Experiment in Poetry

 I'll finish Stepping Stones tomorrow and feel much the wiser for Heaney's bottomless capacity for thinking about poetry. On the one hand, I'm not convinced it needs thinking about that much but for a lot of the time he's hard to fault. Much of what he says is only articulating all kinds of things one has thought about, almost instinctively, but not found the need to set out.

Perhaps if he had made himself less available for interviews, lectures, forewords and essays he might have had less need of formulating quite so many truisms. For better or worse, poetry lends itself to any amount of such wisdom. None of it amounts to hard and fasts rules, though. Mercifully. It's not often that one learns much or any such quotable remarks make any difference to how we read or write. There are no absolute rules, there are only those who issue manifestos when really all one has to be is 'any good'.

The best bits are those that harmonize with what one knew one thought already which naturally enhances one's opinion of whoever agrees with you. I was a big enough admirer of Heaney as it was, though, and if anything the thoroughgoing detail of Stepping Stones has reduced the esteem I've long held him in but only fractionally.

He might suffer sometimes from a 'professional poet syndrome' of simply knowing too much, the affliction that led Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon in their essays of close reading of poems to hear endless re-echoes of more of the 'canon' than was necessary. He does well not to let his deep immersion in the quicksand of Eng Lit and beyond prevent him from producing original work but maybe we are all inter-textual by now.

The stand-out reply in all this profundity comes in answer to Dennis O'Driscoll's question,

How important is experiment to you?

To which the simple answer is, 

Each poem is an experiment.

But also, 

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde; basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Hallelujah to that, except that in the same way that if poetry is continually expected to 'surprise' the reader and present the world afresh, as some claim, and it's not easy to be surprised on every page of a 60 page collection, some prolific poets seem to be able to go 'beyond where they could have reasonably expected to go' on such a regular basis that one might have thought they would expect to go there after a while.

One can hardly spend so long reading one 'voice' without picking some of it up either in imitation or parody and so I can't help but add some Heaney-esque thoughts of my own. I wrote about him as an undergraduate in 1980 and the lecturer supervising my dissertation commented that he found my piece on Heaney 'portentous, but that is almost certainly Heaney's fault, not yours', which was kind. So, poetry is 'precious' in both meanings of the word, both very valuable to those who like it and sometimes over-valued by those who like it. Often in the latter case with reference to their own.

But I'll not pass up the opportunity to stand with Heaney on his measured view of the 'avant-garde' and go further by saying it's those that seriously imagine themselves as breaking free from some mainstream tradition, as if nobody ever had before, that are the most 'precious' about what they do. They are only deluding themselves in an equal but opposite way to those whose idea of poetry is a stereotype of clichéd images and obvious rhymes. They might not even recognize what the other do as poetry but they share a blindness to that which is worthwhile and that requires the talent to be able to do it.