50 years, poetry and Norman to find that out.

MacCaig - Between