A Vertical Art: On Poetry 9780691239149, 9780691233109

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a v ertic a l a rt

by the same author poetry zoom! x anadu kid book of matches the dead sea poems moon country (with Glyn Maxwell) cloudcuckool and killing time selected poems tr avelling songs the universal home doctor t yr annosaurus r ex versus the corduroy kid out of the blue seeing stars paper aeropl ane (Selected Poems 1989–2014) still the unaccompanied sandettie light vessel automatic magnetic field drama eclipse mister her acles (after Euripides) jerusalem homer’s odyssey the l ast days of troy the odyssey: missing pr esumed dead prose all points north little gr een man the w hite stuff gig walking home walking away translation sir gawain and the gr een knight the death of king arthur pearl

simon ar mitage

A VERTICA L ART on poetry

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2021, 2022 by Simon Armitage Published in the United States and Canada in 2022 by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 press.princeton.edu First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Faber & Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House 74–77 Great Russell Street London wc1b 3da All rights reserved Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] The right of Simon Armitage to be identified as author of this work has been asserted. ISBN 978-0-691-23310-9 ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-23914-9 Library of Congress Control Number 2021949814 Typeset by Typo•glyphix, Burton-on-Trent de14 3he This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro Cover design by Chris Ferrante Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

   Introductionvii   1 The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet

1

  2 Mind the Gap: Omission, Negation, and ‘A Final Revelation of Horrible Nothingness’

27

 3 On Lists

53

  4 Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld

85

  5 We Need to Talk About Robert: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature 

113

  6 The Hawks and the Doves: Raptors and Rapture in the Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes

139

  7 Like, Elizabeth Bishop

167

  8 Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres

195

  9 Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? Dilemmas and Decisions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 219 10 ‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’: Clarity and Obscurity in the Age of Formlessness 247 11 ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’ v

277

CODA. Ninety-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry

303

Notes Acknowledgements

337 359

vi

Introduction

Aside from one or two ritualistic engagements here and there, the main duty of the Oxford Professor of Poetry is to deliver three lectures per year over a four-year period. There is no prescribed subject matter other than that implied by the job title and no insistence on any particular approach, though the odd whispered comment did caution me that to talk about my own work would be considered vulgar. Although I give readings about once a week and am no stranger to public speaking, at the time of my appointment I had very little experience of lecturing, and one of my objectives in standing for the post (it is an elected position) was to try my hand at a different form of expression. If the circumstances required me to present a thoughtfully written document, the audience in the room had every right to expect something more than a person reading out loud for an hour. To that end, I discovered very quickly that a lecture is part essay and part performance, and that is the spirit in which I offer these chapters. In transferring them to the page I hope they have retained their sense of occasion and their tone of voice. There were two other motivations in putting myself on the podium: to enforce a break from writing my own poetry – I was looking for a change in style and thought that a self-imposed cease-and-desist order might help vii

a vertical art – and to test out some of the remarks about poetry I’d been making fairly casually for the best part of thirty years. Despite the demands of the research and season after season of near-continuous reading, drafting and redrafting, my attempted abstinence must be considered a failure; if anything, I wrote more poetry than ever in that period, an outcome for which I have no credible explanation. And although I fully interrogated them, neither did I make any drastic revisions to my original attitudes. In fact, if anything, my poetic sensibilities hardened, though in an entirely positive way, through finding more reasons to cele­ brate the poetry I admire, and by being given the opportunity to share passions and enthusiasms with those who had come to listen. One further motivation in taking on the role was to learn. Having never formally studied poetry beyond my schooldays and being somewhat homemade as a writer, I occasionally thought of my time at Oxford as the education in English Literature I missed out on. On that front, it did not disappoint. I’m no wiser than I was before; as we know, all forms of study only lead to more unanswered and unanswerable questions. But through the close reading of texts and in having the time and legitimacy to explore the connections between carefully chosen words, my appreciation of poets and poetry greatly intensified, and the wonder has deepened. I wanted to speak personally in the lectures. When I talk about poetry, opinion will always win out over judgement, and I’m happy to let enthusiasm and preference be my guide. Poetry is a subject well suited to subjectivity. I also wanted to broaden the appeal of the lecture series; viii

Introduction despite being held in the extremely formal and somewhat intimidating surroundings of the Examination Schools, members of the general public are welcome at the events. As, of course, are the University’s undergraduates, though I was warned that their attendance couldn’t be guaranteed, especially when lectures are conducted at the level of one professor addressing other professors. I projected slides to illustrate the presentations – hardly a technological innovation, but something I don’t think had been utilised much before – and all the lectures were eventually made available as downloadable podcasts. Beyond that, there was no grand plan or even a reasoned chronology. I used the platform as a way of talking about some of my favourite poems, and I used those poems as a way of discussing issues relating to the art form and method­ologies essential to its practice. The very definition of poetry was a central theme, something I wanted to explore by thinking about readership and audience, which led me, on several occasions, into considerations about the wobbly tightrope that poetry must walk between obscurity on the one hand and obviousness on the other. My position here is that facile or simplistic poetry does not qualify as poetry at all, yet poetry that is so opaque as to be incomprehensible is not only a crime against the dictionary but an insult to evolution in general. Language, I continue to believe, is the greatest human invention of all time and humanity’s most powerful tool, and poetry is the ultimate expression of its potential. Beyond these brief comments, which I hope give the lectures some useful context, I would prefer to let what ix

a vertical art follows speak for itself. Though I will add that in writing and talking about poetry, my ambition is always to promote its qualities and broadcast its values. Still a vital and, at the time of writing, even fashionable art (yet one that cannot ever be truly ‘popular’), the origins of poetry take us back to the start, to before the novel, before the play and even before the song, to the very beginnings of utterance. Only by keeping some of its fundamental principles and techniques alive – those things that separate it from other forms of writing – will we experience the origins of articulated consciousness, or be best equipped to pronounce on our existence. A relative stranger to both the city and the University when I arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 2015, there are a number of people I would like to thank for making both myself and my family welcome, and for being excellent company and colleagues. My gratitude, then, to Ros Ballaster, John Barnard, Jonathan Katz, Sam Gartland, Bernard O’Donoghue, Heather O’Donoghue, Richard Ovenden, Jamie McKendrick, Tom Paulin, Seamus Perry, Craig Raine, John Vickers and to many other scholars and students connected with Wolfson College and All Souls College. Thank you to everyone at Trinity College, my base at Oxford, whose porters cheerfully facilitated my irregular comings and goings and were always happy to roll back the big blue gates and wave me in or out. Many thanks also to Hilary Boulding, current President at Trinity College, for her considerable thoughtfulness and hospitality towards the end of my tenure and beyond. And for their initial encouragement, continuous support, good x

Introduction humour and unfailing generosity I would particularly like to thank former President of Wolfson College, Hermione Lee, and former President of Trinity College, my nominator and ‘handler’ Ivor Roberts. I am also grateful to the University of Sheffield, the University of Leeds and Princeton University, USA, for their flexibility in allowing me to take on the role at Oxford while having other duties, responsibilities and loyalties. Many thanks also to Tom Cook, always a friendly face in the crowd and a willing guide to Oxford’s social scene. Tom’s foraging in the University libraries on my behalf was an enormous help, and his professional skills as a reader, researcher, compiler of references and wrangler of Middle English were thoroughly tested in the assembling of this publication.

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a v ertica l a rt

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet

To help resolve a protracted and escalating insurance claim following a collision between his car and another motor vehicle, a poet employs the services of a local soli­ citor. The case requires four or five personal visits to the solicitor’s office, during the course of which – and despite never having been asked directly or volunteering details of his day-to-day activities – it occurs to the poet that he has been recognised. Words and phrases begin to enter the solicitor’s conversation, delivered with a grin and a wink, and sometimes within air quotes; phrases such as ‘Apologies for the mixed metaphor’ or ‘If you, of all people, will excuse the pun.’ Eventually, on what is scheduled to be the final appointment, the solicitor utters the one sentence his client had hoped not to hear: the dreaded ‘Actually, I’m a bit of a poet myself.’ Later that day, the poet drives home. On the passenger seat next to him are the finalised, signed-off legal documents, bound in a pink ribbon. And outweighing them by several kilos are two shoeboxes full of poems: poems handwritten on legal foolscap in green ink, which the poet, being a poet, has of course agreed to read and comment on. It is a service he will provide for nothing, such was the unspoken expectation, even though the other document riding next to him in the vehicle is the solicitor’s 1

a vertical art bill for several hundred pounds, to be settled within ten working days. It is, then, with a familiar sense of resigned obligation that the poet sits down some days later to dig through the strata of accumulated verse, and then with a growing sense of hubris and sympathy, as he realises after the third or fourth villanelle that the poems were written out of loss, following the death of the solicitor’s sister. The poems themselves, though cliché-ridden and sentimental (cliché and sentimentality being the dual-frequency carrier signal of the inexperienced poet), are painfully sincere. It reminds the chastised poet of many of the affirming statements he has made over the years – about poetry as the ultimate demo­cratic art form, requiring little more than pen and paper and a working knowledge of the alphabet, and how poetry offers a natural refuge for self-expression during times of emotional disturbance. He is also reminded of some of the poems that proved so pivotal and persuasive when he was first exposed to poetry; when discovering how much power and force could be stored in – and retransmitted by – such compact shapes. Poems as the Duracell batteries of language, though ones which defy some basic Newtonian principle in the sense that, with the best ones at least, their potential energy seems to increase over time. ‘Methought I saw my late espousèd saint,’ begins John Milton, ‘seeing’, in his blind state, his deceased wife appear in a form of visitation not unlike the dream vision experienced by the speaker of the medieval poem Pearl a quarter of a millen­nium earlier, also a ‘pale and faint’ female 2

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet figure, also ‘vested all in white, pure as her mind’. Trusting to an auto­biographical reading, Milton’s evocation and near-­ beatification of either Katherine Woodcock, his second wife, or his first wife Mary Powell (who died the year Milton was said to have lost his sight completely), is one such miracle fuel-­ cell poem, one that Dr Johnson dismissed as a ‘poor sonnet’, suggesting that former students of Oxford University are not always correct in their judgements. The mournful tone and lovelorn voice of ‘Sonnet 23’, as it tends to be desig­nated, appealed to me as a deter­minedly gloomy young man, moping around post-­industrial northern England in a willed state of post-punk melancholia. Looking at it again in the plainer days of middle age, what strikes me about it now is the notso-­subtle preferment of the self, the promotion of the bereaved over the deceased. We meet ‘me’, ‘I’ and ‘my’ within the first line alone, then ‘me’ again in line two, then an emphatic, capitalised ‘Mine’ trumpeting the commencement of line five, given further emphasis by the indenting of preceding and following lines. And although poor Katherine, probably, or poor Mary, possibly, is given her due through the middle and later passages of the poem – as it transitions from octave to sestet, and from pagan to Christian imagery – it is the poet again, in the closing line, who has the final say. ‘I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night’ (my italics). Abandonment might be too strong a word to describe the concluding sentiment, but there is definitely a good old helping of one of poetry’s staple ingredients: self-pity. And to my mind, the poem is more convincing because of it, or perhaps more honest, or more real, or indeed more confessional – exquisite emptiness being a truer representation 3

a vertical art of loss than the idealising or pedestalisation of the lost. It’s something our solicitor hadn’t really considered, judging by his own offerings, which were more eulogy than elegy, green in more than just their ink. A suite of remembrance poems written over three hundred years after ‘Sonnet 23’ testifies to the idea that, while poetic styles evolve and bifurcate in many radical and unexpected directions, poetry’s core subjects tend to remain the same. Douglas Dunn’s collection Elegies is dedicated to his late wife, Lesley Balfour Dunn, and although the phrase ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ wasn’t in common usage when the book appeared in 1985, it is a useful indication of its contents. The collection is pertinent to this lecture’s eventual subject – poetry’s position in the actual world – in as much as Elegies transcended the usual reception afforded a poetry collection, even a very good one, winning the overall Whitbread Book of the Year award. That prize has since morphed into the Costa Book of the Year, a gentrifying act that has shifted its association from the tavern to the coffee house, though it’s still a beverage-endorsed honour run by the same parent company. The award meant that Elegies was deemed not only the best book of poems in the country that year, but better than the best biography, the best children’s book and – holy of holies – the best novel. Maybe it was deemed as readable and comprehensible as its competitors in those other categories, with the judges responding to its unusual approachability, possibly in comparison with other poetry of the same vintage. Elegies is, in many ways, the classic slim paperback as we came to think of it in the eighties: a pocket-sized 4

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet book, eight inches high by five inches wide; three ounces in weight; the trademark Faber & Faber livery framing an elegant woodcut or etching; card covers enclosing sixty-four printed pages on matt paper, carrying a pre-sentiment of ageing, with most poems fitting comfortably within a single page. Of which the poem ‘Birch Room’ strikes me as especially typical. ‘She was four weeks dead,’ Dunn begins the second stanza, somewhat tersely. He goes on:           before that first Green haunting of the leaves to come, thickening The senses with old hopes, an uncoerced Surrender to the story of the Spring. From their second floor, husband and wife once sat watching nature ‘create a furnished dusk’. And later, confined by illness to an even higher storey in the building, already ascending into a more ethereal realm, his wife wishes she could still see the trees – ‘our trees’ – trees belonging to the couple as a shared possession and belonging to the real world; living organisms, rooted in earth. ‘“If only I could see our trees,” she’d say.’ Presented within inverted commas as reported speech, pedants and detractors might wonder at the poet’s wife’s aptitude for talking in syllable-perfect iambs, and might wonder the same again when she next speaks, two lines later; just as counter-pedants might find within the pen­ ultimate line a justification for such prosody in the apparent invitation to rearrange for the sake of decoration: 5

a vertical art ‘If only I could see our trees,’ she’d say, Bed-bound up on our third floor’s wintry height. ‘Change round our things, if you should choose to                   stay.’ I’ve left them as they were, in the leaf-light. Note the courageous reverse foot in that last phrase, a sudden about-face against the steady iambic progression, as if the poet has broken the fourth wall of the poem through a shift in stress, spinning around to address us directly, the abrupt metrical confrontation serving as a reconstruction of his own exposure to the sudden dappled brightness. Also, the narrow confines of the page have forced the typesetter to carry over the word ‘stay’ onto a line of its own, and the term takes on an unintentional poignancy when presented as a solitary expression in physical isolation, as either invitation or imperative (or both). A further con­ sequence of that ‘turn-over’ is the shunting of the final line into its own space, privileging the griever over the departed once again: Dunn the last figure on stage in the final scene, like Milton, before the curtain comes down; Dunn spotlit by daylight, Milton forsaken for the night, both poems of the ‘methought’ variety. The next poem in Elegies is ‘Writing with Light’, on the facing page. Open the book between pages twenty-­ two and twenty-three, and sunlight reactivates these two poems of shadow and illumination, of black marks against a white (or by now yellowing) page. Close the book to entomb them once again. It’s a kind of satisfying materiality that the Kindle has never managed to replicate, despite the inflammatory 6

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet promise of its name. Ditto the Kindle’s superior model, the equally non-combustible Kindle Fire, whereas the Paperwhite Kindle seems to have conceded these limitations and gone back to the drawing board. (Other electronic readers are available, and similarly two-dimensional.) Returning to our parable, the poet compiles a long letter thanking the solicitor for sharing his work, commenting on his brave and heartfelt verses, and gently addressing some of the shortcomings of the poems through positive criticism and suggested reading, including Milton, Dunn, the Pearl poet and others. He posts his letter, and receives in reply . . . no thanks whatsoever – not even an acknow­ ledgement of receipt – though five months later, an envelope does fall onto his doormat bearing the name and logo of the practice, with a note from the solicitor pointing out that, due to an earlier miscalculation, there are outstanding charges relating to the insurance claim, and for the sake of balancing the books could the poet please send a cheque at his earliest convenience for the sum of three pounds and eleven pence. Still in possession of the two shoeboxes full of poems, and with winter coming on, the poet makes his first visit of the year to his wood-burning stove. Let us consider that, just for a few heart-warming and hand-warming minutes, the books were indeed balanced. One of my themes – I say this almost two thousand words in – is the situation of poetry, its standing in this world, which, after almost thirty years as a practising poet (practising in the Gravesian sense of being forever apprenticed to an unachievable goal), I’m still as curious and 7

a vertical art concerned about as I was at the outset. However I range back and forth in these lectures – from Milton to Douglas Dunn, from Chaucer to the latest T. S. Eliot Prize winner – it will be a recurring theme of my appointment here at Oxford. Four years from now, if I’m still here (if I haven’t disgraced myself to the point of dismissal, or expired in the meantime), it’s my intention to be still pursuing this question, puzzling over the position that poetry and poets might occupy in the early phases of the twenty-first century, and positions they have occupied in the past. Some of you, with your brilliant degrees, will be well into marvellous, well-remunerated careers by then – in the City perhaps, or even as solicitors. You’ll be standing in the nose cone of the Gherkin, or at the pinnacle of the Shard, or in a high office in Inner Temple, looking north-west along the vector of the M40; or you might be flying over Oxford in the business class section of the plane, in front of the grey retractable veil that separates two worlds, where the seats are a little wider and the crew a little more obliging. It will be 2019, a Tuesday afternoon in Trinity term, and you’ll look yonder or look down and suddenly think, I wonder if he’s still there, in that big hall, banging on about it. Poetry: it beguiles and perplexes. The Monday after my election to this position was announced, I was in Liverpool Lime Street Station, waiting for a train back across the Pennines, and decided to conduct a little non-­scientific market research in W. H. Smith. Liverpool: European Capital of Culture in 2008, a city extrovert in nature, characterised by an overt interest in the humanities and the arts, revelling in dialogue, and relishing the playfulness and possibilities of 8

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet words; a city proud and practised in linguistic self-­expression. W. H. Smith: the nation’s foremost high street newsagent, and, although not exactly a Waterstones or a Hatchards or a Blackwell’s, still a vendor of books as far as the general public are concerned, and this particular branch located in a station, servicing passengers about to spend time in a relatively distraction-free environment – i.e. a captive audience in a cornered market. Forgetting whatever trite, centre-­ justified, italicised platitudes were printed within the dozens of cellophane-­wrapped greetings and sympathy cards, I can report that on the shelves of that shop there was not a single book, magazine, periodical or journal that carried any contemporary poetry, despite a selection that covered some pretty niche territories. (In fact, if the titles on offer were anything to judge by, subjects more popular than poetry include wood-turning, bus-spotting and practical pig-keeping.) The remaining unsold copy of Literary Review contained no published poetry, nor did it review any that month. Poetry: it intrigues and bemuses. As a subject, it thinks a great deal of itself and takes itself incredibly seriously, but the status and regard it affords itself rarely seem to be reflected in the civilian population. Poetry: it compels and repels. Collections are published to universal indifference, and yet the very number of people in this venue today says something about its abiding importance. It was presumptuous of me to have written that sentence in advance, I admit, but if there had been only three people in this room I would have used the attendance figure to make the same point, namely that to the vast majority of people – even to the majority of readers – it seems an 9

a vertical art irrelevance or, occasionally, a joke. Two recent performances by the actor Ralph Fiennes illustrate the point. In the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fiennes plays the dandified concierge and occasional gigolo Monsieur Gustave H., whose habit of quoting ornate rhetorical verse at moments of high drama draws scowls and yawns from allies and enemies alike. In his portrayal of Jack Tanner in last year’s National Theatre production of Shaw’s Man and Superman, the boot was on the other foot: this time it was Fiennes’s turn to scowl and yawn, as the bandit Mendoza quoted reams of vapid romantic verse composed for his true love Louisa. ‘[He recites, in rich soft tones, and in slow time]’ is Shaw’s stage direction, before Mendoza declares, Louisa, I love thee. I love thee, Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee. One name and one phrase make my music, Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee. Mendoza thy lover, Thy lover, Mendoza, Mendoza adoringly lives for Louisa. There’s nothing but that in the world for Mendoza. Louisa, Louisa, Mendoza adores thee. Shaw writes, ‘tanner [all but asleep, responds with a faint groan.]’ Mendoza summarises the situation: ‘Doggerel to all the world: heavenly music to me!’ 10

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet Poetry: it enriches and it embarrasses. If I had a pound for every time someone had sent me the Gary Larson-style greeting card depicting a bookish man in an armchair and another man bound and gagged at his feet, above the caption ‘on wednesdays, frank would explain his poetry to me’ (with ‘frank ’ replaced by ‘Simon’), I would be sitting at the front of the plane, on the other side of the all-important retractable veil. And if the over-earnest and self-interested poet is an easy target for satirists, poetry itself is often portrayed as an elevated and abstruse concoction that would mock those not worthy of its complexities, as Detective David Mills finds out in the David Fincher film Seven. Following a hunch that a serial killer is modelling his modus oper­ andi on ancient texts, and having crossed the road from the public library, with rain pounding on the roof of his car, Mills (played by Brad Pitt) is less than five seconds into reading when he slams the book against the steering wheel and offers the following critique of The Divine Comedy. And I quote: ‘Fucking Dante, goddamn poetry-­ writing faggot piece of shit,’ adding a final and exasperated ‘fucker’ to his list of analytical terms, before flinging the Dante to the back seat. His outburst carries echoes of a classmate of mine from secondary school, where the English O-Level exam included a ‘blind criticism’ section (now rebranded as the ‘unseen paper’), in which pupils are required to analyse a poem they have never previously laid eyes upon. The poem in front of me in the summer of 1979 was a piece called ‘The Golden Plover’, which I have never managed to find again, and may well have 11

a vertical art been concocted by the chief examiner entirely for study purposes. From James Edmund Fotheringham Harting’s The Ornithology of Shakespeare – one of only about a dozen books in my parents’ house when I was a child, sandwiched between Pears’ Cyclopaedia and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary on the top shelf of the bureau – I happened to know that the golden plover was a bird. A bird not actually mentioned by Shakespeare, but listed as a ‘rain bird’ by Harting: hence Pluvialis, for its reported habit of becoming restless prior to a downpour. It is a trait that Shakespeare ascribes to another species in As You Like It, Act IV, Scene i: ‘more clamorous than a parrot against rain’. But my classmate was convinced that with its flashy wings and estimable velocity, the ‘Golden Plover’ was an American car. He was humiliated by the poem, and has remained wary of poetry – even hostile towards it – from that day. Poets like to quote Shelley, glorying in the backhanded compliment of being ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but the truth is that, to most of the world, they are simply unacknowledged. It calls to mind our solicitor again; something of a legislator himself, or at least an agent of the legislature. What he really sought from the poet was not a reading list and a few writing tips, but confirmation of poetic talent. When no such confirmation was forthcoming, he resumed normal transactional relations with the world, by dispatching an invoice. And if poetry makes the news, it is usually because someone has embarrassed themselves or fallen foul of the rules. A version of Sayre’s law seems to come into play where poets are concerned, 12

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet in which the intensity of feeling generated by any dispute is inversely related to the potential gains – i.e. backbiting and sniping is so rife and aggressive among poets because the stakes are so low. And yet the most highly esteemed of our practitioners inherit a resting place at the heart of one of our most sacred and iconic temples. So, when a berth in the stonework of Westminster Abbey was recently made available for Philip Larkin, BBC arts editor Will Gompertz duly popped up on national news to relay the fact that Larkin would be sleeping for eternity with the canonised best of ’em. Meanwhile, the living bumble on. It is not for the want of trying. Every year, there are an uncountable number of attempts to raise poetry’s profile above the horizontal. We even have a National Poetry Day, fighting for attention in a crowded October schedule of awareness-raising initiatives, including World Animal Day, World Smile Day, Seed Gathering Sunday and Humphrey’s Pyjama Week. Enterprises abound, and of all the efforts to improve poetry’s stature within society, hike up its potential in the marketplace and alert the general public to its benefits, competitions and prizes are seen by many as the most effective. I’ve mentioned the individual cate­gories and grand slam setup of the Costa Book Awards. The two other major annual prizes are the T. S. Eliot and the Forward. The T. S. Eliot Prize has embraced a talent show format (with echoes of the school spoken English competition), whereby shortlisted authors perform before the judges and a live audience on one night and the winner is announced the following evening. The Forward Prizes are delivered courtesy of a ‘live announcement’, the ‘losing’ authors 13

a vertical art required to put on the bravest of brave faces. Rarely do any of the prizes provoke more than a few column inches of reaction in the press the following day – unless, of course, someone has misbehaved. The winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for the Best Collection, and a shortlisted title for the T. S. Eliot Prize, was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen became 2015’s poetry event, winner also of at least two big poetry prizes in the States and – get this – a New York Times bestseller, up there with John Grisham, Anne Tyler, Jeffrey Archer and the like. As an indication of its success, Citizen is now one of those books with a rosette-like sticker on the front cover announcing its accolades, and at least one of Rankine’s previous publications has been reissued with the phrase ‘Author of Citizen’ on it. Poetry periodicals, magazines and journals tend to be ruminative rather than reactive, pensive rather than prompt, and are often slow to offer their responses to new books. Poetry gets pitifully few notices in the British press, though when and where it does, we’re blessed with perceptive reviewers and critics, by and large, who can translate some of the arcane specificities of poetry for a non-­specialist general reader. Kate Kellaway is one such reviewer, and she began her appraisal of Citizen in the Observer by stating that the question of whether the book is poetry or not becomes less significant page by page. The historical complaint against any kind of poetry that didn’t practise recognised techniques was often summarised by the phrase ‘chopped-up prose’, a criticism that can’t be levelled at Rankine’s book, 14

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet since much of it retains a conventional prose appearance, with no chopping whatsoever. But rather than being insignificant, the extent to which it is classifiable or even recognisable as poetry is intensely relevant, given Citizen’s subtitle, An American Lyric, a subtitle she also applied to her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, published over a decade before. Section I is delivered in paragraph form, detailing wounding examples of everyday racism – some casual, others calculated – each one presented as a moral conundrum. It’s a syntactical style remin­iscent of lifestyle magazine questionnaires, as if a set of multiple-choice responses might follow. Section II is even less obviously poetic, being a polemical essay about the American tennis player Serena Williams, written in matter-­of-fact prose. Within it comes the book’s most arresting idea and its underlying motif, Zora Neale Hurston’s line ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,’ of which Glenn Ligon’s stencilled canvas, says Rankine, ‘seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies’. That canvas is reproduced in the book along with other vis­ual images, including a frame-by-frame replay of Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt to the chest of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 football World Cup final after an alleged racist insult. This colour contrast, exemplified by a black sports star in the lily-white world of tennis, is Rankine’s central concern; in a voice that is sometimes infuriated and sometimes incredulous, but often despairing and dejected, her paragraphs eventually fragment into sentences, and the prose eventually disintegrates or crystallises towards the poetic. Any ‘lyricism’ to be found here is sporadic, or ironic, or 15

a vertical art unconventional, or subverted, or insists on a poetic that runs contrary to the historically determined definitions of that term. Certainly the concept of the line as a ‘bar’ of poetic notation appears to carry little weight here, governed, it would seem, by a typesetter’s hand rather than the customary laws of poetic composition (for example, there is a noticeable difference in lineation between the UK and American editions, suggesting that page size and publishing format has dictated the layout, rather than author discretion). ‘Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties,’ wrote Walter Benjamin in the opening of his ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Maybe Rankine envisaged a similar reader­ ship, or wanted to reach beyond the usual cognoscenti, towards excluded or under-confident readers, or those too busy to unravel tightly bound knots of language; the fact that Citizen doesn’t look like a book of poems either from the outside or within may well have proved part of its popularity. ‘Form’ here is reduced, or essentialised, to the stark presentation of black words against the white background of the page, mirroring the poet’s argument. Citizen’s continued topicality has also led to its continued appeal, for example, through Rankine’s referencing of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the reverberations of which are still being detected on cultural and political seismographs across the United States and beyond. Throughout Citizen, Rankine refers to herself in the second person. The effect is to universalise, to implicate the reader in the process of societal marginalisation, and to insist on an empathic involvement in the incidents being 16

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet documented – whether to feel that blunt monochromatic contrast or to live the experience of a person or a people reduced not just to the status of second-class citizens but to a kind of nullified invisibility. Occupied spaces and unrecognised lives: a seat not offered on a train; the cover image of the book itself, showing a detached black hood without a face, set against whiteness. Combining text with visual images and stylised typography, at one point she offers an evanescently presented list of names, victims of race crimes, in memoriam, fading from black to grey and then to nothing as it descends the page. Chillingly, the list has been added to in subsequent editions, with spaces reserved for future victims, like a macabre roll of honour anticipating more deaths through continuing racist killings. Citizen, then, carries the mood of public awareness and has been carried by it. But even beyond the newsworthy and the relevant, there are signs of vitality, strength and even popularity in the world of poetry – voices making themselves heard above the usual low-level background hum. Over the last couple of decades or so, a poetic movement has emerged, or re-emerged, through events in clubs and cafes and bars; a movement that thrives in live environ­ments, particularly at summer festivals, many of which now have a dedicated poetry venue. I’ve been to those festivals – have stood in the mud, sprawled on the straw matting, perched on the arms of old settees at some of the shabbier of the shabby chic events – and have witnessed audiences of hundreds, sometimes thousands, with an appetite for unaccompanied language. Some of its practitioners in those environments are visitors from the music 17

a vertical art or stand-up comedy arena, for whom poetry is a vehicle rather than a vocation, and some of what is vocalised is facile. Others, though, resist the cheap gags, the vacuous ‘life-affirming’ statements, the soliciting of an instant res­ ponse and the over-emoted serving of already over-egged puddings. And among those who have surpassed their contemporaries, Kae Tempest is the most prominent. Once categorised and perhaps demeaned by the literati as a ‘performance poet’, Tempest’s reputation has burgeoned with the very force of their surname, to the point where the poetry establishment has been unable to ignore them. Their across-the-board appeal has seen them appear on one of the main stages at the Glastonbury Festival and receive the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in close succession, and along with Professor Brian Cox – whose universal atomic abundance seems greater even than that of hydrogen – they are someone who regularly appears across the full spectrum of BBC radio networks. In 2014, and with a respected ‘literary’ poetry imprint, Tempest published Hold Your Own, a collection of their work that either inadvertently or unashamedly laid bare the breeze-block foundations of rhyme and repetition around which their poems are constructed. For example, in ‘On Clapton Pond at dawn’, end words include ‘new’, ‘true’, ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘through’, ‘rooms’, ‘through’, ‘view’, ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘do’, ‘new’, ‘fuel’, and ‘you’ – so it wouldn’t be difficult to criticise Tempest on the basis that the visual, printed manifestations of the work fail to convey the winning combination of verbal dynamism and disarming innocence that has become 18

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet their trademark and has won them so many admirers. But to demote them to a literary subset on that basis would be to insist that the printed form of poetry is its primary mode, with performed or spoken versions playing a supporting or secondary role – poetry having a day out, as it were. This is a churlish position to take, I’d argue, because even after Caxton, and for a long while, poetry continued to be a spoken or re­cited art, with an emphasis on sonic and acoustic properties, and even through its most bookish and mute phases there have always been performers and performances. And prior to that, when conducted in the mead hall or around the campfire or at the temple or in the amphi­theatre, poetry’s instinctive address was to the ear rather than the eye, and writing was a means of warehousing and distribution rather than the product itself. In those wider and longer terms, we could even think of Kae Tempest et al. as defenders of poetry’s original practices: traditionalists, if you like. At another level, Tempest has put the body back into poetry, bestowing their work with a presence and a physicality that, once seen and heard, goes on inhabiting the poems through to their printed iterations and delivering a tantalising sense of human proximity. Many other poets operate at a remote distance and from behind the fire curtain of the book, practitioners of a plastic art. Tempest’s poetry, however, is made of air rather than ink, and other poets like them have achieved astonishing popularity in a relatively short space of time. The numbers are staggering. Millions upon millions of people have watched clips of spoken word poets in action, in quantities that the poetry world 19

a vertical art has never previously dealt with. Recalibration has been necessary. Noughts have been added. The Internet created, and goes on creating, a silicon revolution in poetry. It was initially a means of sharing and circulating information and work, but latterly it has been a self-referencing cosmos, a beginning and an end and a middle as well, justifying itself to itself by virtue of itself. Hence Alt Lit, a movement that flourishes via websites, blogs, forums, vlogs and film clips, populated by poets, readers and critics whose very identities are sometimes online constructs. The virtual has become the real, or at least the norm. Much of this kind of thing is like a dog whistle to me, beyond my range of hearing, and even following links from one site to another, I haven’t really been able to determine whether Alt Lit is a serious and coherent poetic school or just a few computer-literate graffiti artists with too much bandwidth at their disposal, suffering from the burden of free choice in the twilight of Western decadence, goofing around in their dorm after a few joints. Another movement that tends to be mentioned in relation to new trends or directions in poetry is that of conceptualism, or ‘uncreative writing’, a discipline that encourages the appropriation, manipulation and reframing of existing texts, rather than the production of new work. In 2015, Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its leading figures, gave a thirty-minute reading constructed entirely from Michael Brown’s autopsy report, offering it as a kind of ‘found’ poem – a performance that drew an angry response on social media, including a death threat. And poetry was newsworthy again. 20

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet The definition of poetry is never a fixed coordinate or a permanent value. Although the Internet is currently testing and stretching that definition at an unprecedented rate, with unpredictable consequences, there will always be those for whom the book and the art of poetry are inseparable. I am probably one of them, and I mentioned the physical qualities of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies as a way of acknowledging the relationship between its material properties and my recollection, and appreciation, of the poems. The smell and texture of the paper, the heft of the collection, how it sat in the hand and where it stood on the shelf; whether a poem lay on a verso or a recto; whether the encampment of a stanza occupied the top or middle or bottom of a page; the typographical ‘accent’ of the chosen font, which became almost palaeographic in the mind’s eye; where I was when I read a particular line. Such a synaesthetic reaction is part of the wider poetic experience, as well as a way of encoding a poetic encounter in the memory – particularly those that have been personally decisive or pivotal. Like my encounter with Geoffrey Moore’s The Penguin Book of American Verse, meeting and being met by the likes of Kenneth Koch, Weldon Kees, Ed Dorn and Gwendolyn Brooks, and developing, almost overnight, a preference for the speaking and singing voice in poetry over the written or the cerebral voice. I discovered a partiality for the demotic over the rhetorical, a predilection for poems commissioned by the mind but designed by the mouth, and a determination to ‘think with the wise’ but ‘speak with the vulgar’, as Emerson once put it. All that ideology feels encoded within the yellowing, annotated 21

a vertical art pages and disintegrating spine of a paperback I have had to re-cover on several occasions. Moore’s anthology was an impulse buy, if only in the sense that there were no other poetry books for sale in Huddersfield’s Greenhead Books that day, and my impulse was to make a purchase. Its effects were entirely accidental, an experience that would encourage me to trust the serendipitous and the coinci­ dental in future reading. Three decades later, a similarly unanticipated and similarly transatlantic offering arrived in the form of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of HipHop, which only just managed to wriggle through my letter­box and then belly-flopped onto the floor. I don’t know who sent it, why they sent it or, more worryingly, where they obtained my address. (Living in south Huddersfield is rarely a life of unalloyed gratification and lotus-eating luxury, but one thing it does afford is a certain level of privacy.) True to its uninvited appearance, The BreakBeat Poets is brusque in its stance and confrontational in its approach. ‘Poetry, and often art in gen­eral, is taught through the lens of a eurocentric, white suprema­ cist, boring-ass canon,’ remarks co-editor Kevin Coval in the Introduction. It’s unapologetic in the scale of its convictions, claiming that ‘hip-hop made poetry an every­day thing well before Billy Collins,’ ‘Hip-hop made poetry relevant,’ and ‘Hip-hop saved American poetry. Made it new, fresh, made it something anybody gave a fuck about.’ Keats, writing to John Hamilton Reynolds in 1819, famously remarked that ‘English ought to be kept up.’ Not propped up, I hope, in order meet some masonic­ally 22

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet agreed standard of practice, but kept in touch with the changing dynamics of English as it evolves and mutates, as it is shaped by internal pressures and external influences. Exposure to this has increased exponentially since the Romantic era, particularly since the advent of electronic media, which have played a huge role in turning hip-hop into a lingua franca, practised by many word artists the world over. And yet the poem from this anthology that caught my eye is largely unrepresent­ative of the collection as a whole, and has a less obvious relationship with hip-hop in terms of its rhythms and registers. Aracelis Girmay’s ‘Elegy in Gold’ also appeals because it intersects with my thematic undercurrents of remembrance and light, black and white. What might my poet-solicitor have learned from its manoeuvres and subtle­ties, from the combination of its physical modesty and the extrava­ gancies of its ambition? Another of the ways in which the Internet has transformed literature is by short-circuiting the insulation between reader and writer. Most authors, no matter how reclusive, are only a couple of keystrokes away from those on the receiving end of their work. In about thirty seconds, not only had I tracked down Aracelis Girmay to an address at an American college (admittedly something of a given with US-based poets), but I had also emailed her, introducing myself and inviting her to tell me about the poem’s origins and intentions. The Internet has conditioned us to expect an instant answer; having not heard back after twenty seconds, I decided to take matters into 23

a vertical art my own hands and resort to some old-fashioned close reading, speculative analysis and personal interpretation. Coming cold to the poem and the poet, in some senses I was back in the examination hall with ‘The Golden Plover’, free to adventure among its lines and stanzas and make of it what I could. ‘Elegy in Gold’ dangles there like the chain of its final line. Fashioned and worked into short couplets, the poem opens with illuminated examples of everyday life; common­place ideas are touched by the Midas-like hand of the poet, a gilded inventory linked by half-rhymes and internal echoes, a list that becomes more particular, personal and intimate as it progresses. I take ‘dog breath’ to be affectionate, literal even – I’m thinking golden retriever, with the sunlit steam from the kettle completing a picture of domesticity, following ‘my love’s / elbow’. But these glints and glimmers are illusions, mirages, because what follows is an abrupt transition, a change to a minor key not even anticipated by a grammatical conjunction or preposition; where the celebratory tone is immediately undercut by the void of the stanza break between lines six and seven. ‘Kettle’ and ‘steam’ find their rhyming counterparts dispersed across two lines, fragmented into ‘rubble’ and ‘the sunk ship’s dream’. The trapdoor opens, and suddenly we are delivered into a post-traumatic landscape, among the disappointed and dispossessed. The myth of Eldorado, the barbarism of the slave trade, the drowned hopes of a race, the fallout from 9/11 and the aftershock of major cultural collisions involving the Americas seem to be referenced in those next four stanzas. It’s as if the 24

The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet optimism of those early lines has been projected through some kind of malevolent prism, splintering the light source not into a spectral rainbow but into shadow and shade. It’s as if a reverse alchemy has taken place, turning gold into debris and dust, transmuting shine and glow into emptiness and absence. ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.’ ‘Elegy in Gold’ strikes me as sociological counterpart to the autobiographical ‘Sonnet 23’ and the photographic nega­tive of Dunn’s ‘Birch Room’: not so much a ‘methought’ as an ‘us-thought’, an elegy for a people, where the golden chain – that ostentatious piece of jewellery, that token of swagger and bling, displayed here as the poem’s only overt simile – becomes a corrosive reminder, an ironic rosary, a bond, a shackle, a yoke and a bind. Just for a moment, the restrained, elegiac, lyric voice finds a role and a place in the hectic, verbose, fact-fuelled, knowit-all world, where many things that glitter are not gold.

25

Mind the Gap: Omission, Negation, and ‘A Final Revelation of Horrible Nothingness’ There was some cheering news for the book trade and for book-lovers recently, as reported by the BBC at the end of December 2015. Apparently, book sales over the Christmas period were vigorous – even if the majority of business did flow through the software portals of tax-­allergic, multi­ national Internet retailers, rather than across the tills of high street stores or independent bookshops. The bul­ letin that carried this uplifting item offered a teaser in its opening lines, by announcing that several of the top-ten bestselling Yuletide titles came from an unexpected genre rather than from the usual glut of ‘cele­ brity autobio­ graphies’ (that seasonal outpouring which, in the radio newsreader’s sardonic voice, sounded like a description of the winter vomiting bug). Hooked by the tantalising prospect of an unaccustomed literary category outperforming all those ghostwritten glossy hardbacks – many of them unironically entitled My Story – I eased into the slow lane of the M62, turned up the volume and waited to hear that poetry’s star had risen. It had not. In fact, the publications that had shifted in such industrial quantities – two million in some cases – fell under the category ‘colouring books for adults’ and contained no words whatsoever, just blank spaces awaiting the application of a felt-tip pen or crayon. A spokesman for 27

a vertical art one of the publishers behind the colouring book phenomenon made a rehearsed connection between colouring in and ‘mindfulness’ – this year’s go-to pop-philosophy concept – and explained how filling in small delineated areas of blank paper helped put a person in touch with their moment-to-moment self-conscious experience. A number of cynical and quick-fingered tweeters contacted the programme immediately to wonder if the publisher hadn’t confused mindfulness with its mental opposite (i.e., mindlessness), arguing that colouring in was such an infantile and undemanding activity that it could only appeal to those with little or no mind to fill in the first place. Or, at best, it represented a form of displacement therapy: diverting the mind from the detail of actual life, tranquillising the thought process and diffusing focus. Although I don’t associate colouring books with the intellectual advancement of the species per se, I’ve always been intrigued by the human habit of opening up empty spaces and inviting imaginative intrusion or occupation. After all, it’s a practice that stands at the foundation of most drawing, from fine art to functional design. And the relationship between what is evident and invisible – between the offered and the withheld – seems to me to be one of the crucial dynamics by which poetry proceeds. Anyone who’s flicked through the pages of a poetry anth­ ology or collection, no matter how casually, can’t have failed to notice the lavish ratio of empty whiteness to black letters, and the peculiar metamorphosis of silhouettes and patterns dancing and shapeshifting as the pages turn. Just as anyone who has dug into the local geology beneath Eliot’s 28

Mind the Gap ‘Prufrock’ can’t help but imagine the expunged Pervigilium section travelling on in that single-line hiatus – like one of those underground streams below a dry limestone valley – from where the authorised version disappears down the drain of the ellipsis (after ‘Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .’, to where it bubbles up again at ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws’). Just as anyone from the poetry community who attended the service of thanksgiving for Ted Hughes, at Westminster Abbey in May 1999, will have experienced the physical enactment of the relationship between noise and noiselessness as a recording of Hughes reading ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, boomed out from the abbey’s PA system: Hughes, recognised as one of the most magnetic and compelling readers of his work, enunciating from beyond the grave into one of the most capacious and sonically receptive architectural voids in the country. In his second full-length collection, 1997’s God’s Gift to Women, Don Paterson seized on the more comic aspects of omission and emptiness, pushing the idea towards its near-literal conclusion in ‘10:45: Dundee Ward Road’ – a poem with no text other than its title. Thirty-six pages later, the same device is re-employed in ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’. The humour in the first of those poems might be drawn from the same well, or even the same sketch, as Alexei Sayle’s appearance at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball in 1981, when the alternative comedian walked onto the stage and introduced himself as the gossip columnist 29

a vertical art for a magazine called What’s On in Stoke Newington. He said, ‘You might have seen it – it’s a big piece of paper with fuck all written on it’. The second poem recalls mindfulness again, combining the importance of emptiness in Buddhist teaching with a reference to the hippy quest – travellers on the spiritual highway, heading to exotic Eastern locations in the hope of ‘finding themselves’. At the end of the book, following four blank pages – like a hidden track after several minutes of silence at the end of a CD – Paterson appends an italicised quatrain, that runs, Of this white page, ask no more sense than of the skies (though you may believe the rain His tears, the wind His grief, the snow His shredded evidence finishing with an unclosed parenthesis, the gate to the abyss left wide open. (For literary geocachers, the missing bracket eventually turns up embedded in the boilerplate of a later collection.) Paterson is reported as saying that a poem is the only art form that can be held entirely intact in the mind, or words to that effect. It’s a challenging and perhaps provocative claim. He means, I think, that while we can’t mentally reassemble all the component parts of an opera, the complex visual elements of a painting or the sheer scale of a novel by thinking about it, we can, just about, recall and remake something about half a page long – a thing often mnemonically inclined in its nature. I like the boldness with which that observation is made, but does it take into 30

Mind the Gap account certain fundamental aspects of a poem’s existence – namely those unarticulated aspects that form part of a reader’s peripheral vision: the verges and aprons of a poem, just beyond the focus of the eye and the understanding of the literal mind; the poem’s untranscribed outfield? As poets, we don’t enjoy many privileges, but one birthright I am always especially keen to uphold is ownership of the page. Prose fills a page; once that page is full, it fills the next one, and the dimensions and capacity of those pages are usually calibrated in editorial and marketing meetings, beyond the earshot of the author. Poetry stakes out a position on a page: it takes a shape, occupies territory, becomes its own autonomous region. Surrounding the poem stands an apparent blankness, but one that conceals many of the poem’s codes and switches, populated by the incorporeal whispering words that have been deliberately and carefully excluded from view. Such oxygenated spaces, such ventilated cavities between titles and first lines – between stanzas or verses, beyond the line break, where the mind’s vapour trail overshoots, and the imagination undergoes millimetres of freefall and milliseconds of weightless abeyance, before the eyes fully execute the carriage return procedure – that airspace is our one inherited kingdom. We might labour with the same material as prose writers and form part of the same industry, but personally I have always felt to have more in common with the visual artist, or even the cartoonist, than the novelist. When I hand in my work, I don’t expect it to be portioned out: I expect it to be framed. 31

a vertical art The Anglo-American poet Michael Donaghy is an absence in his own right, a much-missed presence on the poetry-writing scene and the poetry-reading circuit. He died in 2004 at the age of fifty, leaving a Donaghy-shaped hole in the middle of our generation – the so-called New Generation. ‘Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron,’ he wisecracks in the opening line of his poem ‘Liverpool’. As the poem moves from observation to narrative, from narrative to anecdote, and from anecdote to autobio­ graphy, we meet Tracy, who     confessed she’d had hers done one legless weekend with her ex. Heart. Arrow. Even the bastard’s initials, R.J.L., somewhere where it hurt, she said, and when I asked her where, snapped ‘Liverpool’. From that leglessness, through to the absence of the unnamed former boyfriend, through to the tattoo’s hidden location, and onwards to its surgical removal resulting in a strip of ‘pink and glassy’ flesh, the undisclosed facts and withheld information build incrementally, towards that self-same mark of Valentinus, who was flayed for love, but who never – so the cardinals now say – existed. Desanctified, apocryphal, like Christopher, like the scar you never showed me, Trace, your (    ), your ex, your ‘Liverpool’. 32

Mind the Gap Pretending to ask the reader to not ‘see’ that patch of scar tissue, on or close to some erotic part of Tracy’s body, is like the cognitive linguist George Lakoff asking us not to think of an elephant – it’s impossible. Donaghy relished that impossibility when reciting the poem (which had become his party piece, something of a theme tune, even) to an audience: with his lips theatrically closed, he’d signal that parenthesised omission with a horizontal movement of the hand – a conductor or conjuror summoning the desired effect out of the invisible and the silent. I was thinking of Michael Donaghy and his poem one night in November last year, crossing the Pennines to take part in a launch event for a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool. The idea was to get there early, peruse the collection and respond by reading thematically appropriate poems. It was dark and stormy in the North West when I drove through the gates of the renovated Albert Dock and onto the waterfront – past the Beatles Story Exhibition Centre and along a cobbled pier, until the satnav became disorientated and panicky, and started giving directions in Swedish. At one point, I found myself steering towards the ferry terminal: next stop the Isle of Man, or that place the Gawain-poet refers to as ‘þe wyldrenesse of Wyrale’. Eventually a service road delivered me to the Tate’s loading bay and wheelie bin storage area, a security guard escorted me to the bottom of a goods elevator, and a member of staff pointed me in the direction of the exhibition and left me to it. It is an extraordinary privilege to be alone in an art gallery – to share a personal and individuated connection 33

a vertical art with an artwork, and to feel that connection amplified and intensified by the venue’s enclosed emptiness – an experience not unlike prayer in a sacred building. By which I mean, a private and unspoken communication, but a highly self-conscious and conspicuous act when performed in isolation and set against larger-than-life structural dimensions. In truth, it wasn’t the greatest show on earth; many of the exhibits were abstract and conceptual, in a style that fails to excite or surprise anymore. At one point, CCTV cameras in the gallery will have captured me putting on my glasses and bending forward to examine an ornately fashioned black-and-red tubular installation in a far corner – which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a firehose inlet. But the space was the thing – being alone in it, and being in it under the disquieting spell of the exhibition’s title, An Imagined Museum, drawing on Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, set in a world where books are banned and literature can only survive through being learned by heart. At some future date, all the artworks in An Imagined Museum were to be removed and a ‘day of remembering’ would follow, where members of the public would stand in the empty gallery and recall what they could of particular paintings or sculptures. I found that notion very haunting, very moving, and went home to look for a book I’d read and then forgotten about – one that contained a description of Micha Ullman’s memorial to the Nazi book-burnings of 1933: that toughened glass pane set into the cobbles of Berlin’s Bebelplatz, above an illuminated library of empty shelves. The book I was thinking of was Ivan Vladislavić’s The Loss Library and Other 34

Mind the Gap Unfinished Stories. Conducted in a modest, low-key tone, it’s a lament for several stories the South African author never got around to writing – a retrospective investigation into what might have been drawn from the crime scenes of his own notebooks. As a metaphor for the project, he invokes the presence of Peter Freuchen, the Danish adventurer and author who reportedly ‘hacked his way out of an ice cave in which a snowstorm had entombed him using a hand-crafted chisel fashioned from his own frozen excre­ment’. In ‘The Last Walk’, the first chapter of The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories, Vladislavić meditates on a photograph of the body of Swiss writer Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, lying dead in the snow, not far from the mental institution where he spent his final years. There’s something both compellingly tragic and disturbingly aloof about the picture; Vladislavić invites us to imagine the photographer setting up a tripod ‘at a cool distance’, adjusting the exposure and the focal length, and composing the shot. And even though he doesn’t say as much, there’s something subconsciously poetic about the black shape surrounded by a white margin – the body of the text, as it were, under the title of the fallen hat. I shouldn’t go on about The Loss Library too much – it is, at the end of the day, prose, and I don’t want to find myself in breach of contract. That said, with its extravagantly wide and empty margins framing dark columns of print, it does a good job of mimicking the geometry and geography of poetry. And with its persistent subtexts of absence and omission, I wanted to acknowledge it as the instigating agent for this lecture. * 35

a vertical art ‘The universe is mainly made of thought’, begins the poet Franz Wright, who died in 2015, in his poem ‘Unwriting’. Later on in the same collection, Wheeling Motel – a roadside shrine to self-loathing if ever there was one – Wright offers the following observation in epigraphic style and epi­ taphic tone: The solitary reader sits surrounded by space at the departure gate. It’s the departure gate of life, folks, with passengers waiting to be called towards ‘the / blue upper light’. Franz Wright’s poetry wasn’t for everyone: ‘Wright has a gift for sneered gratitude, for invoking God with the wheed­ ling piety of a three-time loser before a parole board,’ wrote the critic William Logan in his book Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. If I can just about interpret that as a compliment, there’s no mistaking Logan’s intent when he later describes Wright’s confessional poetry as ‘the crude, unprocessed sewage of suffering’. And if an overindulgence of the soul and a tendency towards emotional entropy was passed on to him by his father, the poet James Wright, it also seems that he inherited his father’s sense of spatial awareness, and his recognition of the prairies and plains lying outside and beyond the printed matter. Published in 1963, James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break was part of a poetic high-water mark in the US that also included Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, and, two years later, Elizabeth 36

Mind the Gap Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Like many American poets of that mid-century generation, Wright senior was schooled as a formalist but then underwent a self-willed career-­ defining radicalisation, slipping off the shackles of tradition and technique to pursue a looser and freer approach based on fragment and phrase, rather than syllable count or stress pattern. Never quite sufficiently ego-inspired to be bracketed as ‘confessional’, and never fully diagnosed with the galloping logorrhoea that would have made him a Beat poet, James Wright was eventually lumped in with the Deep Image poets, whose rules of engagement derived from a blend of imagism and narrativism, served with a generous dollop of critical hocus-pocus. Wright’s poem ‘Hook’ comes from a later book, To a Blossoming Pear Tree, published in 1977, by which time he had settled into a less theoretically anxious mode of address. There’s a great deal to say about ‘Hook’, not all of it positive – for example about its somewhat macho posturing, its slightly uncomfortable ‘cowboys and injuns’ ethnographic perspective and its ‘palpable designs’, as Keats would have described them. But it’s the poem’s relationship to the unknown, the unsaid and the margins surrounding it that inter­ests me here. ‘Nothing’, we get at the end of line four – a word repeated in the opening of line five, then again at the end of line six, before Wright identifies or volunteers himself as a solitary existence in a cosmos of ‘dead snow’. Not the fluffy white stuff of a Frostian woodland setting, but something lifeless and inert – the page, possibly, pre-­poem: the uniformly featureless expanse that confronts every writer hoping to make some worthwhile impression upon 37

a vertical art it. (Didn’t somebody once say it was impossible to look at an empty piece of paper without wondering how it could be improved?) But Wright presses on, against the weather, scratching away at the scene-setting and the stage directions to the moment of the meeting, offered in good faith as an autobiographical recollection. In a long tradition that would include, for instance, Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’, ‘Hook’ is an encounter poem – on this occasion, an encounter that invites both comparison and contrast: two outsiders united in their isolation and through their relationship problems, but on the opposite sides of a cultural divide. I don’t know if ‘Ain’t got no bus here / A long time’ is genuine, or even acceptable, just as I’ve never been persuaded by the idea that a lack of speech marks somehow democratises a quote or lends it a kind of hipster coolness – to me it just looks like teenage sulkiness, or a high-­ fiving dad. But I do have a soft spot for the phrase ‘To get home on’. It reads to me as both innocently authentic and knowingly deployed. Have you got enough narrative to get home on? Is the kindness of strangers and the gener­ osity of the penniless enough for the poem to get by on? Will that unanticipated gesture be enough for the reader to get off on? Probably, a lesser poet would have concluded. Probably not, Wright correctly assumes – and his strategy for taking it to the next level is to ask the ‘young Sioux’ an apparently tactless question about his prosthesis, without first notifying the reader of its exist­ence. (Paraphrase: ‘Never mind that you’ve offered me money that you probably can’t afford, tell me about that strange contraption 38

Mind the Gap at the end of your wrist’.) The reply – ‘Oh, that?’ – has a comic, Pythonesque quality that Wright presumably couldn’t have foreseen, but he would have certainly been aware of the synergy between ‘Here, / You take this’ and the disembodied Keats fragment ‘This living hand, now warm and cap­able’, which ends, ‘see here it is– / I hold it towards you.’ In the penultimate stanza, ‘feel’ is the operative word, positioned in a question asked of both reader and writer. Did you ever feel a man hold Sixty-five cents In a hook, And place it Gently In your freezing hand? (Subtext: ‘Did you ever experience such an emotional reaction?’) And such a pitiful amount, even allowing for inflation. So, although I’m not sure what kind of hook can actually clasp sixty-five cents’ worth of coinage (does it have some kind of gripping mechanism, or a spring-loaded opposable thumb?), I feel included in the transaction: I feel reached towards across cold, empty air, in the same way the end of the poem reaches into an unprinted void. The empty eye of the hook, the absence of the hand itself and the anonymity of the giver are all cognate with the undefined, thrice-repeated ‘it’ of the final tercet – surely a reference to something other and more significant than the actual money, but one left for the reader to deduce. 39

a vertical art Here’s the outline, Wright is saying – now you do the colouring in. Poets seem to have an instinctive respect for the brain as highly suggestible organ, just as capable of simultaneously turning its attention towards implied notions as it is towards solidly presented ideas: in fact, incapable of ignoring them; willing and proficient in the art of multitasking, to the point where information and insinuation are processed at the same time. Philip Larkin knew and practised this through negation – the dark matter at the other end of the omission spectrum, a kind of present absence, compared with the absent absence of the pristine page or the stanza break. And, whether his inclination to frame things in the negative was an involuntary projection of his lugubrious personality or a conscious technique, he walked the secular via negativa of Cemetery Road from beginning to end, consistent and persistent in his manner of approach and direction of travel. Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies – those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness. ‘Un-’, ‘not’, ‘non’, ‘no’, ‘never’, ‘nothing’, ‘nowhere’ and other isotopes of the same linguistic element are present in his last lines, time and time again. ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, could have been the poster child for this lecture, but there are dozens more such endings, and this from a relatively modest output; and that’s 40

Mind the Gap without getting into the constructed apophasis of the pieces themselves. The poem ‘Negative Indicative’, written in 1953 and marked ‘unfinished?’, is an object lesson in negation, being a single and incomplete sentence consisting of four main clauses, all leading off with the word ‘never’, and each one denying the possibility, or repudiating the occurrence of, a set of very particular events that, once detailed and described, become undeniable in the mind. In those terms, we might think of ‘Negative Indicative’ as a dry run or dress rehearsal for Larkin’s masterpiece of negation, ‘Talking in Bed’, written some seven years later – a poem so tangled in disavowals and disclaimers that it’s diffi­cult to locate either end of the thread, let alone untie the knot. From the duplicity of the title (the poem is actually about not talking in bed), through the modifying ‘ought’ in line one – via the pun on ‘Lying’ in line two; by way of the dishonesty of the rhymes, the refusal of the wind to be properly or reliably restless and the capitalised ‘None’ and ‘Nothing’, announcing two new nihilistic sentences in line eight – we finally arrive at the poem’s famously inverted finale. Not only does Larkin conclude in a negative frame of mind, it’s one he defaults to, after first offering a kinder, politer version of the same thing. By simplifying the terms, it could be argued that a true word equals a ‘not untrue’ word, and that a kind word is the same thing as a ‘not unkind’ word. But this isn’t fractional mathematics – it’s language, and in language the multiplication of two negatives does not produce a positive. Isn’t there also something legalistically pedantic about that final line, the 41

a vertical art kind of miserly and reluctant qualifying statement we might expect from a thin-lipped barrister – a phrase recast in plausible deniability, typical of the adversarial posture, loading even the slightest mealy-mouthed concession with counterclaim? In my experience, Larkin isn’t particularly appreciated by American poets and critics. When they survey British poetry – if they survey British poetry – he’s a landmark that has to be mapped rather than explored. It’s hardly a surprise; to a country always keen to distance itself from the restraints and residues of a colonial past, Larkin must carry a strong whiff of historical fustiness. In Britain, he’s occasionally credited as breaking the mould, or at least reshaping it; here was a voice from the suburbs, even the provinces: the voice of the professional middle classes rather than the intellectual elite, signalling a shift in poetic sensibilities. But that was a top-down view, the view from above – because from below, Larkin appeared and sounded like another product from the privileged end of the cockeyed British education system: a poet with a plummy accent, snooty pretensions and, as it turned out, some pretty snotty opinions. At school, he was marketed to us as ‘the man next door’. ‘Next door to who?’ we wanted to know. ‘Next door to whom’, came the reply. James Wright’s breakthrough publication The Branch Will Not Break was pretty much contemporaneous with Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, but they weren’t just from different continents – they were from different planets. In comparison with the spikes and surges in the developmental graphs of many late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poets, the gradient of Larkin’s poetic growth is roughly in 42

Mind the Gap line with the steady evolutionary incline of British poetry in general. But let’s leave him be for now, just as he imagined taking leave of himself in the last couplet of ‘The Winter Palace’ – appropriately effaced, empty and absent – concluding, ‘Then there will be nothing I know. / My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’ Here’s the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, with the last lines of his poem ‘The Poet’, from his 1965 collection The Year of the Whale: Under the last dead lamp When all the dancers and masks had gone inside His cold stare Returned to its true task, the interrogation of silence. I’m tempted to think that, of all people, Mackay Brown would have known about the questioning of noiselessness: his forays into the wider, louder world were few and far between, and even on Orkney itself he was not an inhabitant of the capital and relative metropolis of Kirkwall (population circa 9,000), but a lifelong resident of Stromness, the main island’s ‘second city’, away to the south-west. Mackay Brown’s poems are islands in themselves – atolls and archi­ pelagos of words surrounded by seascape and airspace – or standing stones set among treeless moorlands, or the archaeological remains of Neolithic homesteads abutting wind-raked beaches. In both subject and style, Mackay Brown would seem to share common ground and common bonds with 43

a vertical art Seamus Heaney. That manifesto phrase ‘the interrogation of silence’ immediately calls to mind Heaney’s wellknown ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ sequence from North and, for me, also resonates with the less recognised ‘Storm on the Island’, from his debut collection Death of a Naturalist (less recognised even to the poet himself, perhaps, given that it didn’t survive the early cull of Selected Poems: 1965–1975, and wasn’t gathered into later reapings). Mackay Brown’s poems could hardly be described as apolitical, given the extent to which they voice the histories of a people and a place caught in the cultural weather fronts circulating between Britain, Scotland and Scandinavia. But the currents and turbulences that buffet Heaney’s ‘Storm on the Island’ are far less implicit, with words like ‘Blast’, ‘Exploding’ and ‘strafes’ pointing directly towards a violent historical past – and, prophetically, as we would later read them, towards an even more violent future. (I assume that I’m not the first person to notice that the first eight letters of the title spell out ‘Stormont’.) ‘Space is a salvo, / We are bombarded with the empty air’ is the penultimate sentence in a long list of descriptive statements, which read like a blogpost from inside a besieged community. Yet what follows, by way of conclusion, is decidedly equivocal – both damning and diplomatic, both complaining and consoling: ‘Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.’ On the one hand, there’s absolutely nothing to fear, says Heaney; or the thing we fear – which thinks of itself as huge – is nothing; or it’s strange, because our fear actually amounts to a huge nothing. On the other hand, what we fear most is being or becoming nothing. Or, worse, what 44

Mind the Gap we fear can only be described in terms of a huge nothing – and there’s nothing more fearful than the unknown; Grendel was always more terrifying before we met him, his mother even more so. In those terms, and there are certainly other permutations and interpretations, ‘Storm on the Island’ forms a balancing act and a bridging measure – a poised straddling of the Irish Sea that the ambassador­ ial Heaney regularly managed to perform, no matter how much the forces of literary tectonics pushed and pulled at his allegiances and aspirations over the course of his writing life. That political equilibrium is both prefigured and recalled by the manner in which the poem functions, at a literal and metaphorical level, throughout – before it leaves us standing at the cliff edge of that final line, staring into the constructed abyss of ambiguity. Despite an appearance of physical continuousness in its manuscript form (giving it the look of a legal proclamation), the medieval poem Pearl is riven with gaps and intervals in which the imagination might fly and float. Foremost of such gaps is the river or stream that divides this world from the next, and the bereaved dreamer from his lost pearl – an unswimmable caesura of water across which all dialogue is conducted, and one which finally shocks the dreamer back into consciousness as he makes his bid for the far bank. The water in the poem seems as translucent and as tempting as the pearl herself: a vision of shimmering whiteness, into which the dreamer pours his heart, and onto which he projects his feelings. I’m discussing Pearl in this context not just because it has a human aperture and an unbearable 45

a vertical art loss at its heart, but because of another perceived absence – this one in the fabric of the text itself: a surmised omission that has exercised the minds of academics and translators alike. As well as being a poem, Pearl is a veritable abacus of symbolic numbers, not least in its twelve-line stanzas and its 1,212 lines (referencing the twelve-by-twelve furlongs of heavenly Jerusalem, with its twelve gates, and the twelve tribes of Israel, as described in the Book of Revelation). But it doesn’t all add up. Because, for all its meticulous geo­ metrical crafting, there appears to be an error in the fortieth verse, which consists of eleven lines only – an omission highlighted by the fact that the poem has a tightly supervised rhyme scheme, which seems to have misfired at line 472. (Some later hand, like a tut-tutting schoolteacher, has even inked a cross in the margin, with an accusatory prong stabbing the text at the ‘missing’ line.) Speculation and conjecture regarding line 472 abound. For some, it’s a scribal error, made when a copyist transferred the poem from one manuscript to another. For others, it’s an intentional omission, and part of a trinity of irregularities that includes a hyper-numerical stanza in Section XV (like an addition to the poem’s vertebral column, designed to bring it to its necessary numerical height) and a rupture in the chain of concatenation (like a failure of baton-passing between verses and sections – the kind of botched handover familiar to anyone with an interest in British relay running). For my money, it’s an honest mistake: one that the scribe, working on a thirty-six-linesto-a-page basis, has gone some way towards noticing towards the bottom of the facing sheet, where five lines have 46

Mind the Gap been shoehorned into the space of four. But intentional or unintentional, I’m more curious about the way that interested parties have responded to the apparent omission. J. R. R. Tolkien inserts a line of dots at line 472. In cricket­ ing terms, he isn’t drawn into improvising a stroke, but instead lifts the bat and lets the delivery go through outside off stump. In the scorebook it’s a dot ball – thirty-two dots, in fact, compared with six dots in Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron’s direct transcription (who similarly offer no shot, and employ a standard ellipsis in their prose translation, to signal the presumed omission). Others, however, have been unable to resist the temptation. Marie Borroff, in her verse translation, ad-libs with ‘I cannot but think your words are wrong’, thus filling the gap and finding a rhyming companion for the unpartnered ‘among’. Jane Draycott, in a more impressionistic and contemporised remaking, improvises by stretching the canvas of existing text to fill the size of the stanzaic frame, allowing ‘at my words – it seems to me’ to chime with ‘the grace among you there must be’. And Victor Watts, in an edition that is somewhere between transcription and translation, has gone ‘all out’, as they say, supposing both the content and the style with ‘[Methinks thou speakest now full wrong]’. Missing line or no, for my own part, I’ve come to respect a momentary pause in the text, since it acts as a silent prelude to what I consider to be the most felicitous line in the whole poem, according to its complicated rubric – a line semantically, sonically and syntactically perfect, and one whose alliterative asterism includes three binary stars in the form of the Middle English h, oscillating 47

a vertical art between consonant and vowel: ‘Þyself in heuen ouer hyȝ þou heue’. (Translation: ‘You raise yourself too high in heaven.’ In other words: ‘Get over yourself.’) A few quick flashcards, as examples of other absences and omissions, beginning with Paul Muldoon’s ‘The Otter’, which proceeds with all the characteristic guile and craftiness we’ve come to expect from a Muldoon poem, and with the cunning and slipperiness we would expect of the creature itself. The rhyme pattern alone says as much – the call of ‘desk’ at the end of line one not finding its response until ‘Eske’, the poem’s final syllable; the rhymes diffusing outwards, like concentric ripples emanating from one central couplet, where ‘it’ and ‘hit’ stand face-to-face, at the contact point of the poem’s symmetry, where we find, lo and behold, a mirror. It’s a ploy that reflects another of the poem’s parallels: the secretive blackness of a blotter that refuses to carry the impression of any betraying letter or phrase, and the author’s own refusal from the outset to name names – his ‘S——’ leaving the reader to fill in the blanks and make the connections, be they personal or political. Or perhaps poetical, given how Muldoon’s otter rises to meet him, not unlike the old woman who ‘Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’ in Sylvia Plath’s poem entitled, lo and behold, ‘Mirror’. In Philip Metres’s abu ghraib arias, any unlikely singing drifting along the wings and landings of Baghdad’s notorious prison has been reduced to the testimonies of serving US soldiers, abused prisoners and quotes from operating 48

Mind the Gap procedure manuals; then further reduced and stripped down through military-style redaction and censor­ship. The vetoing becomes increasingly severe as the sequence evolves, from ‘The Blues of Lane McCotter’ on page one (where the redacted passages already appear as blindfolds and gags) to the final piece presented as a total erasure of voice – a kind of chalk outline of punctuation marks from the crime scene, horribly telling in its inability to tell. Emily Dickinson’s quiet, circumscribed existence in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts, makes George Mackay Brown look like Indiana Jones by comparison. I’d always thought of those characteristic dashes that separate Dickinson’s lines (and individual words on occasions) as a kind of catch-all gesture – casual and impatient, even – designed to abbreviate the fussiness of conventional punctuation and expedite each poem’s argument. But over time, I’ve come to see them as something more transcendent – ‘gorgeous nothings’, indeed – an elevated form of musical notation, creating momentary suspensions; little leaps and trapezes; wing beats; airborne cognitive deferrals; miniature magic carpet rides; or micro-journeys on the palm of the poet’s own hand, during which the reader glides from one idea to the next without ever touching the floor, without having to steeplechase along a series of commas, pause at the amber light of a semicolon, totter over the cattle grid of an ellipsis or be wheel-clamped by a full stop. ‘We play at Paste’ was one of a quartet of poems she posted to Thomas Wentworth Higginson with that first letter, 49

a vertical art with her heart in her mouth, wondering ‘if my Verse is alive’; confiding to him, courtesy of several more of those enigmatic dashes, ‘Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –’. For reasons of convenience, comprehension and cultural conformity, Dickinson’s dashes have, over the years, been passed through the editorial sausage machine to become homogenised products of equal length and thickness – as if to comply with some WTO directive on standardisation. But it’s hard to resist playing the voyeuristic graphologist or amateur calligrapher, noticing how much the original punctuation varies in shape, size, shade, orientation and emphasis, and wondering how much of Dickinson’s agonised confrontation of ‘a final revelation of horrible Nothingness’, as Ted Hughes put it, we might infer from the full range of her compositional ticks and track marks. It is tempting too, to think that we should consider those original scribblings, fascicles and packages as works of visual art – pictograms for which printed text has no real equivalent. Finally, Kevin Young’s ‘Reed Song’ is another poem whose mournful subject and unsettling tone is entirely commissioned by the breathed spaces and visual silences that both hold it together and force it apart; and do so entirely appropriately, given the drowning at its centre and the wind instrument of its making. It ends:

50

Mind the Gap Stay hereabouts while I hold you, speaking breath      kissing your woodwind mouth:   Dusk gathers    around us like a crowd till I can, no more, sing out

51

On Lists

We like our lists, don’t we? The relative success of the coffee table book Lists of Note, compiled by Shaun Usher, says that we do, without necessarily explaining the attraction. Among curios from many different fields of endeavour, contributions from poets include a list submitted by Marianne Moore to the Ford Motor Company, containing suggested names for Ford’s forthcoming production vehicle: suggestions such as ‘The Dearborn Diamanté’, ‘The Resilient Bullet’ and ‘The Intelligent Whale’ – none of which made it onto the production line and all of which were eventually overlooked in favour of the Ford Edsel, now a byword for commercial failure. Who wouldn’t want to be the driver of an Intelligent Whale? Who wouldn’t gladly trade in their Mini One or their Tesla Model 3, to be transported by a Marianne Moorechristened Utopian Turtletop, or a Mongoose Civique? Also included in Lists of Note are a couple of lists drawn up by the twenty-year-old Sylvia Plath before her return to Smith College following illness, the first being a three-point plan for attracting the romantic attentions of a Myron Lotz. Point one: ‘I will not overwhelm him by breathless over-enthusiasm.’ The second list consists of ten exhortations towards positivism and cheerfulness that, in retrospect, resonate with tragic irony. 53

a vertical art Lists of Note also includes a compilation of words taken from Walt Whitman’s notebook, as he prepared the groundwork for his major elegy ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. For a poet of Whitman’s eloquence and confidence, it’s a surprisingly crude inventory of death-related vocabulary, including ‘tears’, ‘black’, ‘sad’ and ‘gloomy’. But reassuring, too, reminding us how even the most celebrated and affirmed poets, in their search for the transcendent, often set out from modest and even mundane positions. It also sheds a little light on how Whitman, a compulsive lister and cataloguer within his poems, arrived at those compositions from similarly constructed prototypes. I’ll come back to Whitman towards the end of the lecture and stay a little longer with Marianne Moore, if I may. To become aware of lists in poetry, and then to notice them in so many poems, is not to fall victim to ‘frequency illusion syndrome’, but to genuinely realise how intrinsic lists are to poetic practice – from the macro-organisation and grand archi­tecture of entire works, to the internal furnishings and flourishings that a poem might occasionally or suddenly employ. Flourishings like the unexpected, superabundant, riotous digest of flora that springs up unannounced in Moore’s early poem ‘The Steeple-Jack’: ‘the tropics first hand’, as she puts it. That section of the poem appears somewhat hotchpotch and scattergun at first glance, until the instinctive organiser within us recognises the recurring visual shape of each stanza, and our inner bean-counter registers the repeated number of syllables on a line-for-line basis. By which 54

On Lists time, we’re experiencing the painted picture-postcard orderliness of a quaint New England township, while simultaneously being inundated and intoxicated by nature’s profusion and variety – just as the town’s steeplejack, one C. J. Poole, dangling precariously from the gold star on the church’s out-of-kilter spire, will be a harbinger of both fixity and the unknown. Moore was something of a poetic pioneer in terms of her deregulated syntax and breezy loquaciousness; but looking east from Mr Poole’s vertiginous vantage point, across three-and-a-half thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean, and six hundred years of time – towards Old England, or at least Middle English – Moore would have been aware of earlier poets letting lists and inventories set up amplificatory or discordant relationships within the stanzas that caged them. In Fitt II of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, after three sections of cataloguing the would-be hero’s apparel, armour and kitbag – and despite admitting ‘þof tary hyt me schulde’ (i.e. ‘though it will delay me’) – the anonymous author embarks on a detailed explication of the pentangle painted on the outside of the young knight’s shield. What follows is actually a list within a list – a numbered indexing of Gawain’s five virtues, expressed in multiples of fives, resonating and reverberating through exaggerated alliteration: First, he was deemed flawless in his five senses; and second, his five fingers were never at fault; and third, his faith was founded in the five wounds Christ received on the cross, as the creed recalls. And fourth, if that soldier struggled in skirmish 55

a vertical art one thought pulled him through above all other things: the fortitude he found in the five joys which Mary had conceived in her son, our Saviour. For precisely that reason the princely rider had the shape of her image inside his shield, so by catching her eye his courage would not crack. The fifth set of five which I heard the knight followed included friendship and fraternity with fellow men, purity and politeness that impressed at all times, and pity, which surpassed all pointedness. Five things which meant more to Gawain than to most other men. So these five sets of five were fixed in this knight, each linked to the last through the endless line, a five-pointed form which never failed, never stronger to one side or slack at the other, but unbroken in its being from beginning to end however its trail is tracked and traced. So the star on the spangling shield he sported shone royally, in gold, on a ruby-red background, the pure pentangle as people have called it       for years.     Then, lance in hand, held high,     and got up in his gear     he bids them all goodbye     one final time, he fears. The intruding voice of the poet might have apologised for holding up the narrative with this apparent digression, but in fact his anorakish sidebar serves a wider thematic purpose. Because the pentangle on the outside of Gawain’s shield is 56

On Lists presented as an endless knot, an Escher-style design of geometrical continuousness with no beginning or end, and by setting Gawain’s qualities ringing and riffing within that infinitely ricocheting framework, we are being supplied with the subconscious impression of a knight whose faithfulness will never break, whose loyalty is eternal and whose sense of duty is incorruptible. Throw in the image of the Virgin Mary ‘depaynted’ on the inside of the shield, and young Gawain becomes pretty much invulnerable (making his lapse in judgement, later in the poem, all the more thrilling and significant). In verses eighty-four and eighty-five of Pearl, probably by the same poet, the dream vision reaches its crescendo with a glimpse of heavenly Jerusalem, archaeologic­ally and archi­ tecturally recreated from its source material (Revelation 21:19–20): John had described those stones in his scriptures so I knew their names and also their nature. I judged the first of those jewels to be jasper, found at the very bottom of the base, gleaming green on the lowest layer. Sapphire occupied the second stage, and clear, crystalline chalcedony shone pure and pale on the third plane. Emerald was fourth with its glaring green finish, and finely striated sardonyx the fifth, and ruby the sixth, exactly as stated by John the apostle when depicting the apocalypse. 57

a vertical art John also described the chrysolite, the stone which formed the seventh stage. The eighth was of brilliantly white beryl, a table of twin-toned topaz the ninth, a course of chrysoprase the tenth, noble and elegant jacinth the eleventh, and twelfth, most trusted in times of trouble, was a plane of purple and indigo amethyst. The wall above that tiered base was jasper, glistening and glittering like glass, a vision I knew very well from the version in John the apostle’s apocalyptic scriptures. As well as bearing witness to the shining citadel, it is as if its very construction is taking place before our eyes – a methodical, layer-by-layer building up of the palace of heaven, from base to pinnacle – though, to play the part of observers, our eyes must travel in a downward direction through the poem, perhaps encountering the reflection of heavenly Jerusalem, as it appears upside down in the water that separates the dreamer from his pearl, and this life from the next. Displayed in such a manner, the list allows us to sample the earthbound and ethereal in simultaneous equipoise – one a castle in the air reaching into the skies, the other a mirage culminating at our feet. When I teach creative writing at various educational institutions, or in the remote farmhouses and barns belonging to the Arvon Foundation, I occasionally put forward a theory of composition, which argues that all the best 58

On Lists poems are made up of a combination of interesting and dull words. By ‘best poems’, I mean the ones that I like; if you’re egotistical enough to tell others how to write, you might as well go the whole hog and assume that the Venn diagram of absolute critical judgement and your own personal taste presents as a total eclipse. And, while accepting that one person’s dull word is someone else’s PhD thesis, and vice versa (and even though it isn’t the most advanced literary assertion ever proposed), my theory serves to steer students away from poetry made entirely of highfalutin, grandiose, rhetorical, magniloquent, alienating language on the one hand, and away from unrewarding, unchallenging poetry made entirely of routine, everyday, ten-a-penny words from the lower orders of the linguistic food chain on the other. If they’ve used the word ‘walk’ in a poem, I’ll say to them, ‘think again’: because if a character in a poem has taken a ‘walk’, isn’t that the weakest and most casual term – the genus rather than the species, the widest and least precise taxonomic indicator of the activity being undertaken? As a reader, I find it hard to visualise someone ‘walking’, but tell me that they ‘ambled’, ‘shuffled’, ‘hobbled’, ‘hurried’, ‘sidled’, ‘paced’, ‘careered’, ‘capered’, ‘skipped’, ‘traipsed’, ‘tramped’, ‘trotted’, ‘schlepped’, ‘slogged’ or ‘strutted’ and I get a much clearer picture of both the action and the character performing it. Conversely, if you tell me your character went ‘pusillanimously promenading along the pavement’, or undertook a ‘perambulatory peregrination of the premises’, I’m probably going to think your character was somewhat precocious and pretentious, and that you are, too. 59

a vertical art W. H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’ is a good example of how such oppositions work, moving between the knowit-all pomposity of ‘Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines’ in lines thirteen and fourteen, to the commonplace wording of the poem’s final stanza, which concludes: Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast. ‘Very fast’ – really? Out of context, it’s almost McGona­ gallesque in its banality and lameness. Yet the note it strikes, after the intentional over-articulation preceding it, serves at least two purposes: it re-enacts the poem’s juxta­posing of epic and everyday occurrences, and it de­mystifies, even rehumanises the poet. The word ‘move’ is also interesting – seemingly neutral, lacking focus and accuracy. According to the Laws of Poetic Composition Regarding Beings in Motion – laid down at this lectern only two minutes ago – shouldn’t those reindeers ‘glide’, or ‘hoof ’ or ‘stream’? But their detachment is our engagement; the way they move, and the way that moves us, is animated, activated and occasioned by the same verb. This is still a lecture about lists; if I seem to have veered off-piste, please bear with me as I slalom through the woods for a page or two more. Ordinary language is often reserved for bridging or linking material in poems – though it’s often 60

On Lists by those apparently humdrum moments of connective grammar, rather than the headline-grabbing, Hollywood marquee words and phrases, that poems succeed or fail. We can imagine Whitman looking down at his glossary of bereavement, hoping to build a mausoleum for his beloved president, thinking, ‘Okay – here are the big timbers for the roof beams and joists, and here are the stone slabs for the floor. But where are the roof tiles and spars? What do I use for mortar? And how do I fashion a hinge for the door?’ A correspondence broke out recently across the pages of PN Review (the political wing of Carcanet Press), after Grevel Lindop took against James Booth’s biography Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, and somewhat against Larkin himself. In response to Booth’s list of Larkin’s ‘ten great elegies’, Lindop identified what he saw as flaws in some of the poems, reserving particular scorn for the second line of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, calling it ‘perhaps the most vacuous line in all English poetry’. Lindop, a canny poet himself, is also an astute critic, so he knows how much responsibility he’s placing on the word ‘perhaps’. Without it, we’d have to be mightily impressed not just by the breadth of his reading, but by his ability and inclination to compare every line in English poetry with every other line, and then produce a hierarchy of vacuity in which line two of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ was the chart-topper. Admittedly, there is something a little strained and contrived in ‘Not till about’ – the consequence of an indented half-line not leaving much wiggle room, and an enforced rhyme scheme that, at a later point in the same stanza, draws Larkin into rhyming ‘sense’ with the archaic ‘thence’. Lindop suggests that ‘Not 61

a vertical art till about’ has been fitted in ‘like a piece of Meccano’. (For those people of the digital generation, too young to under­ stand that reference, Meccano was a construction-­based educational ‘toy’, consisting of perforated metal struts coup­led together by nuts and bolts, popular in an age when the world was made out of actual things.) But in Larkin’s defence, I like the way that, in the anal, uptight world of the speaker, ‘one-twenty’ is an approximation; and how such affected casualness reverts to strict punctuality after the line break; and how the offhand ‘till’ is preferred to a more formal ‘until’ – the gauche Larkin unbuttoning his top button, if not exactly taking off his tie. I also appreciate the way an apparent confession of personal tardiness in the opening line has been reshaped as a typically British complaint against a late-running railway service by line four. At every turn in the stanza, affected nonchalance is trumped by tradition and reserve. But my real purpose in focusing on Lindop’s criticism of that line is simply to demonstrate how much attention those awkward, eggy passages in a poem can attract – and how difficult they are to execute. Which is one of the reasons, I would argue (circumnavigatory skier rejoining the main slope here), why poets have from time to time avoided them and offered instead a series of hopefully pertinent but uncombined, unattached, unyoked statements instead, i.e. a list. One night, in a hotel bar in the US, after a poetry reading at a nearby university, a fellow poet who was experiencing a dark night of the soul, told me, ‘People think there’s too much continuity in my work.’ By ‘people’, he didn’t mean people, i.e. the 325 million citizens of the USA who, 62

On Lists judging by book sales, don’t care much about poetry full stop, let alone its continuity quotient. He meant the academy, the establishment, the editors, committees, prize-givers, laurel-weavers and the keepers of the purses. He felt emboldened to articulate this grievance, I assume, because he detected in my work a propensity towards continuity akin to that in his own; and so, for a few minutes in a shady alcove of that New Jersey hostelry, we were allies and conspirators, resistance fighters plotting against poetic fragmentation, whispering our comprehensible curses against the evil, all-pervasive non sequitur and the discontinued thought. Is listing a gendered device in poetry, I wonder? Obviously it’s not an exclusively male prerogative – I’ve talked about Marianne Moore, and look how extensively and effectively lists operate in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, for example. Only an exhaustive and exhausting mathematical survey would tell us if listing is a predominantly male tendency, and even then we’d have to factor in the extent to which the publishing of poetry in general has been, over the course of history, a predominantly male privilege. But is the ranking, sequencing, serialising, cataloguing and ordering of the world concomitant with an authoritarian voice and a patriarchal perspective? Certainly in more recent times, the list has been associated with male attitudes, tabloid culture, lads’ mags and the genre known as ‘lad lit’ – offering a portrait of the redundant, impotent contemporary Western male, and his futile attempts to impose order and meaning on life 63

a vertical art through the non-negotiable alpha­betical curation of his record collection, etc. With those connotations as a backdrop, there are times when the list can acquire a subversive, ironic, counter-­ cultural potency and poignancy, particularly when list poems address the power dynamics of male–female relationships. In this section from the poetic sequence ‘The Split’, from Susan Wheeler’s 2012 collection Meme, an acrimonious bust-up or bust-ups are given the list treatment – as if marital vows were being redrawn as a slanging match or rap sheet: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

She was starting to look like her mother. She was clingier than pantyhose. He stayed out all night. She liked to cuff me when she got plowed. He was vapid. She was a fool. She ridiculed me in front of the dogs. He stuck a hairpin in my ear. He had an affair with my older sister. He spent our money on booze and bennies. She wouldn’t clean and it stank like bad beef. I tried to hang myself but it didn’t work. He didn’t like my sweet potato pie and said his mother made it better. She wouldn’t learn trigonometry for me. I took it all out on the little ones. She couldn’t get pregnant. He was shooting blanks. 64

On Lists 18 He made for a pitiful sight in a bathing suit. 19 I wanted out, then I didn’t, then I did. 20 I just couldn’t live without Sally. 21 He wanted to start a family and to start it now, with me. 22 She split when the money ran out. 23 I gave her three more chances and then I left. 24 She hated the Dave Clark Five. 25 I was indentured. I didn’t know I could choose not to. 26 He went out for gum etcetera. 27 By April she had passed on. 28 He only saw his idea of me. 29 We couldn’t agree on an invitation font. 30 He was bad news, and it’s always, like, bad news, here I am. The numbering lends a queasy sense of officiousness and detachment to the poem and the page, as if presenting a compiled register of allegations. So although there’s an even-handedness on display, and no ostensible adjudication, the very act of offering the complaints in list format and in a poetic context feels subjective, strategic, political – like someone playing someone else at their own game, or the tables being turned. As with most of Wheeler’s work, we’re never allowed to be absolutely confident about who’s speaking in the poem, or who the poems speak for; whether a voice is observing, confessing or ventriloquising. The voice and voices in Selima Hill’s 2001 collection Bunny are similarly distorted and refracted, though there seems to be a far darker relationship taking place in the 65

a vertical art rooms of a house where many of the poems are located. The majority of the pieces are only half-a-dozen lines long, if that, so the three poems that do push on towards the bottom of the page, in unbroken stanzas, as lists, become especially conspicuous. In ‘Galloping Alopecia’, a young girl recounts the criticisms made against her by the lodger – a minatory, occasional presence in the book, not someone a young girl would be happy to meet on the landing at night: The lodger blamed the Galloping Alopecia her aunt still nursed behind closed doors on her; and he didn’t like the way she dropped her Ts and he didn’t like the skin on her heels and the way she straightened her beautiful curly hair and jumped on thistles and didn’t come home till bed-time and came home covered in straw and befriended dogs with mud on her skirt and hands like gardening gloves and the tone of her voice and the way she said Can I get down and the way she refused to sit down in his first-class carriage and refused his sweets and refused to look up from her beetles and refused to decide to worship the ground he trod on; he didn’t like her knees like cardboard boxes, he didn’t like the way she’d disappear as if she was right and had a surprise for him 66

On Lists and she was the one who was never going to forget, who witnessed his sorrow, who witnessed his altered blood, who came across him stooping in the bathroom making up secret parcels of wild violets for who or why nobody dares to wonder. He chopped their little legs off at the ankles and bandaged them up in damp cotton-wool. He laid them out in rows like baby quails with the backs of their poor little heads out cold on the  slate. The complaints here are delivered unceasingly, the list indicative of a systematic campaign of personal diminishment and attempted psychological control. The speaker’s quirky and, at times, obstinate personality – as implied by the nature of the accusations – appears to offer hope, but those brief moments of spirited resistance are met by renewed disapproval after the fulcrum of the semicolon, making the speaker’s plight, as I read it, all the more pitiful. The sniping is incessant; presented in list formation, it becomes volley, salvo, assault. In 2009, Umberto Eco curated an exhibition and conference at the Louvre entitled The Infinity of Lists, producing an accompanying anthology of artworks and written material in support of his essay on list theory. Distinguishing between ‘a poetics of everything included’ and ‘a poetics of the etcetera’, Eco compares the shield of Achilles, as described by Homer in Book XVIII of the Iliad, with the 67

a vertical art catalogue of the Greek fleet in Book II – two of the first substantial poetic lists in Western literature. The shield, contends Eco, with its exquisite detail and seemingly endless representations of life and the world, is actually a closed form. Even if we allow for the ‘infinitesimally minute goldsmithery’, as Eco puts it, the fixed circumference of the shield, its circular materiality and its hierarchical structure discourage us from believing that anything of relevance lies beyond its boundary. It is an all-encompassing design and a finite accumulation. The cataloguing of the Argive ships, on the other hand – despite giving an initial impression of completeness – is actually an example of boundlessness, according to Eco: an enumeration hinting at the incomprehensible, whose properties are mere examples of an ultimately indescribable phenomenon. Homer tells us about the number of vessels, their commanders-in-chief and their ports of origin – but we can only guess at the number of men on board, the weaponry at their disposal, their appetite for war, etc., etc. The cataloguing of the ships can never practically conclude, which, in Eco’s view, makes it a prime example of the ‘topos of ineffability’ – a list that appeals to the imagination rather than the rational mind, and one that extends outwardly and exponentially in all directions, or inwardly, Russian doll-style, mise en abyme. Well, it’s a theory, and typical of Eco’s intellectual auda­city and mischievousness. My own understanding and appreciation of lists is less philosophical, and has more to do with attempting to recognise the pragmatic reasons a poet might turn to the list as a means of articulation. It often results in classifying the list in accordance with the kinds of lists we use 68

On Lists in everyday life, and have done for thousands of years – lists that have acquired recognised titles, such as the To-Do List; the Guest List; the Bucket List (not unrelated to the Wish List); the Inventory or the Audit; the Litany; the Roll Call or Register, sometimes related to the Dramatis Personae, sometimes related to the Payroll; the Shortlist; the Charge Sheet; the Menu, sometimes related to the Recipe; the Catalogue; and the Blacklist (a term I’d be uncomfortable with these days but still in common currency, even in liberal publications). And the Checklist, in which the list-maker stands, pen and clipboard in hand, putting a tick against every box, indulging their completist tendencies. In the second book of the ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ – the posthumously published coda, ‘Which, both for Forme and Matter, appears to be Parcell of Some Following Booke of the Faerie Queene’ (list-heavy in its own right) – Spenser embarks on further successions of lists, including a list of the four elements: Earth, Water, Ayre and Fire. Their various forms and properties are outlined by Dame Mutabilitie herself, followed immediately by a list of the seasons: ‘lusty Spring’, ‘jolly Sommer’, ‘Autumne all in yellow clad’, and ‘Winter cloathed all in frize’ – one Spenserian stanza each. Not content with dividing the year into quarters – and despite already having yodelled (or perhaps yokelled) his way through The Shepheardes Calender some years previously – the poet then has Mutabilitie subpoena the individual months in calendric order: hence ‘sturdy March’, ‘fresh Aprill’, ‘faire May, ‘jolly June’, ‘hot July’, ‘rich arrayd’ August, September who ‘marched eeke on foote’, ‘October full of 69

a vertical art merry glee’, ‘grosse and fat’ November, ‘chill December’, ‘old January’, and, bringing up the rear, ‘cold February’. (One Spenserian stanza each.) Had enough? Spenser hasn’t: ‘And after these there came the Day, and Night’. (One shared Spenserian stanza.) Enough? No: ‘Then came the Howres’. In fact, Spenser mercifully defers from listing all twenty-four of them, a horological cheese-paring he hadn’t felt able to resist in his Epithalamion – though that was no consolation for an enervated Walter Savage Landor, who admitted in his poem ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Thee gentle Spenser fondly led, / But me he mostly sent to bed.’ This isn’t to say that Spenser’s listings here are either inelegant or irrelevant, or even entirely soporific – though there is certainly a sense of the poet taking full advantage of the cataloguing opportunities on offer; treading water, perhaps; marking time, we might say; or possibly indulging in a little bit of what sports commentators these days refer to as ‘grandstanding’ or ‘showboating’. In terms of cross-­ referencing the ‘Mutabilitie’ cantos with my own pattern book of list types, yes, there’s something of the stocktake here, and also the CV or résumé by way of audition: the poet outlining his eminent suitability, by performing an on-the-spot demonstration of his undeniable talents. But the list form is appropriate in this instance, because the ‘Mutibilitie’ cantos are, in part, a courtroom drama presided over by Nature, where the meta-case for Mutabilitie is highlighted by Spenser’s inventive descriptions and creative rhyming (e.g. ‘aethereall’ and ‘unusual’), and the meta-case for Jove’s constancy is represented by the regular form, the ongoing logic and the apparently inexhaustible procession 70

On Lists of evidence and witnesses. Even within individual lines, the scales of justice tip one way and then the other – the reader seduced and charmed in one moment, ground into submission the next – and indeed the trial concludes with something of a hung jury. Four hundred years later, Jo Shapcott may have had Spenser in mind, and was certainly exercised by questions of life expectancy, when she penned the title poem to her book Of Mutability – a collection, she acknowledges at the outset, that ‘owes everything’ to a team of medics at a Herefordshire hospital. In the second of two stanzas, the poem suddenly erupts or fragments into a list giddy with possibilities and overwhelmed by uncertainty, with no comfort to be gained from earthly occurrences, and with mind and spirit beginning to drift beyond the body’s jurisdiction, not beholden to the same gravitational laws. She writes: Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets, angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye, join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality, flying, fishing, sex without touching much. Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky. Shelley wasn’t averse to the occasional list, and he liked his mutability as well: I’m thinking here of his first ‘Mutability’ poem, the one that ends ‘Nought may endure but Mutability’ – i.e. the only thing that stays the same is change – a most agreeable truism, worthy of a latter-­day 71

a vertical art fridge magnet, fortune cookie or Christmas cracker from one of the better department stores. So agreeable, in fact, that it crops up in Chapter 10 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, heralding Victor’s meeting with the tragic stitched-together ‘wretch’ beneath the ‘awful majesty’ of Mont Blanc: mutability the creature being called forth by ‘Mutability’ the poem, as penned by the author’s husband. It’s list-making as echo or chain reaction, the type that can usher a biddable reader from one poet or poem to another – a reader like myself, always keen to honour synchronicity and serendipity wherever and whenever they occur. As I’ve been doing just now, and as I’m about to do again, since 2016 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the date of publication of Shelley’s ‘Mutability’. Exactly two centuries earlier, a human cargo of real-life wretches were cast adrift in the ocean, on a raft cobbled together from the remains of the French frigate Méduse, beached on a sandbank off the coast of Senegal. Abandoned by the flotilla of lifeboats carrying the higher-ranking crew and the higher-status passengers, 145 men and one woman clung to a raft that was less than twenty metres long by seven metres wide, and never fully afloat. Thirteen days later, after mutiny, disease, madness, murder, suicide and cannibalism, only fifteen people remained alive. They included one Alexandre Corréard, whose account of the voyage, published as Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse, became a notorious bestseller following his eventual return to home soil. Corréard would later advise the young artist Théodore Géricault as he embarked on his scandalous, early Romantic painting The Raft of the Medusa. I bring 72

On Lists this episode of history into play, by virtue of its bicentenary, because two lists associated with it allow me to segue into the next part of this lecture. Both lists – one a roll call or passenger manifest, the other a shopping list – could easily pass themselves off as contemporary poems, the unarticulated infamy surrounding both the shipwreck and the painting providing the necessary framework to elevate the terse, unembroidered itemisations into the poetic, without any need of ‘continuity’. Corréard’s list of all the people in the expedition, before the Médusa got into trouble, is presented not as a list of names but of trades (‘Two Apothecaries, Five Surgeons, Two Port Captains, Three Pilots, A Gardener . . .’), concealing a smaller inner list – a party of accidental and arbitrary survivors, a skeleton crew still unaware of a journey that would take them to within a hair’s breadth of the after­life, and towards immortalisation in one of the most famous paintings of all time. Géricault’s list of expenses (‘. . . un assortiment de couleurs . . . huile clarifié, huile d’oeuillet et grasse . . . six crayons blanc . . .’) includes materials purchased for his attic studio in Paris – a studio that he lined with rotting body parts from the local morgues and hospitals (to create the necessary atmosphere for his masterpiece, and in order to study the texture and tone of decaying flesh). The oils with which he worked, once procured and applied to the canvas, would become incarnate, and I find Géricault’s shopping list both persuasive and pertinent, because in tracking down and collecting list poems over a number of years, those which catalogue aspects of the human body have come to form a substantial 73

a vertical art sub-­collection in their own right: from the Old Testament Song of Songs, to Ted Hughes’s ‘Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days’, and beyond. Those poems, and parts thereof, include instances of the literary ‘blazon’ – passages of a poem in which (usually) a woman’s features or attributes are listed, the poetic equiva­ lent of ‘checking someone out’, as with this oft-quoted example from our resident cataloguer and serial serialiser Edmund Spenser, taken from his Epithalamion: Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shining bright, Her forehead yvory white, Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte, Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie neck lyke to a marble towre, And all her body lyke a pallace fayre. To digress slightly (‘thogh tary hit me schulde’), I’ve never been able to resist teaching Spenser’s Epithalamion without throwing in Section I of Peter Reading’s poem of the same title, which, rather than honouring bride and groom, chooses to sneer at the acquisitive couple and the material­istic institution of marriage itself, through an unceremonious/­ceremonial recreation of that most egregious nuptial phenomenon, the wedding list. Reading’s sarcastic dowry includes:

74

On Lists     Dragonstraw door mat in plaited seagrass from China.     ‘Tik Tok’ wall clock, battery-operated quartz movement in pine frame.     ‘La Primula Stripe’ dishwasher-proof glazed earthenware coffee set.     Valance with neat box pleats to fit 3ft to 5ft beds (fixed by Velcro pads).     Michel Guérard’s kitchen work table with a base of solid pine, including a duckboard shelf for storage, a knife rack and pegs for teacloths.    Boxwood pastry crimper.    ‘Confucius’ 50% polyester, 50% cotton duvet cover.    Pine wine rack.     Pine lavatory paper holder.     Solid pine toilet seat with chrome fittings (coated with 6 layers of polyurethane).     Iron omelette pan with curved sides.     Angus Broiler cast iron pan for steaks and chops which combines the ease of frying with the goodness of grilling.     ‘Leonardo’ sofa in cream herringbone.     Honey-coloured beech bentwood rocker with cane back and seat.     Cork ice-bucket with aluminium insert.     ‘Mr Toad’ rattan chair from France.     Tough cotton canvas Sagbag filled with flame-retardant polystyrene granules. 75

a vertical art But, to return to my body poems file, within my list poems folder, it’s been interesting to note how many of the more contemporary examples seek to delve below the epidermis or exhibit a fascination with medical procedures – poems such as Paul Farley’s ‘Relic’: One’s a crown, two’s a crown, three, four, five distal occlusal, six distal occlusal, seven occlusal. Upper left: one mesial incisal, two mesial incisal, three’s a crown, four, five is absent, space closed. Six occlusal, seven occlusal, eight. Lower left: one’s a crown, two mesial, three, four occlusal, five is absent, space closed. Six occlusal, seven occlusal, eight is absent. Right: one, two, three, four distal occlusal, five’s a buckle, six and seven are absent, space closed. Among other meanings, the title ‘Relic’ refers to the role that dental records play in identifying the dead – in part, the poem is an exhumation of identity and a retrieval of the past. Yet Farley’s reconstruction evokes an excruciatingly sentient experience as well, conjuring up the sanitised smell of the consulting room and the dentist’s coffee-stained breath, recalling the scrape of metal on enamel, and evoking the horror of some unspeakably barbaric utensil antagonising sensitive flesh or taunting hair-trigger nerves. There’s also a sense of irreverence, and even political reclamation 76

On Lists – because, despite being intensely personal, such inspection records were only ever an overheard and encrypted experience, formed of specialist language and classified information, verbalised by the dentist and recorded by an assistant or hygienist, while the patient remained gagged, doped, horizontal and terrified. This was particularly true for my generation – a generation whose industry-sponsored sugar addictions bankrolled the Iberian holidays and hardwood conservatories of dental practitioners all over the country (and whose tonsils and adenoids were whipped out at the drop of a hat). I can still see the maker’s name, Ash, printed on the million-watt inspection lamp that blazed above me, as a bearded figure in a blood-stained lab coat loomed overhead with a sledgehammer and a pair of industrial bolt cutters. The poem is funny as well, eliciting humour because of the way the list progresses; sometimes confirming expectations, sometimes supplying the satisfaction of pattern and order, and sometimes delivering the unanticipated – as with the painful- and expensive-sounding ‘buckle’. Some of the comedy in ‘Relic’ also derives from a latent recollection of precise technical jargon. And although there’s no humour whatsoever to be found in Seamus Heaney’s ‘bog body poems’, as they’re sometimes called, it is difficult to stifle the sense of gratification, or even pleasure, that takes place when the poet presents what feels to be exactly the right word or phrase for conveying the physical and emotional properties of preserved human remains, by way of an image or simile. (‘The crock of the pelvis’ in ‘Bog Queen’; ‘the ball of his heel / like a basalt egg’ in ‘The Grauballe Man’; ‘the frail rigging / of her ribs’ in ‘Punishment’; ‘prune-stones for 77

a vertical art teeth’ in ‘Strange Fruit’.) If ‘The Tollund Man’, in Wintering Out, was a projection of intent, an imagined meeting with a dead body at some future date and distant location, then the bog body poems in the subsequent North are close encounters, in real time: in fact, a first-person experience in the case of ‘Bog Queen’, where Heaney inhabits the cadaver to speak her monologue and to deliver his macabre blazon. And if ‘The Tollund Man’ was written by the undertaker’s assistant practising on an anatomically correct corpse, the body poems in North are penned by Heaney the credentialed pathologist-poet, constructing his autopsy report limb-bylimb, this time in list mode. Across eight pages and four poems, we examine, in this order: head, feet, skins, stomach, brain, nails, pelvis, breasts, thighs, hides, skull, hair, head, feet, hair, birth-cord, bone, skull, wrists, heel, instep, hips, spine, head, chin, throat, hair, face, head, shoulder, nails; neck, front, nipples, ribs, body, bone, brain, head, hair, face, brain, muscles, bones; head, teeth, hair, nose, and eyeholes. It’s invasive, almost nauseating stuff, made all the more unsettling by a sense of Heaney deliberately breaching his own guidelines on taste and decency, as expressed in the penultimate sentence of his earlier manifesto poem ‘Personal Helicon’, where he judges that ‘to pry into roots, to finger slime, / [. . .] Is beneath all adult dignity’. (This in a poem about peering into wells and staring down into the secretive, chthonic earth.) We might infer from that observation that to go ahead with such probing intrusion requires a childlike naivety, or, at the very least, the setting aside of grown-up sensibilities and sensitivities. Which 78

On Lists leads me to wonder if there isn’t something childlike about a list itself, in the guileless and spontaneous enjoyment that extends from pointing, separating and itemising. In this scenario, the list is both a delight and a comfort, bringing with it the kind of security derived from tidying the chaos of life into an arranged, comprehensible and accessible structure – and list-making becomes a way of warehousing a disorderly universe, stacking and storing muddled emotions on neat shelves. Walt Whitman was born in 1819, the year Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa made its controversial appearance at the Paris Salon. A ‘plate-glassy’ style was what Whitman said he was after, and that is what he achieved, the poems appearing both transparent and reflective at the same time. Anyone who hasn’t read Whitman, either silently, or, more adventurously, out loud – or, even more adventurously, out loud to other people, which would be my recommendation – has missed out on one of the most singular and instructive experiences that poetry can offer. Even now, over a century and a half since the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the work still glows with the discernible redshift of poetic expansion and acceleration. Or, to put it another way, here are the captured images from when poetry stepped beyond its traditional dances and marches, and took flight – a Wright brothers or Montgolfier brothers episode in poetic development. Pound succumbed eventually: ‘I have detested you long enough,’ he admits in the second line of ‘A Pact’: 79

a vertical art It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root – Let there be commerce between us. Lawrence Ferlinghetti also pays his dues, through the voice of Homer, in his Americus, Book I, the ancient and vener­ able elder identifying Whitman as your greatest soul speaker with his ‘barbaric yawp’ sounding for the first time free from the past the voice of the people of America Free, I think he means, of what Charles Wright calls ‘the little deaths of fixed forms’. Despite which, and even with all the documented evidence to hand, it’s not easy to find or create a concise and cogent definition of Whitman’s technique – a technique that needed none of the structures and strictures of governed verse for its sounding board, but obtained instead all the poetic traction and purchase that open-form poetry still requires from the drag and air-­ resistance of the blank page. Perhaps a more convincing way of describing its qualities would be to explain how it came into being: how Whitman’s mode of address extended from his exposure to public oratory; from his love of theatre and proclaimed language; from his predilection for the syntactical measures of biblical pronouncement; from his experience of typesetting and arranging words as 80

On Lists attractively as possible on a page; and from his approach to note-taking, as evidenced by his compendious journals. All those influences, antecedents and preconditions culminate in a type of harmonic abundance in Whitman – an abundance that metred writing could not harvest nor harness. Nor could it adequately house a vocabulary derived from his burgeoning range of interests and stimulations, and this in a mid-nineteenth-century America which, by some accounts, was a veritable big top expo of early science, pseudoscience, mysticism and religious splinter groups. Believers in phrenology – it must have been said before – need their heads feeling. Accordingly, Whitman did just that, probably on several occasions, and published slightly sexed-up versions of the results alongside his poems. We should be grateful that his imperfect score in Language didn’t dissuade or deflect him from his destiny; but an even lower score of four out of seven in the category of Tune allows me to point out that, for someone who often titled his poems ‘songs’, his poems are very un-songlike, at least in the conventional verse-chorus sense. What they are is musical: full of the musical phrasing and cadences of the religious proclaimer, the prophet, the sermoniser, the medium, the mesmerist, the hypnotist, the thespian, the soapbox politician, or any speaker, raconteur, debater, narrator and presenter for whom the refrain and the list is a pivotal technique. Add to this Whitman’s passion for inclusivity – and his desire to embody the entire republic; his ambition to personify democracy itself; his holistic belief in the interconnectedness of everything; and his sense of a world fizzing and trembling with magnetic, 81

a vertical art electrical and gravitational forces, plus the so-called ‘odic’ forces coursing through the nervous system, and with all such energies being enhanced and choreographed by a higher power and a universal deity. Add all those elements together (and append to them his ebullient and usually optimistic personality, and ‘a tendency to the pleasures of Voluptuousness’, as his phrenological assessment puts it, his advocacy of pluralism and his linguistic effervescence), and you begin to see how and why Walt Whitman became Walt Whitman. Or, as Thom Gunn once put it, how his voice welled up from a ‘bubbling source’. To finish, here’s Section 9 from ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, with Whitman in full-throttle list mode: not merely anatomical and systematic in his top-to-toe, kneebone-­connected-to-the-thigh-bone piecing together of the human jigsaw, but epiphanic, rhapsodic, orgasmic and sacramental; his itemisation becoming litany, incantation, heartbeat, breath; the writing itself not just life-­affirming, but life-forming – an act of quasi-religious and near-­ scientific communion and afflatus, through which poem and body and spirit become one: O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, 82

On Lists Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-­ shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-­ sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-­ bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, 83

a vertical art Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

84

Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return’d to me, And answer’d, ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell.’    – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, LXVI The city of Waco in McLennan County, Texas (population circa 130,000), has several claims to fame, many of them death-related. In 1896, as part of a publicity stunt organised by the local railroad company, two steam locomotives were driven towards each other at full speed. Spectators were killed and maimed when the boilers of both trains exploded simultaneously – a family day out reduced to tragedy and carnage through ‘unforeseen circumstances’. In May 1953, the eleventh deadliest tornado in US history struck the downtown area of the city, killing 114 people; and, in 1978, the bones of some twenty mammoths, one camel and a large cat began to emerge from the mud at the confluence point of two rivers, though experts are still unable to explain why so many skeletons should have come to rest in one location. In 1993, the much-publicised siege of the Branch Davidian compound culminated in a shoot-out and fire that killed seventy-four people, including leader 85

a vertical art David Koresh; and, in May 2015, nine people were killed when rival motorcycle gangs, including the Cossacks and the Bandidos, explored a difference of opinion in the car park of the Twin Peaks restaurant and sports bar. This most recent slaughter took place just a short stroll from the Armstrong Browning Library, home to the largest collection of Browning material in the world, strongbox of Browning and Barrett Browning memorabilia, and shrine to Browning’s memory, both in architecture and atmosphere. My notes from a visit there, as far as I am able to decipher them, record close encounters with Robert’s inkpot, his signature ring, a wisp of his hair, dried laurel leaves from his funeral wreath, Elizabeth’s mechanical pencil, her diminutive mittens and her gold-edged fan. It wouldn’t be difficult to make ironic capital from the apparent incongruousness of the juxtaposition: how the author of ‘Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there’ – once voted the UK’s forty-sixth favourite poem of all time – came to be so heavily curated and collected in the re­created Victorian hush of a mausoleum-cum-­ museum under the big Texan sky. But I’d signed up for the tour that day in a genuine attempt to engage with a poet I’ve never really connected with, bar a few of the dramatic monologues. And where better to do this than at such a lavish portal to his corpus, rather than via the closed slab of Italian marble and porphyry on the floor of Westminster Abbey, under which Browning decomposes, with Elizabeth’s name chiselled at his feet. I suppose I was hoping for a virtual katabatic expedition in Browning World, or at least an audience with the work – stemming 86

Access All Areas from the notion that, in one of its ancient and original guises, poetry attempts some form of dialogue with the expired. It is easy to descend into Avernus. Death’s dark door stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, That is the task, that is the undertaking. Only a few have prevailed, sons of gods Whom Jupiter favoured, or heroes exalted to glory By their own worth. So says Virgil, through the mouth of the Sibyl (as told on this occasion by Seamus Heaney). And isn’t there also, in those words of caution, a challenge of sorts: a challenge which the most esteemed and ambitious poets – heroic, exalted, glorious and worthy – have been obliged to take on, one related to the ancient and primal origins of poetry, dating back as far as Gilgamesh and Homer, then taken up by Dante, Milton, Blake – all the way to Eliot and beyond? This is the obligation that views poetry as clairvoyance or necromancy, and garlands the poet with the Access All Areas laminated lanyard, granting an interview with the departed, VIP access to the netherworld and, more importantly, permission to exit. In ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, Browning’s vain and ailing clergyman, ‘dying by degrees’, makes strong recommendations to his family about how and where he should be buried. Even in death, it seems, he anticipates experiencing the world with the senses of the living: 87

a vertical art And then how I shall lie through centuries,  And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,  And see God made and eaten all day long,  And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste  Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! In Waco’s Armstrong Browning Library, I’m sorry to report, I felt no such sentience emanating from the various relics and Browningalia – not even when I turned a corner and came face-to-face with a life-size cardboard cut-out of Elizabeth. Perhaps, with Browning, I’d chosen the wrong poet to summon from across the Styx: witness his poem ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’, a satirical portrait of the American spiritual­ ist Daniel Douglas Home. Browning had participated in a seance at which Home was the psychic croupier, and, as well as seeing through the quackery of the occasion, appears to have recognised in the table magician-cum-con artist a grotesque version of the stereotypical poet, serving up sham necromancies in melodramatic fashion. (Or objected to a charlatan performing services which are the preserve of the poet-priest.) Witness also Browning’s attempt to speak from beyond the grave, in the form of the 1889 phono­graph recording of his famous poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, making it the earliest recorded reading by any of the canonical poets. Even though the fizzing static lends the recording a spooki­ness worthy of Poltergeist or Stranger Things, it is, ultimately, an inauspicious maiden electro-nekyia, Browning twice forgetting his lines, and eventually throwing in the towel. A good ringtone, though. * 88

Access All Areas In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Genesis’ – an entirely apposite title for the opening poem of Geoffrey Hill’s first full-length collection. For the Unfallen was published in 1959, though in the ‘Notes and Acknowledgements’ of the early Penguin Collected, Hill attests that ‘“Genesis” [.  .  .] dates from 1952.’ A gene­sis indeed, then, and a creation piece appropriate to the ambition, seriousness and grandiose vision of the lifelong enterprise ahead, from the hand of a twenty-year-old hardly lacking in confidence or hobbled by modesty. Let’s say that Hill started as he meant to go on. ‘Against the burly air I strode / Crying the miracles of God,’ declares the speaker at the outset. So, not God himself, but not far removed – some kind of land agent or project manager, commissioned to superintend Phase One of the Grand Scheme of Things, sometimes conducting or choreographing the primal elements at his disposal, sometimes renouncing, and even recoiling from, a nature unsparingly red in tooth and claw; and, eventually, reflecting on the paradox of existence – namely the gift of blood, by which we are born and by which we must die. And let’s acknowledge that Hill started as he meant to go on in style, as well as subject. ‘I don’t want it to be a sort of simpering drizzle,’ he once said, inviting the rest of us to reflect on our own wet, smeary poems and soggy, sentimental collections. Hence Hill wrestling with ‘the dense / Fluctuations of the material / Out from which I shall be lucky to twitch / Creative fire.’ Hence Hill stating, ‘I really do want there to be some sense of order battling anarchy within the very structure of a poem.’ Hence Hill striding 89

a vertical art into the ‘force-field’, as he referred to it – i.e. measuring out the four iambic feet of ‘Against the burly air I strode’ within the hefty thermals, irregular currents and swirling weather fronts of contemporary poetry, which buffet him into beginning his second line with a reverse foot, before he regains his balance and falls back into step. ‘Crying’, he says, both with tears running down his cheeks and with a handbell to accompany his Oyez! Oyez! proclamation. And thus the whole enterprise is hatched from that one double-yoked couplet, with the long o of ‘strode’ finding its half-rhyme sibling in the abrupt, full-stopping o of God, the two open-mouthed vowels positioned directly beneath each other on the page, in a kind of poetic pointillism. In Hill’s period of late ripeness or second wind – ‘the serotonin years’, we might call them – the compulsion towards order gives way, in some collections, to a more relaxed patterning and playful design, but with no let up in the moment-­ to-moment, syllable-by-syllable inspection of subject and language. Serotonin: his new transubstantiation. Or, as he comments in The Triumph of Love: on the conversion or reconversion of brain chemicals – the taking up of serotonin? I must confess to receiving the latest elements, Vergine bella, as a signal mystery, mercy, of these latter days. There are, I openly admit, in some of his mature writings, whole passages, whole pages and one or two whole books 90

Access All Areas that have passed me by, or have struck me as surreal karaoke versions of Hill singing his own national anthem. (And also a tendency towards lines that read like clues from The Times cryptic crossword: ‘Near admirers / Cope with our begging Nescafé and rides’ – four across, six letters, etc., etc.) To some, and even to Hill on occasions, the gallbladder, rather than the heart, was the wellspring of certain outpourings, making me pause to wonder – parenthetically, selfishly – what Geoffrey Hill thought of my own work. Not much, I imagine, given the scorn he directed from this platform at others like me, and at others I like. He kept files, I was once informed; and once, when my name came up in a conversation reported to me by my informer, he’d said, ‘Yes, I’ve got a file on him.’ But if I was a fool in his eyes, then I was one he suffered patiently on the few occasions I met him, by which time he wore the woolly white beard of an Old Testament prophet. And if I do lie trounced and dismantled somewhere within his archive in the vaults of Leeds University’s Special Collections, I know it will be with impeccable diction and immaculate grammar. But if Hill could turn the pen against those readers and reviewers unequal to his intelligence and unappreciative of his humour – and against those who spoke from off-thepeg political positions, as he saw them; and against those who failed to revere language for its gravity and solemnity – then he could just as quickly point the sharpened quill at himself. Again, from The Triumph of Love: ‘I am too much moved by hate’ sounds candid, even if he undermines the admission through comic hyperbole by adding ‘greed, 91

a vertical art self-pity, sick / scrupulosity, frequent fetal regression and / a twisted libido’ to the list of crimes, or ‘better out than in’ as the mitigating plea. In that same volume, an editor’s voice makes frequent intrusions on the text, as if rebuking Hill for his obscurity; and anyone who saw him read will have witnessed his occasional habit of self-heckling, throwing out breadcrumbs so as to induce the more gullible or attention-hungry aspect of his ego to leap up and take the bait – not unlike the deranged interplay between puppet and puppeteer in the underrated 1978 Anthony Hopkins film Magic. (That editorial voice, by the way, is itself edited out in later printings. A full survey of Hill’s work would have to take into account all his many revisions and retractions – but, quite frankly, I don’t have the life expectancy, which for a probation officer retiring in 1995 was put at sixty-nine years; though, admittedly, I did retire at thirty-two.) In some descriptions of Hill’s approach to poetry, we get the impression of a man who devoted himself to the art – the word carrying undertones of spiritual obligation and slavish adherence that take the practitioner beyond mere occupation, preoccupation or duty, towards vocation, faith and love. Towards a calling. In fact, I’d go further and suggest a form of martyrdom, though Hill himself waved away that suggestion in an interview published in the Spring 2000 issue of the Paris Review: interviewer: Do you see yourself as a kind of

martyr figure, in terms of your being a poet, and 92

Access All Areas in the context of what we’ve said about people not understanding issues of difficulty or possibilities for intelligence?  hill : No, absolutely not.

So, that’s that. And yet, in his definition of martyrdom that would follow; and in his repeated use of that term in his work and his conversation; and in balancing the great tome of Broken Hierarchies in my hands all this summer; and in the light of his recent passing, the word has a persuasive ring to it. ‘i am doing a great worke, so that i can not come down: why should the worke cease, whilest i leave it, and come downe to you?’, Hill has Nehemiah

say on his behalf, epigraphically, in capital letters, in The Triumph of Love. But to return to the beginning – where I started from, and where I meant to go on from – For the Unfallen is a partly ironic title for a collection stuffed from front to back with the fallen: a veritable graveyard of a volume, not least of the drowned and incinerated. I began at one point to count the bodies, using what Hill himself referred to from this lectern as ‘the wet finger method’, but lost track among the multi­tudes. When, towards the end of the collection, in Part 4 of ‘Of Commerce and Society’, Hill offers with knowing banality, ‘The dead are my obsession this week,’ it is as if to elicit the response ‘no kidding, Geoff ’. It is also a book steeped in the smoke and silverware of religious and church ritual, from a poet whose philosophical or spiritual position at the time seems well represented 93

a vertical art by the communicant in the poem ‘The Bidden Guest’. Approaching the altar rail, among the apparently excitable candles, Hill writes, And I believe in the spurred flame, Those racing tongues, but cannot come Out of my heart’s unbroken room; Nor feel the lips of fire among The cold light and the chilling song. For a poet who became practised in answering to the charge of being ‘difficult’, it’s a surprising moment of lucidity – confession, even – delivered with understated lyrical grace. And that transparency is evident again in the elegy ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’, with its clarity of setting and a sequence of events delivered with a kind of folksong lightness, at least across the first two quatrains. On reflection, Hill came to ‘dislike the poem very much’, offering a repaired version in an addendum to King Log as ‘a necessary penitential exercise’ – though if the deletion of four commas and the introduction of blanket italics passes for penitence, then the sin could hardly have been of cardinal proportions. Elsewhere, he refer­red to the poem’s ‘coy last stanza’, which happens to be the stanza I want to draw attention to. It reads: She died before the world could stir. In March the ice unloosed the brook And water ruffled the sun’s hair. Dead cones upon the alder shook. 94

Access All Areas The cones of the female catkins on the alders are described as lifeless, shaking like some kind of mute bell to toll a passing; but, at the same time, how can they not be symbols of regeneration and rebirth after the grip of winter? Because I can’t help but conclude that Jane Fraser, whoever she was, or wasn’t, is about to be returned to us in the form of new growth, delivered by the midwife of spring – a vital and unavoidable recrudescence, not unlike those biological processes at work in Thomas Hardy’s ‘Transformations’. I meant only to write a couple of sentences of introduction to Geoffrey Hill, as a run-up to his poem ‘September Song’ – something of an inadvertent Hill signature tune or an unintentional calling card, by virtue of its regular appearance in anthologies of contemporary poetry, and the poem by which his work is often represented, no matter how unrepresentative it would become. In the Paris Review interview mentioned previously, Hill acknowledged that ‘The author is perfectly aware of the grotesque difference between his own resentments and the plight of millions, between the claims that he makes for himself and the several holocausts of his age.’ He was actually responding to reviews of The Triumph of Love, but his awareness presumably holds true for ‘September Song’ as well, in its intentionally queasy slippage between the historical and the personal, mirroring – in a distorted, disfiguring, hall-of-mirrors fashion – the slippage between genocide and harvest time: Zyklon B was originally develop­ed as a pesticide. It’s worth noting, as many have, that the birthdate of the anonymous dedicatee of the poem is one day after Hill’s own 95

a vertical art birthday, so we’re already alerted to a biographical resonance in the poem, postponed for two stanzas as Hill lays down several chilling observations, expressed in terms of faux apathy and detachment. The self re-emerges as the central tercet in a somewhat lopsided sonnet, an axle between the then of stanzas one and two, and the now of stanzas four and five. The brackets suggest an aside, but the effect, as Hill surely appreciates, is more of a stage whisper – in part a terrible admission of inappropriateness and intrusion, and in part an assertion of blunt honesty. At worst, those three short lines are contemptible; at best, they mesmerise, even causing us to rethink the opening of the poem as an autobiographical obituary: a double take the reader is forced to repeat at the end of the poem, with its last line that wobbles between tearful sorrow for the historical atrocity, and a breathtaking admission of literary satisfaction. And, framed within the terms of this lecture, I read that death-in-life, life-in-death interchanging of roles as a form of necromancy, in the same way that I read ‘The Bidden Guest’ as an essentially Tiresian nekyia – its speaker as the blind prophet or seer, called forth from among the dead of his own conjuring and drawn to the blood of Holy Communion. So, with that same chalice, I offer a toast to Sir Geoffrey Hill, Bromsgrove’s ‘best-kept secret’, according to the Droitwich Spa Advertiser; Housman’s complicated younger sibling; unceasing poet; ‘hour into hour the iron nib hardly / pausing at the well’; cup-bearer to the king; solitary rebuilder of the walls of Jerusalem; former student at Keble College, and former Oxford Professor of Poetry: born 18.6.32 – departed 30.6.16. * 96

Access All Areas Also of this parish, by way of Boston in Lincolnshire, is poet Elizabeth Jennings. If Browning is remembered by virtue of statuary, stained glass, a proper grave in Poets’ Corner and a handful of poems, Jennings could claim a more utilitarian commemoration in the form of Elizabeth Jennings Way, a street in North Oxford. I haven’t ventured there myself, but preliminary reconnaissance on Google Earth (including sponsored redirection to the Zoopla website) suggests a recently developed residential area of high-end flats and townhouses, whose shaped orderliness might well have been Elizabeth Jennings’s way in terms of her fondness for form and structure, but whose current prices would presumably have excluded her. As an undercover poet masquerading as an agent of the criminal justice system in Greater Manchester in the early 1990s, I made frequent home visits to Longfellow Crescent, Tennyson Street, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and, yes, Browning Road – all christened out of a sense of poetic optimism and hope, I’m sure, but quickly incompatible with the ensuing reality. (Although, in the opiate-based explosion of the era, at least nearby Coleridge Road lived up to some of its promise.) Jennings was a committed Catholic, and despite claiming to have ‘only occasionally written specifically “religious” poems’, the index of her 1,000-plus-page, posthumously published Collected Poems reads like a biblical concordance. Given my prurient interest today in what kind of world awaits us through the parted curtains, I want to focus on just three poems: ‘Lazarus’ (from 1961’s Song for a Birth or 97

a vertical art a Death), ‘Lazarus’ (from 1996’s In the Meantime), and ‘A View of Lazarus’ (from 1998’s Praises). If we take the standard Lazarus commentary as John 11:1–44, we’ll remember how Christ ignores warnings of foul odours and proceeds to call Lazarus of Bethany, four days dead, out of his tomb. Among those who witness the miracle are Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha, an unspecified number of unnamed disciples, and a group of ‘randomers’, some of whom will become members of the flock, others who will go bleating to the Pharisees. Jennings locates herself within that crowd of bystanders and onlookers, and in the first of the poems, possibly the best of the three, presents the following testimony:    It was the amazing white, it was the way he simply Refused to answer our questions, it was the cold pale glance Of death upon him, the smell of death that truly Declared his rising to us. It was no chance Happening, as a man may fill a silence Between two heart-beats, seem to be dead and then Astonish us with the closeness of his presence; This man was dead, I say it again and again. I’ve always read the indentation of that first line as an intake of breath, preceding ‘the amazing white’, at variance with the less dazzling biblical account that describes ‘his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his feet’ – though it could be Jennings’s response to the pale nakedness revealed once Jesus has commanded, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go’ (John 11:44). But the real force of the poem derives from the repeated assertion in the 98

Access All Areas end-stopped last line of the octave: ‘This man was dead, I say it again and again,’ insists Jennings, authenticating the voice through the first and only acknowledgement of herself as the poem’s speaker, and exaggerating the contrast with that spellbound image of birth in the final line. In another version of the myth (if I can categorise it as such), Lazarus was so traumatised by his brief residency in the netherworld that, for his remaining thirty years among the living, he never once smiled. Here, too, he remains mute and bewildered, unavailable for interview or interrogation; and the poem offers an interesting contrast with Sylvia Plath’s monologued inhabitation of the same character, written at roughly the same time. In the next of Jennings’s Lazarus poems, all interested parties have become ‘they’, and the resuscitated protagonist is addressed in the more intimate second person, as if the poet has moved closer to her subject. She wonders if it was bafflement or joy that kept mourners and rubberneckers from asking questions about the afterlife, and on Lazarus’s own reticence concludes, It seems more likely that you could not say What after-death can yield and mean and show,   That there were no words for That place or time when human spirits know This whole vast what? There was no metaphor. Even for Jennings, whose poems were conduits between body and soul, one of poetry’s most fundamental 99

a vertical art techniques is finally insufficient to the task. Metaphor mimics the human instinct to understand and interpret the world through acts of comparison, and, in its ‘carrying across’, perhaps even simulates the neurotransmission processes and the bridging of the synaptic cleft. But the afterlife is beyond even poetic description, because it is like nothing else. By her third iteration of this subject, Jennings has stepped back into the crowd again, trying to look beyond the risen man’s shoulder and steal a glimpse of ‘the glimmering Kingdom he / Has left’. This time she ends,            Lazarus now Opens his eyes and it’s at us he stares As if we were all strangers. Then it’s odd, But we feel we should stop talking. Lazarus is, Yes no doubt of it, now shedding tears, And whispering quietly, God, O no, dear God. Jennings’s editor, Michael Schmidt, has talked of poems being submitted ‘by the carrier bag-full’, so it’s hard to know exactly when the prial of Lazarus pieces was actually composed. But if the thirty-seven years that spans their publication dates is a fair indication of their vintage, then what are we to make of Jennings’s changing understanding of the afterlife as she gets older? In particular, how are we to interpret ‘God, O no, dear God’? Construe consolation and affirmation from it as you may, but to me it reads more like the response of a detective constable emerging from some unspeakable crime scene 100

Access All Areas into a battery of microphones and cameras, eyes closed, hand over mouth. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that, for all their paranormal prestige, the dead are not always reliable witnesses or accurate forecasters. (In Canto X of Dante’s Inferno, as the poet tours the circle of the heretics, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti is shocked to learn that his son Guido has passed away – a situation Prue Shaw describes as a kind of reverse dementia, where the ability to prophesise the future is reduced the closer that future comes to the present: long-term vision intact, but short-term oracular powers virtually non-existent.) The one time I met Elizabeth Jennings was at Lumb Bank, the Heptonstall farmhouse once owned by Ted Hughes but now a residential writing centre run by the Arvon Foundation. By the 1990s, Jennings had developed a reputation for being absentminded and eccentric, so I was surprised when she actually walked in through the door of that remote building on the side of a dark West Yorkshire valley. But I wanted to remember, out loud, and here in this hall, how she charmed and delighted a dozen or so aloof and cynical school students, so that, by the end of the evening, they were sitting in a circle at her feet, or perched on the arm of her chair, as she recited and elucidated her much-studied poem ‘The Diamond Cutter’. Also of this parish, Jon Stallworthy: best known for his critical and biographical writing, I think it’s fair to say – especially that on Wilfred Owen – though it’s his poetry I want to recall today. Many of Stallworthy’s poems arise from his proxy literary experiences in the hellish quagmire 101

a vertical art of the trenches; in The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Michael Thurston focuses on Stallworthy’s ‘War Poet’, which opens in the Church of St James the Great in South Leigh, and its extraordinary depiction of Doom – something of a resurrection itself, having being buried under layers of paint for 400 years. The speaker in the piece is suffering from a form of survivor guilt, following a journey ‘to hell and back’, in which comrades are lost and a lover becomes separated through a version of the Orphean tragedy. The poem is unapologetically Virgilian in its use of the descent motif, and the speaker experiences a Lazarus-like stupefaction following his emergence into the realm of the living. But I wanted to suggest another poem, from a decade earlier, the amputee sonnet ‘A Round’, as a different example of resurrection in Stallworthy’s work. The endless cycle of war and peace, and the recycling of metals – plough into sword, sword into plough, etc. – are staples of storytelling and familiar poetic devices, but the pun of this poem’s title extends further than the circularity of its argument, not least through its subtext of reincarnation. We find this not just in the metaphorical body parts – the ‘flesh pewter’, ‘from the ribs of a ship’, ‘to the lips of his bullet-mould’ – but, more subtly, in the thematic transmogrifications that are taking place. So, the lead ore that that becomes ‘married’ to the tin also serves as a wedding present, before its final incarnation as an instrument of fatality. And when the last line takes us back to the first, we remember that the lead itself was not so much born as exhumed – ‘lifted’, Stallworthy says reverentially – from 102

Access All Areas the underworld setting of a mine. Isn’t there also a passing reference to the Eucharist when the elemental metal is ‘bartered for biltong’ – the parity of the transaction physically achieved through the balancing act of the alliteration, and through the notion of flesh made flesh once eaten and digested (biltong being a sort of jerky, or dried meat)? In that respect, the poem reminds me of the metaphorical equivalence between germination and resurrection that George Mackay Brown navigates in From Stone to Thorn (‘God-begun, the barley rack / By man is borne.’). It reminds me also of David Jones’s belief that many artistic impulses, at least as far as Roman Catholics are concerned, are sacramental at heart and have their origins in the anamnesis of the Last Supper. Jones is very much ‘a poet’s poet’, that terrifying compliment, which usually translates as ‘overlooked’ or ‘neglected’ – though the anniversary of the Somme has given rise to a wider consideration of his work, just as the centenary of World War I has turned up the heat and brightness on all the so-called ‘war poets’. In the context of katabatic descents, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ is the usual standard-bearer – Owen coming face-to-face with one of his own victims in a sort of no man’s land between life and death, a hinterland created via the haze and smudge of pararhyme (or near rhyme, or off rhyme, or close rhyme, or slant rhyme, or half rhyme, or whatever it’s called this week). See also Robert Graves’s ‘Escape’, a poetic account of the twenty-four hours the soldier-poet spent ‘half-way down the road / To Lethe’, while laid on a stretcher alongside 103

a vertical art other casualties – during which a letter of condolence was dispatched to his mother, informing her of her son’s death. In the prose version of the story, as recounted in Goodbye to All That, the dialogue that takes place between Graves and the doctor charged with treating and feeding him is the most moving passage of the book, Graves promising a whole orchard in return for two unripe greengages. (As well as the injuries caused by shell fragments ripping through his groin and chest, Graves reports a smaller wound over his eye, made by a marble chip, ‘possibly from one of the Bazentin cemetery headstones’ – a notion he can’t resist expanding on in the 1957 reprint, in which he states, ‘Later, I had it cut out, but a smaller piece has since risen to the surface under my right eyebrow, where I keep it for a souvenir.’) David Jones also survived the carnage of Mametz Wood and the pandemonium of the war, and, after a period of consideration and composition, delivered the modernist prose poem In Parenthesis, chronicling the experiences of one Private John Ball – from his embarkation at Southampton Docks, through to the front line, and beyond. It is a work that becomes more fragmentary and less coherent as it progresses, but one that grows in lyricism and pity, culminating in the final passages of Part 7. In the aftermath of battle, Ball appears to have survived, stumbling among his dead comrades and ‘going blindly on all paws’, with a rifle that is part broken limb, part wooden cross, part spouse and part albatross slung around his neck. By the un­real, drifting light of flares, the Queen of the Woods enters the 104

Access All Areas field, bestowing on the fallen ‘bright boughs of various flowering’, making her supernatural ward round through some liminal, dreamlike margin. This is the poem as threshold occurrence, the poem as nekyia – situated on the ill-defined event horizon, beyond which only the mythical and immortal may return, but from where we are offered a glimpse of the eternal and the everlasting:   She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what’s due to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-­men. She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down.   Some she gives white berries       some she gives brown   Emil has a curious crown it’s       made of golden saxifrage.   Fatty wears sweet-briar, he will reign with her for a thousand years.   For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.   Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand. In 2015, invited to respond to a Henry Moore retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I walked into a gallery, where a photograph of Moore on a London Tube platform covered an entire wall. The picture was taken by the war photo­ grapher Lee Miller (the same Lee Miller who posed for a photograph in Hitler’s bathtub – though only after removing her boots, still clogged with the mud of Dachau). In the early 1940s, Moore had been commissioned to record experiences in the London Underground during the Blitz, 105

a vertical art when stations were being used as air-raid shelters. Miller covered one of his visits, and the pictorial iconography of this particular image seemed immediately apparent to me. Here was Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, with the cowering Londoners as the drowsy souls of the dead gathering on the brink and Moore as Odysseus himself: dressed as if from another dimension, leaning on a wall that divides light from dark; the black tunnel to the right leading to the deep and distant netherworlds of Hammersmith and Hounslow. That interpretation might be an imposition, if Moore hadn’t been so compulsively engaged with the Odyssean narrative and katabatic descent generally, an interest allied to his South Yorkshire background and his artistic responses to the coal pits and collieries of his upbringing. His illustrations accompanying the publication of Edward Sackville-West’s radio ‘melodrama’ The Rescue (the first-ever BBC retelling of the Odyssey), and his depiction of Odysseus’ homecoming on his island kingdom of Ithaca, are both executed in the same style as his drawings of the Tube stations during aerial bombardment. The American photographer Walker Evans was another visual artist who seized on the mournful implications of an underground transportation system, snapping images of the New York City subway in the 1930s and early 1940s with a camera hidden in his coat. James Agee, commenting on Evans’s through-the-buttonhole photographs in his introduction to Many Are Called, compared the millions of souls in daily, subterranean commute to ‘death[s] in war’, both in number and attitude. 106

Access All Areas Poets, too, have drawn similar inferences while standing in stations of the Metro or rattling through the Tube, and that Seamus Heaney made the connection should come as no particular surprise. From the bog body poems of Wintering Out and North to the descent and re-emergence of Station Island; to the below-ground setting of District and Circle; across a lifetime’s preoccupation with Virgil, and the posthumous publication of his Aeneid Book VI; and via many more forays into the substrata, we might come to believe that Heaney was not only a regular commuter on the line between this world and the next, but something of a season ticket holder. In his poem ‘The Underground’, describing a honeymoon trip to London in 1965, Heaney recalls running behind his new wife through the tiled Underground tunnels on the way to the Albert Hall, then returning after some unspecified period of time to collect the buttons that had sprung from her coat. As Station Island’s opening gambit, the poem operates as a taster or sampler, advertising the themes and motifs of the collection as a whole before they deepen and widen through the book. Though, for all its apparent straightforwardness, I confess to never properly catching Heaney’s drift – possibly because of the competing mythological sources ‘The Underground’ works through in developing its plot points, establishing its argument and securing metaphorical field position. To begin with, we have Heaney as lustful Pan in pursuit of the nymph Syrinx, followed by Heaney as Hansel (of Hansel and Gretel fame), with Hansel’s intentionally dropped pebbles now recast as the accidentally lost buttons. In the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, those 107

a vertical art tokens return the abandoned siblings out of the dark wood towards the safety of home, though here they appear to lead the poet to a foreign and inhospitable place. And, finally, we meet Heaney as Orpheus walking ahead of his wife Eurydice, the follower having become the followed. The speaker’s resolve not to make that backward glance is a statement of artistic determination, and an imperative against nostalgia; and being entirely Orphean, the reference is therefore subterranean – although, to my literal thinking, ‘lamplit’ and ‘wet track’ suggest an aboveground location: South Kensington Tube, perhaps, with platforms open to the sky. Also, the speaker’s refusal to turn around seems to be favouring the allegorical potential of the situation over the quotidian realities of the London Underground after midnight, where any new husband of the gallant mid-sixties would surely be honour-bound to keep a protective eye on his new bride. Perhaps Heaney is alone in that final couplet, and belated, and counselling himself against the temptations of memory – a situation that runs contrary to the fable, whose dramatic satisfaction depends very much on Eurydice’s unseen presence. In a lot of cases, I wouldn’t expend too many thought calories attempting to arrange the jigsaw pieces of a poem into a complete composite picture: with Geoffrey Hill’s work, for example, where complexities of thinking are expressed as complexities of text. But Heaney is a situationist poet, of the this-happened-and-it-meanssuch-and-such school. His poems nearly always offer a user-friendly operating interface, even when they reach towards the numinous and the mystical – as with Section 108

Access All Areas VIII of ‘Lightenings’, in some ways a geometrical inverse of ‘The Underground’, where solid narrative groundwork and firm poetic footings allow the ethereal crewman, drowning on dry land, to be released ‘Out of the marvellous as he had known it’. In an introduction to a filmed reading of ‘The Underground’ on his seventieth birthday, Heaney lets on that in the days of going away outfits, his new wife had worn a white coat, but in the public bar of the Museum Tavern had dropped a complimentary slice of pickled beetroot on it, thus explaining the ‘japped with crimson’ reference as an allusion to Eurydice’s wound after being bitten by the snake. In the small report of my mother and father’s wedding in the Huddersfield Examiner, the final sentence reads: ‘For going away, the bride wore grapefruit’, a ten-syllable sentence crying out to become the concluding line of an epithalamic sonnet, if only Armitage junior could come up with thirteen more lines worthy of its company. And on Heaney’s ‘The Underground’, one further thought: Bob Dylan played the Albert Hall during his 1965 tour, footage of which was included in the rockumentary film Don’t Look Back. End of thought. In a lecture that seems to have developed into a series of obituaries, I wanted to finish by paying respects to the American poet James Tate, as a way of honouring an alliance and acknowledging a debt of influence. In the upsetting and unsettling title poem of his first book, The Lost Pilot, Tate addresses his father, the co-pilot of a World War II bomber plane, lost in action when the poet was 109

a vertical art five months old. Tate seeks to ‘cajole / you to come back for an evening, / down from your compulsive / orbiting’, and questions if it was mistake or misfortune ‘that placed you in that world, / and me in this’, or ‘placed these worlds in us’. The experimentalism and near-­surrealism of Tate’s middle period gave way eventually to a laconic, absurdist style of storytelling: layers of obfuscatory mate­ rial wrapped around a small kernel of poignant, often lonely, truth. Tate died in 2015, after the reoccurrence of a mouth cancer – a crueller condition for a poet of his talkative and loquacious predispositions I can’t conceive – but apparently left a finished poem in the typewriter, and passed away with his newly published book in his hands. With heavy stones tied to his feet, Gilgamesh sank purposefully down into the Great Deep and plucked the flower of endless youth, only for it to be eaten by a snake – the snake that learns the knack of immortality through the shedding of its old skin. One day, I believe, we’ll pick that plant again. Medical science will furnish us with a ‘cure’ for that very serious condition we call death, or provide an inoculation against it: at which point, the nature of the afterlife will cease to be a topic for poetic speculation, and the job of the poet-­ medium – the ‘inter­preter’, as Wallace Stevens mockingly puts it in ‘Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb’ – will become yet one more obsolete occupation or profession. Until that time, we can either believe that dead means dead – as dead as Badroulbadour in Stevens’s ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’, being carried along in a chariot of maggots – or we can retrace the steps of Orpheus, Odysseus, Pollux, Heracles, 110

Access All Areas Theseus, Persephone, Juno, Inanna, etc., and return to the upper world in the shape of our poems (should they have the vitality to outlast us and to go on living). Tate’s poem ‘Shroud of the Gnome’ ends:               so I paid my bill and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself. Amidst the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely, the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare, windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither, battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too. And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward, hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss, and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.

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We Need to Talk About Robert: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature A woman emerges through an internal door adorned with gilt-edged panels, in what seems to be a building of some historical or institutional importance. She is wearing a professional, flesh-coloured microphone headset, and against her body she is holding a black folder, concealing the highly confidential contents of her imminent announcement. Once the coughing and chatting in the room have given way to a respectful hush, she begins speaking – in Swedish – her address punctuated by the synthesised shutter noises made by modern digital cameras to imitate the satisfying mechanical action of earlier, motorised devices. To the non-Swedish speaker, occasional words are identi­ fiable, words such as ‘Nobel’ and ‘litteratur’; then, after no more than thirty seconds, she opens the folder, pulls out a sheet of paper and reads a short sentence that ends with the words ‘Bob Dylan’. A split second of silent realisation is immediately overtaken by a loud collective response from her audience: a reaction somewhere between whooping and cheering; the sound of approval fused with amusement, underscored by sporadic applause. And now the camera turns to that audience – a mixture of journalists and invited guests, presumably, whose facial gestures communicate the same happy acknowledgement of an agreeable novelty. The merest hint of a smile flickers across the 113

a vertical art spokeswoman’s lips; she has to wait a moment or two for the excitement to subside, before resuming her composure, then repeating her statement in several more languages. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan, she says, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. If I have dwelt somewhat voyeuristically on the decor­ ous proceedings and formal surroundings of the Swedish Academy and their headquarters – and on Permanent Secretary Sara Danius’s presentation and bearing, as her organ­isation conferred its highest honour upon Bob Dylan, sometime patron saint of the anti-establishment – it’s simply to set up a non-too-subtle subtext of incongruity and contradiction. The issue in a nutshell: what business does the Swedish Academy have in handing the Nobel Prize in Literature to a singer-songwriter? Or, come to that, what right does Bob Dylan have in accepting it? Clearly, one thing I’m going to focus on here is the extent to which Bob Dylan might be considered a poet – not the first time that question has been asked. But just to return to the Nobel citation for a moment, the first thing that struck me was just how compromised and nervous it sounded – not a statement of ‘admirable delicacy’, as Richard Williams in the Guardian heard it, but a somewhat neutered and tentative compliment, to my ears; one which left plenty of room for manoeuvre. The word ‘new’ is interesting, given Dylan’s folk-singing roots, and the nostalgia-driven traditionalism of his recent output. As for ‘poetic expressions’, it isn’t clear to me if those expressions are musical or linguistic, or whether 114

We Need to Talk About Robert ‘poetic’ here is being used as a literary term or for its catchall sense of something being slightly more something than other somethings of the same type. (Cue Marks & Spencerstyle advert: rich creamy lyrics, drizzled with tantalising metaphors and served on a bed of ripe topicality; ‘This isn’t just songwriting; this is poetic songwriting.’) I’ve also been pondering the phrase ‘the great American song tradition’, offered with what I take to be a nodding reference to ‘the great American songbook’ – not a definitive publication, but a generally accepted corpus of musical material that includes jazz standards and show tunes, and whose hall of fame recog­nises the likes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, etc., plus a few names from the more articulate end of the rock-and-pop spectrum. In other words: a distinctly modern, even twentieth-century phenomenon. So, even though I don’t for a second dispute Dylan’s greatness within it, we’re not exactly talking about a tradition that goes back to the Iliad or the Odyssey – a trad­ ition that most Western poets are conscious of working within, either for better or worse. Certainly, Dylan has staked his claim as a descendant of Orpheus – lyre in hand, charming the birds out of the trees with his words and tunes – but that, apparently, isn’t the way the Swedish Academy view him, or the stated reason for their accolade. Dylan was first nominated for the Nobel Prize as far back as 1997, and again in 1999 for having ‘helped restore the vital, time-­honoured link between poetry and music’ – a more confident claim, it seems to me. In terms of my own take on Dylan, I should admit to having history in this territory. In 2002, I was contributor 115

a vertical art to Neil Corcoran’s anthology of essays Do You, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors. Very much the poet rather than the professor at the time, my chapter took the form of a personalised recollection that located Dylan in the musical context of my upbringing. In it, I ventured to say that if some of Dylan’s lyrics were to be considered as poems, and if the usual investigative standards of literary criticism were applied, then the poems were pretty ordinary. In the following fifteen years, my opinions haven’t really changed – and nor, I suppose, have the opinions of those who took issue with them. Early in Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 1, Clinton Heylin, a prolific writer on all things Bob, sensibly observes that ‘Dylan remains first and foremost an oral poet, and a literary figure only as an unavoidable by-product’. He continues, ‘Seeing him as a literary figure has even led some minor modern poets – Simon Armitage, who he? – to write condescending “appreciations” of his art from a supposedly empathic position. But then, as Nietszche [sic] well knew, “Communication is only possible between equals.”’ I don’t mind admitting that, in the 2016 summer season of the popular BBC television quiz show in which contestants are rewarded for the obscurity of their responses, I was a near-pointless answer. And yet, it would be wasteful of me, given the opportunity, not to reflect on the unembarrassed self-aggrandisement of Heylin’s logic, since, by implication, it categorises him as one of those biographers who see themselves as being on equal terms with their subject. Also, in the Top Trumps game of quotes, Nietzsche might be a high card – and yet, as my 116

We Need to Talk About Robert mother sometimes likes to say, ‘A cat can look at a king, can’t it?’ So, meow, Clinton – and on we go. In his mock-leather-bound Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock ’n’ Roll Underworld – by way of some of the most iconoclastic and unremittingly potty-mouthed language ever to roll off the printing press at Faber & Faber – Julian Cope presents his own eccentric tour through the past half-century of rock music, skittling aside many of the graven images, carved gods and colossi that block his route. Dylan isn’t especially in his path, but receives one or two glancing blows and some collateral damage along the way: ‘Like those other never-done-a-proper-day’s-job-in-theirlives-refusenik-blue-collar-hippies Neil Young and Bob Dylan’, Cope says, parenthetically, during a tirade against Grand Funk’s Mark Farner. Deeper into the tome, Cope refers to Dylan as ‘Bob Zimmerframe’; deeper still, in a more reflective mood, he notes how ‘Dylan’s ever-­changing muse long ago showed what dividends could be reaped by those with total contempt for authenticity.’ Cope’s language might at times be childish, and his attitudes wilfully subversive, but there’s something at the heart of his final jibe that asks questions about what it is we want and expect from our rock stars – especially when they begin to be taken seriously. The allegation that Dylan is somehow bogus or counter­feit is in flagrant contradiction with his image, particularly his early image, as a tell-it-like-it-is man of the people, wearing his heart on his sleeve; yet, in Dylan’s shape-shifting, role-playing and skin-shedding across 117

a vertical art the decades, we have witnessed a person not afraid of re­ inventing himself, even when some of those new identities were unfashionable or regressive. In fact, like David Bowie, Dylan’s successful transformations might be the very hallmark of his talent. Many rebranding exercises end in shamefaced failure, and this is especially true in the music industry, because the bond that couples fan to star is an attachment forged by a very specific set of characteristics, immutable in their nature; any later renouncement or denial by the star represents a form of personal treachery and betrayal for the fan, whose very identity is at risk of being invalidated. ‘Je est un autre,’ said Rimbaud, famously: ‘I is somebody else’. Though not famously enough to stop Clinton Heylin misquoting him on page one of his Dylan biography Behind the Shades, going on to attribute aspects of Dylan’s songwriting to Rimbaud’s disavowal of chronology and narrative. Dylan himself name-checks Rimbaud in several interviews, and also in verse four of ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ – so, for both songwriter and biographer, as well as explaining some of Dylan’s personal mutations, Rimbaud’s name also proves a useful touchstone by lending highbrow literary value to an enterprise sometimes thought of as superficial and populist. But if the spirit of French Symbolism does fall across the lyric sheets of Blood on the Tracks, as we’re invited to think, the influence is either well disguised or Dylan wears his learning lightly. At the very least, the connection feels retrofitted, or honoured more in the breach than the observance. Returning to Julian Cope’s ‘Zimmerframe’ jibe: while to 118

We Need to Talk About Robert mock Dylan’s age via a cheap pun on a brand of walking aid is infantile, offensive and ignores the very stamina and resourcefulness by which Dylan has kept going, Cope might well be remembering the time when a new wave of British and American musicians were trying to trigger some kind of earthquake in the rock and pop landscape – from proto-­ punk in the mid-1970s through to post-punk in the early and mid-1980s, when Dylan and his kind were churning out some of the most mediocre easy listening imaginable, clogging up the charts and choking the airwaves. Dylan, of course, had a prodigious and creative future in front of him, but for the time being, music had found a new and invigorating anti-establishment aesthetic, one determined to challenge, assault and insult the old guard – of which Dylan was, even then, an elder statesman, so financially successful at ‘sticking it to the man’ that he had become the man himself. On the subject of poetry and poets, Dylan himself is a reliably unreliable witness, duly providing the characteristic inconsistencies we have come to expect from him over the years, apparently adept at either covering his tracks or striding back across the same territory in precisely the opposite direction. Given that many of his most famous quotes come from the more supercharged periods of his life, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that his remarks tended to contradict themselves from one week to the next – and just how memor­able some of the more memorable interviews were to the interviewee himself is an interesting question. Try: ‘I don’t know if I’d call myself a poet or not.’ Then try: ‘I consider myself to be a poet first and a musician 119

a vertical art second.’ Or try: ‘I don’t call myself a poet. I’m a trapeze artist.’ Or try: ‘I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading.’ Then try: ‘You read Robert Frost’s “The Two Roads”, you read T. S. Eliot – you read all that bullshit and that’s just bad, man, it’s not good. It’s not anything hard, it’s just softboiled egg shit.’ Or, to the observation that he might be a ‘literate man’, try: ‘I don’t think I am.’ Or, to the direct question, ‘Do you think of yourself primarily more as a singer or a poet?’, try: ‘Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.’ Or try: ‘To tell anyone I’m a poet would just be fooling people.’ Or: ‘Hey I would love to say that I’m a poet. I would really love to think of myself as a poet, but I just can’t because of all the slobs who are called poets.’ For evasive, read gnomic; for hypocritical, read inscrutable; for paradoxical, read mischievous; for vague, read enigmatic; for infuriating, read entertaining. And yet, taken as a whole, Dylan’s accumulated rejoinders and ripostes never amount to anything like a definitive position, or even an evolving set of guiding principles. And why should they? In a 1978 interview with Ron Rosenbaum for Playboy, when Dylan famously described the noise he was chasing as ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound’, he appeared to be defining something elusive, untameable and with quicksilver properties. Two months earlier, speaking to Jonathan Cott from Rolling Stone, Dylan moment­ arily turned the tables to ask his interviewer what he had meant when he’d said, ‘A genius can’t be a genius on instinct alone.’ ‘I said that? Maybe, but really late at night,’ says Cott a little furtively, as if attempting to play Dylan at his own game. Dylan retorts, ‘Well, I disagree. I believe 120

We Need to Talk About Robert instinct is what makes a genius a genius.’ It feels telling because, rather than ducking and diving, or slinging back a flippant answer to yet another predictable question, this is Dylan on the front foot, dictating the nature of the conversation in order to speak his mind. I’ll return to that instinctiveness or intuition later in the lecture, both as a way of questioning Dylan’s literary ambitions, and as a reason for celebrating his songs. (You might think it odd that for twenty minutes I’ve been talking mostly about music, in what is traditionally a lecture about poetry. Well, me too, but just to say it again: Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize in Literature, so here we are. Plus, I have mentioned Rimbaud a couple of times. Also, I checked my contract, and it turns out I can talk about whatever I like – so, on we go.) And, the proof of the song being in the singing, I’d like to look at an actual Dylan number, which I’ll preface by explaining just what an excellent judge of Dylan’s work I am. For one thing, like all people with an interest in popular music, my taste is impeccable and my conclusions unquestionable; and, for another, I’m not generationally betrothed to Bob Dylan – by which I mean that my regard for his first handful of albums, those from the early to mid1960s, was not forged through the imperatives of the era, or by any kind of contemporaneous narcissistic identification with the man and his music. I encountered Bob Dylan retrospectively – in music’s back catalogue, overcoming all kinds of punk-inspired reluctances and prejudices to tune into him – and therefore consider my appreciation to have been objectively formed, relatively speaking. In terms of 121

a vertical art my ability to differentiate song lyrics from poems, I offer as qualification the fact that I have grappled with both, and have the utmost respect for each practice. Martin Amis recently commented that, in being awarded the Nobel Prize, Dylan had effectively ‘won the lottery’. That poetry is a higher art form than songwriting is, he said, ‘self-­evidently true’ – the phrase ‘self-evidently’ being a kind of kill-shot in any argument. I don’t feel the same way, because I have no problem admitting that I have derived at least as much pleasure and stimulation from music as I have from poetry, and have found in both intimations of the eternal and the divine. I also fully accept that the practice of songwriting and the practice of poetry-writing have many shared aims, shared values, shared techniques, shared materials and an interwoven history. Despite all of which, they are, or have become, distinct art forms in their own right; and that distinction colours much of what I’m about to say. ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ is track four of side two of Bob Dylan’s third studio album, 1964’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ (or track nine if you waited twenty-five years for the release of the CD version). The monochrome cover – with a pre-rock star Dylan looking like he woke up in a New England barn or a San Quentin prison cell – is presumably familiar to many people, as are some of the songs on the album; and, although ‘Hattie Carroll’ has never enjoyed the same level of popularity or airplay as the title track, for example, it has always been, and remains, a recherché choice among Dylan critics and connoisseurs. One of his so-called ‘finger-pointing’ songs of the era, ‘The 122

We Need to Talk About Robert Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ recalls the death of a barmaid in a Baltimore hotel, after being struck with a cane by the well-heeled and well-connected William Zantzinger. By some accounts, Dylan read about the derisory sentence handed down to Zantzinger on his way home from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; fuelled with the passion of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, he began work on the song either in an all-night cafe, on the train home or at the house of his lover at the time (the folk singer Joan Baez). None or all three versions of the song’s conception might be true, to a lesser or greater degree, and all have a sentimental attraction of one kind or another – but my preferred provenance is Bob composing at Joan’s place, especially since the chorus of ‘Hattie Carroll’ carries echoes of Baez’s rendition of the traditional ballad ‘Mary Hamilton’. Which, in turn, conjures up associations with Virginia Woolf, a compelling antecedent for a Dylan song about a subjugated and wronged woman – though, as far as I know, there is no evidence to say that Dylan or Baez had read A Room of One’s Own. Or that Dylan had even read the daily newspaper with any great attention, because, either deliberately or unwittingly, ‘Hattie Carroll’ is far from factually correct, despite being presented in document­ary form. Dylan drops the t from his spelling and pronunciation of Zantzinger, making him ‘Zanzinger’; and I don’t think there’s any specific evidence to say that Zantzinger was a drum majorette-style twirler of his cane, as the song suggests – just as there is no diamond ring on any of the circulated photographs of Zantzinger’s hands. * 123

a vertical art Most literary commentators who have written about Dylan, including some who have written specifically about ‘Hattie Carroll’, happily concede that his lyrics are only a component part in a much bigger machine – though, once that concession has been made, the issue is quickly put to one side. And when Dylan’s words have been isolated and brought under the usually unforgiving interrogation lamp of literary analy­sis, it’s interesting to note just how much leeway some critics have afforded them, often choosing to interpret the perfunctory necessities of songwriting as controlled poetic artistry, or nuanced thinking. Let’s take, to begin with, the word ‘poor’ in the first line, as in ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll’. Christopher Ricks, in his book Dylan’s Visions of Sin, defends its use as both compassionate and dispassionate, in as much as it acknowledges Carroll’s sad situation as well as the factual state of her poverty. But to my mind, neither of those points needs making, because the song implies both elsewhere. She’s a maid in the kitchen of a Baltimore hotel, where she cleans out ashtrays; we were hardly about to mistake her for a millionaire Maryland socialite. ‘Show, don’t tell’ might be the most annoyingly repeated poetry workshop adage of all time, but it remains a useful phrase to describe the kind of subtleties that contemporary poetry demands. By the same standards and expectations, neither do we need to be told that the villain of the piece is the offspring of ‘wealthy parents’ – let alone that he is the offspring of tautologically ‘rich wealthy parents’, such prosperity having already been established by virtue of the diamond ring. Dylan is pushing at an open door. Ricks 124

We Need to Talk About Robert comments: ‘Superfluous? You bet. Wasteful? But not a word is wasted.’ To my reading, ‘rich’ is wasted, a syllabic stepping stone to get him from one side of the line to the other without falling through the gap – just as ‘poor’ is also a makeweight, dropped in for metrical convenience. And like ‘poor’, ‘rich’ is wasted in being a word from the very bottom of the linguistic food chain – low-hanging fruit, the most basic and rudimentary term to describe a person or people of money. In drafts of poems and even finished poems, bog-standard words like ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, when used primarily for their bog-standard definitions, are placeholders at best, crying out to be sacrificed for syllables that bear more weight, or carry more load. Turning to the song’s metre, and with the exception of the word ‘cane’, which is afforded a special waiver, Ricks has written that ‘the verses all the way through possess unrhymed feminine line-endings’. This is true up to a point, but not exclusively. Surely ‘room’ in verse three is masculine; as is ‘years’ at the end of the first line of verse two, unless it is deliberately pronounced as two syllables, ‘ye-ars’ – though in Dylan’s rendition, it is barely one syll­ able, given the way his breath falls away before that final s. The word also feels somewhat casually inserted, thrown in because it rhymes with ‘tears’ (almost), which it has no business to do, given the schematic logic of the song. Ricks is drawing attention to the unrhymed, feminine endings of the verses to contrast them with the masculine (i.e. stressed-syllable) rhymes of the chorus: ‘disgrace’, ‘fears’, ‘face’, ‘tears’. Again, this is partly true – but only when the words are read on the page. From a musical 125

a vertical art standpoint, the two syllables of ‘disgrace’ share the same note, E, and the two syllables of ‘your tears’ share the note C. The two syll­ables of ‘all fears’ drop from F to E, and the two syllables of ‘your face’ drop from D to C. The notes that Dylan actually sings vary from chorus to chorus – especially in lines one and four – but the effect at the end of the two middle lines of the chorus is certainly of a descending, rather than an ascending, phrase: meaning that ‘all fears’ and ‘your face’ are, melodically speaking, trochees rather than iambs. One other thought on the metre: the cadencing of the entire song might well have been suggested by the stress pattern of the first line or the title, as has been argued – but did anybody ever ask William Zantzinger how his name is actu­ally pronounced? ‘Zan-tzin-ger’ would be my guess, with the emphasis on the first syllable, and not ‘Zan-zin-ger’, as Dylan gives it. ‘Zan-tzin-ger’, as in ‘Arm-i-tage’. As in ‘Zimm-er-man’. Moving further into the piece, I agree with Ricks that Carroll’s social containment and confinement are well captured by the repeat rhyme of ‘table’, especially when the song is heard rather than read – because the ear can’t fully anticipate the word coming at the end of the line a second, then a third time; whereas, on paper, the eye’s peri­ pheral vision sees it hoving into view. And the detail, real or invented, of Hattie Carroll cleaning out ashtrays is the perfect illustration of her position in life, relative to her tobacco-farm-owning assailant. But ‘on a whole other level’ is lame. For it to succeed, the ambiguity would need to flourish on both the literal and the conceptual plane. Yet would ashtrays really be taken to another floor of the hotel 126

We Need to Talk About Robert to be cleaned out? And, even if they were, the word ‘whole’ only usefully attaches to the idea of status – not to the geometrical stratifications of a building, where there are only whole other levels (unless we’re being invited to consider mezzanines, and suchlike). I’m being pedantic, of course, because pedantry is a staple of literary criticism; and in a world where every angstrom and pixel is held up for scrutiny, ‘whole other level’ doesn’t earn its keep. In fact, its weakness is exposed by a more convincing use of ‘on the level’ in the next verse, in a line about the courts – which, as well as questioning the objectivity and truthfulness of the justice system, also calls up notions of rigid social hierarchies, cultural stratification and racial segregation. My point is this: considered as a poem, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ is littered with errors – or at least strewn with chances for improvement – and I deem it a mistake to credit Dylan with the kind of finely honed poetic sensibilities and control of language that literature would normally expect of its decorated practitioners. However, those flaws and faults, as I would judge them poetically, contribute enormously to the song’s overwhelming and irresistible sense of credence and veracity, and play a fundamental role in making it one of the most moving and persuasive political songs of the twentieth century. Had the lyrics been delivered as a series of highly wrought verses and ornately sculpted choruses, its associations and lineages would have fallen in with exactly the kind of traditions Dylan is seeking to oppose: rich, white, male, Confederate, etc. Instead, the song is transmitted to us as spontaneous and unpolished, delivered by a well-known character type, 127

a vertical art whose role is to give voice to an uncorrupted and unadorned truth. As such, it creates the impression of Dylan as a humble and unpretentious commentator speaking from outside the institutions of language, the academies of philosophy and the structures of authority. So, rather than seeking literary intentions in some of the song’s irregular design and unpredictable moves, I prefer to detect instead a kind of knowing casualness, prompted by an intuitive desire to avoid perfection of diction, syntax, grammar and order, so as to lend the song an unpretentious authenti­ city and a heartfelt sincerity. In that scenario, I imagine its composer looking down at some of those instinctively and perhaps hurriedly constructed lines, and considering himself completely comfortable with their rough-and-ready feel. Hypermetric syllables, unnecessary repetitions, faltering rhyme schemes, unadventurous word choices, mixed metaphors, contrived inversions of the natural word order – all bad marks in a poem. But in the world of a young folk singer protesting a gross miscarriage of justice on behalf of the people, they carry the day. There’s a story, possibly true, in David Remnick’s New Yorker profile of Leonard Cohen, published about a month before Cohen’s death. Like Dylan, Cohen is also a singer-­ songwriter who occasionally wears the poetic chain of office (though Cohen’s claims to that role are somewhat superior, given his publishing history, his more overtly literary mindset and the separation he seems to have practised between the two activities). In the anecdote, Dylan and Cohen are sitting in a Paris cafe the morning after a Dylan concert. 128

We Need to Talk About Robert Dylan, a genuine and knowledgeable admirer of Cohen’s music, asks him how long it took him to write his famous spiritual anthem ‘Hallelujah’, to which Cohen replies, ‘Two years’ – even though the real answer is probably much longer. Cohen then asks Dylan how long it took him to write, ‘I and I’, one of his favourite tracks on the Infidels album. To which Dylan replies, ‘About fifteen minutes.’ Given that the song lasts five minutes and twelve seconds, it isn’t reported if Cohen leapt at the comic opportunity of asking Dylan what he did for the other nine minutes and forty-eight seconds. But the exchange, however exaggerated, encapsulates an aspect of Dylan often overlooked by those who would pore over his lyrics, which is his apparent spontaneity as an artist, and the way in which a form of creative impulsiveness – carried through from composition to recording – is often what gives the songs their very life force. Cohen’s response to Dylan’s Nobel Prize, that it was ‘like pinning a medal on Everest’, had the style and grace of a generous compliment referencing Dylan’s towering presence in the musical landscape. But it also hinted at something raw and unconscious: Dylan the great natural phenomenon, unaccountable and unknowable even to himself (compared to Cohen, the considered thinker and disciplined writer, illuminating manuscripts by candlelight in the hilltop monastery of his imagination). There is a similar logic at play when people remark that Dylan should have received a Nobel Prize ‘just for being Bob Dylan’, as if it’s something he can’t really help. I complained earlier about how other literary commentators have shied away from properly exploring the musicological 129

a vertical art processes at work in Dylan. Staying with ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, I want to suggest what those processes might be, and acknowledge how much they contri­ bute to the song’s success. My first point comes back to that sense of honesty and authenticity, and to the implied integrity of a stripped-down song. One instrument and one voice, right from the off – the musical equivalent of sworn testimony. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll.’ No fanfare, no multi-tracking or complex orchestration, not even an instrumental introduction: just acoustic guitar and vocal cords, straight in on the first note. My second point concerns the musical phrasing of the song and its overall structure. ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, / With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger’: C, A minor, E minor / C, A minor, E minor are the guitar chords behind lines one and two, with the melody strung across them in two sets of descending notes. Lines three and four are backgrounded by the same chord sequence but this time with rising melody lines, a generally upwardly inclined tune. The overall effect is a kind of call and response, or inverted echo – one that might be said to embody the adversarial or twofold nature of the topic. It’s a pattern that remains fixed until the fourth and last verse, the lines of which are all delivered as the response refrain, the guitar work beneath them becoming increasingly arrhythmic and panicky, as if grasping for some kind of resolution or epiphany. As with previous verses, that epiphany is delivered not verbally, but in the form of a short-lived G chord: a pivotal and transcendent sound, by which Dylan transitions from verse to 130

We Need to Talk About Robert chorus, and from sociological description to philosophical conclusion. To my ear and my mind, it’s one of the most glorious moments in the whole of Dylan, setting up an acoustic platform from which the singer will deliver judgement, make his proclamation of wisdom and berate the song’s second-person audience, the all-inclusive ‘you’. Neil Corcoran, in his essay on ‘Hattie Carroll’, states, ‘It is a commonly repeated paradox of elegy that it is unusually self-preoccupied,’ and goes on to say, ‘A genuinely political elegy must be not at all self-preoccupied: its interest must lie all elsewhere. In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Bob Dylan manages a selfless elegy, and one that instructs its audience in a comparable selflessness.’ I wouldn’t seek to contradict that assessment in the slightest, but I also wonder if the chorus of ‘Hattie Carroll’ offers an alternative or complementary reading; or whether it’s now my turn to give Dylan the benefit of the critical doubt, by speculating that the ‘you’ he wags his finger at – ‘the armchair philosophes of the liberal-left’, as Corcoran identifies them – might include the songwriter himself. Is there here, perhaps, a brief moment of self-recognition and chastisement – the chorus of the song taking the verses to task, as it were, via a kind of soul-searching that advances the piece from depersonalised protest song to something more internally questioning, and therefore more . . . what? Literary? Is that what the shimmering and momentary G chord heralds? Finally, in relation to the music, I want to venture what I consider to be the most powerful yet undeclared aspect of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’: that it is a waltz. 131

a vertical art Counting and weighing the stresses in each line of a lyric, or identifying the rhythm of the words as they appear in print, is all well and good – but in the end, the only stress pattern that really matters is that of the underlying tempo, around which all the words in a song are bent, compacted or stretched. Call it ‘dactylic’ if it helps to put it in terms of scansion. But it’s a waltz, essentially, in triple time – which, in the framework of the song, brings William and Hattie together in a truly unsettling danse macabre: Zantzinger, who, by some reports, was too drunk to walk in a straight line; and Carroll, who, by virtue of her allocated role in society, was forbidden by law from dancing in such an esta­ blishment, never mind with a white man. And so it is by musical implication and insinuation, rather than through language, that we witness Hattie Carroll and her killer gliding around the dancefloor at the white tie Spinsters’ Ball in a well-to-do Baltimore hotel: an unspoken image that is subtle to the point of being subconscious, and which, if I didn’t know any better, I might even describe as poetic. On the liner notes to The Times They Are a-Changin’, there’s a long piece of writing by Dylan entitled ‘4 Outlined Epitaphs’, expanded to ‘11 Outlined Epitaphs’ in the notebook that accompanied the CD version many years later. By my reckoning, Dylan didn’t meet Allen Ginsberg until after the whole of that album was recorded, but he had been reading him from the age of eighteen, apparently, so would presumably have been familiar with both ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ when he penned the songs. I mention it because the influence of the Beats generally, and of Ginsberg 132

We Need to Talk About Robert in particular, is fairly apparent in ‘Outlined Epitaphs’ – not least in its prolixity, the eleven-strong version being double-­ columned and stretching across ten pages. I’m inter­ested in ‘Outlined Epitaphs’ because it’s unadulter­ ated by a musical score, which allows for a certain amount of scientific objectivity when it comes to considering it as a piece of writing. So, is it a poem? Well, it’s more like a poem than, say, a novel, or an essay, so of course it is. But is it any good? Well, even if I could ignore the fact that it is written by Bob Dylan – which I absolutely can’t – I would grade it as ‘pretty interesting’. As a teacher, I’d probably be telling Bob that I’m genuinely curious about those ‘Outlines’ and look forward to the way they develop in further drafts. There is also more than a hint of Dylan Thomas in the tone and style, especially in the second section. ‘The town I was born in holds no memories’, begins Dylan, disingenuously, before recalling the faded and fallen glory of Hibbing, Minnesota, in a style that might seamlessly segue into Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard asking the sun to wipe its shoes before it comes into the house, and Polly Garter with her dress halfway over her head. As with most of his personal history, Dylan is either foggy or contradictory about whether he took his stage name from the Welsh bard, who had lived such a rock and roll lifestyle – especially on his riotous tours of the USA – though he does acknowledge reading him: ‘Then unexpectedly I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas,’ he says on page seventy-eight of volume one of his ‘autobiography’, Chronicles, just a page before he says, ‘Spelling is important.’ Not important enough to spell ‘it’s’ correctly, or even consistently, in the poem I just 133

a vertical art quoted – but important enough to construct a linguistic territory where ‘-ing’ is always ‘-in’, where ‘through’ is always ‘thru’, and where ‘to’ is presented as the single letter t – Dylan emphasising his Midwestern credentials through deliberate and determined manipulation of the standard dictionary. By and large, the world of Bob Dylan is a man’s world. Not exclusively, but by and large. Might this, I wonder, be another reason why some of Dylan’s song lyrics don’t sit automatically or comfortably within the context of contemporary literature, since, at times, they seem relatively unaware of the literary discourses of the day – especially those concerning sexual equality? In 1970, Dylan released the album New Morning – an album in which women are, among other things, ‘darlins’, ‘angels’, ‘babes’, ‘sweethearts’, ‘sweet gone mamas’, ‘little apples’, ‘little daisies’, ‘honeys’ and ‘pretty dancing girls’ – no offence intended, I’m sure, and at least in ‘Winterlude’ the cooking duties appear to be shared. New Morning was ‘of its time’, I guess it would be argued – but then again so was Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, published the same year. In 1973, the year Erica Jong published Fear of Flying and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck won the National Book Award (an award she accepted on behalf of all women), Dylan released Dylan, whose track listing included the traditional ballads ‘Lily of the West’, ‘Sarah Jane’ and ‘Mary Ann’ – not affronts to feminism in their intent per se, but casual fallback positions, where women occupy customary roles. (A quarter of a century later Dylan namechecks Jong in his 134

We Need to Talk About Robert song ‘Highlands’, as one of the women authors he’s read, or that his character has read.) In interviews of the 1970s, women could be ‘chicks’ in Dylan’s vocabulary – a word Clinton Heylin found permissible as late as 2010, as in the phrase ‘some wannabe rock chick’, which he uses without irony or the heat shields of speech marks. Also to note: Dylan’s Dylan included his version of Joni Mitchell’s early environmental protest song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. It is a source of annoyance among some music fans that Mitchell never seems to get the same billing as Dylan when it comes to songwriting – when, on reflection, her own early songs were equally acclimatised and attuned to the issues of the day, and no less crafted. Compare, for example, the exposed clarity and audible lyrics of her Ladies of the Canyon album with the fuzz and blur that smokescreens Dylan’s work of the same period, and his propensity for taking cover within cover versions. Consider her ‘Woodstock’ as a kind of Blakean dream vision piece: a lyric of innocence and experience, with its nursery-rhyme simplicity and folky wistfulness, but one that touches on something elemental, political and prophetic. ‘Some brilliant chick folksingers have vanished,’ said Gary Von Tersch in his 1970 Rolling Stone review of Ladies of the Canyon, about to congratulate ‘Miss Mitchell’ for her staying power, without wondering why so many women failed to go the distance. If he had bothered to ask the question, the answer would have been right under his nose, in the title track and in songs like ‘Conversation’ and ‘The Arrangement’ – songs about hippy housewives, or soliloquies written from the 135

a vertical art point of view of disappointed lovers or disillusioned mistresses; lyrics scored through with vulnerability and insecurity. In that regard, Mitchell was something of a lone voice, and decades ahead of her time. In fact, it is a curious irony that literature is often characterised as a staid and old-fashioned pursuit in comparison with rock or pop music – because in terms of attitudes to women, the latter is a slow-moving beast. The American academic Tricia Rose commented in 2012 that ‘if you want to find openly celebrated sexism against black women, there is no richer contemporary source than commercial, mainstream hip-hop.’ But she could have cast the net far wider, because most popular musical genres – from indie, to grime, to country, to R&B – harbour some doggedly unreconstructed attitudes; attitudes that can’t be quietly overlooked if we are going throw literary tributes in the direction of their lyricists, let alone hang garlands around their necks and crown them with laurels. Returning to Bob, I quoted Julian Cope earlier in this lecture remarking on Dylan’s ‘ever-changing muse’, and alluding to the commercial benefits of his role-playing through the eras. In 2012, Dylan released the single ‘Duquesne Whistle’, from his thirty-fifth studio album, Tempest. The video accompanying the song follows the tribulations of a lovesick young man, stealing flowers for the young woman of his dreams and pulling over a stepladder with a man on top as he’s chased down the street by police officers and a disgruntled florist. It’s all fairly rom-com and slapstick until, in a darker turn of events, the protagonist is bundled 136

We Need to Talk About Robert into a van by the injured owner of the stepladder and his accomplices, then beaten unconscious with a baseball bat in a dingy basement and dumped on the kerb. The baseball bat as a weapon of assault provides an interesting juxta­position with the toy cane that sent Hattie Carroll to her grave. And Dylan the protest singer of 1963 makes a thought-­ provoking contrast with the Dylan of forty years later: at the end of the video, open-necked and nattily dressed, the singer and his motley crew are strutting along the sidewalk later that day; but rather than play the Good Samaritan to the bloody and comatose young romantic, Dylan sidesteps him, without even looking down or breaking stride. It’s the classic Dylan body swerve – the one he’s been performing and perfecting for over half a century – a caution against reading too much into his commitment to causes, and a warning to those who would take him too literally, to the letter or at his word.

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The Hawks and the Doves: Raptors and Rapture in the Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes So, noblemen and noblewomen have dined on strange stews and exotic fowl, including swan and young heron, when after the third course the doors of the hall open, and in rides a mysterious knight on an extraordinary horse. It could be the inciting incident in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the event by which escapade and adventure are triggered in several Arthurian narratives. Except the steed this knight is mounted on is made of brass, and the king is not Arthur but Cambyuskan, a.k.a. Genghis Khan – not to be confused with Combusken, the bipedal chicken-like Pokémon character with powerful thighs, who can deliver as many as ten kicks per second. As well as bestowing the gift of the alloy horse, the knight presents a sword with magical healing properties, a mirror that warns against adversity, and a ring, which is given to the king’s daughter, Canacee:     . . . that if hire lust it for to were Upon hir thombe or in hir purse it bere, Ther is no fowel that fleeth under the hevene That she ne shal wel understonde his stevene. Early next morning, out walking in the woods and now able to converse freely in the language of the birds, Canacee 139

a vertical art encounters a female falcon crying and beating herself with her wings until blood runs down the tree in which she roosts. Canacee catches the bird in the lap of her skirt and encourages it to tell its tale. I’m not certain there is a more moving passage in The Canterbury Tales than this section of ‘The Squire’s Tale’, no matter that it’s an age-old story. The falcon’s mate, a tercelet or male hawk, having stolen both her heart and her virtue, has broken all his vows of fidelity and left her for a common kite: ‘And sodeynly he loved this kyte so / That al his love is clene fro me ago.’ Canacee bandages the falcon’s wounds, including bites from her own beak, and builds a velvet-covered pen or ‘mew’ to keep her in. Of course, Chaucer wasn’t by any means the first poet to write about birds of prey, but I present this extract as an illuminated backdrop to what I’m about to say: hang it here as a kind of medieval tapestry, illustrating as it does the enduring and occasionally endearing themes that raptors of various species have come to represent in literature: themes such as class status, humanity’s on-off relationship with the natural world and, of course, conflict, both of the talons and the heart. An alternative and more quotidian setting would have been the gable end of Monastery Farm, from where Billy Casper plucked his young bird in the film version of Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave – tumbledown but still standing at the side of the M1, South Yorkshire’s post-industrial reply to the Hollywood sign. Retrospectively speaking, the lives and works of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes seem to have little in common, though at 140

The Hawks and the Doves the outset there were more similarities than differences. Alan Bold, in a short critical study of their poetry published in the mid-seventies, entitled his first chapter ‘Ted Gunn’, presenting the two poets as an amalgamated single entity, and noting how even their names – both composed of single syll­ ables, both forenames presented in abbreviated forms, surnames sitting next to each other in the alphabet – invited an obvious association. But the resemblances went further and deeper. Gunn was born in August 1929 and Hughes the following August, and the two overlapped at Cambridge while undergraduates (though it seems they had very little meaningful interaction). Both men completed National Service, during which they both chose to protect their country by finding a quiet corner to curl up in and read the complete works of Shakespeare. And both enjoyed quick success and recognition; as early as 1962, the two were somewhat hastily being packaged together in a slim selection of work, a volume that found its way into the stockrooms and libraries of school English departments, and has apparently sold in excess of eighty thousand copies. Attitudinally and thematically, there were also connections. Even though it was Hughes who declared himself ready for ‘opening up negotiations with whatever happened to be out there’, when other post-war poets just wanted ‘to get back into civvies’ and settle down to ‘a nice cigarette and a nice view of the park’, the young Thom Gunn was equally combative in his own way. The title of his first collection, Fighting Terms, announced an aggressive stance and promised to address the rules of engagement, the vocabularies of antagonism and confrontation, and the seasons and periods 141

a vertical art of war. It’s Queensberry Rules, rather than the bare-­knuckle boxing that characterises Hughes’s early relationship with literature and civilisation, but it’s no less armed and engaged. It’s a book staffed with combatants, and stuffed with military imagery: wounds, beachheads, sieges, regimes, barricades and revolt – the consequence of a ‘childhood .  .  . full of soldiers’, an adolescence for which World War II was newsreel and soundtrack, and an indirect consequence, perhaps, of Gunn’s mother having ingested the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with Thom in utero. Hughes’s youthful imagination was similarly lit up by thoughts of battle, and his father’s silence on the subject of his military service at Gallipoli seems only to have encouraged Hughes junior’s poetic interrogation of the topic of war. Unlike Hughes, however, Gunn’s poems are chilly and calculating, strategic rather than actively violent, and not a little stand-offish. In a 1999 interview with James Campbell, Campbell refers to Hughes as ‘the great hot-blooded poet’ and suggests that, in contrast, the temperature of Gunn’s work is at ‘point-zero’. Gunn replies, ‘Yes, I’m a cold poet, aren’t I?’ It’s there from the beginning, tonally, and continues throughout, not least in his poems about statuary and art, where the poet’s gaze often turns away from the corporeal and the sentient, towards inert representations of the body and human emotions. Almost to the point of its being a verbal tic, the adjective ‘hard’ recurs throughout Gunn’s poetry, including five times alone in the poem ‘Iron Landscapes (and the Statue of Liberty)’. Another difference between Gunn and Hughes might appear to be Gunn’s preference for urban settings and 142

The Hawks and the Doves situations, when Hughes’s status as a ‘nature poet’, no matter how simplified, is easily evidenced – not just by the glories of his animal and landscape poems, but by his palpable disdain for the built environment. Witness ‘In the M5 Restaurant’, where the refuelling options are a ‘tyre face pasty’, an ‘illusory coffee’ or a ‘gluey quasi-pie’; food for thought, as Hughes meditates on the idea of feeding his own life and freedom ‘into a carburettor’. Alas, the recent phenomenon that is Gloucester Services came too late for Hughes – that grass-roofed, timber-beamed town-and-country mash-up between junctions 11a and 12 of the same motorway, offering home-cured bacon, farm shop cheeses and locally mongered sushi. But the rural/urban distinction between our two poets is not absolute, there being an unmistakable creature-like quality in Gunn. Witness the tattooed panther on his arm, prominently and proudly displayed in a number of early photographs, like a Pullman-esque daemon ready to spring into life; where a nasturtium grows through a crack in urban wasteland, or a wild bird is tamed by a man’s hand, it makes his ‘animal’ or ‘nature’ writing all the more conspicuous. Many first collections are a coming together of individual poems written with ambition and hope, rather than with the certainty of publication; poems perhaps alike in style and substance, but conceived by writers for whom the single poem, rather than the book, is the unit of production. And many first collections wear a slightly surprised expression on their face; it’s part of the charm that brings 143

a vertical art them to readers’ attention, as if the poems are startled to find themselves in the spotlight’s glare. For that reason, there’s often a temptation to practise a little retrospective cosmetic surgery once the author has established a more assured and affirmed identity – and so it was with Fighting Terms, which underwent a number of reworkings and reorderings in the course of Gunn’s life. In that regard, Gunn was always a frank and self-deprecating commentator on his own output: ‘I made various revisions for an edition brought out by the Hawk’s Well Press in New York . . . Unfortunately they were scarcely improvements,’ he says with characteristic honesty in a note on the first Faber text of Fighting Terms. And in a postscript to a 1993 Collected Poems, he begins, ‘In putting this collection together, I have omitted a dozen poems I find stupid or badly written.’ Reflecting on various recordings he made of his readings, he concluded, ‘all are terrible’. The American poet and critic August Kleinzahler, perhaps emboldened by his friend’s candour, is equally blunt about Gunn’s early work when, after praising Fighting Terms for its discipline, control and structure, he goes on to label the book ‘top-of-the-line juvenilia, interesting only with respect to the later work’. In preferring Gunn’s output from Part II of My Sad Captains – that perceived sea change where Gunn transitions from metrical arrangements to syllabic William Carlos Williamsderived composition – Kleinzahler isn’t just talking up Gunn’s development as an honorary American poet; he’s also defending him from a narrative in which that most English of young versifiers trades the native disciplines 144

The Hawks and the Doves of rhyme and metre for sunshine, leather bars, rent boys, dope, amphetamines, LSD and (the most high-tariff accusation of all) free verse, as if slack lines were the consequence of loose morals. Such prudish and jingoistic complaints may well have lurked in the reviews and comments of one or two British critics at the time, but the idea that Gunn’s work only matured in the sexually liberated subcultures of California, or after Gunn experienced his first acid trip, is no less clichéd; long-term admirers have generally been interested in the full-spectrum array of his poetry, from the formal to the experimental, and whatever hybrid­isations took place in between: AngloAmerican ‘continuities’, as Gunn described them, which ‘my life insists on’. But in his frugal assessment of Fighting Terms (he chose only two poems from it for his selection of Gunn’s work), Kleinzahler makes a special exception in the case of ‘Tamer and Hawk’, which he deems ‘seamless in execution and convincing all the way through’. Gunn once observed that ‘so many poems about animals – by Lawrence, Marianne Moore or Ted Hughes – are marvellous, but the subjects are dealt with from a human point of view.’ This in relation to his poem ‘Yoko’, from 1976’s Jack Straw’s Castle, about a friend’s dog, seen from the dog’s perspective. ‘I leap into the standing warmth, I plunge into / the combination of old and new smells. / Here on a garbage can at the bottom, so interesting,’ says Gunn – or says Yoko. It’s noteworthy that he should have listed Hughes among those who write about animals from an external perspective – partly because it’s true only here 145

a vertical art and there, and partly because ‘Yoko’ has more than a few echoes of Hughes’s ‘Wodwo’, the monologue title poem published nine years earlier, whose speaker muses, ‘What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over / Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge / I enter water’, and even finds a frog ‘so interesting’. There is, it seems to me, an intermittent dialogue between Gunn and Hughes that feels more than mere coincidence: a conversation that begins with ‘Tamer and Hawk’, an early and in some ways un­ representative Gunn poem, yet one that survived all the later culling and sifting. In cocking our ear to space and in peering into the dark reaches of the night sky, we can hear echoes and see glimpses of the early universe – sounds and flickers that allow us to speculate about the Big Bang and the milliseconds that followed. Poems are the same if we listen and look carefully enough; the closer to the source, the more telling and tantalising the signals, encoded with the conditions and preconditions of poetic emergence. ‘Tamer and Hawk’ bleeps and bristles with such signs and indications, not least in its form – a product of Gunn’s interests and learning up to that point, an education that had shaped his ambition ‘to be the John Donne of the twentieth century’. Gunn’s pre­occupation with formal methodologies, especially in his first two books, have seen him described as metaphysical and Elizabethan – both terms being reasonably appropriate in the case of ‘Tamer and Hawk’, which bears all the hallmarks of a courtly romance, presented as a falconry conceit deliver­ed in governed, lyrical lines. You can almost hear a lute playing in the background. It’s a poem in which the two 146

The Hawks and the Doves characters of the title and their tense relationship are not only described, but embodied acoustically and visually. They are evident right from the first line, where ‘thought’ and ‘tough’ are representatives of the poem’s personnel, opposites in some ways – one cerebral and passive, the other physical and active – yet similar in their constituent letters, to the point of the latter being contained within the former (‘kangaroo words’, as they’re sometimes known, the host word pouching the joey word within). Their placement across the line mirrors that of ‘catcher’ and ‘caught’ further down in the poem. I don’t think it’s stretching the point, either, to notice at a subtextual level the word ‘thou’ hiding within that first line, giving the poem a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century topspin – just as ‘gentled’ tips its cap towards the aristocratic and the noble, and ‘seeled’ delivers historical veracity (the word describes the time-honoured practice of blindfolding birds, to the point of threading their eyelids to keep them closed). ‘Seeled’ as a homophone for ‘sealed’ also alerts us to the likelihood of other puns and wordplay, in keeping with the riddling, metaphysical style – as with ‘habit’ in verse two, and ‘formerly’ at the beginning of verse three, which carries a whisper of ‘formel’, the archaic word for the female hawk or eagle, as in Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls’: The formel on youre hond, so wel iwrought, Whos I am al, and evere wol hire serve, Do what hire lest, to do me lyve or sterve. Since I’ve touched on the ornithological aspects here, it might be worth remembering that, rather than referring 147

a vertical art to a single species, ‘hawk’ is a general term, as is ‘falcon’, the two words being complacently and interchangeably used, except by bird spotters and word spotters. The ability to hover, as acknowledged in verse three, might suggest a kestrel, given that bird’s celebrated ability to hang in an apparently fixed position in mid-air, though it’s equally possible that Gunn is using ‘hover’ in the broader sense, i.e. ‘to be airborne in or around a certain area’. Hopkins is more particular in writing about a kestrel in ‘The Windhover’, though confusingly he refers to it as a falcon – as does Yeats, whose unbiddable bird is rising beyond earshot, rather than hedge-hopping or hunting by stealth as a hawk would. Thomas Nashe in Lenten Stuff prefers the common name ‘wind-fucker’ – why wouldn’t he? – as does Ben Jonson: ‘Did you ever hear such a wind-fucker as this?’ enquires Ned Clerimont, in Act IV, Scene iv of Epicene. To add to the complication by returning to the word ‘gentled’, a ‘falcon-gentle’ – from the Old French faucon-­ gentil – is a hawking term usually applied to a female pere­ grine. Gunn’s raptor, then, is no more species-specific than Yeats’s, though the difference in the birds’ responses couldn’t be greater – Yeats’s spiralling beyond instruction as the world tumbles out of control, Gunn’s returning obediently to the wrist (a return nicely mimicked by the rhyme scheme of each verse). As I’ve said before in these lectures, claims about the effect of rhymes and the noises they make can be overstated to the point of absurdity; but here, in a poem in which handler and handled are presented in an edgy and complex association, the abaccb rhyme pattern across each stanza subtly accentuates the powerplay between the two. 148

The Hawks and the Doves The a rhymes in lines one and three set up an expectation of alternating sounds – an expectation disrupted by the abrupt c rhyme couplet in lines four and five. But it’s the b rhyme that has the most powerful consequence, thrown out there at the end of line two, then absent for a further three lines, before finally homing in and pairing with its mate as the last word of each stanza. In a longer-lined poem, the effect would be dissipated across the intervening syllables, but in lines of tight trimeter, mostly, and an even shorter sixth line, the tuning fork of that b rhyme is still vibrating by the time its equivalent chime is struck. The rhyme, like the hawk, returns to the hand that released it. And she came just as good as first time, Straight onto t’glove, grabbin’ for t’meat. could be another Chaucerian couplet, if it weren’t a line from Kes, spoken by an unusually excited Billy Casper, as he describes to his teacher and classmates the astonishing moment when the wild bird is flown without a creance, and choses the gauntlet of its owner rather than the endless freedom of the sky. ‘I don’t like dramatising myself. I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath. The last person I want to be!’ Gunn said, in that same interview with James Campbell. It’s the perceived sensationalism and the narcissistic connoisseurism of the self in the likes of Lowell, Sexton and, of course, Plath, that seemed to send Gunn scurrying back to more guileful and guarded modes of writing. His poem ‘Autobiography’ 149

a vertical art he describes in one interview as ‘a joke’. It’s probably important, on Gunn’s behalf, to make a distinction between confessional poetry – the kind that performs open-heart surgery in front of the mirror – and personal poetry – poetry provoked, inspired or inflected by life events, the type that no poet has ever managed to avoid. Gunn remarks, ‘The danger of biography, and equally of auto­ biography, is that it can muddy poetry by confusing it with its sources.’ And he’s right, in the sense that knowing ‘Tamer and Hawk’ was written about Mike Kitay – Gunn’s American lover at Cambridge, who he would follow to the United States and who remained a lifelong companion – makes it virtually impossible not to categorise it as an allusive but somewhat arch love poem, composed at a time when homosexuality was still a crime in the UK and Gunn was not, by any means, an openly gay man. In that reading, the undeclared gendered elements take on understated significances, and the buried references to the female bird of the species become playful and ironic. Some might argue that shedding a little biographical light on the poem rescues it from its own deceptions and exposes its true intentions; others might feel that such an interpretation represents a reduction of the poem’s ambitions, restricting it to a cheesy pun, i.e. hawking as a ‘gentlemanly pursuit’, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Either way, and issues of sexual orientation notwithstanding, the poem’s local concerns are eventually transcended by the global psychodynamics of those final four lines, in which an intricate form of symbiosis, and the necessary sacrifices and compromises occasioned by it, are cast in a calculatingly Machiavellian turning of the tables. 150

The Hawks and the Doves ‘Mutualism’ is the term used to describe a cross-species biological barter – an example being the African honey­guide bird, which at the sound of a whistle from honey-­hungry tribespeople will lead said people towards a bee hive, incentivised by a share of the spoils. Quite how the hawk of Gunn’s poem intends to turn any such mutualism to its advantage, and the specific way in which tamer will become prey, isn’t made literal or clear. Nor should it be: because Gunn’s sudden and stunning about-turn opens up all kinds of possibilities, by which the apparently captive partner in this relationship might furtively draw sustenance and power from the apparent captor. In an older definition of the word (and, as we have already noted, Gunn is not deaf to such provenances), ‘prey’ also means ‘booty’, ‘winnings’ or ‘prize’. As the more acclaimed, famous and infamous poet of the two, Ted Hughes needs little introduction or documentation – in the safe knowledge that both the biographical and critical context to Hughes are either well understood or widely available, I’ll skip the backstory and get straight into the poetry. The title poem (and the opening poem) of Hughes’s 1957 debut collection offers a more earthbound perspective than Gunn’s ‘Tamer and Hawk’, its speaker trudging through wet and sticky mud reminiscent of the World War I landscapes that would re-emerge in the same volume and beyond. And it is a kind of war: the aerial menace of the hawk – surely a kestrel on this occasion – non­chalantly introduced, mid-sentence, in the closing moments of the first verse, hanging like a dark seraph in the air of the stanza break, while down below, the labouring 151

a vertical art mortal suffers the trials and indignities of geography and meteorology, plus the physical limitations of his own species. Via a poetry that carries strains of Yeats, Lawrence, Owen and, most definitely, Dylan Thomas, the piece moves towards an image of the downed bird, like a crashed fighter plane; but it’s only a ‘maybe’, a kind of wishful thinking or revenge fantasy on behalf of the speaker. Like Gunn’s poem, ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ is a manand-bird two-hander, though this time the tale is told from the opposite point of view, with little in the way of ‘mutual­ ity’ to be witnessed – except by desire, perhaps, through what feels to be the speaker’s underlying envy of the bird’s attributes, expressed as payback or Schadenfreude on the surface, but disguising a deep-lying admiration bordering on covetousness. It’s a covetousness subliminally intimated through the hypnotised speaker’s obsession with the hawk’s eye, described as ‘still’ in stanza two and ‘angelic’ in stanza five. And because the optical ‘eye’ and the first-person pronoun ‘I’ are perfect homophones, a point is reached where man and bird begin to converge, or the former begins to imagine himself the latter. I also firmly believe that ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ is a poem about writing, no matter what philosophies, preoccupations, theologies and mythologies other commentators have proposed in their interpretations and evaluations. I don’t say this glibly, in the way that all paintings are about painting because they use paint, or all writing is about writing because it uses language: I mean in its deliberate word choice and its carefully constructed subtext. This is a poem in which the serried furrows of ploughed 152

The Hawks and the Doves land are lines; in which each clay-clogged step is a poetic ‘foot’; in which the ‘earth’s mouth’, a repeated phrase, is attempting to give voice; and in which the ‘point of will’ is the mind and instrument of the poet, aligned with notions of animal instinct, invigorated with primal reflexes, hovering over the flat, wet, muddy mess of literature. Hughes himself remarked how the book with which this poem shares its title was intended to ‘challenge everything being written in England’, a bold statement in keeping with his determination to wriggle free of ‘the terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus of ancient English poetic tradition’. And anyone thinking that Hughes was beyond the programmatic endeavours or game-playing manoeuvres of writing poems about writing poems need only turn over two more pages from ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ before encountering ‘The Thought Fox’ (written in the early hours of the morning after an evening spent in Thom Gunn’s flat, according to Jonathan Bate), one of the most enigmatic and beguiling ars poetica of the twentieth century. Yet for all its impact at the time, ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, both the poem and the book, now reads like a dress rehearsal for what was to follow. Lupercal, published in 1960, drew strength not just from its predecessor’s achievement, but from the attention and praise reserved for the animal poems. This time there were more (arguably), and they were better (arguably), and among the best of the better ones is ‘Hawk Roosting’ (unarguably). By now, Hughes would surely have read Gunn’s ‘Tamer and Hawk’, and would no doubt have been aware of the overlaps – to the point where he seems to pick up where Gunn signed off, the ruthless and 153

a vertical art imperious bird continuing its dramatic monologue, but now independent and autonomous, with a keeper’s wrist replaced by the branch of a tree. The poem recycles, or perhaps regurgitates, notions of creation from ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, though where that bird once held ‘all creation in a weightless quiet’, like some kind of Charles Atlas-cum-bossy britches librarian of the avian world, creation can now be held in a single (metrical?) foot: a foot that all creation designed. Magisterial and indisputably militaristic on its perch, the roosting hawk oozes arrogance and assurance, so we might infer from its silhouette some form of imperial emblem or fascistic insignia, and hear in its soliloquy the voice of a dispassionate and tyrannical dictator. Considering the poem as a portrait or aria of political and psychological megalomania has been a profitable exercise, not just for dedicated Hughes scholars, but for the hundreds of thousands of students who have ‘done’ ‘Hawk Roosting’ in the classrooms and exam rooms of Britain – often encountering it in the ‘conflict’ section of an exam anthology, and being encouraged to discuss it in the same terms as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, perhaps, or any number of World War I poems. Hughes himself once described the subject of the poem, inexplicably, as ‘peace’, and elsewhere retrospectively identified the hawk as the Egyptian sky deity Horus. My own inclination, at least for the purpose of this lecture, is once again to see it as a poem about writing, both a continuance of the argument taking place between the lines of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ and in conjunction with Gunn’s ‘Tamer and Hawk’. 154

The Hawks and the Doves Not long after the appearance of his first collection, Hughes became a well-known poet, a status most poets never achieve in their whole lives. He might not have had the world at his feet or creation in his claws exactly, but he had most definitely made an impression, and he had done it his way, on his terms, being marked out as different, special, unique. If the confirmation and approval flattered him, it also appears to have empowered him: Hughes wrote with greater conviction and clarity through the late fifties (much of that period spent in America, incidentally, with Sylvia Plath). And it’s the culmination of that conviction – not only in his ability, but in his preferred and affirmed role as a maverick and outsider – that leads Hughes, I believe, to the final line of ‘Hawk Roosting’, a line breathtaking in its simplicity and jaw-dropping in its condescension, from a poem whose composition was ‘truly one of the best moments of my life’. ‘I am going to keep things like this’ is an assertion of poetic intent, by a poet who had got ‘things’ as he wanted them and felt he had the power to maintain control. It is a top-down, authoritarian diktat, issued both to himself and to his growing number of readers: a manifesto-­style declaration that would have proved too egotistical and reactionary had it been delivered directly from the poet’s throat – instead, Hughes channels its message through his totemic alter ego, the hawk, his own voice a kind of subwoofer beneath the more immediate and proximate claims of the bird (which, in keeping with the poem’s persona, read as a plausible version of a raptor’s thought process, where ‘Nature is thinking’). ‘I am going to keep things like this’ is not just a 155

a vertical art prediction, but a guarantee, even a threat, with that beautifully disarming imbalance between the imprisoning ‘keep’ and the nebu­lous, deliberately generalised ‘things’. What things? Oh, you know – everything. And it’s the deter­ mination of the ‘I am’ portion of the statement that I associate most closely with ‘Tamer and Hawk’, hearing its equivalent in the poem’s penultimate end word, ‘choose’. Choice is a central concern in Gunn’s work as an aspect of existential free will, and in ‘Tamer and Hawk’ I hear another poetic mission statement: a vow or sworn oath on the part of the author to be both civilised and wild in relation to his art, to be both captive and captivating, to accept whatever nourish­ment is offered, but also to bite the hand that feeds it. ‘Tamer and Hawk’ and ‘Hawk Roosting’, whatever their alternative identities, are proclamations from two young men to whom poetic recognition came early and easily; surly and macho poems from emergent poets who, as well as being real-life tough guys in their different ways, were combative and belligerent on the page: Hughes brawny and muscular in his diction, Gunn with his six-pack stanzas and hench rhymes; Hughes drawn to the unanswerable violence of the natural world, Gunn flirting with man’s inherent violence within himself. ‘I am going to keep things like this.’ ‘I . . . choose Tamer as prey.’ So, how did it work out? Well, as Robbie Burns reminds us, ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley,’ and what went ‘agley’ for both Gunn and Hughes – what they couldn’t fortify themselves against, and what they couldn’t foresee as the cocky young gang leaders of 156

The Hawks and the Doves the New Poetry, with territory to protect, competitors to see off and supply lines to maintain – were matters of love and death. Spoken in this context, the word ‘suicide’ will auto­ matically evoke the presences of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill, whose deaths, to frame it fatalistically (as Hughes often did), still lay in wait for the author of ‘Hawk Roosting’. But for Thom Gunn, a suicide haunted the past. When he was fifteen, his mother killed herself in the living room of their Hampstead house, Gunn and his brother coming in from the garden to discover her body. In the 2017 publication of Gunn’s Selected Poems, its editor Clive Wilmer includes among extensive and illuminating notes an entry from Gunn’s diary at the time. It begins, Mother died at 4.0 a.m , Friday, december 29 th 1944 – She committed suicide by holding a gas-poker to her head, and covering it all with a tartan rug we had. She was lying on the sheepskin rug, dressed in her beautiful long red dressing gown, and pillows were under her head. Her legs were apart, one shoe half off, and her legs were white and hard and cold, and the hairs seemed out of place growing on them. In fact, Wilmer implies that this was Gunn’s first-ever diary entry. Students of literature and/or human nature might reasonably speculate that an incident as traumatic as this, witnessed so graphically at such an impressionable age, and prompting Gunn to pick up his pen in response, would at some stage find itself the subject of his poetry. When no 157

a vertical art such work materialised, at least not for the best part of half a century, the next assumption would be a connection between the poet’s expressed aversion to confessional writing and his long silence on the subject of his mother. In fact, it makes his comment about Plath – who, of course, died in similar circumstances – all the more resonant. It’s also diffi­ cult not to associate Gunn’s descriptions of statuary with the ‘white and hard and cold’ legs described in the diary. ‘You may from this conclude I like the things / That help me if not lose then leave behind, / What else, the self ’, he appears to confide, towards the end of his longer poem ‘Transients and Residents’. There are, it should be acknowledged, glimpses of the maternal across Gunn’s work, but glimpses are all they are. In ‘Rites of Passage’, the metamorphic first poem of his LSD-inspired collection Moly, the speaker’s sudden mutation into adolescence is presented as a transformation from human to beast – one that taunts and goads its father, while attempting to communicate with an absent, perhaps buried figure. It ends, ‘I stamp upon the earth / A message to my mother. / And then I lower my horns.’ ‘Rites of Passage’ calls back to the earlier poem ‘The Goddess’, where a soldier in a park waits for Proserpina’s emergence from the dark of the underworld. And in the still earlier ‘Jesus and his Mother’, Mary’s line ‘I taught you speech, we named the birds’, recalls how Gunn’s love of literature came from his mother and not at all from his father, who only read journalism and detective fiction. (No offence, crime writers – of course detective fiction can be literature, don’t shoot the messenger. Or, if you do, make sure 158

The Hawks and the Doves you wipe the prints from the trigger, then hide the weapon somewhere where the jaded, divorced and recovering alcoholic cop with the enigmatic surname, who’s about to be taken off the case, can’t find it until Chapter 22.) But if the closing moments of ‘Tamer and Hawk’ were written as a stay against sentimentality and mawkishness, and to bolster Gunn’s icy poetic convictions, it’s also notice­ able, through the course of his work, how often the image or idea of a person holding or holding onto another person by the hand or arm recurs; and the extent to which the meaning of that gesture – which, in the coming together of talon and wrist, is an image of betrayal and duplicity – becomes a signal of compassion and condolence in the later work. In ‘The J Car’, Gunn walks his dying friend ‘home through the suburban cool / By dimming shape of church and Catholic school’ – dimming not just in the evening light, but because the friend’s eyesight is failing and his strength fading, so my assumption is that they walk arm in arm. And in the poem ‘A Blank’, Gunn observes an acquaintance in the street, with ‘a four-year-old blond child tugging his hand’, a hand that has reached across the biological gap (the boy is adopted) to offer ‘This fair-topped organism dense with charm, / Its braided muscle grabbing what would serve, / His countering pull, his own devoted arm.’ The motif re-emerges in Gunn’s elegy for Robert Duncan, from his final book Boss Cupid. Following his last-ever poetry reading, Duncan falls down the steps of Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley, ‘Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn’ – a myth, according to Gunn, who 159

a vertical art nevertheless was present, and who ‘picked him up where he had softly dropped, / A pillow full of feathers.’ The poem ends with an image of a sparrow, briefly illuminated as it flies through the open ends of a feasting hall. And that arm-in-arm companionship is there again in ‘Terminal’, a description of another ailing friend ‘Resistant to all help however good / Now helped through day itself, eased into chairs, / Or else led step by step down the long stairs / With firm and gentle guidance by his friend’. The poem ends ‘I think of Oedipus, old, led by a boy’ – instructive in the sense of Gunn’s long-term poetic treatment of his parents, from ‘the man I least / Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast’, in the poem ‘From an Asian Tent’ (subtitled ‘Alexander thinks of his father’). Finally, unexpectedly, but perhaps inevitably, two late poems emerge on the specific subject of his mother, whose maiden name, Thomson, he adapted and adopted as his own first name, having being born William Guinneach Gunn. It’s as if brotherly love had to precede motherly love in the sequence of his work; as if The Man with Night Sweats, his great sequence of elegies and laments for those friends and acquaintances who died in the AIDS epidemic of the eighties and early nineties, had opened up some new line of communication between his heart and his head. The poem ‘My Mother’s Pride’ ends ‘I am made by her, and undone’, and on the following page, overleaf, we encounter the more astonishing ‘The Gas-poker’, which opens not just with a realisation of time having passed, but an acknow­ledgement, I think, of how long the poem has been in the making. Gunn said that the poem ‘came easy’ once 160

The Hawks and the Doves he’d hit upon the idea of writing about the incident in the third person, ‘because it was no longer about myself ’, an externalising strategy that allowed him to maintain his artistic and intellectual position in relation to confessional writing, and to keep him from becoming Sylvia Plath. But, from a reader’s point of view, the poem’s faux dispassion only ramps up the sense of a hidden hurt finally addressed, a weeping wound belatedly attended to. Returning to Hughes, I’d argue that those endlessly publicised catastrophic events in his private life sent the lofty and hubristic roosting hawk into exactly the kind of tailspin fantasised about in the last stanza of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’. From around the mid- to the late sixties, the voice that had proved so captivating and confident in early Hughes begins to ventriloquise less familiar locutions, and the set-piece poems and mainstream collections are replaced by fugitive or outlier configurations of work – projects emerging through the smoke and mirrors of limited editions and private pressings, projected through prisms of semi-mystical ritual and rite, presented as obscure dramatic sequence, or delivered from behind masks and disguises. Interestingly, three such works are bird-related. The first was Crow, starring a charred and desensitised post-apocalyptic corvid, grubbing among the moral ruins of civilisation. Next came Cave Birds, summarised as far as possible by Neil Roberts as a myth ‘in which the crime of modern humanity (symbolically male) against nature (symbolically female) is superimposed on his personal guilt about the deaths of women he had loved’. Staged and structured as a courtroom drama in an underworld 161

a vertical art setting, the guilty and executed protagonist is resurrected in the closing moments of the sequence, in a poem entitled ‘The Risen’, accompanied by Leonard Baskin’s drawing of a crouching raptor. The poem ends, ‘But when will he land / On a man’s wrist.’ There’s no question mark attached to the sentence, and no answer supplied. The third of the riddling avian poem dramas is Adam and the Sacred Nine, in which the world’s first man is called upon by nine different birds, each bringing its own message or teaching. A reworking of Kabbalistic mysticism it may well be, but to my way of thinking, any such theological or philosophical underpinning is essentially a foundation platform for yet more veiled poetic soul-searching, with the guilt-stricken author as the disgraced Adam, lying in a puddle of mud, contemplating his future. The visiting dove struggles to deliver her milky blood and the flesh of her breast, eventually finding a perch in a ‘body of thorns’, and the visiting falcon seems more machine or fighter jet than bird, with its ‘gunmetal feathers’, ‘bullet-brow’ and ‘tooled bill’, insisting on its falcon-ness; insisting that Adam ‘man up’ and find the falcon within. In some respects, it’s not dissimilar to the poem ‘A Sparrow Hawk’ that opens Hughes’s 1989 collection Wolfwatching, an expanded field note delivered with typical Hughesian imagery and relish: ‘Those eyes in their helmet / Still wired direct / To the nuclear core’. But unlike the monologue of ‘Hawk Roosting’, the sparrowhawk here is a third-person ‘him’ – removed, remote and described with an air of longing and wistfulness, a bird seen at distance in the twilight, among oaks likened to that most nostalgic of 162

The Hawks and the Doves instruments, the harp. I hear melancholy in the poem – the poet contemplating a fleeting image of his younger self. Just to be clear, in using bird poems and bird sequences to chart a descent in Hughes’s poetry, I’m not talking about a fall in the standard of work: some of these poems, books and assignments are among his most revered and discussed. I’m talking about descents into regret, difficulty, terseness, obscurity, evasion, fragmentation and stealth; declensions of thought and purpose that are detectable right up until the publication of Birthday Letters. If that sounds like a crude or even cruel narrative – assembled with the benefit of hindsight and making all kinds of impertinent assumptions – it’s one that seems to be shared by Hughes himself. What should have been ‘a solid city’ of a life’s work had turned out to be ‘a series of hasty campfires’, to quote Jonathan Bate quoting from one of Hughes’s notebooks, with Hughes apparently acknowledging that ‘his real poetic work had been blocked since at least 1970’. In a 1998 letter to his son Nicholas that turns eventually to the same subject, Hughes says, ‘So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say.’ He describes ‘the business of your mother and me’ as a ‘log jam’ and a ‘glass door’, obstacles barring his way forward for decades. Many of the poems in Birthday Letters, or versions of them, were composed long before publication, but making them public, ‘like a confession’, says Hughes, was the act by which the log jam was detonated and the glass door shattered. He writes, ‘It’s as though I have completely new different brains,’ and ‘I have a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962.’ Put simply, by finally giving 163

a vertical art in to the autobiographical impulses he had denied himself, Hughes is taken beyond mere relief or release, towards something approaching euphoria and rapture. I say ‘denied himself ’, though of course confessional writing was a hardly an option for Hughes at the time, since no direct exposure of the soul could have contended with, or replied to, the tense, tender and tormented agonies of Plath’s Ariel, or could have answered those cries and calls, like those of the injured falcon of Chaucer’s ‘The Squire’s Tale’. I can’t say if Gunn felt a comparable exhilaration when finally addressing the subject of his mother’s death, but in the very appearance of ‘The Gas-poker’ there’s a sense of the drawbridge coming down; of Gunn uncoupling from ‘concepts linked like chainmail in the mind’, lifting the curfew and the state of martial law imposed on his work and acquiescing to his own observation whereby ‘Continual temptation waits on each / To renounce his empire over thought and speech’. As with Gunn, even though Hughes put up stiff defences and operated for years with something of a bunker mentality, there were always ecstasies, elations and epiphanies to witness here and there, in the gaps – as with his poem ‘A Dove’, first published in 1979, and often afforded a special place in the tables of contents in his books, cushioned from other poems by a gap or line space. The poem has an antecedent in ‘The Dove Breeder’ (from The Hawk in the Rain), a piece in which love strikes from above like a hawk into a dovecote; a bloodthirsty energy the breeder manages to turn to his advantage, Thom Gunn-style, ending with the couplet ‘Now he rides the morning mist / With a 164

The Hawks and the Doves big-eyed hawk on his fist.’ Note: not ‘wrist’, but ‘fist’. Of its sequel, if I can put it like that, Gunn wrote to Hughes admiring the phrase ‘Wings snickering’ for its ‘rightness’, and comparing it with the accuracy of gnats ‘Scribbling on the air’ in Hughes’s poem ‘Gnat-Psalm’. ‘So accurate, such phrases, that they seem obvious, and yet no one ever said them before you.’

165

Like, Elizabeth Bishop

I’ll begin with a few quotes, all taken from Geography III. Here’s the first: Iberia in shape resembles a stretched-out hide, its breadth running north to south, the neck pointing east. And the second quote: The same is true of whales of differing shape and size; from their snouts columns of water are blown out which to those looking on appear like tall thin clouds. And finally: In countries by the ocean the sun appears larger as it sets and makes a sound like hot metal in a cold trough, as though the sea hisses when the sun is plunged into its depths. 167

a vertical art Apologies to Elizabeth Bishop aficionados ransacking their mental files and folders of poems; the quotes are actually taken from the third book of the Geographica, by the ancient Greek traveller and author Strabo, rather from the American poet’s 1976 collection of the same name. Apologies also for the crude translations, and for inserting line breaks into the work of an ancient and venerable prose writer – but there is method in my misdirection, which I believe goes beyond the coincidence of a shared volume title. Like Strabo, Bishop was a geographer. She even wrote a travel book about Brazil (though ‘chose not to’ remember much about it), and was typically a geographer of the page rather than the planet; a describer rather than an explorer; someone who had undoubtedly journeyed, but whose expeditions were principally those of curiosity and inventiveness – extensions of fancy and association that propelled her beyond the circumscribed boundaries and borders of lived experience, into more metaphysical and imagined territories. ‘I was always a sort of guest,’ Bishop said, talking about her relationships with her relatives and carers, but commenting by extension on the places where she was required to live and the locations in which she found herself. Bishop’s poem ‘The Map’ occupies page one of her 1946 debut collection North and South and represents, therefore, something of a poetic embarkation – the last line, ‘More delicate than the historians’ are the map-­makers’ colors’, disclosing from the outset the poet’s fragile investment in a personalised and customised world. And in many of her best pieces, poetry wells up out of a form of journal-­ making or note-taking, a through-the-porthole view of the 168

Like, Elizabeth Bishop planet, where the glass of the window will eventually serve as a lens, focusing on some peculiar or particular detail that catches her eye. Dozens of her poems follow this arrangement, but the title poem from 1965’s Questions of Travel is a useful example for all kinds of reasons. It begins: There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. This kind of subjective travelogue could be straight out of Strabo or one of his kind: the guided tour leading to a reflective conclusion, in this case a ‘golden silence’ that follows rain, a silence gilded by sunlight, we suppose – a period of illumination, in which the poet picks up her pen and writes the poem we have been reading. It also explains Bishop’s fascination with Darwin, given the scientist’s propensity to slide away from facts and sink ‘giddily into the unknown’, as well as his obvious relish for the exhilaration and excitement of the journey. A Galapagos of foreign lands and unusual creatures is often waiting to be encountered at the end of Bishop’s poems, at which point Darwin is usually relieved of the tiller, and Freud or Jung are called to the helm. ‘We are driving to the interior’, Bishop concludes in ‘Arrival at Santos’. Returning to Strabo, the loquacious old geographer had an endearing partiality for metaphors, often expressed as ‘resemblances’: explaining the alien and exotic through 169

a vertical art comparisons with the recognised and the understood, as in the quoted example, in which the sun sets off the Spanish or Portuguese coast like hot metal in a blacksmith’s bucket. (Strabo is actually quoting Posidonius at this point, and doubting the veracity of the senior man’s observations – though, in repeating the metaphor in full, he seems to under­stand how satisfying the image will be to a reader, and is happy to bask in its reflected glory.) Bishop is equally, if not more, partial to such resemblances. In the afore­mentioned ‘Questions of Travel’, the afore­mentioned mountains ‘look like the hulls of capsized ships, / slimehung and barnacled’. And the aforementioned ‘golden silence’ follows a rain that is ‘so much like politicians’ speeches: / two hours of unrelenting oratory’. These are not isolated or random examples; most of Bishop’s poems include at least one direct comparison, sometimes several, and her use of the word ‘like’ as the conductive interface in such mimetic equations – between what I. A. Richards termed the ‘tenor’ and the ‘vehicle’ – is worthy of closer scrutiny. So, as well as thinking about Bishop’s poetry through her use of simile, it is also my intention to use her work as a way of thinking about the use and value of poetic analogy. If there can be such a person as the darling of poetry, that person is currently Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Darling’, I accept, is a somewhat patronising term, but I use it as a means of characterising the degree of fondness that has develop­ed around her work. As a poet she is often ‘cherished’, and she has achieved the billing that publicists, marketing departments 170

Like, Elizabeth Bishop and blurb-writers prize above all others: she is ‘beloved’. It’s the kind of near-universal approval that led a mischievous Michael Hofmann, reviewing the Chatto edition of her Poems in 2011, to ‘feel stirrings of a wholly impersonal desire to . . . maybe pan her?’ – an urge he ultimately resisted. Yet Bishop’s semi-untouchable status can be seen as something of a conundrum, because – while her poetry subtly captured, or even anticipated, urgent literary themes of gender politics and sexual orientation – hers is, on occasions, a traditional and an orthodox art. By which I mean she is at times an oldschool rhymer and versifier, a romantic, a poet who dabbles in homespun wisdom and someone who, now and again, will offer some fairly queasy perspectives on ‘others’ and ‘other­ ness’. She is also, here and there, a poet of simple diction, conservative syntax, conventional line breaks and sequential logic; an approachable and relatable writer, whose work can be read straight off the page and ‘understood’ by almost anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language. She is not Wallace Stevens, and, several decades after her death, her occasionally engaging and endearing tones seem conspicuously at odds with the stringencies and detachments that often typify contemporary poetry. That her readability and her profundity could be considered a contradiction might seem odd to the uninitiated. But these days obscurity, rather than subtlety, is more readily associated with deep thinking and serious poetic intent – especially within a scholarly environment. So, it’s by no means a given that Bishop’s star should be so high in the sky, especially over the American campus. For such a highly regarded poet within an essentially academic territory, her work is unusually cooperative. 171

a vertical art Not that her approach has always found a favourable reception. Al Alvarez, in his 1957 Kenyon Review piece on her second book, accused ‘Miss Bishop‘ (as she is referred to throughout) of ‘mere mannered fussy prattling’, of ‘hesi­ tant involution’, of possessing a ‘finicky air’, and of having no style at all – only a tone. Of her imagery, he opined, ‘Her similes are often charming, sometimes extraordinary, but very rarely are they absolutely necessary.’ Her interest in Darwin is also an affiliation that might be levelled against her – the association making her the Victorian specimen collector or natural historian, rather than the abstract theoretician or radical experimenter in language that the mid-twentieth century might have expected and produced. What kind of poetry are we talking about? What is the nature of this work that commands so much attention from so many admirers, myself included? In reading through a poet’s entire output, it’s a habit of mine – a bad habit, probably – to try and pick out a manifesto piece: a poem whose every aspect seems to fly the colours for the whole of their writing, or which offers little resistance to the imposition of such a reading. For Bishop, I might elect the short poem ‘Late Air’. It’s a slight poem, as it occasionally admits. Slight in its extent; in the clumsy contraction ‘radio-singers’, as if they were an actual thing; in its awkward reliance on the rather mechanical ‘distribute’, even if that verb does manage to convey a sense of commercial promulgation; and slight for the phrase ‘for love on summer nights’, a line more worthy 172

Like, Elizabeth Bishop of the popular music she defines in the first stanza than the alternative to that music proposed in the second, within which the line incongruously appears. But, as a poem, it’s aware of its shortcomings – it makes something of a virtue of them, in fact – on one level going through the motions of organised verse, but using that as a cover for more nuanced and deceptive point-making; distracting with one hand while stealing, conjuring and practising little acts of legerdemain with the other. We find this in the camou­ flaged rhyme scheme and even in the poem’s title: two small everyday single-syllable words that mask more covert meanings. ‘Air’ as the breathable atmosphere, but also the medium through which the radio waves are broadcast, and the old-fashioned word for a song – both the literal song of the transmission and the song of the poem itself, set down in lyric form. ‘Late’ ostensibly gives the poem an evening setting, but also includes a sense of belatedness: the mid-twentieth century is late in poetry’s evolutionary history to be using a style and shape we might more readily associate with a poet like Thomas Hardy – but that’s what she’s going to do, and she admits to the nostalgia. (The indents are especially Hardyesque.) The poem is structured as a kind of call and response with the self, or perhaps the soul – Bishop setting out a premise in one stanza that she will go on to dispute in the next. Some people, she implies, will fall for the sentimentality of recorded music and pin their romantic hopes on its schmaltzy messages; the ‘dew-wet lawns’ are pretty much dewy-eyed with moisture. Bishop, though, will lift her sight above those lawns and stare more clear-sightedly 173

a vertical art towards the masts standing in the Navy Yard – those mundane and mechanical protuberances by which the broadcast is delivered. At the same time, Bishop isn’t promoting science over sentiment, or steeling herself against the irrationalities of love. Rather, she locates love’s symbols in less obvious locations; if there is an expression of romance to be identified this evening, it will be determined by the imagination of the poet and will be offered in poetic terms. While the five-syllable line ‘Five remote red lights’ is delivered with technical precision and uncluttered intelligence, the poet’s mind is about to transform those lights into nests, and nests of that mythical bird, the Phoenix. Phoenixes which, tonight, are not mere observers but ‘witnesses’, complicit through their presence, expert in their validation of the scene, yet silent in their agreement. ‘Only I have noticed this,’ the poet seems to be saying – hinting at forbidden passions beyond the remit of the traditional girl-meets-boy love song, and at erotic desires that lie outside the ordinary. Furthermore, the poet seems alone. One mention of ‘you’ in the first verse, one mention of ‘I’ in the second, separated by a stanza break that divides two self-contained and somewhat opposed units of thought and speech. That place where ‘the dew cannot climb’ is an envied and elevated position, but also one of isolation, or even impossibility, it seems. Below the tune, a melancholy undertone is playing. Imagery, in poetry, is an annoyingly or usefully vague term that covers everything from the overarching allegorical significance of an entire epic poem to figures of speech and 174

Like, Elizabeth Bishop the specific correlation between one value and another, which might even be expressed in a single word – as when Milton describes Adam and Eve as being ‘Imparadised in one another’s arms’, as Satan looks on jealously. For the sake of simplicity, my own practice has been to divide the larger category of imagery into three subsets, in a descending scale. At the top end, the image of the third magnitude, we have the conceit – both Petrarchan and metaphysical – in which a surface comparison parallels a poem’s inferred subtext from beginning to end. Donne’s ‘The Flea’ is an obvious example, but the idea could be applied to far longer and more wide-ranging texts: Homer’s Odyssey as a conceit for the human lifespan, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a conceit for youthful conceitedness and so on. Secondmagnitude imagery, in my classification system, covers the use of metaphor where component parts are not so much compared as confidently offered as the same thing: ‘You are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter’ (Isaiah 64:8). And first-magnitude imagery, the entry-level mimetic, if you will, is represented by the simile – again, a vexed and contested term, but via my simplification, a linguistic configuration in which the word ‘as’, or more usually ‘like’, is utilised, acknowledging that a comparison or equivalence is being proposed. Though for all its apparent forthrightness, a simile doesn’t usually stand up to too much logical prodding and probing. Take as example Eliot’s famous ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table’. In literal terms, the evening is not a place but a 175

a vertical art time – yet somehow it must assume spatial dimensions to enable it to stand as foreground to the physical entity of the sky. And all this before the real business of the simile, which requires the evening to be a patient and the sky to be an operating table (with the former ‘upon’ the latter, as opposed to being spread out ‘against’ it, as the two referents were in their original relationship). For all its contrivance and unreasonableness, however, Eliot’s opening gambit to ‘Prufrock’ remains one of the most memorable similes of twentieth-century poetry, being satisfying at an instinctive level, as well as announcing the themes of the poem and its attendant linguistic registers; as if we have experienced it as much as comprehended it. And despite their nuts-andbolts constructions, what makes similes more profound than metaphors on occasions is the idea that a likeness is an expression of approximation, allowing for or even insisting upon the possibility of unlikeness. Justifications for using imagery in poetry range from the exalted to the parochial. Towards the higher end of the argument, we encounter Milton and Paradise Lost again – not only the greatest standalone poetic achievement in the English language, but something of a textbook of critical theory, should we read it by that candle. In Book V, charged by God with cautioning Adam about his impending fall, and aware of the limitations of the human mind, the archangel Raphael begins: [. . .] what surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so, By likening spiritual to corporal forms, 176

Like, Elizabeth Bishop As may express them best – though what if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought? Right from the outset, the simile is a method of ‘justify­ [ing] the ways of God to men’; and, since mankind is made in God’s image anyway, we are but a living metaphor, and metaphor-­making is a function of our very existence, of which the sacrament is the ultimate embodiment. At the more earthbound end of the practice, images can be thought of as a form of inclusiveness and sharing, as a shorthand to reason, as a way of showing off or even as a bit of fun – the simile and the smile have much in common. Arguments against the use of imagery in poetry, and particularly simile, include the following. That it closes down, rather than opens up, possibility – reducing interpretation to a fixed and, in any case, fabricated analogy. That it is a canonical device, and therefore a chauvinistic strategy promoting disproved and disapproved-of hier­ archies of language, philosophy and literature. That it has no special meaning beyond the literal, as Donald Davidson was at pains to point out as long ago as 1978. That, in its extreme or isolated form, it is mere ornament and decoration – a criticism levelled at so-called ‘Martian’ poetry, in which comparison (it was argued) became a pennant and mascot of smug poetic satisfaction. And that there’s something cheesy or amateurish about it: poetry by numbers, lesson one in poetry kindergarten, elementary rather than elemental. ‘I am crossing the word ‘like’ out of the dictionary,’ said Mallarmé, a statement that appeared to 177

a vertical art condemn metaphor-making as old-fashioned and unhelpful – though for Yorkshire and England fast-bowler Fred Trueman it was a new-fangled contrivance of the modern era. ‘We didn’t have metaphors in my day,’ said Fred, allegedly. ‘We didn’t beat about the bush.’ Bishop frequently exploits all three magnitudes of imagery as I have defined them, but it’s her unstinting use of the rudimentary simile and her predilection for the word ‘like’ that call most attention to her taste for analogy. In work published during her lifetime – a modest output, compar­ able to that of Larkin – I have counted, or more probably miscounted, and very probably undercounted, 144 uses of the word ‘like’ in a metaphorical context. A nerdy book-bybook breakdown suggests that her strike rate of around 1.8 ‘like’ similes per poem remained true from her first volume to her last; and although some poems are, of course, simile-free, others are simile-rich, containing as many as five. More subjectively, I would contend that simile is a distinguishing feature of all of her most important, or famous, or at least regularly anthologised poems. And these statistics don’t even take into account similes constructed around the comparator ‘as’, which would increase that strike rate by at least a third. As well as spending the short days of December with the Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop in one hand and an adding machine in the other, I also attempted to categorise her use of simile by type. You won’t be surprised to hear that these results are not the findings of a rigorous of scientific investigation; I am a poet, it was Christmas and the door 178

Like, Elizabeth Bishop to the drinks cabinet was not always closed. But, at a very basic level, I feel that I now have some crude numerical evidence to support what I have always suspected: namely, that the vast majority of Bishop’s similes compare objects with objects by virtue of their visual similarities, and tend to do so via a reduction in physical scale – for example, ‘The yellow sun was ugly, / Like a raw egg on a plate’. By my calculations, there are fifty-nine more where that came from. Add to this her penchant for the words ‘little’ (seventy-­one uses in eighty-five poems), ‘small’ (thirty-five uses), and ‘tiny’ (seven uses), not to mention other terms of diminishment, and reading Bishop can at times feel like being in a chapter of The Borrowers. ‘Like’ is an especially versatile word in the English language, being verb, adverb, adjective, noun, preposition, and serving several other grammatical functions besides. It has also proved highly adaptable, not to mention controversial in its current role as a discourse-marker or conversational ‘filler’ within, like, teen speak. Sometimes it’s deployed as a stand-in for speech marks, as in, ‘He was, like, let’s order sushi, and I’m, like, dude, we’re in Huddersfield’; or as a colon before a physical or facial gesture; or purely as a way of treading water while conversing, where previous generations might have ummed and ahhed. The fact that ‘like’, when used in such a context, has become synonymous with stupidity is partly to do with the airheads and dimwits of big screen and small, to whom such verbal mannerisms are assigned; and partly because it suggests a person’s inability to confidently and accurately describe the world around them. 179

a vertical art I’m not implying that Bishop is similarly unconfident, though many commentators have noticed equivocation and prevarication in her work: a tendency to correct herself or cover her tracks within a poem, either by refining a statement or offering supplementary or alternative propositions – as in the poem ‘Under the Window: Ouro Prêto’, where typical Bishop vacillation and typical Bishop similitude combine: [. . .] Oil has seeped into the margins of the ditch of standing water and flashes or looks upward brokenly, like bits of mirror – no, more blue than that: like tatters of the Morpho butterfly. Of course, in Bishop’s case the indecision is deliberate – a technique – yet the effect is one of tentativeness or even naivety, not out of keeping with the childlike frankness of her similes and their heart-on-the sleeve willingness to compare one thing with another, or to perform a kind of hey-presto transformation. This feels especially true when we remember how many of Bishop’s similes represent reductions in dimension – large or unwieldy things being scaled down to domestic or everyday proportions, as if an attempt were being made to render the bulkier items of this world more manageable and convenient, or even to reduce them to models and toys. Added to which, the word ‘like’, even in a metaphorical formulation, always carries an echo of its verb form, giving the subconscious impression 180

Like, Elizabeth Bishop that the comparison is being enjoyed. Conversely, if we agree with the notion that a simile is only a suggested comparison, and that integral to its conception is that idea that subject and object are as unalike as alike, then the excessive use of simile by Bishop could be construed as evidence of distrust and uncertainty, or of deliberate distortion and oscillation between what is seen and what is imagined. This was a duality that Anne Stevenson, in her early study of Bishop, characterised as the mind and the mirror. I want to look more closely at three Bishop poems that employ similes at some stage in their operation. And, using a method that seems appropriate to the subject, I want to explore these poems through comparison with poems by other authors. In class, I’ve found this a useful approach; students who sometimes struggle to describe a poem in its own terms become more articulate and insightful when a contrast is offered, i.e. they begin to comprehend what a poem is by noticing what it isn’t. I mentioned Thomas Hardy earlier in the lecture, and in a previous lecture I mentioned the British and Irish propensity for sketch- or scene-writing in poems – something I approve of, something Hardy excelled at and something Bishop practised over and over. In 1934, Bishop objected to being compared with Hardy, claiming to have read ‘practically none’ of his poems, though she had read enough to dismiss them as ‘descriptions of funerals or the complaints of seduced milkmaids in Devonshire dialect’. By 1965, she’s changed her mind enough to describe Hardy’s 181

a vertical art ‘The Self-Unseeing’ as ‘my very favourite’, ‘one of his most beautiful little poems’, and reports that she is attempting to write her own poem ‘about it’. The same year she is ‘rereading Hardy’ and admiring his titles. And in 1972, in two of her famous letters admonishing Robert Lowell for his use of private correspondence in his poems she conscripts ‘dear little Hardy’ into her disapproval, quoting the Wessex man’s feelings on a similar ‘abuse’. I bring all this to the table as a way of suggesting there is more affiliation between Bishop and Hardy than just the titles of the two poems I’m now going compare: Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’, from Geography III, and Hardy’s ‘In a Waiting-Room’, from his 1917 collection Moments of Vision. The stage-setting of Hardy’s poem gives us the dowdy interior of a railway waiting room on a miserable English spring morning, the lugubrious poet noticing a bible – whose pages have been used, somewhat sacri­ legiously, by a ‘bagman’ to tally his accounts – and a soldier and wife about to be separated ‘as they believed for ever’. But the gloom is lifted by the words of an innocent and enthusiastic child, who interprets the posters of ‘fly-blown’ liners as images of hope and excitement. There’s a corn­ iness to the poem; a contemporary cynic might find in its saccharine finale and manipulated sentiment the artistic equivalent of the latest boyband pop video, or the leaked outline for next year’s John Lewis Christmas advert. But it’s crafty as well, and certainly crafted, Hardy’s waiting room being a limbo space between an Old Testament England and a world to come, his one simile making the laughing children both a new dawn and the sacred flame of a more 182

Like, Elizabeth Bishop enlightened spirituality; his own presence in the poem a marginal one, and a generous one, the speaker disappearing into the shadows as the younger generation emerge and shine. And I can’t resist the superstitious notion that the child in Hardy’s waiting room is reincarnated in Bishop’s waiting room, but with the action relocated to a dental practice in Massachusetts, the bible replaced by a copy of National Geographic and the limbo a place of emerging consciousness between a childlike incorruptibility and the dawn of adulthood. ‘The mystery here addressed is that of the existence of the conscience in an insensate universe,’ says Martin Seymour-Smith of Hardy’s poem ‘Moments of Vision’ and the theme that extends through the collection of the same title, but it can just as convincingly be applied to Bishop’s waiting room poem. On this occasion, though, the child speaks for herself, Bishop reminding Hardy, as it were, that adults and the elderly don’t own the franchise on anxiety and apprehension. In Bishop’s poem, the unstable universe is a personal one, all her coordinates and reference points called into question by the offstage auntie screaming in the dentist’s chair, and the depictions of imminent cannibalism and erupting volcanoes in a maga­zine she has turned to for the purpose of distraction. It’s from one of those National Geographic photographs that Bishop constructs the poem’s only direct simile, which reads: ‘black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs.’ It’s a disturbing image for a number of reasons, not least for its unacknowledged allusion to the noose, and I mentioned Bishop’s occasionally dubious portrayals of the foreign 183

a vertical art and the strange earlier. In the poem ‘Manuelzinho’, for example, and despite occasional mitigating moments of guilt and self-reflection, Bishop’s portrait of the servant or handyman of the title consists of a list of complaints and frustrations, made by the lady of the house against the untameable native, whose children scuttle around her ‘like little moles’. And it’s a similar Elizabeth Bishop whose poem ‘Filling Station’ begins with the rather prim ‘Oh, but it is dirty!’, before running the white glove of judgement over the owner’s dirty boiler suit, his ‘greasy sons’, the ‘grease-impregnated wickerwork’, and the ‘dirty dog’ – ‘all quite thoroughly dirty’, she confirms to us, before concluding with the rather patronising platitude ‘Somebody loves us all.’ Or have I missed the irony? Returning to National Geographic and Bishop’s lightbulb moment, I suppose it could be argued that in relating the incident in this way, the poet is being candid about the way the photograph struck her, just a few days shy of her seventh birthday; alternatively, we might feel that in choosing to include such detail while writing as an adult, the simile does Bishop no favours, particularly from where we view it in the early twenty-first century. True to form, Bishop here is comparing nouns with nouns, and comparing bigger nouns with smaller nouns that are domestic and utilitarian, which, as comparators, only exacerbate the uncomfortable exoticism of the analogy. And for me, the fact that the image is so contrived only adds to the discomfort: the neck of a screw-in lightbulb isn’t wound with wire at all, but consists of a moulded or pressed metallic casing, and her oxymoronic black 184

Like, Elizabeth Bishop lightbulbs stand in stark contrast to the single simile in Hardy’s waiting room poem, in which the children are likened to ‘the eastern flame / Of some high altar’. Of Hardy’s poems, Larkin once observed, ‘there is a little spinal cord of thought, and each has a little tune of its own.’ By later life, the tunefulness of Bishop’s rhyming and lyricism had largely given way to freer – if not free – verse, but the long thin anatomy of ‘In the Waiting Room’, and the irregular vertebrae of its stanzas, could be thought of as a form of Darwinian adaptation. On that front, it’s also interesting to consider that the events being described in both waiting rooms, on either side of the Atlantic, could be occurring almost simultaneously. Hardy’s poem appeared in a book the year before the end of World War I, and Bishop’s poem ends: Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918 . I don’t think Bishop could ever be convincingly described as a ‘war poet’, but, at some level, twentieth-century conflicts are surely present in the symbolism of her poem ‘The Armadillo’ – a poem eventually collected in Questions of Travel with a back-dated dedication to Robert Lowell, but which had first been published eight years earlier, in the New Yorker. Lowell cited ‘The Armadillo’ not only as the 185

a vertical art style model for his signature poem ‘Skunk Hour’, dedicated to Bishop, but also as the irrigating element that ended a barren period of creativity, via which he turned from the rhyme-heavy, densely woven verse of his first three collections to the more languid forms and confessional attitudes of Life Studies and the poems for which he is now remembered. Bishop and Lowell’s bond was a marriage consummated by correspondence, an epistolary relationship to rival that between two poets of any era. It was a conversation that flowed through the work as well, though despite Lowell’s acknowledgement of debt, on the face of it there’s a striking lack of similarity between ‘The Armadillo’ and ‘Skunk Hour’: the former composed of rhyming quatrains, several lines conforming to or falling into regular iambic tetrameter; the latter being an apparently looser composition of six-line stanzas, the lines varying in their length, their syllable-count and their stress-count, and the stanzas utilising occasional but irregular rhyme or off rhyme. Both poems, I suppose it could be claimed, exhibit organising principles from which they are not afraid to depart, and both, of course, are ‘animal poems’, as well as being poems that delay the introduction of those animals until their closing passages. Bishop’s titular species makes a brief three-line appearance between an owl and a rabbit – animals that command more column-inches than the armadillo. Lowell’s skunk, when it arrives, is a far more conspicuous and flagrant presence, in a poem whose direction of travel is towards the ‘interior’, from the sparsely populated coastline to an inland town and eventually into the head of the author, who at one point 186

Like, Elizabeth Bishop presents himself as a kind of peeping Tom or early ‘dogger’, ogling lovers in their cars through the windscreen of his Tudor Ford. The devil has all the best lines, they say, and mature poets steal, says Eliot; thus, at the moment ‘Skunk Hour’ turns in on itself, Lowell appropriates Satan’s famous self-assessment ‘myself am hell’, as rendered by Milton. In some respects it’s a moment of audacious, even absurd mimicry, and the absolute zenith of confessional narcissism: Lowell having the brass neck to compare his own mental turmoil with all the turmoil in the universe, from the beginning of time until the end of eternity. That said, we might remember that Milton wasn’t beyond a little griping himself, and that even within the selfless masterpiece that is Paradise Lost he finds time in Book III to bemoan his loss of sight – devastating for the author, of course, but, in comparison to the fall of mankind, somewhat trivial? ‘I am the skunk’, said Lowell in a letter to Bishop, identifying himself with the mother creature rummaging in the trash can in the final stanza – not unlike the manner by which the poet himself snoops around in his car at the top of the hill, grubby and shameless, feeding off the pleasures of others. My own response to the poem has always been to see the skunk, and especially the skunks of the previous stanza, who march up Main Street with their eyes of red fire, as not so much Lowell, but his demons – an uncontroll­ able, unpredictable and unwelcome gaggle of troublesome creatures, who emerge from the moonlight to do as they please, ransacking his thoughts and destroying his composure. By the end of the poem, something of 187

a vertical art an accommodation appears to have been arrived at: the poet on the back steps, taking the air as the mother skunk plunders a discarded cup of sour cream; but the truce is an uneasy one, and it’s the animal, rather than the poet, who ‘will not scare’. Lowell is not the armadillo of Bishop’s poem, despite what some have thought. Despite, even, what Lowell might have alluded to in an introspective, retrospective essay about ‘Skunk Hour’, in which he talks about his earlier poems as ‘prehistoric monsters’ wearing ‘ponderous armour’, and how reading Bishop had suggested a way of ‘breaking though the shell of my own manner’. ‘The Armadillo’ describes a St John’s Day festival in Brazil, and the outlawed practice of releasing ‘fire balloons’ into the night, forerunners of today’s equally destructive paper lanterns, I imagine. I also imagine that in Bishop’s Brazil the illegality related to the combus­tibility of many dwellings and buildings at the time, though the poet’s concern is primarily for the animals endangered by the falling balloons – one of which, she says, ‘splattered like an egg of fire’. It’s a thought-provoking simile, given the Phoenixes of ‘Late Air’, and one, I think, that combines the revelry and romance of the carnival (at least when the balloons go up ‘like hearts’) with notions of aerial bombardment as they come down. The fire bombings of World War II, the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the conflagrations of the Korean War all feel present in that image. Admittedly, the references are indirect to the point of sublimity, but that was Bishop’s way, in the same way her own ambiguous presence in the poem is incorporated into the words ‘we’ and ‘our’, i.e. she’s not alone. The use of ‘us’ in line eighteen is 188

Like, Elizabeth Bishop more inclusive, more globally intentioned – but in a stanza in which a forsaking is taking place, and in which those heart-like balloons are not only receding and dwindling but ‘suddenly turning dangerous’, their role as romantic signi­ fiers can’t properly be ignored. If the skunk is Lowell, is Bishop the armadillo? Certainly she empathises with the animal, and its habits as a creature feel commensurate with the poet’s somewhat withdrawn and reclusive personality, both in relation to the world and the page. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down – that’s all we get of the creature whose inconspicuousness in the world seems in direct proportion to its walk-on (i.e. walk-off) role in the poem. Except, of course, where it remerges in that enigmatic, rhetorical and italicised final quatrain, in which ‘a weak mailed fist / clenched ignorant against the sky’ is presumably the scaly paw of the animal, the impassioned protest of the poet and the ardent but ineffective remonstration of poetry itself. On this occasion, it feels as if the art of comparison is being called into question, the ‘dreamlike mimicry’ [emphasis mine] being ‘Too pretty’ – though whether Bishop is complaining about the fire balloons and their hazardous attempts at representation, poesy’s misguided efforts in the field of imitation or some failing on her own part in being beguiled by metaphor, I’m not certain. Like many of Bishop’s poems, 189

a vertical art ‘The Armadillo’ turns away from resolution or conclusion in its closing statement, preferring instead some more inscrutable expression or gnomic utterance, as if the signalling and semaphoring throughout had already done the work, after which a grand closing gesture would seem gratuitous or vulgar. Let’s not forget that this was the poet who told us she celebrated winning the Pulitzer Prize with a couple of Oreo cookies in the empty house of a neighbour, and whose best memory of Yaddo (the legendary writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs) was a visit to the local racetrack, where she watched grooms sweeping horse manure into brass dustpans. Bishop was adept at distraction and deflection, not only in interviews but also in poems – especially towards the end of poems, where a reader’s attention is often ushered away from any manufactured significance towards the incidental, the mundane and the seemingly irrelevant. The majority of Elizabeth Bishop’s work doesn’t look or sound like the majority of Stevie Smith’s work, but there are more than a handful of individual poems that have Smith-like qualities, especially some of the lighter and more playful ‘uncollected’ verses published posthumously in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box – poems like ‘Close close all night’, ‘Keaton’, ‘Mr and Mrs Carlyle’, and ‘The Soldier and the Slot-Machine’, which begins: I will not play the slot-machine.     Don’t force the nickel in my hand. I will not play the slot-machine.     For all the nickels in the land. 190

Like, Elizabeth Bishop It’s a comparison, or at least an equivalence, that extends to the lives of the two poets as well – lives out of which the poems extend. Of the same generation more or less (Smith being nine years older), both women were practising poets during a century in which dramatic changes to the traditional structures of society were taking place. As writers, neither Bishop nor Smith were seen as operating in the vanguard of those changes, and both were reluctant, in different ways, to be categorised as women poets (though later appraisals identify strong feminist themes in their work). Both poets positioned themselves on the margins of poetic society, and as outsiders to, or independent of, the metropolitan literati; and both have been claimed and acclaimed as gay poets, though again, this tends to be through retrospective consideration and interpretation, rather than by declarations made by the poets themselves. Both Bishop and Smith suffered from respiratory problems, from psychological issues ranging from painful shyness to depression and nervous breakdown, and both were practitioners of the visual arts – Bishop having said on a number of occasions that she would have preferred to have been a painter, and Smith, of course, publishing her cartoon-like line drawings as illustrations to her poems, or vice versa. More significantly, and in a more striking parallel, both poets suffered parental abandonment. Bishop’s father died when she was just eight months old; Smith’s father effectively deserted the family when she was two or three. When Bishop was five, her mother was hospitalised with mental health problems. She was soon afterwards committed to a sanatorium for the rest of her life, dying when Bishop was 191

a vertical art twenty-three. Smith’s mother died when Stevie was sixteen and both poets were raised by their extended families. It’s easy, of course, with hindsight, to play the part of the ama­ teur psychologist, but it is naive not to acknowledge the importance of such emotional circumstance when it appears reflected in the work. ‘One Art’ is probably Bishop’s most recognised and antho­ logised poem – though, personally, I don’t feel it’s an unqualified success. My problem is in the logic: Bishop’s assertion that ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ and her conclusion that such losses are ‘no disaster’ being, in my view, two separate and non-contiguous positions. By which I mean, it would be perfectly possible to master the art of losing but still find the consequences disastrous. I say this because I feel we are encouraged to understand, through the examples she gives, that Bishop’s art of losing is an active one – like the art of stealing, or the art of sleeping – whereas each section of the poem reflects not on the action but on its consequences. What I think Bishop means, and what commentators allow for her, is that coming to terms with the effects of such loss is the thing that can be mastered. My point is nitpicky, hair-splitty, not absolutely water­ tight and I’m sure a half-competent grammarian could mount a decent case for the defence. But it’s important, in the sense that we need to be confident about what is at stake here – otherwise, how can we fully enjoy the deception and evasion that Bishop performs for us? ‘One Art’ is a late poem, albeit one that underwent endless refinement, and carries a tone of summation, even finality: the poet apparently looking back at her life and dismissing the impact 192

Like, Elizabeth Bishop of loss with a somewhat jocular tone. But that breezy waving away of disaster is a conscious duplicity, designed to alert us to the true heartbreak occasioned by accumulated losses – or ‘losing’, as Bishop has it. For one thing, it isn’t humanly possible to suffer so repeatedly, and on that scale, without being significantly affected – is it? And for another, Bishop isn’t capable of writing a mundane and vacuous poem whose response to a series of escalating bereavements amounts to little more than a cheery and banal ‘Oh well, never mind.’ The language of the poem wears a brave face, but one we’re expected to see through, and its declarations are deliberately half-hearted. So, Bishop’s career preference for ambiguity serves her well here, the easy-going, almost childlike tone of the language being immediately undermined by the rigid strictures of the villanelle – a form whose repetitious nature implies fixation bordering on obsession. Other things to notice and admire include the pun of her mother’s ‘watch’, especially in combination with her play on the word ‘farther’ in the previous stanza, and the word ‘shan’t’, which introduces a calculated uncertainty to the poet’s argument, theatrically distancing herself from the most recent or impending loss with a somewhat decorous verbal gesture and a confusion of tenses. I detect an equivalent strategy at work in Stevie Smith’s ‘Infelice’, also a poem of deliberate self-deception in the territory of love, also a poem which ends with the intention to commit thoughts to paper, and also a poem whose emotional locus might be found in its central simile, i.e. a man with a face ‘like the sand’ – shifting, unreliable and, never the same in the morning as it was at night. 193

a vertical art Finally, of course, we encounter the chequered flag of that parenthetical, part-italicised, part-capitalised and exclamation-­ marked exhortation: ‘(Write it!)’. Meaning what? Advice to others? Another pun – as in, make it right, rather than stop getting it wrong? An encouraging instruction to the self? All three, probably – and other things besides, I dare say – but most pertinently the latter, relevant in this context for the way it falls between two instances of the word ‘like’. Because what it tells us about Bishop’s atti­ tude to analogy, if nothing else, is that the act or art of comparison is crucial enough to let a complex and contorted simile occupy the critical position in this crucial poem; and that things might best be observed, captured or even understood in terms of what they ‘may look like’, i.e. with a sideways glance. Or in poetry’s ‘peripheral vision’, as she once described it – glimpses of what ‘one can never see full-face but that seems enormously important’. So that stuttering, hesitant, and interrupted double use of ‘like’ is actually a reinforcement, a confirmation of her true feelings about the power of loss and the power of metaphor, in the form of a philosophical double negative. Across nineteen lines, Bishop claims a kind of emotional resilience, while simultaneously conveying to us the insincerity of that claim; likewise, in that final line, she apparently doubts the comparison between loss and disaster, even though disaster is exactly what it is.

194

Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres

To write in winter is a contrary endeavour, an act of resistance. It involves crossing the season’s picket line to access the icy workshop; creating lifelike things when so much of what is living is being taken away; rubbing the hands together for warmth when cold has entered the bones; and striking sparks into damp kindling when the planet has turned its face from the light. It’s a contradiction poetry has not been able to resist. During the previous winter – by which I mean the old-fashioned calendric winter, when the nights of lowest temperatures and the days of longest darkness used to reliably coincide – I reread Tape for the Turn of the Year, by the American poet A. R. Ammons. I’ve spoken previously about how I became drawn to mid-twentieth-century American poetry, finding it a breath of fresh air compared to the clubby standoffishness of certain strains of British poetry of the same era – the fresh air being the frontier of the empty page, there to be explored and adventured along, and the breath being the proximity of the written word to the spoken language, where colloquial registers, local rhythms and quirks of dialect were celebrated front and centre, rather than being tolerated as eccentric outbursts or stifled altogether. What I heard and what excited me was the voice rather than the intellect, and although Ammons wasn’t by 195

a vertical art any means the most vernacular or demotic of his peers – in some instances he was one of its more cerebral practitioners – I fell originally for the languid, conversational charms of his poem ‘Corsons Inlet’. Having released himself from the burden of form, from what he calls ‘the perpendiculars, / straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds / of thought’, the poet continues his free-verse wandering and wondering along the New Jersey shoreline, relieved that ‘Overall is beyond me’, liberated from the responsibilities of summary and conclusion we associate with the bards of yore. The titles of the poems in Tape for the Turn of the Year (which are really subtitles in the form of dates) imply entries in a poetic journal, beginning on 6 December 1964 and ending on 10 January 1965: a continuous daily record, with the exceptions of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (when we might assume Ammons had other claims on his time, or other things on his mind), and 29 December. I approached the collection as if it were a kind of advent calendar, dutifully opening each poetic window on its corresponding date and encountering entries ranging from half a page to a dozen or more pages in length – often commencing with a matter-of-fact weather report. Harold Bloom said of Ammons that his poetry ‘helps me to live my life’ – quite a claim – and, crudely speaking, I suppose I wondered if it could do the same for me, either emotionally or practically, on a day-by-day basis. But it isn’t the diarised format that gives the poem its energy and frisson, so much as its means of production – by which I mean the roll of adding-machine tape on which Ammons composed. The poet acknowledges to his readers, and to himself, the 196

Winter Words potentially synthetic and gimmicky nature of such an approach in the opening section, confiding: I’m attracted to paper, visualize kitchen napkins scribbled with little masterpieces:    so it was natural for me (in the House &       Garden store one night a couple weeks ago) to contemplate     this roll of adding-machine tape, so narrow, long, unbroken, and to penetrate    into some     fool use for it: I thought of the poem then, but not seriously: now, two weeks have gone by, and     the Muse hasn’t rejected it, seems caught up in the    serious novelty: 197

a vertical art A serious novelty indeed. Determinedly quotidian and playfully mundane at times; introspective, philosophical and melancholic at others. The tape, with its finite but unknown length, representing an exploration of stamina and dedication, as well as imposing unusually slender constraints on the emerging work. It’s a limitation that forces Ammons into making spontaneous and improvised decisions in regard to line breaks and layout, as he slaloms down a seamless ‘page’ about three inches in width, the colons he prefers to full stops emphasising the continuous forward motion of the exercise. The mention of ‘House & / Garden’ might seem throwaway but actually sets up one of the poem’s ongoing dichotomies: between the domestic life of the writer, much in evidence here, and the world through the window – the outside, where winter sets in, into which the restless imagination and sometimes the body must roam, and from where they must return. In that respect, Tape is a long poem of inner and outer journeys, with the Commedia, the Aeneid, Piers Plowman and even The Pilgrim’s Progress as shadow narratives; but, in terms of its quest for home and the meaning of home, always with Odysseus as a travelling companion. In one of the poem’s few direct quotes, and in staccato, one-word lines, Ammons’s wife Phyllis becomes a sardonic but telling Penelope, when she calls her husband to the table, saying, ‘You can come sit 198

Winter Words down now if you want to.’ Odysseus’s journey to the underworld seems present in several passages, via the occasionally elegiac or funereal tone. On 29 December – the third of the missing dates – Ammons couldn’t keep his rendezvous with his ‘Muse’, because he attended a memorial service to William Carlos Williams in New York, which he describes the following day. Earlier, on 8 December, Ammons watches a violent storm on the Atlantic horizon and ruminates on the nature of fate and prophecy. The next morning, he reports how a plane carrying eighty people was brought down by the distant weather. Spontaneously, and as if turning to the adding machine paper for its intended and dispassionate purpose, Ammons then presses down on the 1 key eighty times, until a cemetery of upright digits or unmarked graves has reached its tally – each figure registering an anonymous embodiment, or memorialising a lost life, through an expression of cold numerical fact. Elsewhere, Ammons is an unacknowledged Theseus, equipped with Ariadne’s thread, using the tape to navigate his way in and out of the labyrinth of winter, and through the shadowy tunnels of his thoughts. It’s hard to do justice to the poem by commentating on it, because there’s something experiential in its flow and direction – something in 199

a vertical art the silent reading of it that reproduces the process of its construction, all the self-conscious wobbles and existential balancing acts that must have taken place as Ammons negotiated the treadmill of the paper, performing his poetic log-rolling act with the spool disappearing beneath him. Nowhere are those feelings more present than when the poet notices a red edging to the paper, indicating that time is running out, and sees the end of the roll lifting from the floor, rising to meet him. The peculiarly extruded poem has served as a handrail or safety rope through to the promise of spring, but the death of the poem waits at the far end. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all I did during those short dark days of winter was read, that all I read was poetry, or that the only poet I read was A. R. Ammons – even if my regular appointments with Tape for the Turn of the Year had the intensity and sometimes the claustrophobia of a waking hibernation, of deliberately joining the poet in his slow journey through the gloomy underpass. Though when I did open other books, it was mainly with the intention of complementing, complicating and sometimes contradicting the experience with other seasonal poems. If many biographical accounts are to be believed, A. E. Housman was an unlovable individual: an intellectual snob and dedicated misanthropist who emitted a virtually tan­gible air of disapproval, and existed within an almost visible aura of unapproachability. Frogmarched along to today’s T. S. Eliot Prize Readings or Poetry International, for example, I imagine him sitting at the back of an 200

Winter Words auditorium in a pose of expressive isolation, rolling his eyes and harrumphing at the half-witted attempts of today’s supposed literary heavyweights. Press-ganged into witnessing a performance poetry ‘gig’ or a spoken word ‘happening’, I picture him on the back row of a stand-up club, or on the fringe of a crowd at a muddy outdoor festival, regurgitating his elevenses. I visualise him in this hall today – or, rather, I visualise the empty chair where he sat for a few seconds, the unimpressed scholar-poet already on a train and halfway back to Cambridge. But even when Housman was trying to be as disagreeable as possible, it’s difficult not to agree with some of his observations, his 1933 Leslie Stephen Lecture being one example. Better known by its title, The Name and Nature of Poetry, in its closing paragraphs the lecture departs from the usual customs and courtesies of academic objectivity, as he describes his own writing practice – beginning with a pint of beer at ‘luncheon’, followed by a two- or three-hour walk ‘only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons’, during which poetic thoughts would occasionally and unaccountably ‘bubble up’. We’re familiar with his description of poetry as a ‘morbid secretion’ from earlier in the same lecture, but this is poetry as a gaseous emission, and if his remarks were judged vulgar and inappropriate at the time, I can only assume that was part of Housman’s general mischievousness. Continuing with the gaseous emission analogy, if the wider tone of his oration was designed to get up the noses of those in the audience, it seems to have worked: either F. R. Leavis or I. A. Richards was ‘reported to say that it will take more than twelve years 201

a vertical art to undo the harm [Housman had] done in an hour’, an anec­dote Housman was pleased to record and repeat. His headline points, however, such as they are identifiable, are persuasive and pertinent. Poetry as a subject is impossible to define, he maintains – or rather, ‘the legitimate meanings of the word poetry [are] themselves so many as to embarrass the discussion of its nature,’ and we shouldn’t compound that embarrassment by associating the activity with writing not worthy of its name. The eighteenth century couldn’t write poetry, Housman tells us – breezily dismissing a hundred years’ worth of the likes of Dryden and Pope – because cleverness had got in the way, a repressing intelligence and snivelling wit that meant poetry ‘could not describe natural objects with sensitive fidelity to nature’, and ‘could not express human feelings with a variety and delicacy answering to their own’. Three centuries later, the poetry of learned scholars is still disadvantaged by the emphasis of erudition over arti­ culation; ironically, poetry that goes out of its way to be anti-intellectual also suffers for similar reasons, when it privileges the message over the means. ‘Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it,’ pronounces Housman, finally getting to his point. And if that’s controversial or opens up the possibility of some uncomfortable truths, it’s a discomfort I recognise. A bad poem isn’t just unconvincing; it actually provokes in the sensitive reader an antipathy towards the very idea being expressed, no matter how acceptable the subject matter, or how laudable its standpoint. Conversely, when I read a poem whose outlook I disagree with – or even find obnoxious – a well-turned phrase or 202

Winter Words felicitous construction of language conjures a positive response somewhere in the neural pathways. If you want me to sign a petition against the unnecessary felling of trees in the Sheffield suburbs, don’t write a clumsy sonnet or some shouty protest piece about a sycamore – psychologically speaking, I’m going to turn up with a chainsaw. Instead, lure some hapless council bureaucrat into composing an excruciating ode on the dangers of falling branches and the health and safety implications of tree roots protruding through pavements in residential areas, and I’ll be there on the barricades. I’ll be hammocked in the boughs. Requested to supply a definition of poetry by an American publication, Housman ‘replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us’. His example of this kind of instinctive and unstoppable canine–rodent identification he gives as ‘the seventh verse of the forty-ninth Psalm in the Book of Common Prayer, “But no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him”’, of which he wrote, ‘that is to me poetry so moving that I can hardly keep my voice steady in reading it’. Another much-­ repeated example of the usually aloof Housman expressing his emotions in public was recalled by a former student, who remembered him ending a lecture with a reading of one of Horace’s Odes. ‘That [. . .] I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature,’ said Housman, allegedly, apparently on the brink of tears, before leaving the room. The poem was Book IV, Ode 7 – ‘Diffugere nives’ – which in Housman’s version begins, 203

a vertical art The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws    And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws,    And altered is the fashion of the earth. If the anecdote is to be believed, and if Housman was a practitioner of his preachings, it is the wording and rhythm of the original, rather than the outright meaning, which he found so appealing. As someone illiterate in first-­centurybc Latin, it’s an experience I can’t share or comment on – though, with just a pocket dictionary and a decent Internet connection, I can determine that his own translation is somewhat free, as poet-to-poet translations must be. In a lesser poem – for example, Wordsworth’s scandalously cheerful ‘Written in March’ – the arrival of spring stirs the spirits in the poet’s breast and is a straightforward augury of health and happiness to come: ‘Like an army defeated / The Snow hath retreated,’ carols the optimistic Romantic. In Horace, the green shoots of spring are but memento mori. The world renews, but man doesn’t, and false hope is what lies beneath the blanketing whiteness. (‘The changing year’s successive plan / Proclaims mortality to man’ is how Samuel Johnson renders its moral lesson, reorganising Horace’s dactylic quatrains into clanging coup­ lets of parade-ground iambic tetrameter – quick, clean and clever, but endorsing Housman’s point about the eighteenth century favouring the brain over the soul.) In fact, the true virtuosity of the poem lies is its slide from the pastoral to the interpersonal, albeit via mainly mythological characters. In Housman’s translation, it concludes, 204

Winter Words ‘And Theseus leaves Pirithöus in the chain / The love of comrades cannot take away’ – lines presumably haunted by Moses Jackson, the unreciprocating love of Housman’s life, to whom the poet was perpetually shackled, and from whom he was permanently bereaved. Odes IV:7 opens as a flower might wake to the spring, full of the equivalent poetic promise. But we have been deliberately misled: the snow was an anaesthetising, numbing element; sensation, when it returns, brings with it painful truths – as painful as a returning memory after Eliot’s ‘forgetful snow’. We know from the sentence-making in Thomas Hardy’s prose how well he could fashion a clause or paragraph, and how smooth and clear the words could run in his shaping of narrative, in his observations of action or in his portrayals of a character. First and foremost, the readers of his novels wanted story and plot; but, having satisfied their needs and the demands of his publishers, Hardy indulged his own preferences as a writer, initially in the off-hours and by moonlight, and eventually to the exclusion of prose altogether. And the poems feel to be developed out of a separate lexicon – as if, in constructing verse, he reached for a different dictionary, on a higher shelf. Or perhaps, like most poets, he was simply aware how conspicuous and exposed poetic language becomes on the page. It sounds odd to say this of a man born in 1840, but Hardy’s poetic diction was always somewhat old-­fashioned, and his delivery could, on occasions, as Tom Paulin has noted, carry ‘the glib sonority of a young man trying to sound old and disillusioned’. It was a poetic tone he 205

a vertical art maintained across the better part of seven decades, and one that he grew to fit; by the time of his death in 1928, his quirky grammar and peculiar vocabulary seemed not so much archaic as arcane – the idiolect of an eccentric genius with a biblical eye for lesson and parable, writing in a language of which he was the last surviving speaker, and to which only he was entitled. Yeats and Frost seemed modernist by comparison. I think of Hardy the poet as a kind of cottage-industry cabinetmaker, using inherited tools and time-honoured techniques, operating alone in a lean-to workshop behind the house: someone with a devotional respect for the materials he worked with, and whose products were antiques the minute they left the workbench. If all that makes him sound like a servant to ‘the perpendiculars, / straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds / of thought’, as Ammons put it, a disciple of the set-square geometries of his architectural training, it was his knack of incorporating reclaimed timbers and found materials into his designs that separated him from other craftspeople of his time. Those eccentric inclusions come in the form of words – words like ‘chancefulness’, ‘undecrease’ and ‘Powerfuller’; words that warrant a ticking-off from Microsoft Word’s spellcheck function, and feel as if they belong to some provincial and uncorrupted dialect of Middle Earth. Those three examples are all taken from his first volume, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, published in 1898, but ‘unnoting’, ‘deedily’, and the near-unpronounceable ‘presciencelessness’, from his posthumously published collection Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, prove he was still at it right to the end. 206

Winter Words That consistency was true of his style, as well as his diction: the phrase ‘various moods and metres’ could be profitably applied to every period of Hardy’s poetic output, and all of his collections – the moods being anything from joy to misery (though more usually misery), with Hardy always ready and willing to jump between auto­ biographical incidents and third-person recollections; between real-time observations and recalled anecdotes; and between personal confession and dramatic monologue or dialogue (though the voice is always recognisably his). As for the metres he worked in, they are as numerous as the physical shapes of the poems on the page, but it’s the metrical variation within the poems, as much as between them, that sets Hardy apart. To express this in terms of the cabinet-making metaphor: if Hardy’s symmetrical and right-angled stanzas are the solid oak drawers in a bureau or dresser, and his rhymes are the dovetails, wooden dowels and mitred corners by which the structures interlock, and his trademark indents are the decorative scrollwork and bevels, it’s the rhythmical subtlety within the poems that represent his individuality and stop him becoming the automaton apprentice to some great master or house of design, producing piece after piece of indistinguishable perfection. Even though the eye perceives something of proportion and measure in a Hardy poem, the ear recognises a more nuanced construction; rarely do the poems stride along to a repeated and regular bang of the drum from beginning to end. Where rhythms do form a sort of backbeat, careful word choice leads to restrained and understated subversions. 207

a vertical art Hardy correctly predicted Winter Words as ‘being probably my last appearance on the literary stage’, but the winter words I really want to ponder come from his previous collection, Human Shows, Far Phantasies: Songs and Trifles. The later volumes form a lesser-studied area of Hardy’s output – at least in comparison with the guilt-ridden poems from Satires of Circumstance (occasioned by the death of his first wife, Emma Gifford), or the early pieces that have the big subjects of war, religion and politics more directly in their sights. That said, the weather in Hardy is nearly always portent and symbol, and often plays a political role. After centuries of land-grabbing by the aristocratic and the elite – and given continuing fashions among the gentry for transforming heaths and wetlands into croquet lawns and boating lakes – the unpredictable and ungovernable character of the skies and seasons is a rascally and rebellious presence in the work, an irrepressible voice and one that speaks with the elemental authority of the natural world, redressing the haughty chatter of the metropolis. Human Shows isn’t entirely seasonally ordered, but the position of dozens of weather-related poems suggests the calendar as a rough template for the collection. So, pro­ gress through autumn might be monitored by keeping a close eye – a weather eye, shall we say – on the leaves on the trees as they turn, then drop, then rot. In ‘Last Week in October’, a spider’s web on tenterhooks acts as an early warning system, winter’s alarm triggered by a falling leaf that dangles like a convict on a noose, ‘mumming / In golden garb’. Another leaf, still green and innocent, shudders at such a prospect. If the personification is heavy-handed, 208

Winter Words the implications are even less subtle: death will come to all, and the loftiest and least grounded among us have the furthest to fall. In drawing a parallel between expiry by natural causes and a public hanging, it feels as if Hardy has anticipated Yeats’s ‘Man has created death’ declaration by four or five years; as the only creature in the universe (as far as we know) to be acutely aware of its own mortality, the idea of passing away becomes a self-imposed execution, a death sentence the human race has handed down on itself. By ‘The Later Autumn’, two poems further in, all the leaves of the previous year have become corpses on the floor, and this year’s crop are in the process of joining them. With an appetite for the worm and the maggot, the opportunistic robin eyes the scene. This is Hardy the consummate ghoul, never better than when he’s mooching about in the leaf litter of misfortune, always a willing messenger when it comes to delivering bad tidings – particularly if the message can be conveyed with a little twist of the knife, in this case by recasting the chirpy robin (the so-called ‘gardener’s friend’, and a clichéd mascot of a sentimental winter­time) as a vulture. By ‘Night-Time in Mid-Fall’, Hardy is in full Gothic mode. During ‘a storm-strid night’, the dislodged leaves are the very least of it: the roots of the trees are writhing and wrenching below ground, and, in a parallel image in the second verse, they have become slimy and slippery elongated fish. Stirred from their streams, eels wriggle out of the turbulent water, squelching under the feet and slither­ing around the ankles of those walking along the road in the dark. And, although this isn’t the time or place 209

a vertical art to address Hardy’s much-debated attitude towards religion, the final line of the poem – ‘Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad’, juxtaposing a creaking ecclesiastical structure against rampant sorcery, and delivered with some relish – deserves a paragraph of response. The poet John Wain, a former professor at this lectern, said of Hardy, ‘He described himself as an agnostic, but he was in many ways closer to being an atheist in the high Victorian manner, combining disbelief in God with a venom­ous dislike of Him for not existing.’ To my mind, Hardy seemed to find religion not only tolerable, but a necessary part of the social fabric, especially in rural or provincial communities where its customs and traditions formed part of a benign code of living. Once in a while he also allowed himself to be beguiled and seduced by the magic of religion, as at the end of his poem ‘The Oxen’, when he acknowledges the persuasive power of the nativity story and his willingness to be drawn along by it. But at the institutional level, religion attracts his distrust and disdain. His famous poem ‘In Church’, in which an egotistical clergy­man is overseen re-enacting a performance that thrilled his congregation, has a universal message on the theme of human vanity, but it is the theatricality of Christian worship, and the hypocrisy of its doctrines and dogma that are really being lampooned. Generally speaking, Hardy seems to say that if there is a deity, which there probably isn’t, He’s not a deliberately cruel or vengeful one, but in a frozen-hearted and unresponsive universe, it’s the unsuspecting and innocent – stock characters in his novels and poems – who will suffer most. 210

Winter Words Those autumnal pieces – ‘interleaved’, can I say, through the first third of Human Shows – bring us eventually to a more intense period of cold weather, Hardy’s own Tape for the Turn of the Year sequence, a sort of poetic mini ice age in the form of six consecutive pieces, numbered 701 to 706 in Gibson’s Complete Poems. I’ve discussed the poised ambiguity of the last line of ‘Snow in the Suburbs’ elsewhere; on this occasion I’m interested in the transformative effect of the snow. Following the increasingly bleak conditions and gloomy atmospheres of the preceding poems, the arrival of winter in its most austere garb might have heralded sadness and despair on a whole new level, but it elicits instead a considerate human-to-animal gesture, as if this pure and primary expression of nature has bestowed an unexpected tenderness on the urban environment and softened the hearts of its residents. The original manuscript title suggests the poem is set in one of Hardy’s London addresses, either a neighbourhood in Upper Tooting or St David’s Villa in Hook Road, Surbiton. Either location dates the event to the late 1870s; Hardy was recently married at that time, and although the poem doesn’t necessarily belong to that body of self-recriminatory work I referred to earlier, it carries the same romanticised view of the past and an idealised sense of companionship – the homely and cosy ‘we’ in the last line a declaration of domestic harmony, the joint decision to bring the cat in from the cold proclaiming a partnership of agreed sensitivities. If ‘Snow in the Suburbs’ was deliberately intended as a bright beginning to the short suite of winter poems, ‘The Frozen Greenhouse’, five poems later, is its morose 211

a vertical art counterpart, an example of frost having ‘a curious effect on my mind’, as Hardy put it in a letter to Florence Henniker, foretelling something of a ‘tragic nature’. No illuminating and dazzling snow on this occasion, just a murderous frigidity that kills the plants in the conservatory one night when someone neglects to light the stove. (Go through, Mr Hardy – Dr Freud will see you now.) A ‘first-date’ poem, ‘The Frozen Greenhouse’ recalls a conversation between Hardy and Emma Gifford during Hardy’s visit to St Juliot, and the deceased plants, ‘Cold, iced, forgot’, become conveniently ironic divinations for a love that would lose its heat, for a wife now lying cold in her grave, and for a poet bingeing on literary remorse – his own spousal numbness of previous years now commuted to the literal numbness of Emma’s body and mind. The last three lines show Hardy at his sharpest and some might say cruellest: the terse diction, the flat factual statements, the curt and clipped rhymes of ‘got’ and ‘not’, the simultaneous display of compassion and control, and a chilling sense of the cool detachment that is both his subject and his means of enactment. Between the contrasting bookends of ‘Snow in the Suburbs’ and ‘The Frozen Greenhouse’ lie four more winter poems, equally various in their mood and metre, and in their interpretation of climatic conditions. In ‘Ice on the Highway’ we encounter several women ‘arm in arm’, sliding and laughing their way along the ‘glassy’ road under­ foot. It’s a poem describing a glad and giddy scene, the women happy despite the weather. But read in combination with ‘The Frozen Greenhouse’ it’s a poem of distant 212

Winter Words observation – Hardy witnessing joyful sisterly companion­ ship from the position of an excluded onlooker. Of the three other poems, two concern music and the inherit­ ed significance of music in Hardy’s life and writing. In Shakespeare, at night, in midsummer, the forest is a place of magic and enchantment; in Hardy’s ‘Winter Night in Woodland’, the darkness is populated not by star-crossed lovers and roguish fairy folk, but by hunters, gamekeepers, poachers, snarers and smugglers: shadowy figures involved in shady activities, yes, but real-life people of the countryside looking to put food on the table at a time of scarcity and hardship. However, on the stroke of midnight songs are heard, chorused by named members of the Mellstock Quire from Under the Greenwood Tree. In Hardy’s words, they sing ‘worn carols’ brought on the air ‘From dim distance’. It’s a distance of time as much as place – the same distance that separates the troupe of passionless and penni­ less fiddle players in ‘Music in a Snowy Street’ from the ‘heys, / Crotchets, quavers’ and ‘old notes’ that Hardy associates with merry-making and dancing ‘When life was no trial’. In both poems, music rouses in Hardy a sentimental nostalgia for the old days and the old ways. Winter is more of a backdrop or stage set for these poems, though against its sparseness and colourlessness it feels as if the sensitivities of the poet are made keener, his nerves laid bare, his eye quick for the detail and his ear tuned to faraway noises – even to individual voices in songs being chorused by invisible members of an imaginary choir from one of his own early novels, their harmonies spanning the divide between poetry and prose. 213

a vertical art Time is also the subject of the final poem I want to discuss, though one in which winter weather is more explicit­ ly included and integral to its meaning. It’s difficult with Hardy – or at least, I have found it difficult – to accurately date the poems, and difficult to know how contemporaneous the poems are to their originating circumstances (as with ‘Music in a Snowy Street’, published in 1925 but presumably a version of a scene he observed on 26 April 1884 and recorded in his self-ghosted ‘biography’). For that reason, I can’t say for certain if ‘A Light Snow-Fall after Frost’, despite the ‘Near Surbiton’ postscript, is a poem of projection or of reflection, and whether Hardy is commenting on the ageing process from a position of anticipation or of experience. But if opinion is allowed to hold sway over fact for a moment, what I can say is that it is one of Hardy’s finest pieces, an exquisitely judged, enigmatically sequenced and expertly crafted conceit. If Housman struggled to recite from one of the Psalms without his voice betraying his response, I have the same problem with the first verse of ‘A Light Snow-Fall after Frost’, which reads: On the flat road a man at last appears:    How much his whitening hairs Owe to the settling snow’s mute anchorage, And how much to a life’s rough pilgrimage,    One cannot certify. To unpack the orchestrated emotional intelligence of the diction, the syntax, the grammar, the symbolism, the cadencing, the ordering of ideas, the physicalisation on the 214

Winter Words page, the rhymes and the puns of those five magnificently composed lines would require an entire lecture. But to consider the poem as a whole, here we find Hardy moved and enlightened by a change in the weather; the frost, which we might read as a frosty outlook, is replaced by a soft and silent transfiguring snow, prompting an introspective response from the poet. If the first traveller on ‘the road of life’ has the appearance of an older man, the fiery red beard and tree-green coat lend the second traveller a youthful vigour and vitality, though the coat is faded and the word ‘dye’ carries an echo of its morbid homophone. The imperceptible transition from youth to old age is Hardy’s theme, and the impossible task of identifying when such a change takes place. Deftly, then, instead of trying to locate that shift in his two representative travellers or letting them bear the weight of his metaphor, Hardy turns instead to the road itself, and ends with a verse equal in craft and design to the poem’s opening: The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though    But half an hour ago The road was brown, and now is starkly white, A watcher would have failed defining quite    When it transformed it so. There were heavy snowfalls across Britain in late December 1927, but by New Year a thaw had set in. ‘Diffugere nives’. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres was being prepared for publication, and in the introductory note Hardy wrote, ‘So far as I am aware, I happen to be the only 215

a vertical art English poet who has brought out a new volume of his verse on his . . . birthday’ – the number left blank, the ellipsis a ghostly omission. Hardy died on 11 January. A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year ends the previous day, winter outlived and outwitted once more, a new almanac begun, light and life on the horizon, ‘blessed hope’ sounded by the darkling thrush, the poet turning away from the galaxies ‘to the warm knot / in the dark’. Ammons’s poem has been an act of survival and escapology – a performance piece, but one performed on and at and for and with the roll of paper. In fact, by the closing stages of Tape for the Turn of the Year, it isn’t clear whether poet is conversing with page, or page with poet, as one says to the other, I’ve given you the interstices: the    space between    electrons:     I’ve given you     the dull days when turning & turning revealed nothing: I’ve given you the sky, uninterrupted by moon, bird, or cloud:       I’ve given you long uninteresting walks 216

Winter Words so you could experience vacancy: The poem, or the paper, ends, thank you for coming: thank you for coming along: the sun’s bright: the wind rocks the    naked trees:    so long:

217

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? Dilemmas and Decisions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Several years ago, I was invited into a local junior school to give a talk to a class of ten-year-olds. Dragons, knights and wizardry being all the rage at the time, I decided to read a couple of sections from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, beginning with a few lines of the original poem. Asked what language they thought the poem was written in, one kid wasn’t a million miles away when he suggested ‘Scandinavian’ (I think some of the words sounded like the names of bookcases and futons his parents had bought from IKEA). Another student wondered if it was ‘American’, and a boy at the back of the class asked, ‘Please, sir – is it Gobbledygook?’ There are innumerable reasons for translating the poetry of the past, including poetry written in earlier versions of our own languages. The most cited justification is that without translation the poems become illegible and incomprehens­ ible – but allied to that, if such poems are not mediated into contemporary registers, they become minority interests, the preserve of experts and specialists, like the gobbledygook of computer code or legalese. Translations of old and ancient texts hold open the possibility of wider readership by keeping them within reach of the literate public; it is a democratising activity. Whether the literate public have any interest in the 219

a vertical art poetry of previous eras is open to question – although as Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Hughes’s versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and countless ongoing productions of plays from classical antiquity prove, there is an audience. The dilemmas facing any would-be translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are apparent from the outset, the poem having no title other than the name it has acquired over several centuries; just as the shape by which we now recognise it is but a typeset representation of the poem’s physical appearance in the one handwritten manuscript copy; just as Ga-wain on some lips is Ga-wain on others. And that’s without getting into the poem’s methodological and mechanical processes, beginning with its metre. Marie Borroff, one of the manuscript’s most dedicated inter­ preters, while willing to divide its stressed syllables into major chiefs and minor chiefs, nevertheless concludes that the prevailing and underlying rhythm of the poem creates ‘an ongoing “swing” of four simple measures per line’, into which all its lines are ultimately accommodated. It’s a theory she imports into her translation of the poem, the opening line of which reads, ‘Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy’. In an expectation of poetic measure on the part of the reader, the first two syllables of that line are automatically subdued, throwing the subsequent stresses onto ‘siege’, ‘-ssault’, ‘ceased’ and ‘Troy’. In other words, a neat four-beat line – two beats either side of an implied caesura, with the alliterating syllables distributed across the first three of those beats. But the first line of the original reads, ‘Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watȝ 220

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? sesed at Troye’. By some counts, that’s as many as fifteen syllables – meaning eleven must be unstressed if only four of them are to be accented. Borroff contends that in the spoken language of the Gawain-poet, the final -e of a word was no longer pronounced, except perhaps at the end of a line, which might bring the number down to thirteen or fourteen when we point the syllabic Geiger counter at line one – but that’s still three or four more than Borroff’s translation. The real problem, though, is in those first words: ‘Siþen þe’, i.e. ‘after the’, or ‘since the’. In poetry – as anyone who works in a lyric mode knows – it’s unrealistic to expect that three syllables can go by at the beginning of a sentence without attracting a stress or causing the syntax to flatline. ‘Siþen þe’ absolutely insists on being pronounced as a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, meaning that line one has at least five beats in total. Furthermore, the first line of a lyric poem is usually a standard-bearer for what is to follow, announcing how the poem means to go on. And Sir Gawain will proceed with a great deal of variety: some lines, like line three (‘Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt’), adhering to Borroff’s four-beat ‘swing’ theory, but others heading for six or seven beats – a variation that Ted Hughes recognised and pondered over in his essay ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’. Following a retro­spective paper­chase through Hopkins, Coleridge and Wyatt, Hughes identified a strain of outsider poetry going right back to Gawain and before – a nonconformist approach that didn’t correspond to the structures of rhetorical English writing, or adhere to the patterns of accentual verse imported from France 221

a vertical art and Italy. This was a tribally inflected poetry of sprung rhythms, passed down from ancient and mystical traditions – Celtic and pagan, presumably – that were nearly lost once Chaucer’s all-­conquering court poetry had won the day, and pretty much euthanised on the slab of the page by interfering and refining publishers such as Tottel. It suited the rebellious Hughes to associate himself with such literary dissidents, as he saw them, and to make claims on their behalf; his reading of Gawain as a more unpredictable and irregular work, metrically speaking, is certainly borne out in his own translation of seven and a bit of the later sections of poem – a project he was never to finish. Towards the poem’s denouement, Gawain offers his neck to the Green Knight’s axe for the third and final time. The blade slices open Gawain’s skin, ‘Þat þe schene blod ouer his schulderes schot to þe erþe’. In Borroff this becomes, ‘And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth,’ but Hughes renders it as, ‘Then over his shoulders the bright blood shot to the earth.’ In this instance, Borroff has been forced to sacrifice some of the detail in the line in order to honour the fourbeat bar of her translation. The Hughes version is more accurate, arguably, for including a description of where the blood travelled to in relation to Gawain’s shoulders, and richer for incorporating the blood’s shining qualities. In fairness to Borroff, she does mention the brightness of the blood in the next line, but then so does the Gawain-poet and so does Hughes, glossing ‘blenk’, i.e. ‘glare’, as ‘blink’ – something of a playful poetic liberty, and in keeping with the shocking appearance of the red blood on snowy ground, as if it shot back a look in Gawain’s direction. In 222

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? saying all this, I’m not endorsing one approach over the other, just illustrating the available metrical options and outlining their attendant dichotomies. But scansion is boring, as I’ve just proved. So, enough of the timpani, and on to the string section. By which I mean, let’s move away from the poem’s percussive time signature and look briefly at the agonies associated with word choice, again focusing on the very beginning of the poem. I’ve stated elsewhere that the job of the translator is to create a plausible universe. For many, that plausibility is secured by the faithful translation of each original word – i.e. through defining its meaning, then selecting its most accurate contemporary equivalent – and in translating Middle English this means finding equivalences not just between languages, but also across eras. But a plausible universe doesn’t always imply a breathable atmosphere, by which I mean that a pinpoint literal substitution is rarely a guarantee of poetic achievement. This is especially true where rhyme is concerned, and true therefore of the so-called ‘bob and wheel’ sections in Gawain, where the ‘correct’ present-day definition is unlikely to bring with it the required acoustic value. In fact, the issue applies to Gawain as a whole, being an alliterative poem whose life force is wholly located in the repetition of similar-sounding noises. Let’s explore this issue through line two, ‘Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askeȝ’ – literally, or as near as I can make it, ‘The city destroyed and burnt to charred wood and ashes’. In pursuit of her four stresses, and with loyalty to those alliterative b’s, Borroff renders 223

a vertical art ‘brittened’ as ‘breached’, and replaces ‘brondeȝ’ with the archaic ‘brands’. A more recent translator of the poem, Bernard O’Donoghue, finds a succinct and contemporary solution in ‘And the city flattened to smoking rubble’, preferring the more expressive ‘flattened’ to the generalised ‘destroyed’, but choosing a more generalised ‘rubble’ over the very particular ‘ashes’. ‘Flattened’ is persuasive if we agree that ‘brittened’ has its etymological derivation in the Old English ‘brytnian’, bringing with it a sense of something broken down, distributed or divided, as per its other three uses later in the poem. As for those ‘askeȝ’, O’Donoghue omitted them only reluctantly, I imagine. Being the ghostly and insubstantial residue of their material antecedent, ‘ash’ is a naturally poetic word, its single whispered syll­ able subconsciously freighted with aspects of cremation, funeral rites, human remains and atrocity. Unfortunately, it offers few alliterative options in this context, even if under the rules of the original any vowel can alliterate with any vowel, and also with the letter h. Rubble is certainly redolent of the raised walls and collapsed buildings associated with destroyed citadels, though if it pertains more to non-­ flammable masonry and stonework, then O’Donoghue pre-empts that notion with the word ‘smoking’, inferring combustible material within the debris and also implying an enduring aftermath. Of other translators – of which there are hundreds to choose from – Brian Stone introduces a new noun element to supplement his alliterative purpose, making it the ‘battlements’ that have broken down and become burnt. Keith Harrison’s Troy is ‘beaten down’ in order to team up acoustically with ‘brands’ – though he 224

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? makes the ‘borȝ’ a ‘town’, rather than a city – probably true by today’s demographic measures, but carrying a somewhat provincial air. And in W. R. J. Barron’s prose translation, those persistent ‘brondeȝ’ have become ‘charred beams’. J. R. R. Tolkien’s virtuoso translation, with its appetite for recreating historically poetic tones, occasionally reads as older than the original. Declining what is offered in terms of ready-made alliteration, he gives line two as ‘and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes’, the repeated fricatives producing a sense of festering heat and fizzing embers, though at the expense, perhaps, of those plosive b’s in the original – materially redolent of physical impact, invoking the battering and breakage of war. Oddly for a poet, W. S. Merwin settles for a somewhat perfunctory ‘The city destroyed and burned down to embers and ashes.’ If any type of translation is to be avoided, surely it’s the kind that I assume is delivered through the headsets of MEPs sitting in the grand chamber of the European Parliament – i.e. simultaneous and information-based, doing everything possible to avoid inference and innuendo. Let’s assume, though, that by the end of line two – perhaps after dozens of false starts, with umpteen crumpled balls of paper in the wastebasket, or following several hundred hits of the backspace key – the would-be translator has arrived at a style of delivery that feels appropriate to the task and points the way ahead. And then we come to lines three, four and five. Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt Watȝ tried for his tricherie þe trewest on erthe Hit watȝ Ennias þe athel and his highe kynde [. . .] 225

a vertical art Roughly paraphrased, line three and the first half of line four refer to a ‘tulk’ – a man or knight – associated with treason­ able acts at the fall of Troy, who was subsequently tried for that treachery. The second half of line four is somewhat confusing: is it the man, his actions or even his trial that was the truest on earth? But the bigger problem comes in the transition to line five, and presents the poem’s first problem of interpretation – a sort of Becher’s Brook that must be successfully negotiated if rider and mount, in the form of ancient poem and latter-day translator, are to continue the course. With no punctuation in the original to distinguish between clauses, we’re now introduced to Aeneas and his honourable kin, but with no grammatical certainty as to his involvement in the aforementioned treason. Perhaps the ‘tulk’ was Antenor, acknowledged in some ancient sources as a duplicitous character from Troy, though it seems odd for the Gawain-poet not to identify him in a stanza where others are explicitly named, including Langaberde and Brutus, and the unheard of (or misspelt) Tirius. On the other hand, if the whole passage relates to Aeneas, why has he been promoted from traitor and mere ‘tulk’ in line three to a nobler and more glorious ‘athel’ two lines later? For alliterative reasons, perhaps – though I prefer to think the original author was better than that, and it might be the case that a tiny error on the part of a scribe or copyist has made a contradiction – or at least a conundrum – out of what was intended as a nuanced ambiguity relating to Sir Gawain’s divided character and his forthcoming dilemmas. At a time when myth and history had a tendency to intertwine, invoking Troy gives the poem a historical and 226

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? a classical gravitas, but more importantly, it establishes a bloodline between Arthur and the ancient world. Gawain in this telling is Arthur’s nephew, and as a metaphorical descendant of Aeneas he shares his psychological DNA. If we skip quickly to the end of the poem, where Gawain berates himself for his ‘trecherye and vntrawþe’, he is effectively recalling the same complaints made against Aeneas at the start of the poem, like a man admitting to fears and weaknesses passed down the family line (and this in a poem whose circularity of argument is reinforced through circularity of syntax). In fact, if those flaws were inherent in one of our founding fathers, they might also be interpreted as national characteristics, and it’s interesting to think of the poem as a reflection of Britain’s somewhat schizophrenic status as a country, from its very beginning right up to the present day. But staying with Gawain for now, I’m interested in the idea that his moral quandaries are introduced by virtue of his ancient elder Aeneas, and then explored through a series of challenges and tests. That being the case, one way of approaching the text is to identify those narrative points where Gawain is confronted with a dilemma, then to consider the young knight’s response. It’s an approach I arrived at after working on dramatised versions of the poem with actors, who were always keen to understand Gawain’s ‘motivation’ at every step of the journey. Crucially, as well as revealing aspects of his personality, such a method­ ology also credits Gawain with a certain amount of free will, rather than viewing him as a plaything at the mercy of higher or invisible powers. Seen in that light, he makes an interesting comparison with the narrator-protagonist of 227

a vertical art Pearl, whose only real dilemma is whether or not to believe the incredulous words of his precious jewel, as she instructs him in the theological consolations of loss. (At this point, let me give a whistle-stop overview of the poem’s storyline and say something about its history. It’s Christmas at Camelot, when a green knight on a green horse enters the hall and invites somebody to trade blows with him, the return blow being due in a year’s time. Gawain decapitates the Green Knight, who then puts his head back on his shoulders and warns the young man not to break his vow. Twelve months go by, and Gawain sets off to look for the Green Knight at the Green Chapel. On the way he is offered shelter at a splendid castle and becomes embroiled in a game of dares: Bertilak, the master of the castle, will give him whatever he wins while out hunting every day (deer, wild boar and fox), in exchange for whatever Gawain wins during his absence – which turns out to be a series of cheeky kisses from the lady of the house and a magical green girdle with protective qualities. Wearing said girdle, Gawain then submits to the Green Knight, survives three attempted blows to his neck, learns that Bertilak and the Green Knight are one and the same, and that the whole escapade was the work of the mischievous Morgan le Fay. Gawain then returns to Camelot, wearing the girdle as a sash, or baldric, as a mark of his shortcomings. Only one copy of the original poem exists, in the strongbox of the British Library. It was discovered in a manuscript with three other poems – Cleanness, Patience and Pearl – most prob­ably the work of the same anonymous author, and 228

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? probably composed in the later years of the fourteenth century by someone in the Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Chesh­ ire, South Lancashire or Peak District area.) Narratively speaking, Gawain’s first decision is to rise to the Green Knight’s challenge, the gauntlet having been thrown at the feet of the Round Table and taken up by King Arthur himself – even to the point of preparing to swing the axe. His intervention comes in the form of a courteous request, and while pondering his motives we might also recognise the skill with which the Gawain-poet handles the episode, having introducing Gawain some 230 lines earlier as one of many guests at the banquet, seating him next to Queen Guinevere as a matter of both drama and status. Retrospectively then, we are invited to imagine Gawain’s silent reaction to the Green Knight’s appearance and his internal deliberation during the laying down of the challenge, and to subconsciously observe the scene from his perspective, even though the focus of the action lies elsewhere. When it comes, Gawain’s offer to take Arthur’s place in the game – his maiden speech, if you like – is a particularly handsome passage: the young knight seeking permission from king, queen and court to volunteer his services, and begging forgiveness should his intrusion be deemed improper. Among his reasons for stepping forward, he lists his admiration for his king – for whom such a challenge is an indignity and a breach of etiquette – and his lack of brawn and brain compared to other knights in the hall, meaning his death would be ‘the least loss, if I live not’, as Tolkien neatly puts it. Ethically speaking, 229

a vertical art this line finds an echo in the parallel scene at the Green Chapel; as something of a puppet master in the poem, we might assume that the Green Knight is, to a certain extent mandated with authorial intentions, so when he states that Gawain’s one wrongdoing was that he ‘lufed [his] lyf’, the charge seems pertinent to his behaviour from the outset. Seen in the context of that remark, Gawain’s apparent selflessness at the beginning of the poem might be judged somewhat disingenuous, with the prospect of promotion partly fuelling his motivation, a possibility hinted at in line 359 – ‘And I haue frayned hit at yow fyrst foldeȝ it to me’ – the words of a young man with an eye for the main chance, who recognises a (literal) no-brainer when he sees it. Gawain’s interpolation is also a rash one; semantically speaking, the like-for-like blow could have been delivered with a glove or a napkin, but his martial instinct as a knight is to reach for the weapon. In a lesser poem, Gawain’s virtues and purity would be all-encompassing, or his flaws would be arch and his failings telegraphed. But in this speech, made by a tremulous adolescent on the verge of manhood, we detect both honour and hubris, and find sympathy for a young man eager to do the right thing yet vulnerable to the impulses of his ego. And it is in passages like this that I feel we are dealing with poetry of the highest order: complex yet emi­ nently readable, brilliantly structured and with a subtlety that takes the poem beyond the utilitarian requirements of doctrinal and instructional medieval writing, and into the realm of literature. Because although Gawain’s stated obligations towards his God and his faith are many and 230

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? fulsome within the poem, they often read as perfunctory and superficial in comparison with his more immediate priorities and his course of action. Likewise the author’s commitments and duties, which in the end feel as if they privilege the poetic over the devout. A number of months after my own translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published in the US, I was visited by a representative of a Hollywood studio inter­ ested in producing a full-length, animated feature film of the whole poem. It was a slightly embarrassing encounter, for all kinds of reasons – not least because they hadn’t realised I wasn’t the original author. Like Gawain, with his eyes on the prize, I didn’t tell them – and nor did I tell them that it would make a really terrible film. They were very excited by the image of the Green Knight holding up his severed head in his own fist; I think at that point in the movie version, two red laser beams would have shot out of the eyes and seared holes in Camelot’s heavy wooden doors. But the story just doesn’t have the narrative arc Hollywood expects us to expect of its products. Much of the persuasive power of the poem resides in its line-by-line detailing and its changes of pace; for example, in the painstaking depiction of the armouring of Gawain, preceded by the accelerated description of the turning of the seasons – essential if we are to accept that a full year has gone by since the Green Knight gate-crashed the Christmas party. Gone by it has, though, at which point Gawain does not need reminding of his promise to participate in a return fixture with his tormentor. 231

a vertical art We aren’t told if Gawain ever considered not honouring his vow, even if those gossipy onlookers at the castle who watch him ride out conclude that advancement to the rank of duke would have absolved him of his obligation. In any case, Gawain exhibits a soulful credibility that wouldn’t allow such a convenient dereliction of duty. Why he so readily saddles up and rides out to keep his appointment with the blade, he doesn’t especially articulate, but two points come to mind, both of them in my opinion illustrating the minor or complementary role that religion plays in his decision-making. At line 564, it is a generalised ‘destines’– either painful or pleasant – that Gawain resigns himself to, a what-will-be-will-be outcome, but not necess­ arily of God’s design. And at line 456, before exiting the hall, the Green Knight’s final taunt is, ‘Þerfore com oþer recreaunt be calde þe behoues’, i.e. ‘come or be obliged to be called a coward’ (or ‘craven’, as Tolkien puts it.) Like treachery and untruth, cowardice is one of the accusations that Gawain eventually levels against himself following his perceived failure, so we might be justified in thinking that he tears himself away from the comforts and company of Camelot with the Green Knight’s words still ringing in his ears. (Probably literally, in the never-made film version, with full echo and reverb, as his trusty horse Gringolet clatters away, its hoofs striking sparks from the stones under­foot.) But although cowardice is a crime against the chivalric code and an offence in the eyes of fellow knights, it is no sin: once again Gawain’s more-pressing obligations feel as if they are psychological or socially determined. So even if he sports the endless knot on the exterior of his 232

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? shield and the image of the Virgin Mary on the inside, beyond the religious furnishings we detect a beating heart and a thinking, independent mind. In referring to destiny, Gawain is presumably anticipating that moment in the future when the Green Knight’s axe and his own neck finally come together. And fate of a kind plays its part at other dramatic thresholds or turning points in the text, occasions when it feels as if Gawain’s decisions have, in part, been made for him, though by authorial rather than divine interference. Early in Fitt II, just seconds after beseeching the Lord and Mary to find him a place of shelter and somewhere to hear Mass, the castle of Hautdesert appears before him in one of those acts of poetic ‘pointing’ the Gawain-poet excels at, zooming in on some fine detail or offering a changed visual perspective through a particular point of view. The castle ‘Þat pared out of papure purely hit semed ’, like a paper model of the type used to decorate cakes or pies at a medieval banquet, imply­ing both high-end accommodation and lavish susten­ ance. We’re talking the medieval equivalent of Relais & Châteaux here, not a Travelodge with a Little Chef across the car park. Yet despite appearing ‘heaven-sent’, i.e. in response to Gawain’s prayer, we would do well to remember that this is Bertilak’s castle and that Bertilak is the Green Knight. In other words, rather than through the workings of an interventionist God or via our protagonist’s skills as a navigator, the means by which Gawain finds the castle (or the castle finds him) is magic. True, the decision to approach the castle is his own, hopefully wondering ‘If he myȝt keuer to com þe cloyster wythinne’, but in reality, what options does 233

a vertical art he have? Exhausted, starving, freezing cold – and having endured an arduous journey across a British country­side beset by dragons, giants and wolves, plus an alliterative combination of bulls, bears and wild boars, plus the sinister ‘wodwos’ eyeballing him from the crags – this shimmering stronghold, with its exquisite turrets and gleaming chimneys, is a gift horse not to be looked in the mouth. What kind of God responds to a plea for sanctuary by delivering his subject into the arms of his mischief-making nemesis? (A personal aside here: that word ‘wodwo’ – ‘troll of the forest’, ‘satyr’, ‘man of the woods’ – is the single reason I engaged with the poem in the first place. For anyone inter­ ested in the work of Ted Hughes, it’s something of a neon word, being the title poem from his 1967 collection, in which a being or animal of some kind attempts to articulate its sense of consciousness and existence. Neanderthal in depictions, of both human and non-human form, in the context of Sir Gawain the ‘wodwo’ is enigmatically representative of a poem that accommodates both the ration­ al and the supernatural, and could be thought of as the mascot-like embodiment of the medieval mindset and the pseudoscientific thinking of the day. Hughes himself, in a 1967 letter to Daniel Huws, impishly defined ‘Wodwoses’ as ‘middle English for Orang Outan’.) Of the other minor decisions Gawain makes in the poem – for example, whether to agree to Bertilak’s wager, and whether to heed the guide’s doom-laden warnings on his way to the Green Chapel – we might observe that, either by social duty or through personal conviction, Gawain isn’t really presented with a choice. As to his decision to reject 234

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? the amorous advances of the lady of the house and to deflect her sexually charged conversation, this feels as much a literary imperative as a moral one. Adultery and cuckolding certainly weren’t out of the question in a medieval story (just ask Sir Lancelot), but in this text such an indiscretion would have completely overbalanced the plot – a plot designed to give Gawain the opportunity of acknowledging his shortcomings and yet be recognised by the Round Table and the reader as virtuous, heroic and, most importantly, likeable. Delivering Gawain into the medieval equivalent of a swingers party, where spurs rather than car keys are thrown into the fruit bowl, would have also robbed the poem of its choreographed subtexts, things the author has worked hard to achieve – for example, through those visceral and lustful hunting scenes, with their disrobed flesh and penetrative culminations, telling us all we need to know of the fantasies and desires running riot beneath Gawain’s polite and canny rejoinders. Likewise, there must be an equivalence of risk between the two beheading scenes that bookend the poem, an equivalence overbalanced if aspects of sexual infidelity are introduced. We should also assume that even if Gawain had given in to his feelings, at some stage the lady of the castle would have withdrawn her invitation. I say this because, as Bertilak tells us, ‘I sende hir to asay þe’ (‘I sent her to test you’), a test that presumably didn’t need to go all the way. Bertilak’s setting of a ‘honeytrap’ would have been utterly reprehensible had he required his wife to literally embed herself in Gawain’s chamber, and if Gawain is to be tried for his behaviour, the internal logic of the poem insists that he cannot be tried by 235

a vertical art a full-blown hypocrite. The fact that Gawain accepts an item from the lady that carries with it sexual connotations (a belt from around her waist) is more than enough in the context. Of the remaining dilemmas, they can be thought of as the most significant by far, simply because Gawain gets them ‘wrong’. The belt I have just mentioned is offered after two attempts by the lady to give Gawain a gold ring. On both occasions he rejects this symbol of betrothal, with its implications of bigamy and unfaithfulness. But another ring of sorts, this one an intimate piece of the lady’s attire, circumscribing her waist, now comes his way. Undoubtedly Gawain has been played, softened up by the offers of the ring, after which the belt is thrust in his direction as something of a last-ditch compromise. In fact, the lady has even removed it from around her body as she makes the proposal. Again Gawain refuses, but on hearing of the belt’s magical, life-protecting qualities, his resistance crumbles – the poet on this occasion granting us access to the turning cogs in his protagonist’s mind: Þen kest þe knyȝt and hit come to his hert Hit were a iuel for þe ioparde þat hym iugged were When he acheued to þe chapel his chek for to fech (Then the knight considered it and it entered his thoughts It was a godsend for the jeopardy which he was allotted When he reached the chapel to meet his doom) Gawain takes the belt, and in doing so commits the twin crimes of cowardice and covetousness, as he later defines 236

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? them. In terms of cowardice, not accepting enchanted belts was never one of the agreed rules of the game; if the Green Knight has superpowers – he’s green, has a green horse and can self-medicate after decapitation – why can’t Gawain help himself to a little magic of his own? But the virtuous young knight has his own standards to uphold and a private moral code by which he must abide, and against that self-imposed ethical framework the use of an enchanted girdle as a defence against destiny is illicit and gutless. The covetousness comes from loving his life – the opposite of charity and an unseemly character trait in chivalric circles – and also from desiring the woman, i.e. coveting his neighbour’s wife, though the idea that Gawain might have broken one of the Ten Commandments is never explicit­ ly explored. In his final summary of events, the Green Knight finds Gawain not guilty of ‘wooing’, as he puts it, something of a lesser charge, but Gawain appears to judge himself more harshly. It’s understandable; if you’re wearing somebody else’s girdle, given to you in a bedroom by someone whose partner is out at work, at some level you are coveting. A girdle, by the way, that during its symbolic progression from belt to baldric is referred to henceforth as a love token (or ‘luflace’) – once by the narrator and once by Gawain himself, in an embarrassed speech about ‘The faults and the frailty of the flesh perverse’, as Borroff puts it. Gawain’s second crime, and the highest tariff of his misdemeanours, according to the Green Knight, is in failing to hand over the belt, as per the terms of the wager. Just to recap: what Gawain wins in the house during the day, he 237

a vertical art must give to Bertilak in exchange for Bertilak’s winnings in the field. When Gawain’s winnings turn out to be one kiss, then two kisses, then three kisses, the psycho­sexual tension within the poem rises to another level: a lie is being told, a man is kissing a man, one of those men is contemplating wearing an item of clothing from a woman’s wardrobe and that woman is the other man’s wife. All those elements combine to make this section of the text more transgressive than any of the supernatural episodes – one that subverts social conventions and undermines decorous behaviour, while at the same time pushing the poem towards the pantomimic and the absurd. Though, personally, I feel the author has missed a trick, dramatically speaking. When Bertilak arrives home from the final hunt after slaying a fox, it seems he goes directly to the hall and meets Gawain by the fire. In other words, he hasn’t spoken to his wife, so won’t have been told that Gawain accepted the belt. As a shape-shifter and an illusionist, I suppose it could be argued that Bertilak’s magical powers run to para­normal omniscience; if you can turn a horse green and speak with a severed head, I guess you can also be everywhere at all times. And the plot doesn’t hinge on Bertilak knowing about the belt at that very moment, though in light of such an understanding, Gawain’s flustered demeanour and hastily delivered kisses would have escalated the theatrical and comedic possibilities of the exchange. (Shakespeare would have turned up the heat on Gawain by letting his audience know that Bertilak was aware of the untruth as it was being spoken; in fact, in Shakespeare, Gawain would be wearing the girdle beneath his tunic as he pretended his innocence.) 238

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? The bigger point, however, is still made: Gawain tells a lie, for which there will be consequences. Gawain’s third crime is to flinch from the blade. In terms of the storyline, by this point our young hero has located the Green Chapel in what some commentators believe to be Lud’s Church, an eerie gorge in the Staffordshire Peak District with primitive and clandestine associations. Gawain offers his neck, and the Green Knight hoists the axe: Hade hit dryuen adoun as dreȝ as he atled Þer hade ben ded of his dynt þat doȝty watȝ euer Bot Gawayn on þat giserne glyfte hym bysyde As hit com glydande adoun on glode hym to schende And schranke a lytel with þe schulderes for þe scharp yrne The critic J. A. Burrow said of Gawain that he ‘analyses his single fault into three moral constituents, cowardice, covetousness and untruth,’ and, if we agree with those subdivisions of his overall failure, we might find evidence of them all in this one action. Cowardice for not keeping still, covetousness in loving his life too much and untruth in terms of not being faithful to knightly virtues, which must include bravery. In flinching, Gawain is also denying the Green Knight his right of reply, so is not being true to his word. I say ‘flinch’, though the Gawain-poet uses the word ‘schranke’, which in Middle English includes ‘wince’ among its definitions – hardly becoming for a member of the Round Table – as well as the more literal ‘to become smaller’, an insult a sensitive fledgling adventurer hoping 239

a vertical art to prove his manliness and stature would have been skewered by. Yet his reaction is one that presents Gawain as a living being, subject to the laws of biology rather than the requirements of religious homily. In another of those examples of ‘pointing’, at the moment of reckoning Gawain glances sideways or from the corner of his eye sees the falling axe, and his response is an entirely involuntary one, like blushing or blinking. In a split second, animal reflex and survival instinct override whatever philosophies and ideologies have been imposed on his thinking. The stages of the Catholic confessional and a tableau of Christ’s crucifixion might be identified in the psychic structuring of this beheading triptych, but only as sacrificial images to a more secular message – props, costumes and scenery from which Gawain emerges mortal and earthly. In such a numerically configured poem, it is both convenient and satisfying to identify those three key moments when Gawain falters, the ‘rule of three’ being deployed throughout as a literary device. But I would also point to a fourth occasion when the protagonist’s decision-making has a critical bearing on the storyline. Returning to the ‘wooing’ scenes, it’s worth remembering that on accepting the belt, Gawain is made to promise not to breathe a word of it to the lady’s husband – problematic, since his immediate loyalties would seem to lie with his host rather than with the woman who entered his bedchamber without invitation. On the other hand, lying to Bertilak only infringes the rules of a game, whereas admitting to the belt might constitute a violation of trust suggestive of adultery. Throw 240

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? in the issue of the belt’s special properties and the scales tip in the direction of concealment. I don’t think the importance of this incident, both to the plot and the poem’s moral ramifications, can be overstated, and the Gawainpoet appears to be at pains to spell out clearly what has taken place. In the 2007 prose edition of The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron translate the passage as follows: Then he gave in to her insistence and allowed her to speak, and she pressed the belt on him and offered it to him earnestly, and he consented and gave in of his own free will, and she implored him, for her sake, never to reveal it, but faithfully to conceal it from her lord. The knight agrees that no one should ever know of it, indeed, but they two, on any account. Checkmate. It seals Gawain’s fate because honesty of one kind involves deceit of another, condemning him to the kind of ‘untruth’ that he so passionately disapproves of. Incidentally, ‘free will’ here is a rendering of ‘goud wylle’, which is not every translator’s verdict. In fact, Marie Borroff, Brian Stone and Keith Harrison see the glad giving of the belt and the goodwill involved as belonging to the lady. Of those who attribute the expression to Gawain, O’Donoghue reports that he ‘gave in with good grace’, Tolkien that he ‘agreed’ to take it, Merwin that he ‘accepted’ it, Anderson that he ‘consented’, Barron that he ‘consented and surrendered very willingly’ and James Winny that ‘he consented and gave way with good grace’. Whichever and 241

a vertical art however, in receiving the belt Gawain has entered an illicit pact, the momentum of which insists he must maintain the secret. Such compliance would appear to confirm Gawain as the architect of his own downfall, especially if we suspect that in keeping the conspiracy silent, he hopes to ‘get away with it’. It should be remembered, however, that in seeing a chance to bring this immediate and excruciating social predicament to an end, while at the same time improving his chances of surviving in the longer term, Gawain has walked into a cruel and cleverly constructed trap. Like his recoiling from the blade, the response is intuitive to the point of being automatic, a choice that he will interpret as failure, but one that draws sympathy from a reader because it casts him in the role of victim. Attracting less sympathy, especially from a modern audience, is Gawain’s diatribe against women, a tirade prompted by Bertilak’s disclosure that he directed his wife to Gawain’s chamber to test him (lines 2,414 to 2,428). Gawain’s illogical and uncomfortable conclusion might be explained away by virtue of medieval sensibilities, but a contradiction in the poem’s narrative chronology a few lines earlier seems to shed more light on this sudden and aberrant outburst: And comaundeȝ me to þat cortays your comlych fere Boþe þat on and þat oþer myn honoured ladyeȝ Þat þus hor knyȝt wyth hor kest han koyntly bigyled In other words, Gawain readies himself for his invective by identifying two female persecutors, whereas at this point in 242

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? the story, the only woman involved in the conspiracy, as far as he knows, is Bertilak’s wife. Not only that, Bertilak’s wife took part at the bidding of her husband (‘I sende hir to asay þe’), in a game of his making (‘I wroȝt hit myseluen’), making Bertilak the real culprit. And, although it’s true that Bertilak was acting on orders from Morgan le Fay, as he reveals a little later, Gawain doesn’t know this at the time of his tantrum. Such an uncharacteristic continuity error by the poet, followed by an uncharacteristic rant by Gawain, leads me to believe that a certain amount of authorial control has been lost over these passages. Like many writers in an age when ‘plagiarism’ was as much a badge of learning as a crime, the Gawain-poet appropriated storylines and pirated material from diverse sources. Marie Borroff identifies two earlier ‘Gawain poems’ in Old French – The Mule without a Bridle and The Knight of the Sword – that include elements of the beheading and temptation scenes respectively; and several Arthurian stories begin with the interruption of a meeting or celebration by a stranger bearing strange tidings, an enduring staple of literary and dramatic structure (J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, for example). What distinguishes the Gawain-poet from more jobbing writers is the virtuosic reshaping of such material into a unique stylistic enterprise, whereas what distinguishes Gawain’s misogynistic outburst from the rest of the poem is its cut-and-paste complacency – the feeling that an entire system-built section has been airlifted from one text and parachuted into another. I can offer no evidence for that theory; it’s simply a speculative observation made by a poet looking at a poem and recognising the 243

a vertical art craft and craftiness of the greater part of its composition, compared with the crude mechanical excursus that takes place four stanzas from the finish line. Or maybe the poet was just having a bad day; again, something I can’t prove, but can certainly empathise with. ‘The hero of this epic is an antihero, a superman [. . .] By pre-emptively attacking a monster, he brings on himself a disaster that can only be overcome by an agonising journey, a quest that results in wisdom by proving its own futil­ ity.’ That’s Stephen Mitchell in the introduction to his free-handed version of Gilgamesh – and, like Gilgamesh, Gawain is a hero for all times, by which I mean he is hardly a hero at all. From Batman to the Incredible Hulk and Deadpool, from Wonder Woman to Daenerys Targaryen, the successful contemporary superheroes of comic strip, graphic novel, cinema blockbuster and boxed set are deter­ minedly imperfect individuals, whose feats of physical bravery and wrong-righting are always eclipsed or under­ mined by personal struggles and inner conflicts. And today’s heroes have inherited their defects and shortcomings from the heroes of myth and legend: like Euripides’ Heracles, returning home triumphant from his miraculous labours, only to slay his wife and children; and like damaged and divisive Odysseus, wily and guileful in his pursuit of home, boastful and vengeful in triumph, faithful to the point of unfaithfulness and a lover of his own life. In creating the conditions for a flawed hero like Gawain to flourish through failure, the Gawain-poet had to create for him an adversary of similar ambiguity, a figure both 244

Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? human and monstrous, being green and a half-giant, but one who is slender, handsome and, in his communication with Arthur, quite literally a speaker of the King’s English. As further evidence of that ambiguity, he holds in one hand a fearsome weapon but in the other a branch, bunch or cluster of holly – an evergreen token of life and peace. Through his decisions and choices, Gawain learns the hard way that to err is human, to be born is to be a hypocrite, and to recognise and admit one’s inadequacies is to come as close to triumph as is humanly possible.

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‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’: Clarity and Obscurity in the Age of Formlessness Had closed-circuit television been as widely used in retail premises thirty-odd years ago as they are today, grainy film footage would verify that on the afternoon of 23 February 1982, the eighteen-year-old Simon Armitage was a customer at the Co-op mini supermarket on the corner of Great Southsea Street and Elm Street in the city of Portsmouth. The date is significant: Shrove Tuesday, a respected and observed event in the household of my upbringing, though more for culinary than religious reasons. On that particular Shrove Tuesday, I was 250 miles away from where I grew up – a homesick Geography undergraduate at Portsmouth Polytechnic, about to indulge in a large helping of comfort food. Like most students of the day, I was something of a survivalist chef and not familiar with the preparation of even the most basic dishes – which explains why I purchased an expensive sachet of ‘pancake mix’. Back in the forty-watt gloom of a squalid bedsit, disappointment and humiliation went hand in hand once I had deciphered the small print on the reverse of the packet, which read, ‘Just add milk, eggs and a pinch of salt’. (In other words, I’d bought a few ounces of flour.) The word ‘Just’ was especially annoying – as if it were a nonchalant or capricious afterthought rather than an integral part of the recipe. And 247

a vertical art the ‘pinch of salt’ delivered a kind of subtextual ironic insult; the pinch being the painful nip and lingering bruise of having been swindled, the salt being of the hypothetical kind, to be rubbed into the open wounds of ignorance and naivety. Even if I could have scraped together the money to buy a pint of milk, six eggs (when I only needed a couple) and a canister of Saxa, by that stage I had neither the energy, enthusiasm or self-esteem to traipse back across Southsea Common. Thus, the delicious-looking product on the shiny cover of the packet – a packet that, for all I know, might still be sitting at the back of a shelf in some grotty student dive, less Shrove Tuesday and more Ash Wednesday by now – went unrealised. And I am using Ash Wednesday here as a contrived segway into T. S. Eliot, because, in the early years of my poetic self-education, I did from time to time file some of his work in the pancake mix folder, frustrated by a poetry that either deliberately or unintentionally failed to incorporate key ingredients, the omission of which said a great deal about the poem’s intended audience. Of course, there were always the notes, as in ‘Notes on The Waste Land’, supplied with the poem, but weren’t they just a paperchase in their own right, leading to more unanswered questions? Why was Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ acknowledged as the pre-echo to line 196, ‘But at my back from time to time I hear’, but not to line 185, ‘But at my back in a cold blast I hear’? And even if I knew that ‘Lac Leman’ was Lake Geneva, on the shores of which Eliot convalesced in late 1921, or even that ‘leman’ is another word for ‘lover’ or ‘paramour’, didn’t ‘By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .’ merit a quick 248

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ ‘cf. Psalm 137’, to point in the direction of the Rivers of Babylon? Eliot famously pronounced that meaning in a poem might be provided ‘much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for the housedog’, though that statement itself reads like something of a diversionary sausage – especially to readers who consider that the ineffable and transcendental properties of a poem can only work in harmony with their literal and comprehensible counterparts. Across the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the divide or separation between reader and writer. I thought about it again a few months ago, after taking a friend to a poetry reading – a friend who reads a great deal of literature, of which poetry is only a small proportion. ‘Those introductions and explanations between the poems – why don’t they put them in the book?’ he wanted to know. On behalf of the Poets’ Union, I trotted out the standard justifications: that the book is a more considered environment than the recital, allowing readers to encounter poems at their own pace; that in supplying context, which in any event can only be partial, a poet is operating in an autocratic rather than a democratic manner by restricting the interpretative liberties of the reader; and that anecdotal asides are not really offered as elucidatory insights, but as a relief from the effort of attending to intense and unfamiliar formulations of language. ‘Yeah, I think they should put them in the book,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘Or, better still, in the poems.’ Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 allegorical fantasia The Fight Between Carnival and Lent depicts a semi-pantomimic clash between the forces of excess and the forces 249

a vertical art of austerity; the carnival’s chief and most corpulent representative rides into the fray on a beer barrel, wielding a long skewer with a pig’s head on the end and wearing a meat pie as a hat. Coming at him from the other side, dragged along on a crude and uncomfortable-looking trolley, is Lady Lent, sallow and bony, two scrawny fish on her outstretched baker’s paddle. The battleground is a market square, with a well in the middle signifying some sort of neutral location, or perhaps the winning objective. If I were to mischievously repopulate the painting with opposing forces from the world of poetry, the scene would present a symbolic conflict between excess and parsimony; between openness and disguise; and, metaphorically, between those who combine milk, eggs, salt and flour in one product, and those who don’t. Wordsworth was an all-inclusive poet – I might even have him in the front rank, charging into the dispute sporting a juicy pork chop on the front of his chariot – and as evidence I offer his untitled, self-reflexive sonnet, ‘Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room’: Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room; And Hermits are contented with their Cells; And Students with their pensive Citadels; Maids at the Wheel, the Weaver at his Loom, Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness Fells, Will murmur by the hour in Foxglove bells: In truth, the prison, into which we doom 250

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground: Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find short solace there, as I have found. The poem was composed in that period when the poet’s mind was turning towards the expanding manifesto-style remarks prefacing the Lyrical Ballads editions; and, to Wordsworth’s detractors, ‘Nuns fret not’ reverberates with the same supercilious attitudes and protocultural appropriation they detect in the Lyrical Ballads project as a whole. Nowhere in the letters or the biographical accounts is there any evidence of the great bard canvassing the opinions of nuns or hermits regarding the limited geometry of their accommodation or the restrictions of their callings. Only in Romantic representation was spinning and weaving anything other than a laborious and underpaid activity. And, so far as he has authority to speak on behalf of the bee regarding its likes and dislikes, the most that can be allowed is that Wordsworth has successfully used the insect to ventriloquise elements of his argument. As to his celebration of confinement, it makes an interesting contrast with Terrance Hayes’s latter-day articulation, describing the ‘American sonnet’ as ‘part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame’. But if the poet’s case is flimsy and his evidence somewhat conscripted, the execution of his reasoning (particularly in the second half of the poem) is priceless, possibly through 251

a vertical art that quiet transition into personal experience and private conviction – always safer ground in a Wordsworth poem. It is interesting to note that in the earliest known draft of the poem – written in Dorothy’s hand, at a speed suggesting contemporaneous dictation – the bees that ‘murmur by the hour in foxglove bells’ have travelled on a flight path ‘from Bath to Wells’, and ‘the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’ – the best phrase in the poem – was formerly ‘the little Sonnet’s humble ground’. Whatever you think about Wordsworth, he knew how to revise. (Or Dorothy did.) By the time the poem is written up in an edition presented to Coleridge, to accompany him on one of his frenetic Mediterranean jaunts – again in Dorothy’s hand, but this time with greater care – it has achieved the wording we now recognise as its finished arrangement. Both within the poem and elsewhere, Wordsworth often pondered and reflected upon the fourteen-line form, the key by which ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ (‘Scorn not the Sonnet’). In November 1802, in a letter probably written to Charles Lamb, he comments that Milton’s sonnets are ‘distinguished by simplicity and unity of object and aim, and undisfigured by false or vicious ornaments’. Despite some misgivings, he goes on to applaud the way Milton’s music­ ality has ‘an energetic and varied flow of sound, crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of’. That reuse, or prior use, of the phrase ‘narrow room’ reads like a confirmation of Wordsworth’s paralleling of physical geography and poetic form; and in January of the previous year, in a letter to the Whig statesman Charles 252

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ James Fox, accompanying his gift of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the poet makes a more direct association between honest toil, limited space and the consequences for language. Speaking up on behalf of ‘small independent proprietors’ in ‘the North of England’, he says, ‘Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten.’ By 1833, in a letter to the anthologist and editor Alexander Dyce, Wordsworth has revised his thinking on the sonnet, so that ‘Instead of looking at this composition as a piece of architecture, making a whole out of three parts, I have been much in the habit of preferring the image of an orbicular body, a sphere or a dew-drop.’ Something patterned and regulated on the one hand, yet impressionistic and equivocal on the other. And this I find instructive, because Wordsworth’s own sonnets, including his sonnet of sonnets, ‘Nuns fret not’, are astonishingly transparent at the textual level – or, as I have categorised them previously, inclusive. Everybody – even the semi-literate payroll of William’s own writings – knows what a nun is (ditto a hermit, a maid, a prison and a foxglove), and even if some readers might not be able to pinpoint the exact location of ‘Furness Fells’, the reference is fairly self-explanatory. The orbicular and spherical elements – those aspects magnified and manipulated through the lens of a drop of liquid – are presumably provided by the form: a form that arranges language in accordance with rhythm and positions words in accordance with sound, the consequences of which – no 253

a vertical art matter how much we think we know about the effect of such qualities on the senses and the imagination – are ultimately ineffable. A monumental generalisation: back in the day, most poetry was constructed using a pattern or formula of some type. Over time, form came to be ditched – mainly because it represented the old farts, with their stuffy directives and controlling regimes. They had to be overthrown, and tearing up the rulebook was a necessary stage in the revolution. But form provided mystery in poetry. It brought ritual and ceremony to writing, without which writing was prose. So a new type of mystery had to be developed to replace form’s complex and enigmatic effects, and it emerged as concealment: concealment of meaning, concealment of motive, concealment of reference, concealment of reason. It had always been there, but now it gained primacy. The hidden codes in poetry – once the preserve of unspoken line breaks, subconscious structures and indefinable musicality – were replaced by withheld knowledge, suppressed information and camouflaged intent. I don’t expect everyone to agree with that assertion, and I know there are thousands of examples to contradict that logic – but as a broad trend, as a vague drift, I believe that to be the case. And if the Wordsworthian approach is to be located at one end of the spectrum, on the inclusive side of things, then on the exclusive side (toward the right-hand margin of the Brueghel painting) we find a poetry so frugal and miserly in its patency that it might even be described as homoeopathic, containing within it 254

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ only subatomic quantities of its actual purpose. An efficacious remedy to some, snake oil to others. Part 1 of W. S. Graham’s poem ‘Approaches to How They Behave’ reads: What does it matter if the words I choose, in the order I choose them in, Go out into a silence I know Nothing about, there to be let In and entertained and charmed Out of their master’s orders? And yet I would like to see where they go And how without me they behave. It partially acknowledges one of the great anxieties of modern poetry, as articulated through modern criticism: that no matter what control poets attempt to exert on the page, ownership of and power over any text rests ultimately with the reader, and readers are largely unpredictable in their responses. It’s an anxiety that has encouraged some poets to back away from direct intentionality and to treat language as being wholly enigmatic – like music or colour. In doing so, they have aimed for response and effect, rather than comprehension and understanding (their endeavours usually culminating in failure of one sort or another, IMHO – because once language has been acquired, by virtue of its definitions and its usefulness as a communication tool, it cannot, except through neurological dysfunction or blunt trauma injury of some kind, be unlearned. It’s like trying to open the fridge door 255

a vertical art before the light comes on; illumination is a function of its programming). I now want to look at a handful of attested and affirmed contemporary poems, by a handful of praised and decor­ ated contemporary poets, and to plot where they lie on the Shrove Tuesday–Ash Wednesday axis. The poetry of Sinéad Morrissey is, on first appearances at least, outward-facing and public-spirited. By which I mean her poem ‘Collier’, to take a random example, is about a collier, the poet’s collier grandfather, as it happens, as she acknowledges in line one, the directness of her expression throughout giving us every reason to be confident that this is her actual grandfather, rather than a character of literary fiction. Likewise, when her poem ‘Perfume’ opens with ‘My Great Auntie Winnie may as well have spotted a crack / in the floor of Nottingham’s Odeon Cinema’, it’s fair to say that we know where we are. Many of her poems have a talky, conversational quality (a quality emphasised by her public readings), and at page level most are organised by shape, I would suggest, rather than form, in the strict sense of the word. Her poem ‘Jigsaw’, from her 2013 collection Parallax, conforms pretty closely to that description – i.e. when we learn in line one that ‘The Royal children have been sent a gift’, we are right to assume that gift is the jigsaw of the title; just as line two, ‘A map of Europe from 1766’, provides useful geographical and historical exposition, as well as announcing the system of irregularly cadenced off-rhyming couplets by which the piece will proceed. 256

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ Some of those rhymes are little more than the same letter at the end of lines – though, for the sensitive, they are as keenly felt as a petit pois beneath the layered mattresses of a sleepless princess. The poem’s meaning, if I can put it in such crude terms, is on a par with the comprehensibility of its syntax: as a toy for the offspring of the elite classes, this jigsaw map, with its many geopolitical inferences, is a metaphor for the world they will inherit, and the earth’s surface is a ‘game’ or ‘puzzle’ to be dismantled and rearranged according to preference and prejudice. Being a thing of borders and territories, the map also speaks to predicaments and crises of a contemporary nature, and a note of gender politics is sounded via the indirect reference to male primogeniture. Possibly because her poems often focus on actual things – places, works of art and scientific phenomena – Morrissey has taken to including a page or so of notes at the back of a collection, the notes from Parallax relating to six poems, on five occasions describing the means by which the poems were ‘inspired’. No note, though, on ‘Jigsaw’, which I find odd, since presumably it was ‘inspired’ by John Spilsbury’s 1766 ‘dissected map’ Europe divided into its Kingdoms, sometimes credited as the first-ever puzzle of its type. Perhaps Morrissey saw it in the flesh as one of the prize possessions of the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, or just encountered the exhibit online, next to a commentary explaining how Spilsbury marketed his jigsaw maps ‘as educational playthings to aristocrats whose children needed to learn geography – vital preparation for their future roles in governing the British Empire’. There’s no obligation to credit 257

a vertical art source material in a poem, of course, and the poem certainly functions without any supporting explanation. Also, the poem is about a puzzle, so why shouldn’t it be a little bit puzzling? Just because the partly qualified cartographer in me feels that the poem would be enhanced by a mention of the original jigsaw map doesn’t mean that everyone else will feel the same. Still, I’m curious about the moment, and the reasoning that took place in that moment, when the poet decided to withhold disclosure. When she thought, No, I’m not telling them that. ‘Receiving the Dead’, from Morrissey’s next collection, On Balance (2017), is another poem that extrapolates significance from an antique artefact – but of an acoustic rather than visual nature. This time there is an accompanying note, which reads, ‘When Gugliemo Marconi invented the radio in 1898, he was convinced that this new technology was the perfect medium for picking up the voices of the dead. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were two other famous believers in Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP).’ Let me begin by saying how en­ gaging I found this poem when I first read it, and how curious and haunting it has become with every subsequent reading. In fact, other than those involved in its preparation for publication (and, of course, the author herself ), I wonder if I have read it more times, and more closely, than anyone else in the universe. And it’s through those close readings that I’ve turned my attention to some of the poem’s more unexplained aspects – such as why the poem is presented in the form of a monologue from Sherlock Holmes, addressing his more practically minded 258

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ crime-solving partner, beginning with the catchphrase ‘Elementary, Watson’. The answer I arrived at might have something to do with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s enthusiastic belief in all things paranormal and spooky, not least the idea that the dead could communicate with the living. In April 1934, four years after Conan Doyle’s death, the clairvoyant Noah Zerdin hosted a seance at the Aeolian Hall on New Bond Street, and the ethereal voice captured on record that day is said to be that of Conan Doyle himself, talking to us from ‘the other side’ through the medium of EVP or ‘instrumental transcommunication’. Having listened to the recording several times, I still haven’t been able to decipher what is being said, though I don’t think the ghostly mutterings are among the italicised phrases in Part 2 of Morrissey’s poem, offered as examples of EVP – the first of which is ‘you are being watched / my little Friedel’. According to The Spirit Book: The Encyclopedia of Clairvoyance, Channelling and Spirit Communication, the Swedish film director, portrait painter, and EVP pioneer Friedrich Juergenson was playing a recording of birdsong one day in 1959, when he heard a man’s voice in the background. ‘He listened carefully a number of times and was then further surprised to make out the sound of his deceased mother’s voice saying, in German, “Friedrich, you are being watched. Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?”’ I can’t attribute the other quotes in the poem to any specific source and suppose them to be made-up, though I was interested to learn, after following several false leads, that the comedienne Ada Jones’s rendition of Alfred Solman’s ‘All She Gets from the 259

a vertical art Iceman Is Ice’ was recorded on a wax cylinder and released on the Edison label. If only the song had been ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, I might have heard the plaintive strains of the deceased Michael Furey singing to Gretta Conroy in the closing sections of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, thus petitioning Morrissey’s literary ancestors into the bargain, but maybe that would have been too easy. Sherlock takes up the argument again in Part 3 of the poem, mentioning at one point the distance between ‘Signal Hill’ and ‘Rathlin’, before rising to the Heaneyesque conclusion that, even as ‘pure air, pure interruption’, those voices are ‘wholly literate’ and ‘equivalent / to language in its given state’ (in which I hear Heaney’s ‘The Given Note’, his poem about a musical refrain transcribed from the wind, about hearing an air in the air). Wordsworth’s ‘Bath to Wells’ draft seems to imply that ‘Furness Fells’ was little more than a necessary rhyme for ‘foxglove bells’ – whereas Morrissey’s locations are significant: ‘Rathlin’ being Rathlin Island, presumably, where Marconi experimented with wireless transmission; and ‘Signal Hill’ presumably being Signal Hill on Canada’s easternmost distal point, the place at which the first-ever transatlantic radio communication was received – three clicks, representing the letter s in Morse code (though, inconveniently for the connective purposes of the poem, they were sent from Poldhu in Cornwall). As with ‘Jigsaw’, perhaps we must allow for unresolvable quandaries and unanswerable questions in a piece in which voices come to us from beyond the grave. And if we’re looking for clues, the poem calls back to the collection’s epigraph – ‘here / men / had ranted 260

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ / on radio’ – part of a quote from Mayakovsky’s ‘Brooklyn Bridge’. But in terms of the more recherché moments in these two Morrissey poems, and in poetry generally, what is the purpose? Are the references planted – i.e. deliberately buried along the path of literary detectorists, who will happily unearth and examine them? Are they of a personal nature, deployed to the private satisfaction of the poet only? Is there a belief on the part of the poet that the references are explained through context? Or an assumption that a twenty-first-century poem will not just be casually read, but studied and analysed? Is intrigue the aim? Are we being educated here? Do opaque allusions operate as a form of entry qualification or club membership, by which the ignorant and uninformed are kept outside the door? And what value do we assign to those moments in a poem we don’t properly understand – are they vital to its operation, or optional extras we can take or leave? I should point out that I haven’t devised those questions as a cheap rhetorical device by which I then outline my own opinion in the form of ready-made answers. Neither is this a call for dumbing-down in poetry. I simply ask them on behalf of an art form seen by many as ‘difficult’, and whose USP – its unique selling point – is very often its unique lack of sales. The British artist Helen Chadwick is identified as ‘the presiding spirit’ behind Jo Shapcott’s 2010 collection Of Mutability. On the same acknowledgements page, she also pays tribute to doctors and staff at Hereford County Hospital, to whom the book ‘owes everything’ – so, given 261

a vertical art that Chadwick and Shapcott were both born in 1953, and that Chadwick died aged forty-two, we’re guided from the outset towards a biographical parallel between poet and sculptor and, as the volume unfolds, towards an alliance of an artistic dimension. Shelley’s ‘Mutability’ isn’t directly attributed, though his deduction that ‘Nought may endure but Mutability’ provides an implicit watermark to each page; ditto Wordsworth’s sonnet of the same title. The poem ‘Piss Flower’ is Of Mutability’s final poem: a singular­ ised and personalised response to Chadwick’s early-1990s work Piss Flowers, whereby Chadwick made casts of the interior hollows formed by warm urine, after she and her partner had peed into fresh mounds of Canadian snow. Less concerned, or at any rate less satisfied, with the effect of her outpourings on the ground, by force of imagination Shapcott rises geyser-like from the surface, signing off with an ebullient and gleefully exhibitionist gesture, no matter how temporary. I can shoot down a jet stream so intense my body rises a full forty feet and floats on a bubble stem of grace for just a few seconds up there in the urban air. Given the earlier attribution, there’s no obscurity or sleight of hand being practised here, at least in terms of external references and anchor points. It makes for a clear 262

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ and self-contained set piece – one rich in insinuation and feeling, a poem that performs a mischievous act of joie de vivre in the context of literature’s ephemerality, the impermanence of existence and the insubstantial nature of the human body. In fact, in many ways, even though the poem wouldn’t exist without the original sculptured forms, it feels to have overthrown them, or transcended them, we might say, in relation to the elevation Shapcott claims to achieve in those final two stanzas. Poems like this, with their brevity and apparent simplicity, remind me, if I ever need reminding, of the startling power of controlled thinking, when presented as contained language. ‘Piss Flower’ consists of two-dimensional black shapes against a white background, in a space not much bigger than a playing card; yet to me, this ostensibly straightforward construction outperforms the work that inspired it, inadvertently making Chadwick’s enamelled bronze castings – fabricated at significant expense, and via a huge effort of labour and process, I imagine – seem contrived and convoluted by comparison. Forty poems earlier in the same book, ‘The Oval Pool’ is also acknowledged as referring ‘directly or indirectly’ to Chadwick’s work – in this case to The Oval Court, the centrepiece of her first solo exhibition, held in 1986 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts under the title On Mutability. On this occasion, however, the relationship between poem and artwork is more dependent, yet less tangible – and therefore less satisfying, I’d argue. Chadwick is an ‘important’ artist, but not by any means a ‘household name’. Contemporary poetry, of course, is not a household 263

a vertical art subject, by and large, so perhaps there’s an equivalence of enterprise here – and it’s also true that being or not being a household name very much depends on whose door we enter. But that, I suppose, is my point, and raises from me a question about my responsibilities as a reader. I can certainly react to the poem as it exists on the page, deriving feeling and meaning from its surreal descriptions of time and place, and enjoying sections that read like reports of psychedelic or hallucinogenic experiences. But something’s missing – and, for me, that something only materialised once I’d gone online and discovered that ‘The Oval Court’ is the name given to a fully decorated room within the On Mutability exhibition, with Shapcott’s ‘The Oval Pool’ referring to the ovoid platform in the middle of that room, on which five gold balls are positioned (apparently representing the fingertips of a divine hand). In photographic documentation of the exhibition, I can see how the plants and animals floating or flying alongside Xeroxed images of Chadwick herself form a sort of twelve-section zodiac-­ cum-celestial or oceanic map; and, by holding poem and image side by side, either literally or figuratively, Shapcott’s poetic monologue is activated, the poet inserting herself into the artwork and channelling Chadwick’s concerns. Of course, some aspects of the poem operate capably on their own, but other elements rely so heavily on the originating image that they become like puns without their punning counterparts, or like metaphors with only one half of the comparison on display. For example, in the second half of line six, which refers to photographs on the walls of ‘The Oval Court’ depicting Chadwick in tears, and the repeated 264

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ use of the word ‘copy’ – not just a conceptual element within the poem, but a direct reference to one of the techniques by which the original artwork was constructed. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is often the go-to poem in discussions of ekphrastic poetry and presents a solid template – for example, in its philosophical contemplation of both the general and the particular, via that orchestrated transition across its two stanzas; and in its direct, no-­nonsense (though potentially incorrect) naming of the painter and painting at the beginning of that second verse; and because it deals with a ‘famous’ painting, allowing the text of the poem to operate simultaneously with a familiar image of ‘the white legs disappearing into the green / Water’ and the ‘expensive delicate ship’ that ‘sailed calmly on’. In fact, in some ways it could be argued that the poem takes something of a belt and braces approach, telling us things that we already know or using poetry to provide unnecessary subtitles to the image. Some twenty years later, William Carlos Williams would write ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ about the same picture, observing how the same splash happened ‘unsignificantly / off the coast’, and summarising the event with the startlingly mundane ‘this was / Icarus drowning’. If Williams’s ambition was to strike a note of lexical banality, the poem must be judged a personal triumph, the previous nineteen lines being little more than brief and/or bland descriptions of the artwork’s visual narrative. Perhaps the trite linguistics were designed to undermine the grand traditions of the Old Masters and the lofty didacticism of their high art – and on that level, 265

a vertical art they succeed. We could also credit Williams for recognising that, in a humdrum, diminutive and skeletal poem like this, relatively conspicuous terms such as ‘pageantry’, ‘tingling’ or ‘concerned’ are enough to mirror the small yet important moments of detail within the less dramatic landscape of painting. But the bigger point here is that both the Auden and the Williams poems, in different and similar ways, are of the all-inclusive variety: flour, egg, milk and pinch of salt, with no assumption on the part of the poet about what the reader might happen to have in the pantry. What complexities exist reside elsewhere – in the staging of arguments, for example, in the shaping of the poems on the page, or, in Auden’s case, in the rhymes. It isn’t by any means unusual to find, in published books, poems that were commissioned by outside agencies. This might seem like a relatively recent and somewhat vulgar phenomenon, and those radical poets who appeared on television of late, singing the praises of one of the nation’s biggest financial institutions in recession-battered ‘Austerity Britain’, would be well advised to avoid certain chatrooms and Internet forums. But commissions are nothing new, especially if we consider the practice to be the contemporary equivalent of literary patronage, and it’s certainly one of the means by which poets today manage to earn a crust. On some occasions, the inclusion of commissioned works within a collection makes reasonable sense: for example, if the bespoke poems speak to the overall theme, or if a book is presented as a portfolio of work demonstrating the range of the author’s interests, the diversity of their vocabulary 266

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ and their creative flexibility in the face of unexpected subject matter. Elsewhere, figuring out how a contracted poetic assignment dovetails with the artfully constructed topic and sequencing of a collection is yet another duty that might fall to the reader, willingly or otherwise. And where it becomes necessary, readers can do worse than make a careful study of the prelims, notes, acknowledgements, end­papers and boilerplates of a slim volume, where many of the book’s terms and conditions will be tucked away. Vahni Capildeo’s ‘The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford’ is the first poem in the seventh and final themed section of her 2018 collection Venus as a Bear. The book offers a further set of subdivisions in an index of places (‘intended as a guide’) at the back, with this poem appearing under the ‘Thetford, Norfolk’ heading in the ‘England’ grouping. So, as well as reading the book via its subject categories, we might also think of it as a map or gazetteer of influence and inspiration – the work of a well-travelled writer or restless imagination. Capildeo thanks a couple of literary festivals, the locations of which correspond closely with several of her place-based poems, suggesting a spontaneous, adaptable or impressionable poet capable of writing en route; or a poet prepared and willing to write to order; or a poet whose wanderings conveniently or coincidentally match the purpose and direction of her current manuscript. No thanks, however, are offered to anyone or anything connected with either Thetford or Norfolk, a ‘very fine county’ where the poet has ‘never lived’, the poem tells us – though she has lived ‘in other Fens’, which, while not ruling out Lincolnshire and parts of Suffolk, seems more likely 267

a vertical art to indicate Cambridgeshire (Cambridge also featuring a couple of times in the book’s ‘sleeve notes’). A vein of sarcasm runs through ‘The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford’: sarcasm that sours into cynicism when what feels like a genuinely expressed liking for the geology, religious archi­tecture, literature, takeaway cuisine and natural history of the region is undermined by suspicion and unease – the visitor becoming a self-conscious, upright stranger surrounded by ‘horizontal neighbours’, in one of the tweediest, most traditional and most ‘county’ of the English counties. In a poem that makes a visual display of dodging any linear argument and whose principal strategic device is the non sequitur, that’s an interpretation I arrived at by reading each of its two columns in isolation, rather than hopscotching along the divide; and, as far as such an approach is justifiable, it’s the right-hand indented column that offers the most topical evidence and narrative traction – the one embarking in ‘One man went to mow’ style, keying in to the poem’s recursive habits and its rural setting. Applying the same method to the left-aligned verses takes us closer to what I assume are the poem’s origins: a poetry event in Liverpool’s Bluecoat gallery, by the name of ‘Doped in Stunned Mirages: A Poetic Celebration of Don Van Vliet’. According to the Internet, as part of a Captain Beefheart weekend in November 2017, thirteen UK poets were invited to respond poetically to a Captain Beefheart album. Either by good luck or good judgement, Capildeo was paired with Trout Mask Replica, the 1969 LP generally reckoned to be Beefheart’s finest hour, or finest hour and a half, and one that has achieved a kind of cult status. So 268

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ far, so good, and Capildeo could hardly be accused of coyness or mystique in that respect, ‘after Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart’ being the poem’s subtitle or dedication, and Beefheart being name-checked twice more in the body of the poem. However, beyond those initial signposts, navigation starts to get tricky. Because, although ‘cult status’ suggests a badge of honour, especially within the creative industries, it also implies a minority interest – and of the minority of the population who are interested in Trout Mask Replica, myself included, even fewer will be interested in ‘China Pig’, the muffled, fumbled, warbled, jazz-blues number that wouldn’t be out of place on a wax cylinder, with Ada Jones or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speaking to us at 78rpm from the dominion of the departed. The lyrics, so far as they are audible and comprehensible, tell of a China Pig that might be part pet and part moneybox – part penis, even. ‘I put a fork in his back,’ croaks the good Captain. ‘And have forks stuck in their backs, / perhaps in Thetford’, echoes the poem, before lamenting, ‘A sad contrast with Captain Beefheart’s China Pig’, though both song-pig and poem-pig appear to meet the same fate, at the end of a set of prongs. I suppose by this time I feel I’ve done quite a lot of work on behalf of the poem (reading, thinking, rereading, listening, googling) and although I’m enjoying the playful relationship between the Thetford pigs on the one hand and the poetic deconstruction of fenland Britain on the other, I can’t quite get the Beefheart elements of the poem to bridge the gap, specifically in relation to ‘China Pig’. ‘It’s about how fragile a human being is. I mean the body as opposed to all the forces,’ said Van Vliet himself, 269

a vertical art helpfully or otherwise, though most commentators seem to agree that, beyond the typically weird Beefheartian delivery, it’s an unusually straightforward ditty about ‘selling out’ and sacrificing what is personal or sentimental, in order to service the more utilitarian and necessary aspects of life. Given the song’s overt presence in the poem, the idea of sacrifice feels important – and, with some effort, I can apply it to the political and cultural subtexts of the right-hand column, though less successfully to the swine on the left, Orwellian at times, straight out of a comic strip at others. ‘This poem is a Captain Beefheart tribute, / but I can’t say it has nothing to do with Thetford’, the poem states, apparently with some frankness, but more teasingly in reality – presumably gesturing to us that the ‘tribute’ has a great deal to do with Thetford. But what? I’m not asking to be spoon-fed; no one sets out on a poetic adventure in search of the featureless and the insipid. What this reader wants, though, and what I assume most readers want, is to share the poet’s excitement when connections have been made, and for those connections to be communicated without the need for detailed investigation. In those terms, I’ve also failed to pin down the relevance or provenance of the quatrain beginning ‘I’ve fallen to bits’, presented in the poem as a quote. Or, from earlier in the poem, to confidently interpret those three sections beginning ‘Black’, ‘Yellow’ and ‘Red’. I did eventually stumble on a painting by Van Vliet himself, entitled China Pig, which includes the aforementioned hues, but no heli­ copter, as far as I can make out, and no ‘pianist frig[ging] his dog’. (The significance of the latter might be common 270

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ knowledge among Beefheart aficionados, given the legends and myths that swirl around Van Vliet, and most furiously around the recording of Trout Mask Replica – but after an afternoon of typing ‘pianist frigs his dog’ into a search engine, I decided that ignorance was preferable to the array of astonishing images accumulating in my search history. I’ll have another look one day. On somebody else’s computer.) As the painting confirms, and as anyone who has subjected themselves to sustained quantities of the music of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band will have discovered, Van Vliet was a certified surrealist. I could listen to an argument that says the poem meets like with like, though I suspect both Capildeo and ‘The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford’ are better than that. I feel it to be a poem of engineered intentions and plotted purposes – a poem whose calibrated machineries I would like to experience, rather than descend into the inspection pit and peer up into its undercarriage with a torch in one hand and an instruction manual in the other. Perhaps it’s the case that the printed form represents a secondary or ancillary version of the poem – a poem written for Beefheart nuts, to be read out at a Beefheart celebration and presented within a Beefheartian context, with all the accompanying patter and preamble. Maybe ‘you had to be there’. And a PS on this poem – I like it. A lot. And, with just a little help, I feel I could have liked it even more. Both topographically and stylistically, it puts me in mind of ‘Anna Colutha in Suffolk’ by Oliver Reynolds, from his 1985 debut collection Skevington’s Daughter. Set in small towns in the east of England and describing a random 271

a vertical art romantic encounter between the speaker of the poem and the woman of its title, each of its four stanzas ends with the following single-line, single-sentence statements: ‘The hatchback is easier to load’, ‘Boycott had just scored his hundredth hundred’, ‘In Walberswick I went to the dentist’s’ and ‘Bulk orders are on the up’. I could, if forced, relate the content of those declarations to the general thrust of the piece but, in a poem that throws in the nom de plume of the Reverend John Galbraith Graham, crossword setter for the Guardian and no stranger himself to fenland geo­ graphy, the cryptic takes precedence over the literal. And the clue, as it turns out, is in the title, ‘Anna Colutha’ being a homophone for the pluralised grammatical term describing discontinuities of logic or narrative within a text. So the poem defines its constituency of readers as those people of a riddling sensibility, who are familiar with that precise word. It’s a clever poem and you’re either in on its cleverness or you’re not. ‘Anna Colutha’/anacolutha . . . geddit? To summarise by way of a recap: poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. In dispensing with form and formulae, and without any meaningful frameworks or scaffolding to support its structures, poetry has – in spirit, at least – tended more recently towards the horizontalness of prose. By which I mean it has become a less pressurised activity, taking place in an unlimited space. To shore up its standing, the intriguing consequences of pattern and shape have been replaced by specialist knowledge – a poor substitution, since the effects of structure, no matter how 272

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ covert, are involving and engaging at both the aural and visual level, whereas classified intelligence and restricted understanding tend to exclude and alienate. This slow but discernible shift has led to a kind of poetry that, in some circles, is now the norm – i.e. a poetry housed in its own Faraday cage, insulated against any external probing and contact. Poetry is not one thing but many, and long may that be the case – but the elusive golden standard remains an intensified version of language that offers the best opportunity for reflection and scrutiny while being ingeniously clear, effortlessly fluent, powerfully communicative, successful in its intentions, aware of its causes and effects, wide in entreaty and glorious in consequence. Language is the greatest tool ever devised by the human brain; obscurity is a betrayal of its expert and exquisite functionality – and to be opaque in poetry, either deliberately or unconsciously, is to take this most precious and precise of instruments and use it as a delivery mechanism for white noise or pepper spray. The greatest art requires the least explanation: discuss. PS: Closed-circuit television being what it is today, high-definition footage from dozens if not hundreds of security cameras will verify that, on 19 September 2018, the fifty-five-year-old Simon Armitage backed a long wheelbase Mercedes Sprinter van into an art storage facility somewhere in the industrialised hinterlands of the nation’s capital. (A number of operational and procedural sensitivities prevent me from outlining the exact purpose of the trip, though that needn’t concern us now.) The exterior of 273

a vertical art the building resembled a modern bonded warehouse: no windows, very few doors – other than two or three fire exits – and one high-strength roller shutter, which scrolled down behind me once I’d passed through it. Inside, across an area about the size of a football pitch, dozens of aisles of reinforced metal shelves were stacked with sealed wooden crates, some no bigger than a suitcase and others like garden sheds or scout huts. All of them were numbered, barcoded and standing on pallets, so as to facilitate the attentions of a forklift truck. While two of the staff were loading the van, I wandered between the rows of shelves, reading the labels on the boxes. Many of them meant nothing to me, but some related to exhibitions of contemporary art I’d seen or read about over the past couple of decades. After ten minutes or so of meandering alone through the gangways and corridors of that place, I began to feel as if I were in a kind of morgue or tomb, with the packing cases as coffins and the artworks as bodies – laid to rest and mummified in bubble wrap. Some, indeed, probably contained objects that were body-shaped or body-themed – busts or sculptures of the human form, portraiture, and so on – but the majority, I was led to believe, held items of a more conceptual nature: the materials and components of artistic projects commissioned and installed, then decommissioned and dismantled, and now held in stasis in a mausoleum of culture, surplus to society’s requirements. One of the men in overalls, whose multitasking skills allowed him to chinwag and box-tick simultaneously, told me that they were planning a clear-out in the next few months. Storage is expensive, and some owners were 274

‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’ coming to the end of their contractual arrangements and credit agreements. Other owners had simply disappeared or had been dissolved in the legal or financial sense, and even the artists themselves hadn’t shown much interest in reclaiming the work. Although my informer denied it, the presence of a recycling centre and council incinerator at the end of the lane seemed too convenient to be coincidental. An expensive melancholy hung about the depot, the whole place a reliquary of private ideas the public hadn’t connected with, an ossuary of unrequited and unrequired artistic expression, full to the rafters (or rather to the Universal RSJ steel beams) with creative endeavours lying encased, undisturbed and beyond reach.

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‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’

In 1994, I was named as one of twenty poets in what had been identified as an original poetic movement in the UK, dubbed ‘the New Generation’. In truth, we weren’t all that new, and weren’t all of the same generation. Most of us had never met or communicated, let alone hatched a plan to revolutionise literature. In keeping with the marketing culture of the era, the initiative was partly a publicity ploy, conceived in the hope of making the cash registers rattle and getting bums on seats. ‘Poetry has replaced stand-up comedy as the new rock-n-roll,’ was the unofficial strapline. Guess how that worked out. Ever since Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology (1956) was followed by Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962; revised 1966), there’s been a compulsion among literary commentators to identify succeeding groups, movements and poetic schools, to the point where vintages now come along with suspicious regularity. The New Generation class of 1994 was followed in 2004 by the Next Generation, with a further iteration, bearing the same name, rolled out ten years later. That decade interval was too short and too chronologically convenient to be meaningful, the repeated epithet sounding more and more like a list of sequels from the Star Trek franchise. However, in retrospect, I do think some kind of shift in poetic sensibilities and temperament 277

a vertical art occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, significant enough to justify its label – a shift that two Mexican poets and translators, Carlos López Beltrán and Pedro Serrano, described as well as any in the introduction to their anthology The Lamb Generation. Having lived in Britain during that period, and as outsiders with a relatively non-partisan perspective, it seems they were well placed to witness the changing social fabric of the UK and observe the subsequent poetic response. In ‘Gulf Streams’, the introductory essay to that comprehensive anthology, they characterised New Generation poetry as the poetry of public spaces – a poetry which, either consciously or unconsciously, sought to establish an open dialogue with society in general. Undoubtedly Thatcherism had played its part, with high-octane politics and protest being played out at street level on a daily basis, against a post-colonial, post-­industrial backdrop – in a country experiencing ‘the death of the national consensus’, as editors Hulse, Kennedy and Morley put it in their own New Gen anthology, the imaginatively entitled The New Poetry. In their introduction, they also acknowledged the idea of Englishes at work in the field, as opposed to one standard and dominant English. Elsewhere, the vocabularies of the media, of advertising, technology, computing, materialism and disposability had entered the poetic lexicon and the poetic attitude. The lightweight, portable and user-friendly CD had replaced the heavy and worthy obligations of the long-playing album; if you didn’t like a track, you could aim the remote and skip it. Cappuccino society had finally reached Huddersfield – even if it hadn’t brought any cappuccino 278

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ with it – and the extravert, outward-facing, comfortably demotic, unashamedly demonstrative, publicly oriented, set-piece poem was the result. In line with the improved production values of other arts and the heightened expectations of audiences, the poetry reading – once a slightly vulgar sideshow to the printed page – had also evolved, and was now a slicker and smoother event (ticket holders no longer satisfied by the sight and sound of the drunk old wordsmith, gravy down his tie, off mic, chewing through his latest work in progress till long after the last bus). Of the style of writing, irony and cynicism were in, but ornate satire was out, an ‘Oxbridge excrescence’ according to Don Paterson, vox-popped on the day we all gathered for a publicity photograph behind the Poetry Society’s plateglass frontage, like mannequins in a not-very-fashionable shop window. (A photograph which seems to have been permanently deleted or suppressed, by the way, not even retrievable through petitions to its commissioners or via the deepest Internet search.) The New Generation didn’t represent an outright rejection of modernism, as some tried to claim, but engagement certainly appeared prefer­able to estrangement, and poetic features inherited from the likes of Hardy, Auden, Larkin and Bishop were more evident in this cohort of siblings than anything from the Eliot and Pound side of the family. I’m generalising, of course; not everyone wanted to stand in the spotlight or broadcast to the precinct, and the municipal environment will never be a comfortable or appropriate arena for some poets. Another New Generation generalisation – but one backed up by actual poems, for example in the work of Carol Ann Duffy, 279

a vertical art Sujata Bhatt and even the lugubrious Peter Reading – was an underlying tone of empathy in the work, or a prevailing register of sympathy for those at the wrong end of an unsympathetic political regime, articulated through observational description, dramatic monologues and, at times, a plainspokenness of thought and feeling. A poetry about and on behalf of others – not to be confused with the identity literature of our current era, with its emphasis on the predicament of the writer him- or herself, or of others in the same situation. But I’ve strayed off-topic here; what interests me in this context is the relationship between those original twenty New Generation poets and the academic institutions of the United Kingdom. Because, by my calculations, at the time only three or four of us held anything like a meaningful position within a university, and only one or two held a full-time academic appointment. Of the rest, most were freelance writers, scratching a living through commissions, short-term residencies, council-run workshop groups, occasional reviewing and ad-hoc teaching jobs with the Arvon Foundation, etc., while others had careers, or at least jobs, in education, publishing, arts admin or people-­centred roles in the social services sector. I don’t know how different that made us from poets of preceding decades; many of the recognised and anthologised poets of the twentieth century had been university employees, but just as many hadn’t. Hill, Hughes, Heaney and Harrison, four heavyweights of the previous era, make interesting comparisons, Hill being a university man from beginning to end, Heaney being comfortable on either side of the 280

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ academic perimeter, and Hughes and Harrison choosing to keep their distance, by and large, once their own education was complete. And, although most of the New Generation (at least those of us who are still alive and still writing) are now on the payroll of one educational establishment or another, it wasn’t anything like an expected or even foreseeable destination at the time. The comparison I’d make, then, is with those subsequent ‘generations’ of poets for whom a job within an English department, or more commonly a creative writing department, is either a welcome inevitability or a necessary milestone in their progression as writers. The model has become particularly Americanised: in the US, a poet’s occupation – which university or college they teach at, and at what level – is just as much a part of their professional CV as the books they have published, the praise they have received and the prizes they have won. There’s even an organisation to represent them, the great behemoth that is AWP – the misspelt acronym of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs – whose annual conference invites over 2,000 presenters to give over 500 presentations and attracts up to 15,000 delegates. I was one of them in 2019, in Portland, Oregon, and can confirm that it is the most extraordinary gathering, with opportunities for networking that make the taprooms of Fitzrovia and the coffee houses of Bloomsbury look like the taprooms of Fitzrovia and the coffee houses of Bloomsbury. AWP is a portrait of poetry-as-industry in a state of over-production and the living proof, if it were needed, that far more people are interested in writing the stuff than they are in reading it. 281

a vertical art Allied to which, anyone concerned that too many trees are laying down their lives for the sake of printed matter would have been horrified upon setting foot in the ‘Bookfair’ in Exhibit Hall B – a vast hangar-sized space housing over 800 merchandising stalls and stands – a veritable temple to deforestation and arboricide. But whatever else it suggests, most significantly it confirms that in the US, the writer, and especially the poet, is now predominantly a creature of the educational environment, habituated to its practices, its calendar and its vocabularies. A similar thing is happening in the UK, and it’s worth considering what such a situation means for poets, what it means for universities and what it means for poetry. For poets, it certainly means security. Many universities use graduate employment as a metric of achievement and as a criterion for ranking – but it’s an algorithm that tends to disadvantage creative writing departments, especially ones turning out successful novelists, for whom an actual day job is a mark of failure. (There’s a very simple reason J. K. Rowling isn’t teaching a fantasy fiction module at Goldsmiths and Kazuo Ishiguro isn’t Head of School at St Andrews.) The case for poets is somewhat different, though, because even high visibility and public recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into a living wage – especially for poets who don’t, won’t or can’t do anything but write poems. In that scenario, a post at an educational institution can mean regular guaranteed income, and in the US – where a good healthcare plan is the holy grail of employment benefits – a job in education can be the literal difference between life 282

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ and death. How long before that situation is also true in the UK? And the rewards aren’t just financial – a poet in a university department takes part in a cultural and intellectual dialogue with both colleagues and students that would be difficult to find elsewhere. That conversation with students is particularly important: the poet gets older year on year but the students stay the same age, and bring with them renewed sets of cultural reference points, including their own reading lists. They even bring new definitions about what constitutes or does not constitute poetry full stop, and as a writer it is a privilege to have access to those changing coordinates and shifting boundaries. It is a privilege also to challenge beliefs and offer alternative perspectives – essential duties in the echo chamber of contemporary society – and to disagree with students who would prefer, or even demand, that literature be nothing beyond a set of personal reassurances or political validations; and to push back against timid university governances who pander to those positions. In terms of those changing reference points, it’s been interesting to note over the past few years how many newly enrolled students are more familiar with certain Internet-incubated personalities operating under the flag of poetry, than they are with some of the most respected and affirmed ‘literary’ poets of this or any era. It is all part of an exciting sea change, we’re told, in the transmission and dissemination of poetry, by which emerging talents are short-­circuiting conventional publication methods and sidestepping traditional editorial processes. In this redrawn landscape, ‘gatekeepers’ are figures to be reviled – though, 283

a vertical art of course, the best gatekeepers open gates as often as they close them. Connected to that topic, one news item that has gained currency of late is the story of a dramatic spike in poetry sales. Suffice it to say, don’t get too excited . . . Because, while it is probably true that the civilian population has become marginally less uninterested in the slim volume recently, the percentage upswing is largely accounted for by a handful of people – not least by Rupi Kaur, whose vast and rapid commercial success has spawned many imitators. In turn, those imitators have been encouraged by publishing houses quick to monetise the work of dood­ lers and scribblers, for whom the creative use of language is something of an occupational inconvenience. Too much applauding of the sentiment and nowhere near enough scrutiny of the approach – an approach characterised by a type of fortune-cookie wisdom grafted onto aphoristic inanities. But while I might not be a big fan of this kind of work, I don’t necessarily blame it, or its perpetrators, for exploiting what might crudely be described as a gap in the market. That blame must be shared with the poetic art form itself, its general drift towards inaccessibility and its gradual withdrawal from the public domain and common ground, leaving behind empty plots and vacant premises, from where counterfeiters and rogue traders are now selling hand-over-fist quantities of mass-produced imitations. Geoffrey Hill’s celebrated retort to the charge that his work was difficult – ‘Human beings are difficult’ – was all well and good in the moment, but it didn’t really explain why one impenetrable conundrum must be met by another, 284

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ or why poetry shouldn’t engage with the next level of diffi­ culty, which is to be clear. Readers, don’t be intimidated or made to feel foolish by poets whose work is inexplicably obscure: they’re probably first-rate thinkers but lower-rank writers, for whom the challenge of text­ual clarity is a difficulty too far. But revere those poets who bring entangled complexity into lucid focus. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, with its proemium and testimonia, with its multiple perspectives, shadow narratives, classical references, framing devices, roman numerals, mock interviews, italics, quotes, appendices, subheadings and fragments might sound like an unapproachable proposition, but at no point in that book will the thoughtful reader say, ‘I don’t under­ stand what she means.’ (In the past few years, Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica, Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting and Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum have achieved that same level of deep perspicacity.) Sometimes a poet’s right to difficulty is defended through the extended metaphor of interpersonal relationships. Expressed in those terms, demanding that a poem be easy, it is argued, is like demanding a person be easy (sexually speaking) or, to use the local vernacular, that a person ‘puts out’. A reader who expects a poem to give away everything on a first reading is like a person (a man, most likely) who expects another person (a woman, most likely) to go ‘all the way’ on a first date. And because the comparison aligns itself with agreed values about human dignity and gender politics, it is an analogy that often draws spontaneous approval. But hearing this argument rehearsed in a seminar session at AWP in Portland, ‘rising and gliding out 285

a vertical art I wander’d off by myself ’, and ‘In the mystical moist nightair, and from time to time’, it occurred me that the very opposite was just as true, if not more so – i.e. it’s the impossible poem that behaves like the sexually domineering man of the traditional gender stereotype, expecting not just one but a whole harem of readers to consent to his requests, conform to his expectations and confirm his prowess. As for the utterly incomprehensible poem, it insists upon a truly humiliating degree of promiscuity – one that mocks and demeans through its refusal to acknowledge the reader as an intelligent equal. If the job of the poet in the university is to steer students between the treacherous poles of mundanity on one side and impenetrability on the other (which is partly how I interpret my own teaching duties), then a further task is to encourage students to look beyond the programmes, modules, principles and attitudes associated with their centre of learning. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford, I don’t have much interaction with students – the lectures are the headline requirement – so, if I’m speaking to under­ graduates, it’s usually from this lectern, across a buffer zone between the podium and the first row of seats. But I have chosen to give a workshop every year, and in doing so have been surprised firstly by the uptake (there is a great desire here to write poetry), and secondly by the historical tone of some of the presented work. And when I act as a judge in four University-based poetry competitions – the Newdigate Prize, the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize, the Prize for an English Poem on a Sacred Subject and the Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize – it’s noticeable how antique 286

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ many of the entries are. That isn’t a criticism of quality, by the way, simply an observation about style. It might have something to do with the competition requirements: one seeks to reward ‘the best composition in English verse’, whatever that is; another solicits ‘a sonnet or a poem written in strict rhyming metre’. But tonally speaking, it would seem to be a consequence of the poetry the students are channelling and imitating. Like all art, poetry is a reactive medium: what comes out is a version of what goes in. In that scenario, the role of the practising poet is to expose students to poetry that hasn’t yet found its way onto the examined syllabus, and to acquaint them with the current field of activity. A university also promises, inter alia, admin support (possibly), books (remember them?), opportunities for research, technology (and, more to the point, technological assistance), access to grants, bursaries, the stationery cupboard, subsidised meals and a parking permit handy for city centre shopping trips. All those possibilities and perks, in combination with the intellectual and cultural blessings I’ve been outlining, are not just welcome benefits but useful distractions – especially to poets of an introspective nature, who might otherwise spend all day in their attics or tree houses, going stir-crazy and mouldy, their poems becoming mad or stale. But what of the disadvantages? Most poets aren’t cut out for work, full stop, which is why they’ve gone into poetry in the first place – preferring to make unusual shapes and patterns out of words and daydreams rather than face the 287

a vertical art overwhelming logic and overpowering reason required by conventional and gainful employment. They are opt-outers – people who ‘medlest [. . .] with makynges’, as Langland puts it in Piers Plowman – whose minds aren’t necessarily of an analytical persuasion. That might be lazy typecasting, but it’s certainly true that teaching and writing aren’t always mutually beneficial – if only for the reason that most human brains seem to have a finite daily capacity for language, and when that day has been taken up with assessing poems, talking about poems, reading about poems and writing about poems, plus all the other bureaucratic language needed to satisfy the systemised and operational activities of the latter-day university, actually writing a poem doesn’t feel like a desirable or achievable activity. Worse, after several years of creative institutionalisation – and limited contact with the world beyond the boundary patrolled by cruising campus security vehicles and scrutinised by the fully rotational heads of CCTV cameras – poets occasionally begin writing poems of an institutionalised nature, designed to appeal to a handful of critics and/or a coterie of colleagues: specialists in restrictive codes and occupants of neighbouring offices. In the spring of 2000, I taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. The location was remote and the atmosphere rarefied. Among the staff, something of a commune or bunker mentality had developed – and the students fell prey to the same autonomous mindset, only seeking approval from their immediate tutors and classmates. As one of my workshoppers put it when I suggested he amend a line into something resembling intelligible English, ‘The 288

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ way I see it, no one’s gonna read this crap.’ However, the students did want to publish books, because a book of poems was the equivalent of a teaching certificate; and with a teaching certificate a student could get a job in a creative writing department, maybe even at Iowa. As we all know, or should know, interfamilial reproduction has freakish and unhealthy consequences – and if that’s an unkind analogy, what isn’t in doubt is a kind of poetic cloning that takes place through the creative writing departments of universities, inevitable in a system where tutors hand out grades, prizes and letters of recommendation, and inevit­ ably tend to favour those whose literary ideologies re­semble their own. At Iowa (certainly during my brief stint), narrative poets and formalists, for example, were thought of as laggards or even neocons, and were not expecting anything like top marks or lavish praise. On a lesser scale, something similar takes place in the UK via the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and through other ‘impact evaluation systems’ by which institutions are measured and ranked. As far as creative writing is concerned, the REF represents something of a conundrum. On the one hand, even if a university’s in-house authors are not contributing to learned periodicals or peer-reviewed journals, most tend to turn out books on a fairly regular basis – some of which go some way towards meeting REF criteria. But research isn’t always what poets want to do, what they do best or what they do at all, and ransacking the archives and databases of the imagination is something that’s hard to quantify or prove. There’s a consequence for the work as well, arguably a more important consideration. 289

a vertical art Over the last five or six years, in reading, reviewing and judging, I’ve come across an increasing number of books that are research projects first and poetry collections second: ‘REF-able’ (it’s now a word) undertakings, with the line endings added afterwards, so to speak; or collections that include a good number of poems that appear to have been developed out of study, rather than, say, fancy, or as Auden called it, ‘love’. It isn’t a problem per se; research initiatives can prompt the poetic imagination and provoke creative linguistic responses just as effectively as a Greek urn or an archaic torso of Apollo. But there is a suspicion with some collections of the cart coming before the horse, and it’s frustrating and/or disappointing to turn to the notes section at the back of a book and find that a particularly bewildering poem was written for a hospital trust in Wolverhampton and is the culmination of three years’ work evaluating the medical records of outpatients at the podiatry clinic – hence the baffling references to ingrowing toenails and inoperable bunions. Who wants to read endless poems that are only activated by the small print at the bottom of the page? Clearly some works are designed to operate in tandem with accompanying annotation, for example David Jones’s The Sleeping Lord, which is more notes than it is poetry. Fair enough, but it doesn’t carry the watermark of an employment contract or a certificate of qualification. Similar questions might be asked of the creative writing PhD, whereby the poetic portion often ends up between the covers of a published book, with the academic essay portion – in some cases the activating or explanatory element – put to one side. To reiterate, it doesn’t 290

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ matter how work is generated (I offer this as a caution rather than a criticism), but achieving a high academic grade and operating effectively in the world of published poetry are not necessarily the same thing. Just to be clear, I’m not initiating a campaign to have poets evicted from their university offices or have their ID cards confiscated, but it is my contention that – for the good of the art – fellowships, residencies, visiting professorships, fractional appointments and part-time contracts are the healthiest forms of working arrangement for both parties. I don’t want to see poets operating as the tramps of literature, dwindling away in isolation or poverty, no matter how much the romantic idea persists that suffering is a necessary precursor to inspiration. Nevertheless, it’s essential that poetry is capable of making itself heard beyond the university circuit; able to communicate with the informed reader and the enquiring listener in a wider territory; and in a fit state to compete with museums, art galleries, cinemas, sculpture parks, theatres, prose fiction, non-fiction, the better TV channels and the more enlightened radio networks for a ‘share of the market’. Therefore, for the sake of poets, please do offer them a job, for all those mutual benefits I listed earlier – but for the sake of poetry, please kick them out by the middle of each week, at around Wednesday lunchtime, so, whether they like it or not, they have to set off up the road, seeing things and bumping into people who might prove to be their subjects and, who knows, even their readers. What should poets actually be doing during their two and a half days a week on university premises? The automatic 291

a vertical art assumption, it seems, is that as well as being poets, they will also be able to give useful instruction on the creative process; an assumption that seems largely correct, probably as a consequence of their own learning experience. Nearly all poets of my age or era, during their unofficial apprenticeship to the art, were active members of writing groups or writing workshops – informal and unofficial R&D poetry laboratories of a type where, as well as testing the operational capabilities of their poetic creations, they observed an instructor in action, to the extent that they weren’t just being schooled as poets, but also as tutors. It is those tutoring methods, along with their associated vocabularies, exercises, philosophies and coaching tactics, that have been successfully imported into university and college settings. Some poets claim that discussing the craft of poetry with novices is part of the ancient role of being a poet, as if they were members of the Magic Circle or adepts in a secret society, imparting the arcane tricks of the trade to those who would follow the path. Undergraduate modules and courses based around the workshop model are now a well-established feature at most universities, though not at Oxford, at least at a graded or examined level. Certainly there are numerous extra­ curricular and out-of-hours poetry workshops, groups and societies (some of them dating back centuries), in addition to the MA and Diploma programmes in the Department for Continuing Education – but nothing located at the core of the English Language and Literature degree, within the auspices of ‘the largest English Department in Britain’. When I have asked why this is the case, I’ve been given a number 292

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ of answers ranging from the conceptual to the practical, though the one I liked the best was ‘It would be too popular.’ On this front, Oxford is obstinately unaligned not just with the rest of the country but with the rest of the world, with most of the top-ranked universities offering writing programmes that are, yes, popular, but beneficial to many aspects of learning. They’re also lucrative: vice-chancellors don’t have to sanction investment in a radio telescope, a particle accelerator or a squillion terabytes of cloud storage to get a creative writing department up and running; compared with biochemistry, molecular physics or even fine art or film studies, poetry is presumably a relatively cheap date. Perhaps it would be argued that analytical writing and critical reading is no less creative than composing a poem or a short story. But at some fundamental level, I continue to believe that through attempting to make poetry, those who would prefer to assess and evaluate it are brought to a new level of understanding and insight – even if any such attempts result in a spectacular flop. In other fields, those who sit in judgement are often denied the experience of trying their hand because the endeavours they comment upon are far too complex, time-consuming or expensive to produce. Nobody is going to give an opinionated critic from The Architectural Review the chance to design and construct a billion-pound corporate headquarters in the Square Mile. Poetry can offer that opportunity without too much fuss and palaver, and with limited collateral damage. Perhaps there is a feeling that a practice-based degree is more in keeping with the training courses and vocational qualifications offered at lower tiers of the educational 293

a vertical art hier­archy – though, ironically, given the dissolution of the polytechnics, that’s the direction education has travelled of late, with students hungry for more experiential learning, in keeping with the world they operate in. I’m referring to the extent to which the means of production have been disseminated into the hands of the many, making us all journalists, film-makers, photographers, builders, DJs, master chefs, etc., etc. Once the prerogative of the validated expert, the technologies by which artistic excellence is accomplished are now cheaply available to the general population, with access to them seen as neither a right nor a privilege but a given. Added to which, education is now a shopping service and a buyers’ market – and what the student population desire or demand, universities tend to supply, or risk losing their customers. As to the accusation that poetry (or other forms of writing) can’t be objectively graded, that’s nonsense. It’s perfectly possible, as long as clear frameworks of expectation are stated in advance. It’s forty years since I was sitting in a temporary classroom at Colne Valley High School in West Yorkshire – the first purpose-­built comprehensive school in the north of England. The classroom went by the name of ‘Elliott 1’ – a glorified shed, really – named after the brand of modular Portakabin craned in to accommodate the seventeen-­ hundred-strong-and-expanding student population. Elliott 1 was supposed to be a temporary teaching space but had become a permanent feature and part of the school’s crumbling and flaking infrastructure. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is still there. 294

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ As an indication of Colne Valley High School’s demographic makeup in the late 1970s, it boasted a small farm, where students grew potatoes and learned rudimentary animal husbandry; it wasn’t unusual to be going home on the school bus next to someone with a cardboard box full of newly hatched chicks on their lap or a pitchfork propped between their knees; and timetabled lessons on the smallholding were referred to colloquially as ‘double digging’. But it wouldn’t be fair on Colne Valley’s dedi­ cated and occasionally exasperated staff to characterise the school as a failed enterprise; there was a decent education on offer for anyone prepared to engage with the subjects, get their head down and be alert to the possibilities of learning. I wasn’t one of those students, until my English teachers, Mr Bamford and Mr Shaw, handed out copies of a book called Worlds – a book that should have been handed back in and wasn’t, for which many apologies. My only mitigation is that I very quickly felt a sentimental attachment to it, even if I didn’t recognise it as a gateway or signpost at the time, which is the role I have retrospectively bestowed on it as a pivotal artefact in my personal creation myth. Worlds is a poetry anthology of seven ‘modern’ poets (modern at the time, anyway, and, unsurprisingly, all male and white) edited by Geoffrey Summerfield. Its appeal to me initially was that it contained pictures: black-and-white photographs of a cool-looking, tattooed and pony-tailed Thom Gunn rocking a pair of hipster jeans, a studded leather wristband and cowboy boots; of Charles Causley, who looked a bit like my grandad, in a house that looked a bit like my grandparents’ house, with the same tiled 295

a vertical art hearth and pottery figurines on the mantelpiece; and of a fresh-faced, agricultural-looking Seamus Heaney in rural Ireland, going about in a peat bog, wandering across an overgrown field with his wife and kids and at a ceilidh – or maybe a wake – in someone’s front room, under a single bare lightbulb. The point being made, I suppose, was that rather than being painted portraits or carved busts of canonised and long-dead literary demigods, these poets looked like people I knew and recognised – real-life human beings in real-life human situations; no one to feel threatened or intimidated by. If this bloke Adrian Mitchell wore a shirt like that, he couldn’t be so difficult, could he? And how unfathomable could this chap Edwin Morgan be if he had to walk up a urine-stained concrete staircase to get to his flat? (He lived in a flat!) In and among those images, each section began with an essay or an interview with the poet, which served as an intro­duction to the poems and the person. In later years, in a phase of literary insecurity, I would fall for the idea that the text was the text, and that biography and other external or extraneous circumstances should not intrude. But here were the poets, explaining, ushering, being approachable, making themselves available; inviting readers into their worlds, just as they’d invited a photographer into their kitchens, studies, gardens and local pubs. And into their poems, normally the last element of the book I would have been interested in at that age; but via the photographs and the essays, I was curious to see what these people had to say for themselves, and how poet and poem coincided. Forget the New Criticism – all that would come later, if at all; here 296

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ we were being actively encouraged to witness Heaney’s wellies and his woolly jacket, to goggle at the sailor’s cap from HMS Cormorant on Charles Causley’s dresser, and to notice that Norman MacCaig watched television and smoked fags. Worlds reassured and it humanised; which isn’t to say it took away the mystery, because, for all the poets illuminated and explained, they also made fables, fashioned surprising truths and magnified the significances of the everyday – none more so than Ted Hughes, who was the only poet who had refused, or at least resisted offering himself to, the camera. In lieu of his image came half a dozen of Fay Godwin’s photographs of the Calder Valley – locations I recognised and had always thought of as unremarkable, but suddenly appearing all moody and meaningful – alongside a short prose piece about Scout Rock, that black quarry face overshadowing the Mytholmroyd terrace Hughes had grown up in, shutting out the light of day and barring his passage to realms beyond, both real and imaginary. Just a slab of stone, I’d thought whenever we’d driven past, but in the Hughes version, a vast geological barrier and psychological fault line, to be challenged and overcome. But if Worlds acted as some kind of wake-up call to a lacklustre teenager sleepwalking his way through school, the occurrence that truly opened my eyes and my mind came in the form of the next book to be handed out (and not handed back in): Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain, and more specifically the poem ‘Bayonet Charge’, an imagined description of a World War I soldier going ‘over the top’ into no man’s land. Recently, the centenary of that conflict 297

a vertical art fused with the anniversary of my first reading of that poem, via the line which fused itself into my memory on first reading it. The line runs, ‘In what cold clockwork of the stars and nations / Was he the hand pointing that second?’ I couldn’t make a literal paraphrase or offer a definitive explanation of it at the time, and I still can’t, except to say that, like the soldier in the poem, I was suddenly awake and running – and that vague feeling of self-­awareness I’d experienced from time to time now had a sentence to describe it. I didn’t just exist: I had consciousness. I also experienced what I remember as an incredible high-­voltage surge of understanding about the electrifying possibilities of language, as the sharp jolt of the poem’s subtext arced from its letters into the optic nerve. Some dormant region in the brain’s three-dimensional and infinitely inter­ connected wiring had suddenly been acti­vated, or perhaps reactivated, by the two-dimensional monochromatic circuit board of the printed page. And all this without physical contact and conducted via the medium of light. Or through the medium of resonating air a few months later, when Hughes read the poem from the stage of Hebden Bridge Picture House – a purely oral projection, with no film necessary. Depletion by opportunist theft notwithstanding, it’s a matter of great regret that books like Geoffrey Summerfield’s Worlds and the earlier Voices anthologies are no longer piled high in the stockrooms of Britain’s secondary schools and presented to pupils on the first day of term. Sure, books are expensive – initially, at least, and certainly compared with photocopied sheets of paper handed out in lessons, 298

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ scanned poems airdropped or emailed to screens and tablets or the flimsy, stapled-together booklets distributed by our current exam boards. But books are the truer econ­omy, because they recognise the physical certainty of poetry, acknowledge the symbiotic pleasure of being possessed by an object while being the possessor of it, and reinforce the connection between literature and the time-honoured device by which it is most effectively delivered. Anyway, what’s not to like about a pre-loved book, with all its hand­ written marginalia, its archaeology of ownership and its environmental credibility as recycled artefact? In my copy of Worlds, underneath the Ted Hughes poem ‘Thrushes’ the book’s previous leaseholder had written, ‘The birds eat to live and live to eat; they have none of man’s debilitating intellectuality or his slavish adherence to rules’ – a comment that made its way verbatim into my own exam essay. (Some might call that cheating; others might deem it a form of alternative tutelage.) My daughter’s school copy of Of Mice and Men was relatively unannotated – apart from inside the front cover, where a former student had written, ‘George kills Lennie.’ A few years ago, I visited a well-known English public school to give a reading and workshop. The Head of English asked if I needed a map, and when I told him that my satnav should land me there without too many problems, he replied, ‘I mean a map of the school.’ (I found out later that the school prides itself on having a pupilto-­acreage ratio of one-to-one.) I didn’t envy them their landscaped environs; whatever you can get up to behind the boating shed at the far side of the ornamental lake, you 299

a vertical art can just as easily do round the back of Elliott 1. But I did, on behalf of many other schools I’ve visited, envy them their books: towers of stockpiled hardbacks, ready to be recirculated and reread. When Walt Whitman, or his Whitmanesque character, leaves the ‘lecture-room’ and goes outside – as he does in the poem I quoted from earlier, and whose title I have borrowed – he is preferring the role of the romantic stargazer to the obedient student of cold measurements and hard maths. But no matter ‘How soon unaccountable’ he wearies of ‘the proofs’ and ‘the figures’, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that, as a great follower of technological advancement and an occasional spokesman for the relationship between science and poetry, he was inclined to attend the lecture in the first place. Although his journey from enclosed academic auditorium to open night skies might seem like a rejection of, or even a defection from, scholarly values, his decision feels impulsive and of-the-moment – a ‘from time to time’ flounce-out, rather than a permanent or obstinate position. If he has chosen instinct over instruction in this instance, he has at least put himself in a position to make a comparison and to set up a dialogue between knowledge and mystery. However much Whitman played the part of the independent thinker and wandering free spirit, the intellectual progressions of his era were instrumental to the development of his imagination and the execution of his work. At the same time, his transition from the populated hall to a situation of solitariness reads to me as a recognition of those aspects of poetic contemplation and 300

‘When I Heard the Learn’ d Astronomer’ composition that can only be achieved individually and in a ‘perfect silence’ that goes beyond auditory soundlessness. Thought of in those terms, those closing lines always send me to what I think of as their British counterpart or domestic counterpoint: the final section of Norman Nicholson’s The Pot Geranium (Nicholson being the Cumbrian poet famous for his loyalty not just to one town but to one house, and in this instance to one room within that house). In his bedroom in Millom, lying on his bed, the sloped ceiling overhead is no limit to his vision; the expert earth sciences and grand geographies of the planet are no daunting restriction to his curiosity; and celestial distances are no barrier to his grasp. What he describes as ‘the pattern, the prod and pulse of life’ are all apparent in the crimson-petalled plant thriving on the windowsill. The poem ends:     And what need therefore To stretch for the straining kite? – for kite and flower Bloom in my room for ever; the light that lifts them Shines in my own eyes, and my body’s warmth Hatches their red in my veins. It is the Gulf Stream That rains down the chimney, making the soot spit; it is the Trade Wind That blows in the draught under the bedroom door. My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet To one small radius of rock; yet I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry The great white sun in the dirt of my finger nails. 301

CODA Ninety-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry In section IV of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Station Island’ sequence, Heaney has a pointed exchange with a man of the cloth, a young priest who has ‘sweated masses’ as an overseas missionary in some steamy jungle. The poet can’t picture this ‘holy mascot’ in such an alien landscape, preferring to think of him on his bicycle, performing domestic duties closer to home. ‘Visiting neighbours. / Drinking tea and praising home-made bread’ is Heaney’s gently sarcastic description. To which the priest replies, ‘what are you doing here / but the same thing?’ – questioning the motivation behind Heaney’s pilgrimage, but also, I think, accusing the poet of offering similar consolations and absolutions in the shape of poems. Five hundred years after Martin Luther supposedly nailed his treatise to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, in the form of complaints against poetry’s contemporary indulgences and reassertions of its enduring values, I offer my own ninety-five theses to the floor.   1. Subtlety is the watchword.  2. But one person’s cat’s whisker is another person’s sledgehammer, one person’s understatement another’s 303

a vertical art foghorn. So, here’s the key question: who are you writing for? If the answer is ‘myself ’, you’re fibbing. And fibbing to yourself, which is the most deceitful of all deceptions. You write because you want to be read. Let’s get that out in the open, and move forward.   3. I’m not going to read the numbers out every time.   4. To write only in the way that others want to read is to sell out. But to write only in the way you want to write is to disengage. To manage both is the requirement.   5. I’m talking about finding the equilux between writer and reader, when the amount of daylight in a poem – that which is clear – and the amount of night-time in a poem – that which must be imagined or figured – correspond.  6. It means taking risks. Risking sentimentality for example, for example in the last lines of Yusef Komunyakaa’s much-anthologized poem ‘Facing It’, where the poet – a former reporter in the Vietnam War – stares into the dark depths of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and concludes: ‘In the black mirror / a woman’s trying to erase names: / No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.’   7. Poetry occurs at the dew point where difficulty meets understanding, or where considered thought condenses into considered language. 304

CODA   8. Poetry exists in some optimal zone between the obscure and the obvious, between the pretentious and the prosaic, between the highfalutin and the facile. I’m not saying that whatever falls outside that zone isn’t poetry at all; even if that’s what I happen to believe privately, I’m not saying it.   9. And as a zone, as well as having a conceptual dimension, it has a geographical one. Be internationalist by all means, but run the risk of dilution. Stay local by all means but be an importer, otherwise you might think you’re ploughing your own furrow when you’re actually digging your own grave. 10. If it helps, consider poetry the semiconductor of language, regulating both flow and restraint. 11. Poetry can provide a refuge for those who wish to write without the pressures of commercial interference, the intrusions of celebrity, or any of the compromises associated with public engagement. But obscure poets can’t then complain, as they sometimes do, about a lack of interest in their work. Listen: if you’re a poet, you’re already obscure. If you’re an obscure poet, you’re operating somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. 12. Being culturally constructed and therefore beyond an individual’s control, that boundary between difficulty and understanding changes through time as well as 305

a vertical art space. We can’t write for posterity or be the actuaries of our own work, because we’ve no idea in which direction taste will shift or where poems will stand in relation to it. Neither can we rely on our spouses or descendants to catalogue our archives or laminate our reputations. 13. Blake is a handy reference point for those students of mine who claim future readers will recognise their talents even if I don’t – though in truth this is usually a hedge position they’ve taken up after a profit warning on their current business model. 14. Helen Vendler has been one of our best contemporary poetry critics because, by and large, she’s been on the side of the makers rather than the dismantlers. But what did she mean when she said, at the end of an essay on John Ashbery, that ‘“Accessibility” needs to be dropped from the American vocabulary of aesthetic judgement if we are not to appear fools in the eyes of the world’? 15. Actually, I know what she meant, because in the sentence preceding it she argued, via the examples of Mallarmé, Eliot, Moore, Miłosz, and Ashbery, that ‘no matter how alien the content, or how allusive the lines, readers flock to the poems’. I could contest the definition of ‘flock’, or argue that by having readers flock to them those poets must be accessible, or that all poems by their very nature are alien or allusive to 306

CODA some degree, or I could call in the number-crunchers to dispute the figures. But let me put it this way instead: if I were choosing which side of the argument to defend, I think it would be far easier to point to the large number of truly alien and allusive poets to whom readers have not only failed to flock, but from whom they have actually fled. 16. Or to namedrop genuinely accessible writers (Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Hardy, Plath, Bishop, Heaney, Harrison etc., etc.) whose evaluators and adjudicators are only rarely considered fools. 17. Accessibility, in the Vendler context, is a byword for popularity – which by extension becomes shorthand for dumbing-down. I see the connective logic. And yet, as a citizen of the world, I know that millions of really smart people go to the cinema, to art galleries, to museums, and to concerts. Millions buy literature; but not poetry. If people ‘flock’ to Mallarmé, what exorbitant verb shall we assign to the manner by which people congregate around Hilary Mantel or attend the most recent Hockney exhibition? 18. I’m not an apologist for the superficial. Adrian Mitchell’s contention that ‘Most people ignore most poetry / because / most poetry ignores most people’ was true up to a point, but would have carried more clout coming from a Hugo Williams or a Selima Hill or a Les Murray – hospitable and accommodating 307

a vertical art poets who trust the imaginative and intellectual capabilities of a potential readership. 19. I’m only an occasional visitor to this platform, but I’m a frequent teacher, and in the classroom environ­ment, fewer things have muddled the minds of creative writing students – those who read criticism, anyway – than the ‘intentional fallacy’, the notion that an author’s objective can never be properly realised in the mind of the reader. It leads some students to throw away their pens in despondency and others to throw down any old words onto the page, on the basis that whatever they write will be misinterpreted. 20. But while it would be naive to assume that every aspect and angle of a poem can be safely couriered between reader and writer, it’s defeatist to think that the greater or necessary parts cannot. How do I know the intentional fallacy is itself a fallacy? Because when critics of the New Criticism wrote about it, I understood it. 21. Ambiguity, being a kissing cousin of intentional fallacy, is also a much misunderstood and abused concept in poetry. ‘It’s, like, ambiguous,’ says Scarlet in the creative writing class, responding to the last line of Josh’s poem, which she doesn’t understand. ‘Yeah,’ agrees Josh, ‘I was doing, like, ambiguity there,’ he confirms, largely on the basis that he doesn’t understand it either. Or, ‘It’s very meta,’ they might chorus. 308

CODA 22. Wrong. Whatever its dictionary definition of ‘in­ exactness’, ambiguity is a controlled technique in poetry, being the managed balancing of two or more describable positions. For example, the last line of Hardy’s ‘Snow in the Suburbs’: ‘And we take him in’. Receiving the cat into the house, he means. And he also means perceiving the situation. He means them both, simultaneously and intentionally. 23. As for meta, i.e. more consciously and conspicuously of itself . . . if I hear one more student say something is ‘very meta’, I’m going to take a bite out of the desk. To the supposition that a certain player couldn’t be offside during a football match because he wasn’t interfering with play, manager Brian Clough is alleged to have retorted, ‘If he isn’t interfering with play, what’s he doing on the pitch?’ For ‘play’ read language, and for ‘pitch’ read poem. 24. Of the many historical and ongoing vexations associated with the art, poetry’s very identity is one of its most agonising conditions. Passing from ‘poetischer realismus’ to ‘poetry, theories of’, the 1965 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics I bought from a library sale in 1986 to try and figure out what the hell I was doing, had no entry for poetry. It’s a situ­ ation the book’s editors have since addressed, but to no resounding conclusion. More courageously, Edward Hirsch’s excellent A Poet’s Glossary has a stab at definition, which begins: ‘An inexplicable 309

a vertical art (though not incomprehensible) event in language’. The entry will extend to another three pages, but that bracket­ed ‘though not incomprehensible’ spoke to me personally. 25. Poetry is shaded language. On many examples of terrain cartography, hills and mountains are shown with shade to their south-eastern slopes, as if light were emanating from the top left-hand corner of the map – perhaps taking its bearings from printed matter, given that in reading, north west to south east is the direction of travel. Forgetting for now that light rarely originates from that direction in the Northern Hemisphere, the shading exists as a visual subtext indicative of perspective. Similarly, in a poem, the shadows of chosen words fall in a particular direction, suggesting an angle or view. It’s a form of hachuring, as in, ‘Hachuring distinct with threads of shadow’ in Norman Nicholson’s poem ‘Gathering Sticks on Sunday’. ‘And moon and earth will stare at one another / Like the cold, yellow skulls of child and mother,’ it ends. 26. What other physical properties can help with identification? Comparing the density of poetry with the density of prose via the number of rare, unusual, or interesting words or phrases per page might not be enough to highlight a quantifiable difference between the two – but let’s still consider the specific gravity of a piece of writing as a possible indicator of its poetic quiddities and credentials. 310

CODA 27. Let’s locate and celebrate it in ‘Composed underneath Westminster Bridge’, Denise Riley’s bicentennial and parallax response to Wordsworth’s Petrarchan sonnet (an uncharacteristically off-message urban moment from William, given his more usual role as poetry’s spokesperson for the Countryside Alliance). Riley’s reverse perspective from below the bridge might be a subtle acknowledgement of Dorothy’s unacknow­ ledged role in the original poem, but it’s the magnificent muddy slurp and viscosity I’m interested in here, its thickness of diction. 28. Staying with definitions, if we describe the poem as a ‘snapshot’, which we occasionally do – especially the shorter poem – perhaps it is to distinguish it from something more cinematic, which might be the visual equivalent of the novel. If we associate the poem with the snapshot, possibly because it’s often Polaroid in shape and size, or cross-sectional in its presentation, then let’s agree that it isn’t necessar­ ily the subject matter which is caught in time, but the moment of writing. The hairs rise on the back of the neck on reading Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’ not because we’re re-witnessing the animal entering the frame, but because we’re witnessing the poet framing the act of framing the animal entering the frame, the moment of ‘an artist gazing amazed at a work / That points at him amazed’, as he says in ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’. It is creativity’s self-consciousness that has been captured and preserved. 311

a vertical art 29. Another reason that the snapshot analogy might be apposite is in relation to that satisfying clunk when we witness two or more ideas fitting together. Example, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptural poem Bring Back the Birch, when a reactionary request for the reintroduction of corporal punishment is ironically fused with an environmental appeal for the re-establishment of a tree species; where grave and grove are simultaneously monumentalised. 30. I’m moving on from definitions to substance, and to the question of whether poetry has stopped delivering the goods or supplying its legal high. Sometimes you pay the dealer, only to be given the chemical equation rather than the product itself. Too many Walter Whites out there peddle the science, when what we really crave is the hit. Or, as Heaney put it, ‘You want it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus. You want something sweetening and at the same time something unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity.’ 31. If the drugs analogy doesn’t please, let me wonder instead if poetry has stopped being the expo – with its public interface between innovators and consumers, with its aisles and stalls – bringing its fare to the fair, and become instead the conference, with poets as lanyarded delegates in closed sessions, professionals and experts in dialogue with co-workers and associates. 312

CODA 32. It’s generally agreed that at some point in history the novel replaced the poem as the principal and most popular form of literature; it’s difficult to envisage a reversal, given poetry’s sullen introspection since that time. Broadly speaking, the contemporary novel operates through an unspoken reciprocity, offering readers the opportunity to engage without requiring them to unscramble an encrypted code. 33. In a recent wide-ranging Ipsos MORI poll conducted on behalf of the Royal Society of Literature, 90 per cent of people reported that they had read a novel in the last six months – an encouraging statistic for authors, publishers, booksellers, and anyone who believes that reading is a good thing. 34. But only 11 per cent of respondents had read any poetry – roughly the same number who had read a self-help book. Some nights, I lie awake worrying that they are the same people. 35. Peter Porter’s observation that poetry can either be ‘language lit up by life or life lit up by language’ now seems a generous, even-handed, and optimistic assessment, probably penned before the wide-scale emergence of poetry as language – not so much illuminated by, but subjected to some form of X-ray or CAT scan. 36. In a recent interview to promote No Art, his collected three volumes, the American poet Ben Lerner seems 313

a vertical art to acknowledge or confirm such a predicament. Across those three volumes, Lerner says, he’s dealing with topics such as univocalism versus heteroglossia, the impossibility of the second-person pronoun, the repurposing of language, a resistance to closed readings, avant-garde proceduralism and ironic detachment etc., etc. It’s only really in the final poem of the book that he gestures towards what he describes as ‘a calling for the possibility of feeling in poetry’, daringly flirting with vintage or discontinued emotions. 37. In contrast, for example, with the stated subject matter of one of Lerner’s students, Ocean Vuong, who, according to the blurb on the back of his debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, writes ‘about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire’. 38. It allows for a formal and confident distinction to be made, I think, between those poems whose critical and theoretical components are implied, and those whose critical and theoretical components are not only explicit, but entire. Poetry as criticism and theory. 39. Invent a measuring device for the above, a kind of breathalyser test that registers critical parts per thousand. Keep blowing, keep blowing, keep blowing. The light’s gone red, you’re over the accepted limit, I’m going to have to ask you to step outside the vehicle, sir. Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask for your licence. 314

CODA 40. The Doomsday Clock is a hypothetical chronometer that gauges the perceived likelihood of planetary cata­ strophe – whose hands, the last time I checked, are currently set at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. Interactive exam question: Onto the face of a clock anticipating the doomsday scenario in which all the poets and all the critics in the world are exactly the same people, draw the current position of the hands. 41. Just to be clear, I’m not mounting some sort of shopfloor protest on behalf of the Poets’ Union. Without criticism, there is no poetry; if poetry is the egg, criti­ cism can either be the chick that hatches from it or the hen that laid it. 42. And in the Venn diagram of manufacturers and commentariat, a shadowed area of overlap is an inevitable and healthy thing. But beware complete occlusion: the darkness occasioned by total obscuration, the oblivion brought about by 100 per cent self-absorption. 43. Or we could further divide those two Venn diagram cells, a procedure which might lead to a Johari Window approach, as it would be described by that aforementioned percentage of society frequenting the Personal Development section of Waterstones, or to a Rumsfeldian classification of poetry. 44. Rumsfeldianism! Let’s start with the ‘known knowns’: poems whose text is immediately comprehensible, 315

a vertical art and whose meaning is in direct relation and proportion to it – poetry of Thribbish artlessness, requiring little effort and bringing scant reward. When Geoffrey Hill made reference to a ‘cult of simple-mindedness’ that had emerged in the sixties and seventies, it was the purveyors of known knowns that he was presumably at pains to distance himself from. 45. Into the ‘known unknowns’ pigeonhole we might place large chunks of Eliot, for example. That is to say, we can all read and make sense of a line like ‘And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.’ And certain sections of Four Quartets, for example the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’, have a nursery rhyme or even popular song simplicity to them. Yet for all the surface comprehensibility, the philosophical thinking underpinning the poetry remains remote, aloof, perhaps even ineffable. 46. Donald Rumsfeld didn’t actually get into the terri­tory of the ‘unknown knowns’, but I’m proposing John Ashbery as my cheerleader in this category. That’s because the fragmented and sabotaged cortex of his poems, certainly in his later work, is usually as intentionally unfollowable as it is unfathomable. And yet the thinking behind it – signifier over signified, language as an unsatisfactory, unreliable, and even disreputable tool when it comes to the analysis, perception, and reflection of actual experience etc., etc. – all that is relatively well signposted and understood. 316

CODA 47. And finally the ‘unknown unknowns’, the irresolvable linguistic equations of those out-and-out poetic experiments, baffling to both reader and writer alike. 48. I’ve mentioned John Ashbery a couple of times already, and will mention him again as a special case, given how he has not so much cornered the market for unpredictability in contemporary poetry, but brokered some form of international free trade agreement. Unexpectedness is what we expect from Ashbery, his principal strategy being deviation from the linear – a strategy that succeeds because his fragments are so surreptitiously eavesdropped, so convincingly reproduced, and so entertainingly juxtaposed. Unfortunately, his virtuoso modus operandi has been misheard by others as a clarion call for the abdication of logic and the abandonment of sense across the board; many have noticed the truancy and mischievousness in Ashbery and confused it with the school rules. Conversely, it’s a big mistake to characterize him as some kind of emperor in new clothes, when in fact he’s the tailor and dressmaker. ‘The poem is you,’ he reminds us in the last line of ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’. We, his coat hangers and his dummies. 49. Is it ever ‘brave’ to write poems? I’ve seen this word in book blurbs, in reviews, and in citations of works. Certainly some poets publish at great personal risk, but even for the likes of Mandelstam and Akhmatova, doesn’t manner always pull rank on matter in the end? Won’t mode always be looking to upstage material? 317

a vertical art Isn’t the poet’s mind always cocked to the poem’s standing as a poem, in relation to other poems? 50. In poetry, isn’t there always an element of dancing in front of the mirror? Aren’t poets like the dewdrops in Yeats’s ‘The Sad Shepherd’, ‘always listening / . . . for the sound of their own dropping’? 51. Some poets have attempted to disguise their exhibitionism, or to imply modesty, by representing themselves with the lower case ‘i’. It worked for a day or two as a refreshing kind of self-effacement, allowing the poet to momentarily sidestep the role of wise sage and important person. But pretty soon it had the reverse effect, shouting ‘Hey, hey – over here, look at me – over here – I’m the quiet one!’ 52. ‘First, try to be something, anything, else,’ begins Lorrie Moore in ‘How To Become a Writer.’ She’s pretending to tell you about life choices, but she’s really telling you about writing. She’s talking about fiction, but she’s also talking about poetry – and then she’s also talking about poetry, but she’s really talking about literature. You yourself are not literature, she’s saying. Even the most candid confessional poets – the Lowell of Life Studies, the Plath of Ariel, the Hopkins of the so-called ‘Terrible Sonnets’, the Pearl-poet recounting his dream, if his dream is what it was – we don’t appreciate them because their soul-searching was so thorough, but because their illusions were so 318

CODA accomplished, their portrayals so convincing, their puppetry so lifelike. 53. So when Craig Raine says ‘poetry is a battle against the prompter, which can only give us someone else’s lines to say,’ he isn’t suggesting that an individual’s unmediated thoughts are poetic of themselves, no matter how unique. And he certainly isn’t aligning himself with Allen Ginsberg’s description of the poet as a ‘stenographer of your own mind’, with its implication that any and every thought can be transferred, unedited, straight onto the page. 54. Sometimes in the appraisal of poetry – when judging competitions, for instance, or considering applications for courses via sample poems – I’ve heard colleagues bring up the issue of trust. ‘I don’t trust this poem,’ someone might say at a grading meeting, or ‘How trustworthy is this piece?’ It happens in situations where there’s nothing inherently measurable about the work to hand, and no calibration system beyond educated guesswork. 55. The recent resurgence of the spoken word scene is sometimes explained as a reaction to the opacities and obscurities in literary poetry. Performance poetry, in that version of events, is a breath of fresh air – sincere in its application, honest in its ambitions, and happy to make itself vulnerable in front of a live audience, rather than hide away behind the fortifications of 319

a vertical art a book cover. Its detractors disagree, arguing that a poem in search of immediate responses and instant gratification is even less trustworthy, failing the poetic polygraph test by virtue of its neediness. 56. About ten years ago, I thought I’d noticed a growing rapprochement between the two camps, but it would seem that certain irreconcilable differences persist. 57. On that same subject, James Fenton once commented that a group of aspiring American poets he knew defined their practice through entirely negative characteristics: no rhyme, no metre, and no form other than ‘open form’, which Fenton clarifies as ‘no form at all’. He might have also added no metaphor, no narrative, and no subject matter to this litany of poetic allergies and intolerances – though his larger point was in relation to the poetry reading as an event, and how writing for the eye rather than the ear hasn’t discouraged page-bound poets from giving public performances of their work, despite having nothing to perform. These are poets who put themselves through ‘the agony of standing in front of an audience reading words which were specifically designed not to be read out loud’, Fenton comments. And who consequently put their audience through the same agony as well. 58. And those who write without respecting the importance of sound will fall in with Frost’s overheard description of Carl Sandburg as ‘the kind of writer who 320

CODA had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language’. The kind of atonal or cloth-eared poet for whom something gets ‘lost in the original’, as they say. 59. All those points about the acoustic and out-loud importance of poetry are true and well made, yet we shouldn’t deny the special properties of writing on the page, even in its appeal to memory – often thought of as the preserve of spoken or oral poetry. Like recognizing the silhouettes of birds on the wing against a featureless sky, the patterns and shapes of poems on the page, post-Caxton, have become memorial mechanisms in their own right. So when Edward Hirsch describes trying to recall Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ while driving through a snowstorm, he says, ‘I could see the shapely stanzas unscrolling before my inner eye.’ 60. John Fuller is saying something similar when he talks about the ‘glamour’ of the page, anything else just being ‘whispers on the wind’. And even though he refers to the inner ear, and Hirsch to the inner eye, they’re both acknowledging that poetry presented as an entirely visual phenomenon and received in silence has its own unique pleasures. 61. Added to which, analysing the noises a poem makes can lead us into the realm of the pseudo-scientific, often via a form of retrospective justification. Take Iain Crichton Smith’s poem ‘Neighbour’, which begins, 321

a vertical art Build me a bridge over the stream to my neighbour’s house where he is standing in dungarees in the fresh morning.

– about which Carol Rumens, in her ‘Poem of the week’ slot in the Guardian, comments: ‘The sound of small waters threading over pebbles is captured in the “r” and “ree” sounds of the first quatrain’. I regret choosing an example from a column that regularly provides a highly effective arbitration service between specialist texts and non-specialist readers, and from such a thoughtful critic. But her assessment in this case seems correct only in hindsight, when what we’re really curious about are the decisions the poet made at the time of composition. Because isn’t this the kind of interpretation that drives tentative or novice readers not only to despair, but to disbelief? ‘I thought “r” and “ree” were the sounds of small waters threading over pebbles,’ said reader will complain, when said syllables turn up in another poem representing a growling machine gun, or the noise of a dry wind in a parched desert, with nary a stream for a thousand square miles.

62. The Internet may have undermined the printed page as the automatic location for poetry, but the page remains a high-value plot, or sought-after limelight, or as Maurice Riordan has termed it, a ‘coveted space’. Not only in terms of prestige, and the fact that it implies a degree 322

CODA of editorial regulation that the Internet occasionally short-circuits, but in terms of its suitability as a physical, two-dimensional plane for the reception of thoughts projected as language. It’s still a comfortable fit. 63. Poetry in its written guise also allows us to play the form and content game – always my favourite bit at school, and still good value in the workshop. The poem is tall and thin because it’s about a chimney stack. The poem is presented in half-rhyme couplets because it’s about two incongruous ideologies struggling to achieve harmony with each other. Put like that, it shouldn’t be difficult to choose a form that represents a poem’s objective, but as Terry Eagleton points out, poems often operate by multiple systems, sometimes in concert and sometimes in contradiction. His example is Empson’s quarrel with this famous quatrain in Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, lamenting, by elaborate metaphor, faithful rhythm and manicured rhyme, how human potential is sometimes overlooked or goes unfulfilled. Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. Eagleton notes how ‘the elegance of the verse dignifies this dire situation in a way which makes us feel reluctant to see it altered.’ 323

a vertical art 64. Eagleton is exposing a kind of inadvertent hypocrisy at work, and even though I wouldn’t go anywhere near as far as that with my own example, I’ve always felt a similar kind of contradiction in relation to the first stanza of Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’. Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead   In the windless nights of June, As congregated leaves complete Their day’s activity; my feet   Point to the rising moon.

In what is generally accepted to be a successful opening to a successful poem, the grammatical systems appear to be running smoothly, ditto the system of sounds and beats, and plenty of other subsystems as well, I dare say. But given the poet’s apparent determination to paint a clear, draughtsman-like picture, wouldn’t it have been more effective to arrange the stanza in accordance with the physical architecture of the scene he describes? By which I mean, if a spatially mimetic system were to operate – which is one of poetry’s privileges – then as a representation of the geometry of the universe as seen from the human perspective, we could expect Vega to be found at the top of the poem and ‘bed’ to be positioned below ‘overhead’. By the same logic, ‘feet’ would be positioned beneath the rising moon; and a bathetic descent from the planetary body to the mundane and earthy appendage of 324

CODA the human foot would have saved the punchline till the end, where punchlines tend to be most effective. Such an arrangement would have also served to remind us, via a concluding pun, that it is the poetic foot as well as the physiological one that addresses the moon. Moreover, if Auden had managed to put his feet on the ground, so to speak, it would have allowed him to physicalise them as the comic protuberances they undoubtedly are, courtesy of that indented and therefore extended last line. 65. I suppose it could be argued that the ostensible nonsense of the first line – being in bed on the lawn, something he occasionally did, apparently – legitimizes the topsy-turvy arrangement of the stanza. But for all his idiosyncrasies, Auden was a no-nonsense poet, and this was a no-nonsense occasion, the author recalling a spirit­ually significant or quasi-religious episode when, for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what it meant to ‘love one’s neighbour as oneself’. Incidentally, given that the revelation took place on ‘a fine night’ in June 1933, at the Downs School in Malvern, with Vega visible and a rising moon, a combination of maps, star charts, and weather records would probably allow us to not only triangulate the exact date of the experience, but also to calculate the direction the poet was facing at the time. That said, Auden was sitting in his oblique prose account of the evening and lying down in the poem, so we should be careful when considering the piece a faithful documentary testimony. 325

a vertical art 66. I could never prove it, but I suspect rhyme dictated the sequencing of ideas in ‘A Summer Night’. John Fuller suggests Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’ as the template, and once a rhyme scheme has been decided upon, and once rhyme partnerships like ‘June’ and ‘moon’ have come so obligingly to mind, everything else must fall in around them. And because it deals in sound, open-ended and faux-critical claims similar to those I mentioned earlier are often made in relation to the function and effect of rhyme in poems. Undoubtedly, particular sounds in a particular order generate particular effects, but to my mind rhyme serves two more blatant and less virtuous purposes. 67. Firstly, and as far as the writer is concerned, it operates as a provocation, on the every-problem-is-a-­potentialopportunity basis. Rhyme is an obstacle to be overcome. It is a limitation that requires an ingenious and apparently effortless solution. 68. Its second purpose, beyond offering an auditory mnemonic – which matters less now than it did in the era of oral poetry – is to impress the reader. That is, to demonstrate cleverness by ramping up the degree of difficulty by which an idea is executed. Rhyme is an act of escapology, in which thoughts must wriggle free from the bindings and fastenings of similar-sounding words. ‘Voila, hey presto, ta-dah!’ is what rhyme says to the reader. ‘I was in a tight corner there – look how impressively I managed to manipulate my restrictions.’ 326

CODA 69. Brevity is another hallmark of smartness: the fleetness of a poem, its tight turning circle, its economy of language, the anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-quicker aspect of its character. ‘Poetry is the art of saying in two words what is better said in ten,’ the late art critic Brian Sewell is reported to have complained, and to disagree with Brian Sewell was always to be in the right. 70. Brevity within a poem creates useful tensions, opposing our instincts to embellish, adorn, and peacock by stripping back to a tooth-and-bone bare minimum, curling up into a foetal ball when confronted with an immeasurably large and expanding universe. 71. And brevity not only within poems but within collections, most books being an economic and geometrical convenience to which the writer has shaped his or her output. Their productivity has only increased since the advent of the word processor – a device that has circumvented the frictional drag of pen on paper, which once allowed time for contemporaneous reflection. 72. For this reader, about forty-five minutes’ worth of poetry’s rich confection per sitting is ample. I don’t think enough is omitted or finds its way to the shredder these days. Come the day when I assume complete control of the Federation, poets wanting to go beyond a legally enforced quota will have to apply for special permits, which will be handed out sparingly. 327

a vertical art 73. Judged in those terms, Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac is exemplary, being a slim volume both in name and nature: thirty-nine printed pages, many of them not printed with very much at all. But I also commend it for its sleight of hand, the poems being fictitious translations of a fictional Eastern European poet – a conceit that turns up the reverb on the poems, and makes devious advantage of poetry’s inherent foreignness in relation to everyday language. Katerina Brac, being Martian in outlook, is also an object lesson in metaphor-making, metaphor being another form of brevity through the near-­ instantaneous consideration of ideas, and another form of cleverness. Hence ‘a radio thinking aloud’, pale blue butterflies ‘as detachable as earrings’, ‘a blister like a moonstone’, a new born baby like ‘a little howling blood sausage’, and the stairwell outside an apartment ‘like the deepest, most super­humanly patient of ears’. 74. Some contend that poets have no business likening one thing to another, and that to do so is just affectation and decoration. I say that all aspects of cognition and perception depend entirely upon comparison. 75. The problematic long poem isn’t only problematic because of dwindling attention spans, but because most of the things it can do can be done better by the novel, the play, or the boxed set. 328

CODA 76. Programme idea: a Grand Designs format, in which poetry’s equivalent of Kevin McCloud follows the trials and tribulations of a poet about to embark on a composition of epic proportions. Over the course of the construction, we make frequent visits to the site to find the poem in various states of completion and the poet in a variety of moods – from the enthusiasm and energy of his initial outline sketches, to days of spiritual exhaustion and creative bankruptcy, and the jeopardy moment before the ad-break, when the central, load-bearing beam is found to be rotten. We revisit the monolithic pile a year after completion, with a ‘For Sale’ sign at the front gate, but as yet no offers. The author is proud of his titanic achievement, but reluctant to talk about its final cost. 77. Does poetry have a USP? Not really, I’d conclude, though the best I can offer is the line. Be faithful to it for a reason, or plot against it for a reason. 78. Some poets distance themselves from the idea of the line, seeing it as an imperial measure or a colonial gesture, committing themselves to an unacceptable tradition. The conventional line-ending in that scenario is a gilt frame or milled edge, redolent of historical power structures. So a truncated line that cuts against phrase or clause might be doing a radical job, and short lines are sometimes characterised as ‘breaths’, emphasising the rhythms of respiration over those of rhetoric, favouring the individual over the institution. 329

a vertical art 79. Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout is a poet whose work I’ve become interested in – and not only because she sometimes stands next to me on alphabetic­ ally arranged shelves in bookshops and libraries. Occasionally associated with the Language school of poetry, many of Armantrout’s poems rarely expand beyond the most clenched or clipped lines – lines that imply a skeletal fundamentalism, or seem ephemeral and tremulous, hanging there like linguistic windchimes. That said, such concision and terseness can run the risk of appearing coy, precious, even melodramatic or hammy – or as Craig Raine puts it, like ‘the dying man in a movie trying to tell us where the treasure is buried – and failing’. 80. Short lines draw less attention to themselves when they are regulated by the flow of expression or the building blocks of sentences, but become conspicu­ ous and even suspicious when their endings and breaks deviate from those administrating principles for no apparent reason. 81. An example: R. S. Thomas, a normally scrupulous poet on the page, breaks the last lines of ‘A Marriage’ like this:       . . . And she, who in life had done everything with a bird’s grace, 330

CODA



opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than a feather. Why? Amputating the penultimate line at the word ‘no’ cuts against the natural cadence, squanders the opportunity of a partial rhyme between ‘heavier’ and ‘feather’, denies the phrase ‘of one sigh’ the mimetic opportunity of existing in its own exhalation and letting the sigh extend into the blank space beyond, and misplaces the emphasis in that final line to the point where the sigh overbalances, rather than counter­ balances, the feather.

82. Nevertheless, in both Armantrout and Thomas, and no matter the interpretation, something is at stake in the breaking of those lines. The line as a unit of organisation is honoured, as is the poem as a system of staged intervals. 83. So credit the line, and credit its ghostly other half in that fallow margin between the end of the line and the edge of the page – in the bubble wrap protecting the delicate edges of the poem from its packaging. On a page, that gap is for your mental notes, a designed void where intention and interpretation can come to an understanding. If poetry is the writing between the lines, that writing often takes place in the measured space beyond them – which is why poems 331

a vertical art in newspapers and magazines are usually presented as cartouche, or printed within their own display cabinets, rather than bleeding out to the same border as the surrounding prose. 84. Prose poems, especially those conforming to Parkinson’s law (i.e. expanding to fill the space available), might be offered as evidence against the line being poetry’s only defining property, and fair enough. But the prose poem is usually just that – i.e. poetry disguised as prose, pretending to have prose values, rather than proving them. It is poetry in fancy dress, entertaining us with its masquerade, though never expecting for one minute that we will be duped by the fakery. 85. I’ve been musing on the current situation of poetry, but what of its future? Nicolas Barker, in his book Visible Voices, comparing the receiving surface of a stone stele with that of a papyrus leaf, writes, ‘Stone is indestructible, and inscription on it permanent.’ Recent events in Palmyra, among other places, suggests otherwise, just as Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ warns against notions of immortality. 86. Yet the desire to make utterance endure . . . endures. Barker goes on to quote R. B. Parkinson et al. citing a caption inscribed in the Temple of Horus at Edfu, in which an inkwell is being offered to a group of deities credited with ‘having caused memory to begin because they wrote’. It ends, 332

CODA The heir speaks with his forefathers, when they have passed from the heart: A wonder of their excelling fingers, so that friends can communicate when the sea is between them, and one man can hear another without seeing him! 87. In Morgan Freeman’s voice, it could be an advert for the next generation of iPhone, but it’s actually an ancient description of the miraculous and magical nature of considered written material, and one that still holds good today. 88. The urge to emphasise language at the ceremonial level, and the everyday practicalities of producing text in a physical dimension, have contributed to our understanding of what poetry is, and the characteristics by which we recognise it. Accordingly, we should expect the orthodoxies of poetry to develop not just in line with the vocabularies of its practitioners, but in accordance with whatever technologies are invented to store and convey it. 89. So, is there a school of Twitter poets yet, exchanging poems of not more than 140 characters, as if they were the modern equivalent of a tanka or a haiku? Of course there is – it’s already a tradition. 90. And has anyone written the world’s first poem using only emojis, as if they were the modern-day equivalent 333

a vertical art of temple hieroglyphs? Yes, it was done a good while ago. 91. Just as the Snapchat poem is now well established. In fact, Snapchat, that messaging service which delights in the ephemeral and insists on perishability, might represent an unlikely opportunity for uniting the opposing forces of printed and performed poetry – given the way it delivers compact blocks of language as writing, but as writing that vaporises instantly, like speech. 92. And has a machine produced viable poetry yet? Actually, no – not that I’m aware of. At least, not the kind of poetry I’m advocating and celebrating, despite the fact that there’s plenty of poetry-writing software out there. One online customer review for such a package read, ‘It works a treat; personally, I still prefer to write the poems myself, but hey, that’s just me.’ 93. ‘Type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the next two decades,’ said a page on the BBC website. I typed in the word ‘poet’. Nothing happened. ‘Browse our full list of jobs,’ was the next instruction – but between ‘podiatrist’ and ‘police community support officer’ there was nothing. I took this as an encouraging existential sign: if a computer doesn’t recognise poetry full stop, how can poets be replaced? As I remarked earlier, we’re an exceptionally insecure lot, unable even to give a convincing account of what 334

CODA it is we do; but pity the poor ‘water and sewage plant operative’, for example, currently at position 146 on the career-extinction red list, with a 60 per cent chance of imminent automation. 94. Which leads me to these final thoughts. Since the advent of the digital camera and Photoshop, we’re all photographers. And since the advent of the iPod, we’re all DJs – and we’re all composers once we’ve downloaded the Sibelius software, and scriptwriters with Final Draft to nudge and prompt us. We’re all film directors as far as YouTube is concerned, and all journalists according to the Huffington Post. The list goes on. But we’re definitely not all poets. Which I find astonishing, given the apparent simplicity of the task. 95 ‘Prove you’re not a robot,’ insist some secure websites, before allowing users to continue. Transposed into a literary context, metaphorically asking the same question of poems we encounter might at least give us confidence in filtering out the junk and the malware. Some poems don’t pass the robot test: of course, they weren’t actually composed by algorithms or binary coding, but they might as well have been – either because they’re mind-numbingly shallow or because they’re inhumanly convoluted, gracelessly contrived. And the day a software package – or even a good mimic – can achieve that elusive-but-not-illusory amalgamation of complexity and coherence that the most convincing poetry aspires to, is the day we can all pack up and go home. 335

Notes

1. The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet 2 ‘Methought I saw’ John Milton, The Complete English Poems, ed. Gordon Campbell (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 108. 3 ‘poor sonnet’ Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, eds. Roger Lonsdale and John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 70. 5 ‘She was four weeks dead’ Douglas Dunn, Elegies (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 22. 10 ‘Louisa, I love thee’ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 122. 12 ‘more clamorous than’ William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 646. 12 ‘the unacknowledged legislators’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 701. 15 ‘Because of your elite status’ Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 12. 16 ‘seemed to be ad copy’ ibid., p. 25. 16 ‘Baudelaire envisaged readers’ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. Harry Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 152. 19 ‘On Clapton Pond at dawn’ Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own (London: Picador, 2014), p. 50. 22 ‘speak with the vulgar’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Art and Criticism’, The Complete Works, vol. XII (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904), p. 286.

337

Notes to pages 23–39 23

23 23 25

‘Poetry, and often art’ The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, ed. Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015), p. xvii. ‘hip-hop made poetry’ ibid., pp. xviii–xx. ‘English ought to be kept up’ John Keats, The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 493. ‘Elegy in Gold’ Aracelis Girmay, Black Renaissance, Vol. 10, issue 2/3, Summer 2010, New York.

2. Mind the Gap: Omission, Negation, and ‘A Final Revelation of Horrible Nothingness’ 29 30 32 33 35 35 36 36 36

37 39 39 39

‘Of lonely men’ The Poems of T. S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), pp. 7 and 385. ‘Of this white page’ Don Paterson, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 53. ‘Ever been tattooed?’ Michael Donaghy, Collected Poems (London: Picador, 2009), p. 75. ‘þe wyldrenesse of Wyrale’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A. x copyright © Tom Cook 2021. ‘hacked his way out’ Ivan Vladislavić, The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (London: Seagull, 2012), p. ii. ‘at a cool distance’ ibid., p. 3. ‘The universe is mainly’ Franz Wright, Wheeling Motel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 43. ‘The solitary reader sits’ ibid., p. 73. ‘Wright has a gift’ William Logan, Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 28 and 29. ‘Nothing’ James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), p. 315. ‘Oh, that?’ ibid., p. 316. ‘This living hand’ John Keats, The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 331. ‘Did you ever feel’ James Wright, Above the River, p. 316.

338

Notes to pages 40–53 40

‘Nothing, like something’ The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 42. 41 ‘Negative Indicative’ ibid., pp. 286–7 and 610. 41 ‘Talking in Bed’ ibid., p. 61. 43 ‘Then there will be nothing’ Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 211. 43 ‘Under the last dead lamp’ George Mackay Brown, Selected Poems: 1954–1992 (London: John Murray, 1996), p. 37. 44 ‘Storm on the Island’ Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966; rev. ed. 1991), p. 38. 47 ‘I cannot but think’ Pearl: A New Verse Translation, tr. Marie Borroff (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), p. 139. 47 ‘at my words’ Pearl, tr. Jane Draycott (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), p. 30. 47 ‘Methinks thou speakest’ Pearl: A Modernised Version of the Middle English Poem, tr. Victor Watts (London: Enitharmon, 2005), p. 51. 48 ‘Þyself in heuen ouer hyȝ þou heue’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A. x copyright © Tom Cook 2021. 48 ‘The Otter’ Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 30. 48 ‘Rises toward her’ Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 174. 49 ‘The Blues of Lane McCotter’ Philip Metres, abu ghraib arias (Denver: Flying Guillotine, 2011). 50 ‘Should you think’ The Letters of Emily Dickinson, eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1986), p. 403. 50 ‘a final revelation’ A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1968; new ed. 1993), p. xv. 51 ‘Stay hereabouts’ Kevin Young, Jelly Roll: A Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), pp. 76–8.

3. On Lists 53

‘I will not overwhelm him’ Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher (London: Unbound, 2014), no. 55.

339

Notes to pages 54–71 54

‘When Lilacs’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp. 276–83. 54 ‘the tropics first hand’ Marianne Moore, New Collected Poems, ed. Heather Cass White (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 93. 55 ‘þof tary hyt me schulde’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A. x copyright © Tom Cook 2021. 56 ‘First, he was deemed’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Revised Edition, tr. Simon Armitage (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), p. 45. 57 ‘depaynted’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A. x copyright © Tom Cook 2021. 58 ‘John had described’ Pearl, tr. Simon Armitage (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), pp. 86–7. 60 ‘Altogether elsewhere, vast’ W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1976; rev. ed. 2007), p. 331. 61 ‘perhaps the most vacuous’ Grevel Lindop, PN Review, vol. 41, no. 5, 2015. 64 ‘She was starting’ Susan Wheeler, Meme (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. 43. 66 ‘The lodger blamed’ Selima Hill, Bunny (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2001), p. 73. 68 ‘a poetics of everything’ Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay, tr. Alistair McEwan (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), p. 7. 68 ‘infinitesimally minute goldsmithery’ ibid., p. 11. 68 ‘topos of ineffability’ ibid., p. 49. 69 ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, Longman, 1977), pp. 714 and 727–8. 69 ‘lusty Spring’ ibid., p. 729. 70 ‘sturdy March’ ibid., pp. 730–2. 70 ‘Thee gentle Spenser’ The Works of Walter Savage Landor, vol. 2 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), p. 667. 71 ‘Look up to catch’ Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 3.

340

Notes to pages 72–85 72

72 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 80 80 82 82 84

‘Nought may endure’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 112. ‘awful majesty’ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 98. ‘Her goodly eyes’ Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 441–2. ‘Dragonstraw door mat’ Peter Reading, Collected Poems: I: Poems 1970–1984 (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 1995), p. 238. ‘One’s a crown’ Paul Farley, Selected Poems (London: Picador, 2014), p. 45. ‘The crock of the pelvis’ Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems: 1966– 1987 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), pp. 66, 69, 71, and 73. ‘to pry into roots’ ibid., p. 9. ‘plate-glassy’ Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, vol. 1, ed. Edward Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 101. ‘It was you’ Ezra Pound, Selected Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 39. ‘your greatest soul speaker’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus: Book I (New York: New Directions, 2004), p. 9. ‘the little deaths’ Charles Wright, Buffalo Yoga (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), p. 16. ‘a tendency to the pleasures’ Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, ed. Graham Clarke (Robertsbridge: Helm, 1995), p. 24. ‘bubbling source’ Thom Gunn, Positives (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 30. ‘O my body!’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp. 86–7.

4. Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld 85

‘I sent my Soul’ Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 83.

341

Notes to pages 86–98 86

‘Oh, to be in England’ Robert Browning, Selected Poetry, ed. Daniel Karlin (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 44. 87 ‘It is easy to descend’ Aeneid: Book VI, tr. Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), pp. 9–10. 88 ‘And then how I shall lie’ Robert Browning, Selected Poetry, ed. Daniel Karlin (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 47. 89 ‘Genesis’ Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 199. 89 ‘Against the burly air’ ibid., p. 15. 89 ‘I don’t want it to be’ The Isis interview, 2015. 89 ‘I really do want there’ ibid., 2015. 90 ‘on the conversion’ Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 56. 91 ‘Near admirers’ Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (London: Enitharmon, 2011), p. 20. 91 ‘greed, self-pity, sick’ Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 39. 92 ‘Do you see yourself ’ Paris Review, no. 154, 2000. 93 ‘i am doing’ Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love, p. v. 93 ‘The dead are my obsession’ Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems, p. 49. 94 ‘And I believe’ ibid., p. 20. 94 ‘a necessary penitential exercise’ Geoffrey Hill, King Log (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), p. 70. 94 ‘coy last stanza’ Quoted by Nicholas Lezard, Guardian, 20 November 2013. 94 ‘She died before’ Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems, p. 22. 95 ‘The author is perfectly aware’ Paris Review, no. 154, 2000. 96 ‘hour into hour’ Geoffrey Hill, Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 54. 97 ‘only occasionally written’ Elizabeth Jennings, An Autobiography, Chapter XXII; quoted in Dana Greene, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 52. 98 ‘It was the amazing white’ Elizabeth Jennings, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Schmidt (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 48.

342

Notes to pages 99–110 99 ‘It seems more likely’ ibid., p. 309. 100 ‘the glimmering Kingdom’ ibid., p. 311. 101 ‘a kind of reverse dementia’ Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (New York: Liveright, 2014), p. 29. 102 ‘extraordinary depiction of Doom’ Michael Thurston, The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 19–20. 102 ‘to hell and back’ Jon Stallworthy, War Poet (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), pp. 26–32. 103 ‘God-begun, the barley rack’ George Mackay Brown, Selected Poems: 1954–1992 (London: John Murray, 1996), p. 95. 103 ‘sacramental at heart’ David Jones, Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber & Faber, 1959; new ed. 2017), pp. 167–8. 103 ‘half-way down the road’ Robert Graves, War Poems, ed. Charles Mundye (Bridgend: Seren, 2016), p. 131. 104 ‘In the prose version’ Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 182–3. 104 ‘Later, I had it cut out’ ibid., p. 181. 104 ‘going blindly on all paws’ David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber & Faber, 1961; new ed. 2014), p. 184. 105 ‘She speaks to them’ ibid., p. 185. 105 ‘on a London Tube platform’ Lee Miller, Henry Moore, Holborn Underground Station, London, England (1944). 106 ‘during aerial bombardment’ Henry Moore, Odysseus in the Naiads’ Cave (1944). 106 ‘death[s] in war’ Walker Evans, Many Are Called (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 13. 108 ‘Heaney as Orpheus’ Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems: 1966– 1987 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 146. 109 ‘Out of the marvellous’ ibid., p. 32. 110 ‘cajole / you to come back’ James Tate, Selected Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), pp. 15–16.

343

Notes to pages 110–129 110 110 111

‘Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb’ Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 56. ‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate’ ibid., p. 49. ‘so I paid my bill’ James Tate, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010 (New York: Ecco, 2012), p. 15.

5. We Need to Talk About Robert: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature 114 114 115 116 117 117 118 119

124 125 125 127 128 129

‘for having created’ ‘admirable delicacy’ Richard Williams, ‘Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel literature win’, Guardian, 13 October 2016. ‘helped restore the vital’ Gordon Ball, letter to the Nobel committee, 23 January 1999. ‘Dylan remains first’ Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. I: 1957–73 (London: Constable, 2009), p. 8. ‘Like those other’ Julian Cope, Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock ’n’ Roll Underworld (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 212. ‘Dylan’s ever-changing muse’ ibid., pp. 575 and 580. ‘I is somebody else’ Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems and Letters, tr. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 238. ‘I don’t know if ’ Quotes from Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006). ‘William Zanzinger killed’ Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961–2012 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), p. 95. ‘Superfluous? You bet’ Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), p. 230. ‘the verses all’ ibid., p. 226. ‘on the level’ Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961–2012 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), p. 96. ‘In the anecdote’ David Remnick, ‘Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker’, New Yorker, 17 October 2016. ‘like pinning a medal’

344

Notes to pages 131–144 131

133 133 135 135 136

‘It is a commonly repeated’ Neil Corcoran Do You, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002), p. 160. ‘The town I was’ The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts (London: Phoenix, 2014), p. 327. ‘Then unexpectedly’ Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Scribner, 2005), pp. 78–9. ‘some wannabe rock chick’ Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan (London: Constable, 2009), p. 429. ‘Some brilliant chick folksingers’ Gary Von Tersch, ‘Ladies of the Canyon’, Rolling Stone, 11 June 1970. ‘if you want’ Tricia Rose, ‘Jay-Z – dropping the word “bitch” doesn’t begin to cover it’, Guardian, 17 January 2012.

6. The Hawks and the Doves: Raptors and Rapture in the Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes 139

‘that if hire’ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 170–1. 140 ‘And sodeynly he’ ibid., p. 176. 141 ‘amalgamated single entity’ Alan Bold, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1976). 141 ‘The title of his first collection’ ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, interview by Ekbert Faas in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983), p. 201. 142 ‘childhood . . . full of soldiers’ ‘Moving Voice’, interview with Robert Potts, Guardian, 27 September 2003. 142 ‘Yes, I’m a cold poet’ James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 26. 142 ‘Almost to the point’ Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 104. 143 ‘In the M5 restaurant’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), pp. 566–7. 144 ‘I made various revisions’ Thom Gunn, Fighting Terms, (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), front-matter.

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Notes to pages 144–153 144 ‘In putting this collection’ Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 489. 144 ‘all are terrible’ Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 181. 144 ‘top-of-the-line juvenilia’ ‘Introduction’, Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, ed. August Kleinzahler (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. xii. 145 ‘my life insists on’ Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, p. 184. 145 ‘seamless in execution’ ‘Introduction’, Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, p. xii. 145 ‘so many poems’ Thom Gunn in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, ed. John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 53. 145 ‘I leap into’ Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, p. 123. 146 ‘What am I?’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 183. 146 ‘to be the John Donne’ Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, vol. 33, ed. James Lesniak (Detroit, MI; London: Gale Research, 1991), p. 196. 147 ‘The formel on youre hond’ Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, p. 391. 148 ‘Did you ever hear’ Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 133. 149 ‘And she came just as good’ Barry Hines, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, screenplay of Kes (released 1969, adapted from A Kestrel for a Knave, London: Michael Joseph, 1968). 149 ‘I don’t like dramatising’ James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 19. 150 ‘The danger of biography’ Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, p. 187. 152 ‘This is a poem’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 19. 153 ‘Hughes himself remarked’ Ted Hughes, letter to Edith and William Hughes, 29 June 1957, MSS 980, MARBL, Emory University. 153 ‘the terrible, suffocating, maternal’ ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, interview by Ekbert Faas, p. 20.

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Notes to pages 153–168 153 ‘written in the early hours’ Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes, The Unauthorised Life (London: William Collins, 2015), p. 94. 155 ‘truly one of the best’ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 631. 157 ‘Mother died at’ Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, p. 270. 158 ‘You may from this’ ibid., p. 143. 158 ‘I stamp upon’ ibid., p. 85. 158 ‘I taught you speech’ ibid., p. 23. 159 ‘home through the’ ibid., pp. 175–6. 159 ‘a four-year-old blond child’ Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 84–5. 160 ‘picked him up’ Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, p. 182. 160 ‘Resistant to all help’ ibid., p. 171. 160 ‘the man I least’ ibid., p. 47. 160 ‘I am made by her’ ibid., pp. 183–5. 161 ‘because it was no longer’ James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell, p. 19. 161 ‘in which the crime’ Neil Roberts, The Ted Hughes Society website . 162 ‘But when will he land’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 440. 162 ‘body of thorns’ ibid., pp. 449 and 445. 162 ‘Those eyes in their helmet’ ibid., p. 747. 163 ‘his real poetic work’ Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes, pp. 505–6. 163 ‘I have a freedom’ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, pp. 712–13. 164 ‘concepts linked like chainmail’ Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, p. 37. 164 ‘Continual temptation waits’ ibid., p. 25. 164 ‘Now he rides’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 26. 165 ‘Scribbling on the air’ ibid., p. 181. 165 ‘So accurate, such phrases’ Letter from Thom Gunn, 3 February 1990; Ted Hughes papers, box 3, folder 8 [Emory University].

7. Like, Elizabeth Bishop 168 ‘I was always’ Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 126.

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Notes to pages 169–182 169 169 169 170 170 171 172

172 175

175 176 177 177

178 179 180 181

182

‘There are too many’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011), p. 91. ‘giddily into the unknown’ Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne, 1966), p. 66. ‘We are driving’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 88. ‘look like the hulls’ ibid., p. 92. ‘worthy of closer scrutiny’ I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965; 1st ed. 1936), p. 96. ‘feel stirrings of ’ Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), p. 57. ‘mere mannered fussy prattling’ A. Alvarez, ‘Imagism and Poetesses’, in The Kenyon Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (Gambier: Kenyon College, 1957), pp. 321–9. ‘for love on summer nights’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 45. ‘Imparadised in one another’s arms’ John Milton, The Complete English Poems, ed. Gordon Campbell (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 235. ‘When the evening’ The Poems of T. S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 5. ‘what surmounts the reach’ John Milton, The Complete English Poems, p. 265. ‘justify[ing] the ways’ ibid., p. 150. ‘That it has no special meaning’ Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 1 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–47. ‘I am crossing’ Edouard Dujardin, De Stéphane Mallarmé au prophète Ezéchiel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1919), p. 21. ‘The yellow sun’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 113. ‘Oil has seeped’ ibid., p. 176. ‘This was a duality’ Anne Stevenson, ‘The Geographical Mirror’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, eds. Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (Hexham: Bloodaxe), p. 32. ‘descriptions of funerals’ Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: The Selected Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 17.

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Notes to pages 182–194 182 182 182 182 183 183 184 184 185 185 187 187

188

188 188 189 190 190

192 194

‘my very favourite’ ibid., p. 434. ‘rereading Hardy’ ibid., p. 442. ‘dear little Hardy’ ibid., p. 561. ‘fly-blown’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 518–19. ‘The mystery here’ Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), p. 850. ‘black, naked women’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 179. ‘like little moles’ ibid., p. 96. ‘Oh, but it is dirty!’ ibid., pp. 125–6. ‘the eastern flame’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 519. ‘Then I was back’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 181. ‘myself am hell’ John Milton, The Complete English Poems, p. 224. ‘I am the skunk’ Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 239. ‘will not scare’ Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter with DeSales Harrison (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 192. ‘breaking though the shell’ Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 227. ‘fire balloons’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 101. ‘a weak mailed fist’ ibid., p. 102. ‘Let’s not forget’ Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 125 and 131. ‘I will not play’ Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe and the JukeBox: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), p. 57. ‘The art of losing’ Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, p. 198. ‘peripheral vision’ Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop, p. 66.

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Notes to pages 196–205 8. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres 196 ‘Overall is beyond me’ A. R. Ammons, The Complete Poems, Volume 1: 1955–1977, ed. Robert M. West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2017), pp. 91–2. 196 ‘helps me to live’ A. R. Ammons: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 5; see also Chapter 18 of Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 197 ‘I’m attracted to paper’ A. R. Ammons, The Complete Poems, Volume 1: 1955–1977, pp. 142–3. 198 ‘You can come’ ibid., p. 275. 201 ‘Better known by’ A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 255. 201 ‘morbid secretion’ ibid., p. 255. 201 ‘reported to say’ A. E. Housman, letter to Laurence Housman; quoted in Richard Percival Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 255. 202 ‘the legitimate meanings’ A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, p. 235. 202 ‘could not describe’ ibid., p. 240. 202 ‘Poetry is not’ ibid., p. 248. 203 ‘replied that I’ ibid., p. 254. 203 ‘that is to me’ ibid., p. 248. 203 ‘That [. . .] I regard’ Richard Percival Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet, p. 172. 204 ‘The snows are fled’ A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, p. 142. 204 ‘Like an army defeated’ William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 248. 204 ‘The changing year’s’ Samuel Johnson, The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 37. 205 ‘And Theseus leaves’ A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, p. 143. 205 ‘forgetful snow’ The Poems of T. S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 55.

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Notes to pages 205–221 205 ‘the glib sonority’ Thomas Hardy: Poems Selected by Tom Paulin (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. xiii. 208 ‘being probably my last appearance’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 834. 208 ‘mumming / In golden garb’ ibid., p. 709. 209 ‘Man has created death’ W. B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 122. 209 ‘The Later Autumn’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, p. 710. 209 ‘a storm-strid night’ ibid., p. 731. 210 ‘He described himself ’ Selected Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. John Wain (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. x. 211 ‘the joint decision’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, p. 733. 212 ‘a curious effect’ One Rare Fair Woman: Thomas’s Hardy’s Letters to Florence Henniker, 1893–1922, eds. Evelyn Hardy and F. B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 75. 212 ‘Cold, iced, forgot’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, p. 737. 212 ‘arm in arm’ ibid., p. 734. 213 ‘worn carols’ ibid., p. 734. 213 ‘When life was no trial’ ibid., pp. 735–6. 214 ‘On the flat road’ ibid., p. 733. 216 ‘to the warm knot’ A. R. Ammons, The Complete Poems, Volume 1: 1955–1977, p. 340. 217 ‘I’ve given you’ ibid., p. 347.

9. Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? Dilemmas and Decisions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 220 ‘while willing to divide’ Marie Borroff, ‘The Metrical Forms’, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition, eds. Marie Borroff and Laura L. Howes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), pp. xx–xxi. 220 ‘Since the siege’ ibid., p. 3. 221 ‘Siþen þe sege’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A. x copyright © Tom Cook 2021.

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Notes to pages 221–232 221

‘but that’s still’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition, p. xv. 221 ‘Þe tulk þat þe trammes’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Tom Cook. 221 ‘Following a retrospective paperchase’ Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 326–372. 222 ‘Þat þe schene’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Tom Cook. 222 ‘And a little blood’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 59. 222 ‘Then over his shoulders’ Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 171. 223 ‘Þe borȝ brittened ’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Tom Cook. 224 ‘And the city flattened’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. Bernard O’Donoghue (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 3 224 ‘brittened ’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook, lines 680, 1,339 and 1,611. 224 ‘Brian Stone introduces’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. Brian Stone (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 23. 224 ‘Keith Harrison’s Troy’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. Keith Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3. 225 ‘charred beams’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. W. R. J. Barron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 33. 225 ‘Declining what is offered’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, tr. J. R. R. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 17. 225 ‘The city destroyed’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, tr. W. S. Merwin (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2003), p. 3. 225 ‘Þe tulk þat þe trammes’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 227 ‘trecherye and vntrawþe’ ibid. 229 ‘the least loss’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, tr. J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 27. 230 ‘lufed [his] lyf  ’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 232 ‘destines’ ibid. 232 ‘Þerfore com oþer recreaunt’ ibid.

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Notes to pages 232–250 232

‘“craven”, as Tolkien puts it’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, tr. J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 30. 233 ‘Þat pared out of papure’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 233 ‘If he myȝt keuer’ ibid. 234 ‘wodwos’ ibid. 234 ‘Hughes himself ’ Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 268. 235 ‘I sende hir to asay’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 236 ‘Þen kest þe knyȝt’ ibid. 237 ‘luflace’ ibid. 237 ‘The faults and the frailty’ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 61. 239 ‘Hade hit dryuen’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 239 ‘analyses his single fault’ J. A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature 1100–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 122. 241 ‘Then he gave in’ The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript in Modern English Translation, tr. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 125. 241 ‘goud wylle’ Text of MS Cotton Nero A., Cook. 242 ‘And comaundeȝ me’ ibid. 243 ‘I wroȝt hit myseluen’ ibid. 244 ‘The hero of this’ Gilgamesh: A New English Version, tr. Stephen Mitchell (London: Profile Books, 2005), p. 2.

10. ‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’: Clarity and Obscurity in the Age of Formlessness 248 ‘But at my back’ The Poems of T. S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 62. 248 ‘By the waters’ ibid., p. 62. 249 ‘much as the imaginary’ T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 151. 250 ‘Nuns fret not’ William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 286.

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Notes to pages 251–265 251 ‘part prison’ Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018), p. 11. 252 ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’ William Wordsworth, The Major Works, p. 356. 252 ‘an energetic and varied flow’ ibid., p. 710. 253 ‘Their little tract’ Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, ed. Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 65. 253 ‘Instead of looking’ The Letters of William Wordsworth, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 259. 255 ‘What does it matter’ W. S. Graham, New Collected Poems, ed. Matthew Francis (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), p. 178. 256 ‘Collier’ Sinéad Morrissey, On Balance (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017). 256 ‘My Great Auntie Winnie’ ibid., p. 256 ‘The Royal children’ Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013), p. 26. 257 ‘the notes from Parallax’ ibid., p. 69. 257 ‘as educational playthings’ museumofplay.org/blog/play-stuff/2015/ 06/the-first-jigsaw-puzzle 258 ‘When Gugliemo Marconi’ Sinéad Morrissey, On Balance. 259 ‘you are being watched’ ibid. 259 ‘He listened carefully’ Raymond Buckland, The Spirit Book: The Encyclopedia of Clairvoyance, Channelling, and Spirit Communication (Canton: Visible Ink, 2005), p. 207. 260 ‘pure air, pure interruption’ Sinéad Morrissey, On Balance, p. 26. 261 ‘On the same acknowledgements page’ Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. i. 262 ‘Nought may endure’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, eds. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 112. 262 ‘I can shoot’ Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability, p. 54. 263 ‘directly or indirectly’ ibid., p. i. 264 ‘The Oval Court’ ibid., p. 7. 265 ‘the white legs’ W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 179.

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Notes to pages 265–290 265 ‘unsignificantly / off the coast’ William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 212. 267 ‘So, as well as reading’ Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018), p. 110. 267 ‘in other Fens’ ibid., p. 97. 268 ‘horizontal neighbours’ ibid., p. 98. 269 ‘And have forks stuck in their backs’ ibid., p. 99. 269 ‘It’s about how fragile’ Mike Barnes, Captain Beefheart: The Biography (London: Omnibus, 2004), p. 100. 270 ‘This poem is’ Vahni Capildeo, Venus as a Bear, p. 98. 270 ‘I’ve fallen to bits’ ibid., p. 99. 270 ‘pianist frig[ging] his dog’ ibid., p. 97. 272 ‘The hatchback is easier’ Oliver Reynolds, Skevington’s Daughter (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 35.

11. ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’ 278 ‘the poetry of public spaces’ La Generación del Cordero: Antología de la Poesía Actual en las Islas Británicas, eds. Carlos López Beltrán and Pedro Serrano (Chapultepec Morales: Trilce Ediciones, 2000), pp. iii–xxix. 278 ‘the idea of Englishes’ The New Poetry, eds. Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, and David Morley (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 1993), p. 16. 279 ‘Oxbridge excrescence’ David Lister, ‘New generation of writers presents poetry in motion’, Independent, 13 January 1994. 284 ‘Human beings are difficult’ Geoffrey Hill, interviewed in the Paris Review, no. 154, 2000. 285 ‘rising and gliding out’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), p. 227. 288 ‘medlest [. . .] with makynges’ William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Norton Critical Edition, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. 186. 290 ‘as Auden called it’ W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber & Faber, 2012; 1st edn 1963), p. 1.

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Notes to pages 298–314 298 ‘In what cold clockwork’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 43. 301 ‘And what need therefore’ Norman Nicholson, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 32.

CODA. Ninety-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry 303 304 306

307 309 309 310

311 311 312 313 314

‘Visiting neighbours’ Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966– 1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 249–50. ‘In the black mirror’ The New Oxford Book of War Poetry, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 360. ‘“Accessibility” needs to be dropped’ Helen Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 331. ‘Most people ignore’ Adrian Mitchell, Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 8. ‘And we take him in’ Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 733. ‘An inexplicable’ Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), p. 473. ‘Hachuring distinct with’ Norman Nicholson, ‘Gathering Sticks on Sunday’, in Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 29. ‘Riley’s reverse perspective’ Denise Riley, Selected Poems: 1976–2016 (London: Picador, 2019), p. 155. ‘an artist gazing’ Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 182–3. ‘You want it to touch’ Quote Poet Unquote, ed. Dennis O’Driscoll (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), p. 11. ‘language lit up’ ibid., p. 4. ‘a calling for’ ‘Ben Lerner: No Art | Poetry, fiction, criticism, fiction, poetry’ (2016). .

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Notes to pages 314–322 314

‘about the most profound subjects’ Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017). 316 ‘And an old white horse’ The Poems of T. S. Eliot, eds. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 101. 317 ‘The poem is you’ John Ashbery, Shadow Train (New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 3. 318 ‘always listening’ W. B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 5. 318 ‘First, try to be something’ Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 120. 319 ‘poetry is a battle’ Quote Poet Unquote, ed. Dennis O’Driscoll (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), p. 196. 319 ‘stenographer of your own mind’ Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, ed. David Stephen Calonne (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), p. 167. 320 ‘no form at all’ James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 12. 320 ‘the agony of standing’ ibid., p. 13. 320/21 ‘the kind of writer’ The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 2: 1920–1928, eds. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 242. 321 ‘I could see’ Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (San Diego, New York, and London: DoubleTakeBooks, 1999), p. 158. 321 ‘whispers on the wind’ John Fuller, ‘In Conversation’, PN Review, 43.3 (2017), p. 45. 322 ‘The sound of small waters’ Carol Rumens, ‘Poem of the week: Neigh­ bour by Iain Crichton Smith’ (2016) . 322 ‘a “coveted space”’ Maurice Riordan, ‘Editorial’, Poetry Review, 106.1 (Spring 2016), p. 5.

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Notes to pages 323–332 323 ‘the elegance of the verse’ Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 74. 324 ‘Out on the lawn’ W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1976; rev. ed. 2007), p. 117. 327 ‘Poetry is the art’ Quote Poet Unquote, ed. Dennis O’Driscoll (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), p. 194. 328 ‘a radio thinking aloud’ Christoper Reid, Katerina Brac (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), passim. 330 ‘the dying man’ Craig Raine, My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: A Look at Poetry (London: Atlantic Books, 2016), p. 60. 330 ‘And she, who’ R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems: 1945–1990 (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 533. 332 ‘Stone is indestructible’ Nicolas Barker, Visible Voices: Translating Verse Into Script and Print: 3000 BC–2000 AD (Manchester: Carcanet, 2016), p. 8. 332 ‘having caused memory’ Nicolas Barker, Visible Voices: Translating Verse Into Script and Print, p. 17.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the editors of the following magazines, journals and publications in which five of the essays in this collection first appeared. ‘Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld’ first appeared in Areté (Issue 52, 2018). ‘The Hawks and the Doves: Raptors and Rapture in the Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes’ first appeared in Essays in Criticism (February 2021). ‘Like, Elizabeth Bishop’ first appeared in PN Review (July– August 2018). ‘Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres’ first appeared in the Poetry Review (Winter, 2018). ‘Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t’ first appeared in the Norton Library edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2021). The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: The poem ‘The Split’ by Susan Wheeler from Meme, University of Iowa Press, 2012, p. 43, copyright © Susan Wheeler/ University of Iowa Press, 2012. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. 359

a vertical art The poems ‘Galloping Alopecia’ by Selima Hill from Gloria: Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 2008; and ‘Epithalamion’ by Peter Reading from Collected Poems: I: Poems 1970–1984, Bloodaxe Books, 1995. Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books, www.bloodaxebooks.com. The poem ‘Relic’ by Paul Farley from Selected Poems, Picador, 2014, copyright © Paul Farley. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

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