Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.