Don Paterson - The Poem

Don Paterson, The Poem (Faber)

Before I went to University to play pool, attend pop concerts and write some terrible essays on poetry, I had imagined seminar groups poring over poems identifying dying falls and suchlike. That never came about as such and in the forty years since I have heard little about dying falls. Don Paterson here provides one paragraph and two examples on the subject as a section in his chapter on ‘Closure’. They are commonplace, not really of great interest per se, and so that’s that.

The Poem is not for the faint-hearted, it’s not a primer or a guide to reading or writing poetry and there are a lot of other things it’s not. For long stretches it is more about linguistics and neuro-science than it is about poetry, like the idea brought forward from his book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets that three seconds is a natural length for the human brain to take in a line of poetry and thus the iambic pentameter, that lasts that long, lends itself to being the most viable line length in English. This looks to me like the book that Don Paterson wrote more or less for himself and if it’s of any benefit to anybody else, all well and good.

It is not quite exhaustive and readily admits it can’t be quite regularly. Paterson, who can be scabrous when he feels like it, kindly signals to the reader when they can miss out the next fifty pages if they don’t feel up to it. But, being diligent and not wanting to miss anything, I wouldn’t dream of doing that. He recaps and apologizes for deviation when necessary, has plenty of long footnotes that are often well worth not skipping over and finishes with Endnotes that are essays in themselves that I chose to wait for rather than read when directed to them.

And it can be exhausting, mainly in the second section, on ‘Sign’ – the book is sub-titled Lyric, Sign, Metre – and more than once one is tempted to wonder how much we really need to be thinking about aeteme, syntagm, quale or metonymy when reading Goblin Market and I’m not sure Don expects us to but if we want to know how poems work, at a deep level, this is his account of how he thinks they do and hats off to him for throwing the kitchen sink at his theme. Never knowingly unaware of what he’s doing, he does at an early stage accept that this sort of analysis is like dissecting a frog – you find out how a frog works but it dies in the process.

If almost anyone, never mind how high-minded in their pursuit of poetics, might find themselves challenged by the relentless specialist vocabulary of section two, or wondering why the third part, on metre, takes up nearly half the book – although I might agree with the implication that rhythm and music have such a degree of importance in poetry- The Poem is never far away from being hugely entertaining (to its target audience) in its apposite use of anecdote, example and attitude.

In the TLS, William Wootten expressed reservations about Paterson taking a ‘mainstream’ position as the bane of the avant-garde. I would hardly think that of Don’s poems. He makes entirely worthwhile points about the self-serving nature of avantism, using a story about Gaelic speakers using Gaelic to talk about speaking Gaelic, which seems to me exactly what those old-fashioned experimentalists are still doing. The fad came and went, nobody’s saying it wasn’t interesting once but by now it’s like playing old albums by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.

The examples used in the book, often understandably from Heaney or Donaghy, led me to look up poems by Richard Wilbur and George Mackay Brown amongst others. I particularly enjoyed the verdict of Sorley MacLean on the latter when he thought about it before saying,

Lovely poem.

What?

That one he always wrote.

There are worse things than having that as your epitaph.

The significantly larger third section on metre makes it clear that there’s more to it than stressed and unstressed syllables. The salient point is how lexical stress diverges from metrical stress. Paterson has a sophisticated set of symbols to perform his analyses, with values, punctuation marks pressed into his own usage, arrows and tables but even his decisions are still open to discussion. Having done so much work in pursuit of the final analysis, it might have saved us much time and effort just to have said, ‘it is what it is’ and ‘if it feels good, do it’. Rhythm and music are inevitable in language, even in the poetry of poets who proclaim themselves to work against such traditional effects. While damning them for their foolishness, Paterson is ever open to experimentation which is inevitably absorbed into the dreaded mainstream if it is anything more than a trivial gesture.

However often one feels like parodying Paterson’s sometimes highly technical language, he does it for us in an Endnote that quotes a passage from one Judith Butler in which abstraction and jargon has gone beyond useful meaning and reminded us again that satire is hopeless once we go beyond a certain level of absurdity.

Gladly, The Poem sent me back to poems more often that it might have and it is an impressive account of how poetry works except, of course, rules are just as recondite to those that insist on them as they are to those who insist that they’ve broken them and that all you have to do is be any good. It might have put me off writing any more poems for quite some time, feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep all these aspects of the art form in mind at once. But that doesn’t matter. I had no plans to write any anyway.