Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays 9780748669424

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Don Paterson

Don Paterson Contemporary Critical Essays Edited by Natalie Pollard

© editorial matter and organisation Natalie Pollard, 2014 © the chapters their several authors, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12pt Goudy Old Style by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6941 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6942 4 (webready PDF)

The right of the contributors to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vii List of Abbreviations viii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1

Part I PATTERNS AND PATERSON: FORMS, TECHNIQUES, HISTORIES

  1. Don Paterson’s Ars Poetica 21 Derek Attridge   2. Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet Hugh Haughton

34

  3. No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson Edward Larrissy

49

  4. Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson Michael O’Neill   5. Form in Poetry An Interview between Don Paterson and Derek Attridge

61 75

Part II POETRY IN ITS PLACE: RESPONSES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

  6. Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry Gerard Carruthers

85

vi  c o n t e n t s   7. On Spirituality and Transcendence Jo George

98

  8. Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing Natalie Pollard

114

  9. Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers Peter Robinson

131

10. The Publishing of Poetry  An Interview between Don Paterson and Matthew Sperling

145

Select Bibliography 153 Index 159

Acknowledgements

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ublication of this volume has been made possible by the generosity of many individuals and organisations with whom I’ve collaborated in the editing process. In particular, thanks to Faber and Faber, to Rogers, Coleridge and White, and to Don Paterson, not only for granting permissions to reprint quotations from the poetry, aphorism and critical prose, but also for their diligence and patience throughout the various stages of the process. I’m grateful to The Estate of Francesca Woodman, George and Betty Woodman, for granting permission to reproduce Woodman’s photographs – and providing the high-resolution images – which appear in Chapter 8. Also to the Ingelby Gallery, Edinburgh, for the reproduction of Alison Watt’s and Paterson’s work from Hiding in Full View (Ingleby Gallery, 2012). This book was supported in part by a grant provided by the British Academy, as well as by the space and time afforded by a Research Fellowship at the University of Reading, which enabled me to work on the final typescript. The initial inspiration for this book arose during my Fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, to whom I would also like to express gratitude. I am more indebted than I can say to the many people who have engaged me in conversation at different stages in my work on Paterson, especially to those who have invited me to deliver talks on his writing at conferences and at other events, and to those who have read and commented on my own writing as it took shape. All quotations from Don Paterson’s poetry are copyright © Don Paterson. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Faber and Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA. All quotations from Paterson’s books of aphorism, and from New British Poetry, 101 Sonnets, Robert Burns: Poems Selected by Don Paterson and Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, are copyright © Don Paterson. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. All images of the work of Francesca Woodman are © The Estate of Francesca Woodman, courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Fount, 2011, is copyright © Alison Watt, courtesy of Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

List of Abbreviations

Best Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work and Death, Aphorisms Blind The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice Burns Robert Burns: Poems Selected by Don Paterson DP1 and DP2 ‘The Domain of the Poem’, Parts 1 and 2 Gift God’s Gift to Women Light Landing Light LP1 and LP2 ‘The Lyric Principle’, Parts 1 and 2 NBP New British Poetry Nil Nil Nil RSS Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets Shadows The Book of Shadows

List of Contributors

Derek Attridge’s most recent book is Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (2013). His other books on poetry include Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995) and, with Thomas Carper, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (2003). Another interest is literary theory, evinced in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (reissued by Routledge, 2004) and Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (2010). He teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Chair of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the new Oxford University Press edition of the Works of Robert Burns and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow. His publications include Scottish Literature: A Critical Guide (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (2012; co-edited with Liam McIlvanney) and Beyond Scotland: New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (2004; co-edited with David Goldie and Alistair Renfrew). Jodi-Anne (Jo) George is a Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the University of Dundee, where she also runs the JOOT Theatre Company. She has published widely in fields as varied as Old English poetry, early drama, the Pre-Raphaelites and the history of the animal welfare movement. Until recently, Jo was the editor of the newsletter of the William Morris Society. She is currently writing a monograph on the Pre-Raphaelites and Theatre. Hugh Haughton is Professor of English at the University of York. He has published widely in the UK, the US and Ireland on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as on psychoanalysis and literature, and the literature of nonsense. He is author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon (2007), and editor of Poetry of the Second World War (2004). He is the co-editor (with Valerie Eliot) of The Letters of T. S. Eliot (2009), and editor of The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (2007). He has

x  l i st o f con tribu to rs also published numerous essays on modern literature, including on Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Banville, Samuel Beckett and Dante. Edward Larrissy is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. He was previously Professor of English at the University of Leeds, where he led the AHRC project ‘Leeds Poetry 1950–1980’. His books include Reading Twentieth Century Poetry: The Language of Gender and Objects (1990); Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (1994); Blake and Modern Literature (2006); and The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period (2007). He has edited Romanticism and Postmodernism (1999) and W. B. Yeats: The Major Works (2000), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry Since 1945. He has reviewed poetry for the TLS, Poetry Review, Stand and Poetry London. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University. His recent books include Poetic Form: An Introduction (2012; co-authored with Michael D. Hurley) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013; co-edited with Anthony Howe and with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan). He is the author of two collections of poems, The Stripped Bed (1990) and Wheel (2008), and his third collection Gangs of Shadow will be published by Arc in 2014. Natalie Pollard works on modern and contemporary literature and theory, especially Scottish and English poetry. Her monograph Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She has also published articles and book chapters on topics that include scholarship and stupidity, literary commerce and reader-relations, poetry and architecture, and the ethics of rudeness and bickering. In her current post as British Academy Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Reading, she is writing a new book entitled Lyric Economies, about contemporary poetry and current anxieties over commerce, broadcast, funding, stylistic rivalries and the politics of literary friendship. A future book is also planned, on the subject of Not Getting It. Peter Robinson has published various volumes of poetry, short stories, aphorisms and translations, including This Other Life (1988), for which he was awarded the Cheltenham Prize, The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), which received the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations, for The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012). Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and Poetry Editor for Two Rivers Press, he has also published four volumes of literary criticism and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). Matthew Sperling was born in Kent in 1982, and lives in London. He is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Reading. Previously he

list of contributors    xi taught at the University of Oxford, having studied there, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at Gravesend Grammar School. His monograph, Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014, and he was co-editor of Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts (2011). He has published other essays on Roy Fisher, J. H. Prynne, the index as a critical tool, and modern publishing history. He also writes poetry, fiction and art criticism; his current research is concerned with the recent history of poetry publishing.

Introduction

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on Paterson’s author photograph, on his online Faber page, combines cool directness with an archly askance gaze.1 Looking into the camera’s lens, the subject appears to fix his eye boldly, knowingly on the viewer, yet the pose is also angled sympathetically, and the facing eyebrow seems to be raised, as if he were not quite able to take the process seriously. It is a flattering, frank shot; an image that appears to grant a face-to-face between reader and poet, while ensuring that its composition inspires respect, through distance. Paterson’s ruminative cameragazing is suggestive of ‘serious’ biography in the Oxford University Press tradition of poet-portraiture, but his casual attire, the natural backdrop, and the three-point lighting – which reduces the shadows and stark contrasts produced by direct illumination – soften the austerity of the shot, emphasising his accessibility. One sees a similar interplay between formality and over-familiarity on the dust jacket of Orpheus, where a classic writerly pose, hand studiously on chin, meets the cheeky full-frontal smile of the youthful poet: Paterson is at once the boy-next-door and the sophisticated man of letters.2 In each case, ‘Don Paterson’ shows up as a textual object, available to be interpreted, analysed, explicated and evaluated by current and future generations of readers. Paterson’s work has both self-consciously responded to and gleefully ironised such objectifications of the lyric subject. At the start of ‘A Talking Book’, his lines appear directly to speak to an ill-assorted audience of critics, potential purchasers, poetasters and young fans, as if all were gathered at a public reading in a commercial bookshop: Welcome children! First, to those rare birds for whom all journeyings are heavenwards, who always wing it, mapless and alone; to those undecided shades in Waterstones, trapped between the promise and the cost; [. . .] and a big hi! to those holders, old and new

2  d o n p a t e rso n : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s of the critic’s one-day travel pass (I too have known that sudden quickening of the pulse when something looks a bit like something else;3 It is an address that showcases writerly susceptibility to, as well as agile manipulation of, good reader-relations. On the one hand, Paterson’s self-reflexive lines hold back from pretension and complacence, suspicious of the self-admiration that results from being won over by generous critical attention. On the other hand, they reveal concerns that the audience will not imagine they are self-promoting, or vainly concerned by reputation and status. The lines are comedic, but also self-protective. The casual tone – ‘a big hi!’ – is also carefully poised. Unlike its imagined reader-­ listeners, this speaking voice is not ‘wing[ing] it, mapless and alone’. Nor is it ‘undecided’, however much it is willing to talk of, and to show sympathy for, all ‘those’ who might be baffled by the promotional material, steep ‘cost’ and dust-jacket ‘promise’ that get between the poet’s printed words and the scanning eye. Querulously attentive to the claims made for his writing by copy-writers, booksellers, academics and publishers, Paterson’s work appears to stand against the portentous. But it is also suspicious of the ways in which it may be courting attention and praise through striking humble attitudes: in making a show of its resistance to the literary industry it tries to rally the support and sympathy of critics and common readers. Emulating the voices of literary commendation and the ‘poetry lovers’, Paterson turns the writer-figure – through a parody both of the self and of the culture-industry – against his own impulse to rest secure in public congratulations or promotional puff. He probes the gratifications and fears of commercial poetic dissemination. Although Paterson’s work has had many important allies and supporters, it has also generated dissent and negative response, especially from those who are invested in what he has contestatorily dismissed as a ‘postmodernist’ poetics. In a sense, Paterson has been desirous to provoke judgements of both kinds. One sees this even in these lines quoted from ‘A Talking Book’: a vexingly ingratiating, bright tone of greeting (‘a big hi!’) is quickly followed by the acerbic, meta-critical put-down: ‘one-day travel pass’, but if both solicit critical responses, they go out to meet hostility as much as approval. Such writing is in search of assessment from those professionals who will judge it alongside other poets, both of its time and apart from it; from those who define, demarcate and canonise. In another sense, as Paterson knows, the kind of lyric figure he will cut in twenty years, or that which he will go down as in literary posterity, inevitably remains up for negotiation, part of a set of judgements in a future he cannot reach into and alter. Against that uncertainty, a Paterson speaker’s air of provisionality, his use of unpredictable tonal features, and his characteristic oscillation between aggressive stance-taking and vulnerability – often expressed as finely balanced ‘lyricism’ – offer forms of self-defence against the assessments they incite. The work’s shape-shifting makes Paterson difficult critically to pin down: however much he seems to be asking for it, he retains a protean prickliness about being judged, considered and assimilated into the establishment – or not. Paterson’s authorial voices oscillate between the

introduction   3 living and the dead, friends and foes; and this range of different figures talking to, for, and against one another lends the poetry an elusiveness that may or may not be to his advantage. As he knows, it is not always entirely felicitous for the poet to be gathered to the bosom of the academy, which becomes especially clear in ‘A Talking Book’, when the ‘book’ pokes fun at ‘the critic’s swift inspection’. Yet he wants that security too, as the work’s repeated soliciting of scholarly inspection and audience (and financial) appreciation attests. One can clearly see in the poetry, as well as in the editorial and theoretical work, a writer mediating warily between his status as professor and poet, editor and cultural arbiter. It is in part due to Paterson’s complex occupation of these conflicting roles within the academic, poetic and publishing scenes that his work and career have become particularly instructive testing grounds for the changing facets of contemporary literary negotiation. Paterson is by no means alone in having to juggle these duties, but he is somewhat unusual, I think, in producing a popular poetry in which issues at once highly relevant to and heatedly debated across the poetry scene are insistently played out – especially those of audience and poetic rivalry, book sales, and the financial insecurity and status anxiety of both rising talents and established poets. His prose, too, has directed at itself and at others’ questions about the poetpublisher’s status and duty, which manifest frequently in discussions about the ethics of readership and the market, current battles over style and form, and in dialogues about the privilege conferred on certain traditions within the poetry scene since, at least, early twentieth-century modernism.4 The most intimate, lyric poems of Paterson’s – including his ‘versionings’ of European writers – have also been closely attentive to literary value and venality (albeit more subtly than, say, ‘A Talking Book’). Such writing alerts us to a longer, trans-national history in which poetry is commissioned, promoted and disseminated. Paterson’s work, at its best, gives depth and focus to the question of the changing relationship between poetry and commerce that writers have negotiated during the last forty or fifty years – at least since rising production costs in the 1970s led to a number of publishers shedding their poetry lists, and independents having to merge with larger firms.5 It is a period during which anxieties in the market and in the writing world are drawn together, both in and out of poetic texts. Some have turned their attention to the invasion of accountancy concerns and free-market capitalist discourse into poetic language. Paterson’s lyricism tends not to articulate an invasion but an opportunity.6 It is part of what makes his work an especially provoking access point for a consideration of the aesthetics and politics of today’s poet-editors and professors, who, in the light of very different agendas, create the taste by which their work (and that of others) will be enjoyed. Of relevance here, of course, is Paterson’s role as Poetry Editor for one of the largest commercial publishers of poetry in early twenty-first-century Britain, the London-based list Picador. So too his position as Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, an institution that has a distinguished history of scholarly and poetic-creative dynamism, and whose School of English has often had in its employ or as affiliates, Writers in Residence and Visiting Creative Writing Lecturers among the most highly regarded contemporary poets working in English, including

4  d o n p a t e rso n : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s Douglas Dunn, John Burnside, Paul Muldoon, Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie to name but a few. In working within the publishing, academic and educational systems through which cultural capital is disseminated, Paterson is intricately involved in shaping the climate of reception, promotion and valuation of poetry written in the UK. His attempts to get into readers’ hands, or at least onto their radar, certain kinds of work (particularly that in which familiar subject matter meets edgier formal and syntactical structure) indicate Paterson’s willingness as a publisher actively to invest in and promote kinds of work not immediately recognisable to a book-buying UK audience as ‘good’ poetry. In so doing, his role as poet-publisher is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s as editor at Faber between 1925 and 1965: both are driven to intervene in and to direct mainstream tastes, using their positions at leading publishing houses and their statuses as public figures to influence contemporary writing’s direction and scope. (Both are also committed to identifying and promoting what they believe to be good literature, whether or not the market exists for it.) Perhaps for this reason, both critically and poetically, Paterson finds himself compelled to worry over questions of value. The editorial introductions, aphorisms, lectures and speeches, as well as comments in interview, repeatedly circle around such concerns as: ‘Is it any good?’, ‘Is it better than everyone else’s?’, and ‘How do we know, or set criteria for answering that question?’. The theoretical essays (particularly the Ars Poetica, forthcoming at time of publication) show him striving to locate an answer beyond the curt response that value is now a mere facet of commerce, with aesthetic judgement having fallen into the hands of authoritative cultural figures and economically influential persons who exert sway in the literary world, in accordance with their particular tastes and agendas.7 What becomes evident throughout Paterson’s oeuvre is a sense of personal and professional self-dividedness. Lack of a clear consensus of self, which takes numerous forms, circles around this protean contemporary poet-figure, who is called to mediate between the roles of scholar, editor, creative-writing lecturer, competitionwinner and prize-giver, commissioned lyricist, media pundit, and poet-at-publicreading. As a judge of national and international literary prizes ranging from, say, the Ondaatje Prize for the Royal Society of Literature (2011) to the recent Montreal International Poetry Prize (2013) Paterson has, on the one hand, enthusiastically consented to acting as arbiter of cultural value. ‘There’s no better way of taking the pulse and temperature of contemporary poetry than judging a competition,’ he says of the Poetry London competition. ‘Competition poems display poetry in its most self-conscious aspect, true; but precisely because they do, they handily exaggerate the fashions and trends you’d otherwise have a much harder time defining.’8 That seems to embrace, with few qualms, a popular poet’s responsibility for making significant cultural decisions, and his assessment of what counts as poetry and should be rewarded for its literary qualities. That is, in Paterson’s account: ‘intelligent, musically expert’ poetry, which is ‘above a certain level of expertise’. Yet this enthusiastic explication of the cultural value of the literary competition itself suggests a degree of self-justifying unease, which is strengthened when Paterson adds to the criteria for literary reward the ability to surprise or pull one’s reader (and judge) off course:

introduction   5 ‘irresistible’, ‘I forgot I was judging a poetry competition’, ‘the best trick a competition poem can pull’, ‘I would have killed to have written that line’. In taking on the role of judge, not only are responsibilities conferred but also difficulties: one must respond to contradictory pressures. These are especially present in any competition that claims to ‘recognise [. . .] the best new, previously unpublished poetry in the UK’, as the Picador Poetry Prize puts it (2010). It is not consistent for Paterson to comment, delightedly, that the winner ‘made us want to read his poems again and again’, each time discovering ‘more and more’, but elsewhere to remark on having had to ‘more or less invent reasons for taking one over another; two days later and I’d have placed them all differently [. . .] your preferences and feelings change from one day to the next’. The public life of the well-known contemporary poet involves a succession of book launches, readings, writer’s residencies, conference attendances, guest lectures, blurb-writing, participation in interviews both printed and broadcast, and press releases (one sees a good range of these on Paterson’s website). At times it seems that this perhaps overly ambitious juggling of roles affords insufficient time for the poet to develop a rigorous analysis of others’ contributions to the poetry scene, or of the nuances of his own particular position in relation to them (a problem sometimes exacerbated by his use of the sound-bite and the generalising pronouncement in his media commentaries). However, Paterson’s poems are determined not to lament but to glean vituperative energy from his compromised hand in promotional cultural activities, even when they cock a snook at the resultant selfdivisions, impoverishments and shortcomings. Literary commerce is seen to lend piquancy to the fallen and changing selves and personas, roles, relations and vexed intimacies that take shape in contemporary poetry. It is Paterson’s prose writings and public commentaries that reveal a more jarring, disturbed sense of his cultural and economic uneasiness. But by no means are these entirely new worries and concerns. Perhaps for this reason the subject of economic patronage, and the relationship between the writing of poetry and its reception, do not manifest only in those poems of Paterson’s which are explicitly about public readings in well-known bookshop chains, or in those that directly reference contemporary poetry events, sales figures or audience-­ negotiations. In Paterson, concerns about the relationship between art, commerce and the politics of poetic patronage emerge, as they did in classical and early modern periods, or in twentieth-century European poetry, in the heart of lyric address itself. In his versioning of Rilke’s ‘A God’, in Orpheus, Paterson writes: A god can do it. But how can a man follow, will someone tell me, through the narrow lyre? His mind is cloven. No temple to Apollo can rise at such a crossroads of desires. And song is not desire; so you taught. Nor is it courtship, nor is it courtship’s prize. Song is being. Easy for a god. But when are we? When will the Earth and stars

6  d o n p a t e rso n : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s be squandered on us, on our living? Youth – don’t fool yourself that love unlocks this art; for though love’s voice might force your lips apart you must forget those sudden songs. They’ll end. True singing is another kind of breath. A breath of nothing. A sigh in a god. A wind. (5) Paterson attends to the nature of art and ‘true singing’, alternating between tones of uncertainty and hectoring, in the attempt to discover ‘how can a man follow / [. . .] through the narrow lyre?’. The singer’s all-too-human inability to access divine order, and his attempt to come to terms with his compromised art, produce a ‘cloven’ and desirous song that is fraught with fears of lyric falsity (‘[t]rue singing is another kind of breath’), self-deception (‘don’t fool yourself’), and a certain alarm at wielding, against musical transience, a rhetoric of imminent violence that could also ‘force your lips apart’. The poem listens back on Rilke as source and also as a gateway: the references to Apollo and the virtues of constructing appropriate memorial structures indicate earlier precedents for Paterson’s lyric concerns about the possibilities of achieving truly praise-worthy – or prize-worthy – patterns in art and music, and about the appropriate voice in which to offer lyric or architectural structures of this kind as tributes to the dead, or to express joy in the natural and the human. Calling upon Apollo, even in articulating the lyric’s inability to raise a temple to him, Paterson brings the name of the ancient Greek patron of music and poetry and the god of truth into contact with present-day concerns about the verity of art as it takes shape amidst struggle with vain ambition and mortality: the lyric song is not ‘courtship, nor is it courtship’s prize’. The need for that emphatic double negative suggests the poem’s preoccupation with wooing and winning what it praises, just as the earlier italicised negative definition – ‘song is not desire’ – indicates how much song and desire have in common. If the winning of the intimate prize of the lover is key in Paterson’s text, so too are desires for certain rewards which are a part of the world of fame and worldly success: hence the speaker wants to raise a temple others will see, and in which they will worship; a public shrine and spectacle. The language in which his desires and his love are expressed indicate a hankering to be seen winning the ‘prize’, having courted the object – which is both ‘true’ art and the beloved; the patron and the addressee of the love song. When Paterson defines true singing as the music which does not end, he makes clear it is those lyrics addressed to future generations, not to one’s beloved, that are the proper aim of art. On this view, intimacies shared only with one auditor – which will not ‘unlock’ aesthetic ambition or realise its fullest (lasting) potential – are the false poetic ideal. Lyric fidelity to the mortal beloved issues a violence upon art, and must be resisted: ‘love’s voice might force your lips apart // you must forget those sudden songs. They’ll end.’ In that sense, it is especially aesthetic judgements, such as the best handling of the relationship between sound and meaning, which draw attention to lyric inheritance – even in staging departures from it. The act of address, in particular, prompts questions about the just appropriation of present and past voices: Paterson is confronted

introduction   7 by ethical concerns, such as respect for audiences and readers, in his adaptations of literary tradition. Speaking to the ‘youth’, for instance, Paterson’s poem seems to engage another, but its second-person warnings sound more like self-reminders than face-to-face dialogue: ‘you must forget’, ‘don’t fool yourself’. Paterson’s use of the deictic pronoun leads the poem outward, and toward mutuality, in contemplating the responses of a ‘you’ that would speak and act in reply. It also engages with the lyric history of voicing, for the personal voice of ‘I’ is both shaping and informing, and being shaped and informed by literary precedent. ‘I’ speaks as and through its forebears. Paterson’s address alerts us to the shifting role-play and literary history involved in speaking intimately and, at the same time, speaking in another tongue. Whilst the nature of such versioning makes the writing self gesture beyond itself, outside of apparent self-regard, Paterson is very much aware of the poet-figure’s yearning to commandeer the material and the various possible addressees set up by its English versioning. Such versions emphasise themselves as traditional and invested, as a ‘following’ of men by men, as well as of gods. In producing his new version of Rilke, Paterson enables ‘another kind of breath’ to be added to the tradition. This is articulated as distortion, determined re-appropriation, wooing, and following, as well as a generative rolling on of language that keeps inviting in, even in the act of buttonholing, new subjects. In so doing, Paterson produces a poetry that makes clear the invested nature of its formal strategies, literary-historical alignments and economic affiliations – and combines that recognition with accessible humour, intimacy and lyric grace. The conjunction has helped Paterson secure both his large popular readership and the attention of a steadily increasing academic readership. His work not only shifts copies, it has already begun to secure his name as a writer with a distinctive attentiveness to contemporary poetry’s roots in twentieth-century, Romantic, medieval and classical thought, as well as in relation to literary traditions in Europe, the USA and, more locally, as part of the English/Scottish literary scenes. A marker of Paterson’s growing reputation in British poetry is the critical attention he has received: numerous book chapters, short essays, and parts of essays on his work have appeared.9 So, too, his inclusion in a number of leading contemporary British and Scottish poetry anthologies.10 Critics have attended to the early volumes of poetry in particular, examining Paterson’s contribution to Scottish poetry, his place as a twentieth-century ‘New Generation’ British poet,11 and aspects of postmodernist style and thought in his work (especially his rather incendiary commentaries on the so-called contemporary divide between mainstream and postmodern poetics). However, a number of significant areas of Paterson’s work remain critically neglected to date. First, no substantial account has been penned on Paterson’s theoretical writings, in particular on his essays on metre and meaning, ‘The Lyric Principle’ (2007) and ‘The Domain of the Poem’ (2011), published in Poetry Review.12 (Derek Attridge has just published an essay on sound and metre in Paterson and J.  H. Prynne, in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). However, Attridge’s chapter in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays is the first sustained essay on the subject that exclu-

8  d o n p a t e rso n : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s sively focuses on Paterson.) Secondly, relatively little critical attention has been focused on Paterson’s more recent lyric volumes (Landing Light and Rain) or on his volumes of translations (Orpheus, The Eyes). More rigorous analysis is also needed of Paterson’s role in negotiating and perpetuating factions in the contemporary poetry industry – especially with regard to the much-famed antagonism between the avant-garde and the mainstream. Keith Tuma’s work has been illuminating in this respect, especially on USA-UK relations.13 However, more sustained work remains to be done in this area in twenty-first-century poetics, particularly in terms of Paterson’s relationship with postmodern writing and his rebarbative relations with the British avant-garde (especially the Cambridge School). Lastly, very little has been said in contemporary criticism about the key role of religious, mystical and humanist thought in Paterson’s work, as well as his interest in the visual arts and psychoanalytic theory. Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays is the first book-length study of the poet. The volume brings together chapters focusing on his poetry, aphorism, editorial work, literary criticism and theory, as well as his presence on the UK poetry scene, and his interests across the arts – including music, photography, painting, analytic psychology and architecture. Included within the book are also two interviews. The first, ‘Form in Poetry’, takes place between Paterson and Derek Attridge, who discuss sound, metre and meaning in lyric poetry. The second, ‘The Publishing of Poetry’, is between Paterson and Matthew Sperling. This book is organised into two parts. The first section, ‘Patterns and Paterson: Forms, Techniques, Histories’, considers the relationship between sound, shape and semantics, and engages a series of discussions about lyric form and structure in Paterson, and the literary-historical precedents of semantic and aural organisation. These chapters attend in some detail to the scientific, mathematical and musical vocabularies that Paterson has used to describe and explicate forms of lyric structurings and to justify his own particular tastes, preferences and practices (often against other current, potentially competing contemporary poetic forms and patternings). The second section, ‘Poetry in its Place: Responses and Responsibilities’, consists of chapters that are topic-focused, and dwell at more length on the social, political and economic dimensions of Paterson’s writing and other activities as a contemporary literary figure. Here we find topics that include national identity, editing and value, gender and religion, photography and the gaze, issues of readership, ethics and address. The chapters within Essays are not organised into a sequence that follows the chronology of Paterson’s individual publications. Rather, the volume provides approaches to and angles onto Paterson’s oeuvre that help trace the similarities and interconnections between early and later work, and between the numerous different genres and forms (editorial, theoretical, poetical, aphoristic) his writing has adopted through his career. This way of shaping the collection has the advantage of enabling readers to gain a view across the body of existing work from a range of different perspectives, rather than primarily through each volume. It also means that the contributors to these Essays have been free to shape their engagements with the concerns and arguments that they see emerging across Paterson’s work to

introduction   9 date, rather than focusing their commentary on an individual text. Nevertheless, a clear impression of the development of ideas and practices through Paterson’s career develops as one reads through the Essays, with individual contributors independently taking chronological approaches to the various texts they examine. What results is an impression of a body of work that develops organically, through reading across the various arguments, approaches and positions. Ideas about how best to explore Paterson’s work have not been imposed on the authors (or readers) from conception. This collection has tried to adopt an approach that is as non-partisan as possible, in bringing together theoretically sophisticated and up-to-date criticism on Paterson’s work. What it does not do is attempt to provide an objective account of the poet’s achievement, or to proffer ‘the full picture’ of the writer. Paterson’s engagements within the British poetry scene over recent decades have prompted responses from diverse critical positions, including feminist, nationalist, semiotic, cultural-editorial, Marxist, biographical and postmodernist, and by no means have these always been in sympathy – either with each other, or with Paterson’s work. The aim of this book has been to select – from a range of representative approaches to contemporary poetics – analyses of Paterson by writers publishing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. In so doing, it aims to probe current concerns at play in the contemporary British poetry scene. A key principle, in drawing together these differently invested contributions, has been to include recognised approaches to Paterson’s oeuvre alongside new arguments for, against and about the work and its place in contemporary culture. By making this a principle for the selection of material, Essays sets out to encourage readers to formulate their own judgements about Paterson’s writing, as well as to engage with the diverse critical responses that it has so far received (and which it continues to excite). The volume’s inclusion of different methodological approaches provides a reading experience that invites alertness to the range of positions and compromised conditions under which criteria of value are arrived at in the world of poetry criticism, publishing, teaching and media engagement. It balances discussions of literary value currently operative in the British poetry scene with attention to the negotiation of these judgements as they arise in Paterson’s life and work. Questions posed by the contributors to Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays include: What do Paterson’s published writings on theory and structure, and their relationship with mathematics and science, contribute to understandings of sonnet form, metre, rhythm, rhyme, aurality and meaning today? What is the relationship between the poetry and the theory? How do his interests in the visual arts and music manifest in his poetry? In what ways does Paterson’s interest in publishing shape the kind of poetry he writes (and vice versa)? In what ways might it still be helpful to consider Paterson in the light of ‘experimental’ or ‘mainstream’ groupings (to which the vocabulary of Paterson’s own critical writings has subscribed)? How integral is the formative influence of religion on his early volumes, as well as his later work? How important is national identity in Paterson’s writing? What is at stake in seeing him as working in the line of, say, an Anglo-American tradition of poetry after modernism, or in the line of modern European poetics, or in the context of postRomantic British and Irish poetry?

10  d o n p a terson : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s A number of the contributions articulate both feelings of admiration for and reservation about Paterson’s contribution to contemporary poetics. Juxtaposing detailed critical appreciations of the work with analyses that balance praise with attention to perceived problematics, the volume probes Paterson’s conflicting economic, methodological and cultural investments. A key (and often vigorous) point of contestation has been his attack on ‘postmodern’ poetries, largely in editorial work and interviews. It is an approach that has been found questionable by some due to a disappointing lack of specificity about its targets, and by others because it wields irresponsible textual violence. Some also consider Paterson’s position as exemplifying an aggression common in commercial literary poetics: the corporate publishers’ promotion of work that possesses recognisable and accessible formal and linguistic features goes hand in hand with a rejection of alternative formal strategies, and vigorous dismissal of their literary value. (For larger publishing houses, work that will help further brand-loyalty and a market identity that an existing readership can recognise – as one might a new Faber or Penguin poetry edition – becomes key in the poet’s acceptance and career success.) The poetry of those who employ long-­standing historical forms, small variations in a largely regular field of language, recognisable modes of literaryhistorical allusion, and a familiar address to the readership tends to be judged more accessible, and marketable. One sees such aesthetic values at play in Paterson’s own poetry, as well as in his editorial introductions and public remarks as Picador Poetry Editor, and in his role as judge of literary prizes. At the same time, such comments articulate anxieties about a poet’s ability justly to confer value-judgements in the current literary scene whilst maintaining his or her popular poetic and academic image and juggling the vicissitudes of critical reception. Given that this book as a whole directs attention to the contemporary British poetry scene and Paterson’s negotiations within it, no one chapter focuses exclusively on that subject. Rather, a range of different approaches to and theories about contemporary poetry’s redeployment of different traditions and of the work of earlier literary periods is explored. Hugh Haughton and Michael O’Neill trace links between Paterson’s work and writers in the classical as well as the nineteenthand twentieth-century European tradition, exploring his relations with Baudelaire, Hölderlin and Valéry, as well as considering his book-length versionings of Machado and Rilke. Other contributors have attended to Paterson’s incorporation of medieval and early modern sources (Edward Larrissy, Jo George), his relation with nineteenth- and twentieth-century American forebears, including Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath (George, O’Neill), and also his use of Arabic courtly love poetry and of Basho’s haiku. Peter Robinson and O’Neill in particular focus on the links between Paterson and contemporary British and Irish poets (Heaney, Muldoon, Donaghy) and writers working in the mid-twentieth century (Auden, Larkin, Gunn). Gerard Carruthers considers the extent to which his work engages with Scottish poetic forebears, listening back to Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Burns, as well as their influence on subsequent generations of poets. Reading Paterson as part of a generation of writers after Anglo-American modernism who connect back with Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, both Larrissy and Derek Attridge gesture

introduction   11 toward points of similarity with and divergence from the formal features of his contemporaries, such as J. H. Prynne and Denise Riley, touching on the links between Paterson and so-called postmodernist poetics. My own chapter brings into focus relationships across the visual arts, literature, mystical and alchemical writings, and analytic psychology, through a discussion of Paterson’s collaborative artist’s book Hiding in Full View. Derek Attridge’s chapter, ‘Don Paterson’s Ars Poetica’, considers the ambitious theoretical project of Paterson’s forthcoming book, which attempts to establish a new basis for the current discourse about how poems work in terms of sound, patterning and meaning. His piece focuses on Paterson’s essays ‘The Lyric Principle’ and ‘The Domain of the Poem’, addressing such topics as what techniques make language memorable, the function of language patterning, and the links between aural organisations and originality. Attridge attends especially to Paterson’s analysis of sounds, sound-clusters and their link with meaning, including the ‘phonestheme’, a term debated in stylistics since it was coined by J.  R. Firth in 1930. Paterson’s arguments about ‘trope’, ‘integration’, the play of ‘conceptual domains’ and the ‘thematic domains’ entered into in negotiating poetic meaning are also covered. Attridge considers Paterson’s remarks about the ‘contract’ between the poet and the reader, with regard to speed of delivery, and the change from one’s initial ‘metonymic’ encounter with a poem to subsequent ‘metaphoric’ appreciation. Later parts of the chapter consider sound-patterns in themselves and the ‘balance that constitutes a “musical” sequence in poetry’. In extended close readings, Attridge tests out Paterson’s approaches, drawing on examples from Tennyson and Keats. Throughout, he traces Paterson’s debt to earlier thinkers on linguistic meaning, amongst them Roman Jakobson, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Lakoff, to theorists of cognitive blending (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner), and to Saussure. Arguing that Paterson’s theoretical contributions to questions about the nature and function of poetry as aural experience offer a departure from the existing discourse in this area, as well as a challenge to the tenets of that dialogue, Attridge considers Paterson’s theoretical engagement in this area unmatched amongst his poetic peers. However, the chapter also raises questions about the application and scope of some of Paterson’s arguments, especially with regard to ‘postmodern’ poetry, and in his insistent remarks against obscurity for its own sake. Attridge is sceptical of Paterson’s application of his theories to all poems, rather than ‘specifically the lyric poem – the short poem’. The chapter also expresses reservations about his ‘badtempered’ introductions as editor to volumes, and his ‘colourful scientific allusions’. In ‘Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet’, Hugh Haughton explores Paterson’s derivations from and implementations of fourteen-line form, in the light of his quasi-mathematical explanations for its ubiquity. Paterson has paid special attention to the ‘golden ratio’ derived from the Fibonacci sequence, and his association of this with the sonnet has undergone many derivations through his career. The chapter examines Paterson’s claim that we ‘arrived at the sonnet as we arrived at the wheel, out of evolutionary necessity’ and considers his craving for flexible symmetries and disrupted sonnet ratios, with particular reference to music and poetry, literary form and translations or variations. Attending to Paterson’s

12  d o n p a terson : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s ­­ structuralist attention to form (especially the ‘visual appeal’ of the square shape), Haughton traces its alternation between Spenserian and Shakespearean forms, as well as in Spanish, French and German, Scottish and Arabic, in Paterson’s work. In so doing, he shows ‘the protean nature’ of Paterson’s sonneteering, which has been both faithful re-sounding and creatively invested re-appropriation of his forebears’ structures. The chapter links Paterson’s flexible versionings with his energetic vicariousness in metamorphosing the golden mathematics of form. It attends to the erotics of wooing the beloved (and readership), in which witty adaptations of the structures of eros in earlier writers and writings come into play in translations that are often sonnets and near-sonnets. Haughton focuses especially on music and poetry, and the oscillations and variations between them. Here, acts of framing enable Paterson to smuggle sonnet-play into poems that appear not to fit the requirements of sonnet structure: the ‘framed’ shape or form helps define the meditative as well as the physical space of the sonnet, even as the lines throw weight on the blurred or frayed nature of its organisation. Such space, Haughton proposes, is critical to the design of many of those Paterson poems that are on-the-edge-of-sonnethood, and which come to being in refocusing the distinctions between lyrical and musical (and physical and metaphysical) spaces. Though he remains hesitant about endorsing the theories that Paterson uses to explicate the literary-historical journey sonnets have taken – via the ‘golden mean’ and Fibonacci sequential order – to the ‘Patersonnet’, Haughton provides a persuasive account of a poetry that turns upon the idea of lyric structure as a tightly ordered, but also ingeniously metamorphosing, system of repetition and return. Edward Larrissy’s chapter ‘No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson’ explores the paradoxes and slippages of quantifying terminology (‘nil’, ‘zero’, ‘double’) in his work. Such play keeps leading back to postmodern, and postmodernist, questions about whether there are objective principles grounding ideas of meaning and value. If Paterson sees meaning as potentially void – a linguistic game – Larrissy raises the possibility that his poetry expresses the impossibility of raising the literary score above zero, or unlocking aesthetic language from stalemate. Larrissy focuses especially on Paterson’s first volume, Nil Nil, and the sense of perpetual draw, attending to the processes of measuring and numbering hinted at by Paterson’s title. The chapter later turns to God’s Gift to Women, Landing Light, Rain and the books of aphorism. In a comparison with Paul Muldoon, Larrissy attends to the use of the detective film and the search for meaning through an array of locations. Paterson’s postmodern gaming is linked with topos and pathway; the poem as a ‘disillusioned quest romance’ on trains, journeys through derelict areas of Scotland, council estates and closed theme-parks. Here, real places seem part of a world of books, second-hand experiences, which are now ‘Remaindered’. Larrissy charts how this array of dislocated places, narrative accounts and contexts ‘discourages synthesis or grand narratives’. For Larrissy, Patersonian relativity gives rise to the idea of the no-score draw; a person confronting the flat equivalence of all action, including poetic. The sense of doing so ‘for the hell of it’ is run alongside postmodern art’s renunciation of the desire to shore meaning’s fragments against its ruins. Paradoxically, such attitudes

introduction   13 seem to put Paterson into company with the very poets whom he has forcefully claimed opposition. Larrissy considers whether it might be better to read his work in the line of ‘neo-modernism [. . .] which, with its overtones of discovering new realities by subverting ones, harks back to the idealism of the modernist avant-garde’. The chapter also explores experiences of temporal order and disorder in Paterson, contrasting mundane, quantifying clock-time with time experienced through art and love. Paterson’s suspicion of both the surrender of self-control and the rage to preserve it in artistic technique is exemplified in his own playful formal dexterities and numerous structuring devices. Larrissy explores a range of visual and shaped Paterson poems, reading them as explorations of the feared limitations of experiences that feel like release. In ‘Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson’, Michael O’Neill considers the poet’s attraction to lyric nothing as indicative of an affirmative stance towards reality. Nothing helps keep in play endlessly varying poetic possibilities and imaginative alternatives. However, investment in it can also manifest as shoulder-shrugging insouciance towards certainties and successes. Nothing, in Paterson, gives succour by associating itself with failure. It comes to seem a paradoxical guarantee of authenticity or literary integrity. O’Neill explores the lyric power of generating ‘nothing from nothing’, arguing that the poetry’s value and distinction derive from its exploration of the challenges posed by, and the frail but durable value latent in, ‘nothing’ and its associations. If, in Paterson’s poetry, nothing keeps trying to convert itself into an imaginative and near-religious (and post-Romantic) something, for O’Neill that uneasy slippage is key to the poetry’s precariousness and its success. Attending to the forms nothing has taken as absence, negative transcendence, non-meaning, and the question of the relationship between the imagination and reality, O’Neill’s chapter keeps us aware of nothing as key to poetry through literary history. Paterson’s forebears wrestled cognate ‘nothings’ and the chapter connects him with a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers. O’Neill shows us a Paterson using nothing to redeploy, tussle with and critique his predecessors. The first part of the chapter attends largely to Paterson’s British and Irish forebears. It reads the work as post-Audenesque in its commanding lexicon and mastery of tone. It draws on Larkin, comparing the two poets’ self-ironising scepticism, which yearns for spiritual meaning: such writing both negates religious hopes and keeps alive a symbolist belief in the value of the immaterial. Also within earshot for O’Neill are contemporary poets including Seamus Heaney, whose confrontations with nothing have served as meditative technique: the poet undergoes an emptyingout of the mind in order to regalvanise recollection. The second part turns to Paterson’s versions and to his redeployment of Continental lyric traditions in which nothing has been key. O’Neill explores Paterson’s faithfulness to the form and rhythm of Rilke and Machado in The Eyes and Orpheus, and considers his explorations of the poetics of late symbolism. He attends to the Rilkean notion of the self finding fulfilment through discovery of its imminent abolition; through attention to non-being, and the associations for Rilke with a positive ‘emptiness’ and absence.

14  d o n p a terson : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s The first section of the book concludes with an interview between Paterson and Attridge entitled ‘Form in Poetry’, on the subject of sound, metre and the meaning of lyric. The second section of the book, ‘Poetry in its Place: Responses and Responsibilities’, begins with Gerard Carruthers’ chapter ‘Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry’. Carruthers analyses Paterson’s work in terms of national identity, inheritance and literary history, considering the poet’s engagement with Scottish forebears. How resistant is his work to being read primarily in the context of the Scottish literary tradition? The chapter begins by analysing Paterson’s handling of these issues as an editor: his production of the slim anthology of Scotland’s ‘national bard’ creatively, and cannily, rethinks the totemic status of Robert Burns. Paterson’s selection of only forty-one songs and poems offers, Carruthers argues, a ‘modernising’ of Burns that gives his readers a ‘trenchant, accessible introduction to theme, metre and poetic form’, as well as a break from ‘large Scottish shibboleths’. At the same time, the neo-Augustan dimensions of Paterson’s poetry – especially in terms of its digressions – reveal the poet’s close identification with Burns’s ‘mongrel tongue’ and ­marginalised class and national situatedness. The chapter paints a picture of Paterson as a savvy operator in the publishing industry. Carruthers reads Paterson’s editorial work more broadly as attempting to liberate well-known Scottish authors from ‘proprietorial constituencies’, especially in national contexts, and ‘to tweak the noses of two cultures’. He examines whether the goading, guiding tone of Paterson’s critical introductions are editorial strategies that underline the ‘impossibility of completely consensual certainty in interpretation’, even editorial interpretation, or whether his brooking of disagreement and his heckling prose reveal a more straightforwardly quarrelsome inability to renounce ‘forceful opinion’. Carruthers considers Paterson’s poetry in the light of these questions. Keeping Hugh MacDiarmid’s use of Scots dialect in mind, he attends to Paterson’s pastiche-texts, ‘Twinflooer’ and ‘Zen Sang at Dayligaun’ (Light), analysing the notion of being ‘beaten down’, culturally and economically, whilst using humorously drawn figures and situations ‘devoid of refinement’. For Carruthers, Paterson creates ‘high poetic humour from the ridiculous and seedy’. This suggests a ‘marked difference [. . .] between Paterson and Scottish writers of his generation’ and ‘between Paterson and early writers under the influence of MacDiarmid’. The chapter poses questions about Paterson’s depictions of the current UK scene and its schisms in prose and poetry, probing how Paterson’s concern with readership and reception – and with the status of his kind of work in the academy and publishing industry – is mingled with questions of ‘aesthetic predilection’ and the ethics of audience ‘access’, particularly in terms of national, regional, and classbased and educational groupings. Examining Paterson’s use of literary Scots in the poem ‘Postmodern’, Carruthers identifies both problems and strengths in Paterson’s goading of ‘postmodernists’. He also makes the case that Paterson’s interventionist approach in ‘editorial manoeuvrings do[es] not sit entirely easily with [. . .] ­scepticism toward nationhood’. For Carruthers, however, Paterson’s lyric attention to love and the individual experience of sexual politics are part of a more positive endeavour to disman-

introduction   15 tle problematic aspects of romantic nationalism. He argues that a good deal of Paterson’s ‘power as a poet is to be liberated from overburdening anxieties about his country of birth. What he does is to use Scotland within his imaginative lexicon both as literature and as nation, and to show that these speak to, but are not constraints upon, one another.’ In her chapter ‘On Spirituality and Transcendence’, Jo George focuses on Paterson’s treatment of organised religion, spirituality and death, and considers how they alter through his career. Raising issues of belief, she examines how the poetry draws on autobiography, especially Paterson’s own early loss of faith, and explores a number of alternatives to Christian theology and Western philosophy, including tenets of Buddhist thought and practice, and anti-humanist work, such as John Gray’s Straw Dogs. George examines Paterson’s use of direct address and self-revelation alongside the strategies of earlier generations of American poets, considering Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost in terms of inheritance, paternity and religion. The chapter considers the work’s expressions of anger about and rejection of ‘the vast, rapt stadium’ of organised religion, of which Paterson, as a child, was part: his grandfather’s ministering and the child’s aping of it are read in terms of a still-performing lyric ‘I’. Exploring representations in both poetry and prose of the young Paterson, always ‘the star performer’, his engaging theatricality is joined with a self-lacerating humour that at once draws in and evades a rapt crowd. For George, his eagerness still to impress audiences with his linguistic aptitude might be read in terms of the lure of the ‘gorgeous tongue’ of the theological mode, which still fascinates him. Later parts of the chapter turn to Christian ideas about the afterlife, with recourse to Paradise Lost and the Inferno. George also explores the influence of classical order, organisation and harmony on Paterson’s sense of the mutability of scholarly and aesthetic achievements, and the random vicissitudes of a godless world, especially his poetic deployments of literary, archival and historical error. Discussing Zen concepts in relation to the representation of space and sound in Paterson, the chapter focuses attention on Paterson’s attraction to blank white pages and performed silences. To what degree are these expressions of spiritual failure, or responses that transcend material descriptions and self-representations, performances and communications? George considers the extent to which Paterson’s work is patient in the face of disaster, not merely self-protective or performatively fatalistic. She argues that Paterson’s agnostic worldview allows him to gather seemingly contradictory facets of spiritual and philosophical traditions without judgement or an insistent urge for unification. My chapter, ‘Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing’, focuses on a rarely analysed text of Paterson’s, in which photography’s ability to tease, conceal and blur the viewer’s gaze – as well as capture a human subject – is key in the ethics of author-audience engagement. The artist’s book Hiding in Full View was produced in collaboration with the painter Alison Watt, following her joint exhibition with Paterson at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh in 2011–12. It is a tribute to the American photographer Francesca Woodman, and explores the uses and abuses of self-representation in text and image, as well as the advantages of partial vision, shade and shadow, and disguise and concealment. Attending closely to Paterson’s

16  d o n p a terson : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s poems and Woodman’s photographs, this chapter analyses how, in setting up pages and persons as chameleon visual relations, the work of both forms a set of carefully constructed visual and spatial moves that knowingly defies both the familiar association of violated/viewed, and the idea of a photographed subject captured in flat, deathly fixity. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes – especially Camera Lucida and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments – and D.  W. Winnicott’s ‘complex game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found’, the chapter analyses Paterson’s poetic redeployment of mystical, alchemical, psychoanalytic and artistic traditions that have manifested distrust of illumination, and animation in the darkness that guides: light writing in Paterson takes shapes in terms of dream, myth, rescue, labyrinthine wandering, and poetic relationships with identity and knowledge-structures through the literary-historical canon.14 In the final essay in the volume, ‘Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers’, Peter Robinson probes the lexicons of violence (bruising, punching, thumping, ‘swing[ing] for you’) in Paterson’s work, and examines what these have to do with the politics of reader-relations in contemporary poems. He analyses the ‘tangled web’ between poet and reader, as well as ‘between that reader and further readers [. . .] so many sensibilities and minds’, considering how Paterson’s work deals with the singularity of each mind that enters into relations with his printed language. Robinson explores a number of examples in Paterson’s critical prose that ‘make assumptions about its writer’ and about ‘an inscribed, assumed reader (“we”)’. In each, Paterson might be seen to be redeploying the popular appeal of poetical plain speaking harnessed earlier by Philip Larkin in High Windows (1974) and Tony Harrison in From the School of Eloquence (1978): the chapter considers the extent to which this straight-talking, despite seeming to be attractively down-toearth, can also be insulting. Placing his aphorism in a tradition that takes in Marcus Aurelius, G.  C. Lichtenberg, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Adam Phillips and many others, Robinson also considers the punchiness of Paterson’s prose. He reads Paterson as competitive with literary historical figures, especially in the way his work seeks audience. Repeatedly indicating the presence of an imagined reader, Paterson’s aphorisms display an attention-seeking desire for readership that creates a ‘tonally needy dialogue’ that occasionally lashes out at the nearest interested party: its reader. Later the chapter turns to Paterson’s editorial and critical commentary, including his interviews, and focuses especially on his remarks about ‘the Postmoderns’. Paterson’s characterisation of the stand-off between these poets and his own work (and others in ‘his’ vein) is played out ‘as if in a fight to the death’. Taking us to Paterson’s criticism of his peers – for instance, Geoffrey Hill and J.  H. Prynne, whom he reads as being ‘unethical’ by using language ‘likely to confound the reader’ – Robinson probes the apparent distinction between these two fiercely contrasted poetic groups, ‘postmodern’ and ‘mainstream’. He argues that Paterson is often as guilty of certain kinds of estrangement and alienations of the reader as he charges them with being, and instances the poetry of Denise Riley and Lee Harwood as examples of reader-relations that overlap with those Paterson claims for the mainstream. The second section of the book concludes with an interview between Paterson

introduction   17 and Matthew Sperling entitled ‘The Publishing of Poetry’, which focuses on the contemporary British poetry scene. Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays has been written for both old and new acquaintances with Paterson’s writing. Its aim has been to bring together, in a sophisticated, engaging and readily accessible fashion, a range of innovative and thought-provoking approaches to his work, and to the various ways in which it may be said to have made an impact on the contemporary British poetry scene. The topics discussed continue to be the subject of lively professional debate among practitioners, critics, students and readers of contemporary poetry today. I warmly thank my contributors for sharing these original and engaging views. The result is a collection that, read through from start to finish, enables us to consider Paterson’s work from numerous directions: from the relationship between the lyricism and the theorising of the lyric to the writing of contemporary epigram; from an interest in the visual arts, mathematics, science and music to the poet’s work as editor, publisher, translator, literary judge and professor of creative writing. For me, what emerges is a picture of complex cultural and literary-political negotiations in the poetry industry, and a sense of what they contribute – or of what the poet might wish them to contribute – to the ongoing shaping of the literary canon. I hope the book both offers its readers fresh encounters with Paterson’s distinctive poetry and prose, and provides a range of theoretical, contextual and critical frameworks for it. In particular, we can attend more closely to Paterson’s relations with contemporary British and Irish poets, and his engagement with European and Anglo-American poets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essays also provide a lens onto contemporary British poetry’s continued investment in writing from earlier periods in history, including the work of classical, medieval, early modern, Augustan and Romantic writers, as well as artists and thinkers working across media, and in different traditions. If the relationships that underpin Paterson’s poetic consciousness frequently bring to the fore economic shortage, rivalry and literary competition, they also show sensitivity to religious, mystical and humanist understandings, psychological and psychoanalytic theory, and the changing relationships between the consciousness of the individual and the group. What I hope emerges through each of these chapters is a keen awareness of contemporary poetry as a broad spectrum of activities, engagements, resistances and heated contestations, which include intimate address, formal precision and economic cunning. Such work reminds us both semantically and structurally of the literary, political and editorial manoeuvrings enacted through lyricism, as the contemporary poet negotiates his place in – and the future of his perceived contributions to – twenty-first-century cultural life.

n otes   1. The photograph is also current on the ‘Biography’ page of Paterson’s personal website at time of publication: (last accessed 21 November 2013). The image also appears on the dust jacket of Paterson’s Rain (London: Faber, 2009).   2. Don Paterson, Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006).

18  d o n p a terson : con tem pora ry critical e ssay s   3. Don Paterson, ‘A Talking Book’, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 28. Referred to as Light.   4. See the introduction to Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004). See also Paterson’s interview with Matthew Sperling at the end of this volume.   5. The explosion of the popular poetry scene in the 1960s contributed to the rise of the public poetry reading.   6. In ‘My Love’ and ‘The Reading’, the fraught relationship between poetry and commerce is again treated as an opportunity to enable poetry and human intimacy to flourish (Light 43; 23–5).   7. See also Paterson’s theoretical essays ‘The Lyric Principle’ (2007) and ‘The Domain of the Poem’ (2011). These essays, and the new work, are discussed by Derek Attridge in Chapter 1 of this volume, and in the interview between Paterson and Attridge that concludes Part I of this book. See Poetry Review 97:2 and 97:3 or (last accessed 13 December 2013) for ‘The Lyric Principle’; and for ‘Domain’ see Poetry Review 100:4 and 101:1.   8. Don Paterson, Judge’s Report, Poetry London magazine: (last accessed 1 October 2013).   9. See Alan Gillis on Paterson’s early lyric poetry, in Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 172–86 and 208–10; Scott Hames on ‘Paterson and Poetic Autonomy’ in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 245–54; Fiona Stafford’s ‘A Scottish Renaissance’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 230–44; Sean O’Brien’s ‘Contemporary British Poetry’, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to TwentiethCentury Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 571–84; Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); David Morley, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Paterson is discussed by numerous contributors to Peter Robinson’s The Oxford Handbook to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) including Iain Galbraith, Romana Huk, Heather O’Donoghue, Matthew Sperling and Natalie Pollard. 10. See Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford’s The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 1998); Maurice Lindsay and Lesley Duncan’s The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Michael O’Neill’s The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah’s The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). 11. For further commentary on the New Generation and Next Generation in British poetry, see Simon Armitage’s remarks in ‘Life on the line’, The Guardian, 5 June 2004: (last accessed 21 November 2013). See also ‘Groups and Movements’ in Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod (eds), The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 694. 12. See note 7. 13. Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 14. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Communicating and Not Communicating: Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth, 1965), p. 186.

1  Don Paterson’s Ars Poetica Derek Attridge

F

or several years, Don Paterson’s website has announced a future publication under the heading Ars Poetica, implicitly associating his theory of poetry with Horace’s epistle of that name, a poem that profoundly influenced European poetic thinking for many centuries. Paterson himself would no doubt disclaim any ambition to be Horace’s equal, but, to judge from what has so far appeared of this venture, his project is no less bold in its aspirations: to establish, from the ground up, a new basis for thinking about how poems work, both for the poet and for the reader. At the time of writing, two substantial essays have appeared in Poetry Review, each composed of two parts.1 These do not, as do many published accounts by poets or critics of the machinery of poetry,2 travel over familiar territory one more time, reintroducing us yet again to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the role of imagery, the use of dramatic monologue, or the different types of prosodic foot; rather, they attempt to think afresh, with the aid of whatever findings of linguistics or other branches of scientific knowledge seem appropriate, about the fundamental elements of poetic writing. Unlike those many introductions to poetry, they are not designed for easy reading: the strenuousness of Paterson’s engagement with the most basic features of poetry is continuously evident, in spite of the familiar unbuttoned breeziness of his style and the many memorable bons mots to be encountered along the way. The result is an impressive intervention in the age-old debate about the nature and function of poetry, unmatched among contemporary poets’ reflections on their art.

I The two parts of the first double essay, ‘The Lyric Principle’, bear the individual titles ‘The Sense of Sound’ and ‘The Sound of Sense’, and are concerned, as these titles suggest, with the relation between the sounds of language and the kinds of meaning operative in the successful poem. Paterson begins with an account of poetry’s origins that stresses two features: its use as a mnemonic device and the ascription to it of magical properties. These two features are at the heart of Paterson’s ‘art of

22  d e r e k attrid g e poetry’, which focuses both on the techniques that make language memorable and on the poetic power that can’t be reduced to the exercise of technique. (He is scathing about poetry workshops; good poems arise only from an ‘urgent impulse in the mind of the poet’ (LP1 60).) The properties that make speech itself memorable, he states, are brevity, patterning and originality, and these three characteristics also form the underpinning of any poem worthy of the name. It will be evident already that what Paterson has in his sights is not poetry in all its forms but specifically the lyric poem – the short poem whose effectiveness is in part at least due to the handling of sound and rhythm. The long poem, whether narrative (from Homer to Vikram Seth) or didactic (from Lucretius to Erasmus Darwin), is obviously innocent of the first of his three features; and, as we shall see, the degree of patterning he regards as central is not a necessary property of the extended poem either. There are also poets who, even in short poems, deliberately eschew patterned aural configurations of the sort Paterson values, and there are poems that openly flout long-standing norms of form-meaning relations. Genres such as satire, comic verse and verse drama, for instance, may not exhibit the qualities prized by Paterson. Unsurprisingly, the kind of poem that emerges from Paterson’s theorising as the epitome of poetry is the kind of poem he writes himself, and for which he has, rightly, gained a host of accolades. In order to properly appreciate his achievement as a poetic theorist, it’s important, I believe, to acknowledge at the outset this circumscription in the object of his analyses. The other determining feature of poetry that Paterson stresses at the outset – and here he echoes the findings of many practitioners of stylistics over the last half-­ century – is that it draws out and makes evident those properties of language of which we are usually unconscious, including its tendency towards rhythmic regularity and patterning of sound, its self-renewal through metaphor, its metonymic machinery, and its control of sense-unit spans. Like many another writer, Paterson testifies to the creative consequences of the apparent constraints introduced by the necessary attention to all these properties in the writing of the poem: they constitute, he argues, ‘the engine of poetic composition itself’ (LP1 61). The result of the creative process is a language of condensation, density and intensity; poets subject their speech to unusual pressure ‘that requires it to unite its constituent elements at a far deeper and more integrated level than one would normally encounter in the mainly linear narrative and argumentative structures of prose’ (LP1 64). The poetic feature at the heart of the first part of ‘The Lyric Principle’ is what Paterson calls the ‘phonestheme’. The term seems to have been coined by J. R. Firth in 1930 (as ‘phonaestheme’), and has been much debated in the field of stylistics ever since. Unlike onomatopoeia or sound symbolism, with which it is sometimes confused, the phenomenon of the phonestheme is a language-specific association between a particular sound or sound-cluster and a meaning or mood. In other words, it doesn’t rely on any assumption about a universal linkage between certain sounds and certain types of meaning – the often claimed correlation between short, high vowels (bit, little, tit) and suggestions of smallness or lightness, for example – but on the evolution in a particular language of groups of semantically related words. Thus in English, the words fling, flicker, flap, flash and flounce all indicate some sort of rapid

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    23 movement, though there is no inherent connection between the sound of fl- and this meaning, nor would we expect to find a similar grouping in other languages. Paterson, however, plays down the distinction between phonesthemic and more universal onomatopoetic sound-meaning connections: he explains the feeling we sometimes have that a word’s sound is peculiarly appropriate to its meaning as a consequence of the evolution of language, and cheerfully ignores most phoneticians’ insistence on the arbitrariness of the signifier-signified relation. He is happy to say things like ‘We hear the roundness of moon, the warmth of mum’, the ruminativeness of memory, the hiss of sea, the thinness of needle, the lumpiness of hump, the speed of quick (LP1 68). Whether a Japanese or Farsi speaker would hear these things is doubtful, and Paterson is on firmer ground when he confines himself to the English language. Paterson’s larger claim is that the operation of the phonestheme is not confined to specific effects of individual words but is a principle that underlies poetry (that is, we need to add, lyric poetry) itself. He announces ‘the poet’s operative conceit and fundamental article of faith’ as ‘sound and sense are aspects of the same thing’ (LP1 66). As the words ‘conceit’ and ‘faith’ suggest, we aren’t dealing here with a scientific statement, but a governing idea or impulse, and in this spirit it’s possible to accept what might otherwise appear to be a hyperbolic assertion. From the reader’s point of view, the successful lyric poem is one in which this impression of the inseparability of sound and sense is achieved, and, further, it is made to seem (as Paterson would have it) that it is itself a principle of language now brought out of habitual concealment by the poet. The principle as enounced need not mean, however, that sounds alone always carry meaning, irrespective of the actual sense of the words in which they occur; if this were the case, poets would find it very difficult to use words like big, significant, small or fast. Even within a single language, there are always counterexamples – flat, floor and flaccid convey no suggestion of quick movement – as Paterson fully appreciates. At the same time, even counter-examples can be pressed into phonesthemic service in the appropriate context, and poems can create what Paterson calls ‘ghost-phonesthemes’ (and I have elsewhere called ‘nonce phonesthemes’): words that share a cluster of phonemes may create the temporary impression of a motivated relation between sound and meaning; he gives the example of putting pale and apple together in a poem. In a version of Jakobson’s famous principle of poetic language – the projection along the syntagmatic axis of the principle of equivalence normally reserved for the paradigmatic axis3 – Paterson notes that patterns of sound can create relations among words: a sentence whose sounds are closely related will gain an added sense of coherence. But this emphasis on sound should not be taken to suggest that Paterson favours poetry where sound is allowed to dominate sense; his emphasis is strongly on their co-operation, and he is equally insistent that obscurity for its own sake is a weakness in poems. He has never made a secret of his strong opposition to what he terms ‘postmodern poetry’, and his stance has given him something of the status of a bête noire in certain poetic circles. It is true, as I’ve already indicated, that his conception of the poem – as revealed in both his poetic practice and his poetic theorising – is rather narrow, but within that limit his arguments (like his poems) are immensely rewarding, and bear careful attention.

24  d e r e k attrid g e Part 2 of ‘The Lyric Principle’, entitled ‘The Sound of Sense’, concentrates on the sound-patterns themselves, rather than on the relation of sounds to sense.4 By way of some colourful scientific allusions whose relevance must remain speculative, Paterson arrives at an uncontroversial statement of the balance that constitutes a ‘musical’ sequence in poetry: one in which the sequence of elements is neither wholly predictable nor wholly unpredictable. His further claim is more arguable: that verse we respond to as musical reveals a significant difference between the way it handles vowels and the way it handles consonants, the former being unusually varied, the latter being unusually patterned. This tendency towards ‘vowel heterophony and consonant homophony’ constitutes what Paterson calls the ‘lyric ground’ (LP2 59), the backdrop against which the poet constructs more salient patterns like rhyme and alliteration. This distinction he relates to what he sees as the different function of vowels and consonants, the former carrying feeling while the latter fix the sense – something of a simplification, since it’s possible to pronounce consonants with strong emotion (imagine spitting them out in ‘sexist bastard!!!’) and it’s not the case that vowel distinctions are less important (in English) than consonant distinctions. Pararhyme – a feature of much of Paterson’s own poetry – is thus a paradigmatic device, as it combines vowel variation with consonantal repetition (his collection Rain includes breath/path, sparked/forked, want/scent and hill/nail), whereas true rhyme is atypical because it repeats the vowel sound. (This is not to say that rhyme should be avoided; on the contrary, Paterson devotes several illuminating pages to rhyme, providing the kinds of insight that only a practising poet who has worked intimately with sound-patterns can offer.) Here is Paterson’s description of what we find if we examine the ‘unconsciously received ideals of “beautiful” English lyric’: Vowels are strongly emphasized through a pattern of their deliberate contrast and variation, so that each word retains its distinct spirit, and has the sense of standing in a clearly-stated and discrete spatial and temporal relation to those on either side; or [. . .] through stark, consciously-perceived deviation from that varied ground, that is to say through assonance and rhyme. (LP2 62) He provides a number of examples of lines of verse in which the sequence of varied vowel sounds gives way momentarily to a repetition, thus foregrounding a particular phrase. My own attempts to find examples of lyrically compelling verse which rely on constant variation of vowel sound with occasional emphasis by repetition have not been very successful, and it seems to me that what we respond to as beauty of sound can just as well be produced by vowel patterning. Keats seems an obvious place to test the theory: here are some of the sequences of similar or closely related vowels5 in the opening stanza of the ‘Ode to Autumn’, all of which start with one of the words in the poem’s opening two lines: Season – eves – trees – sweet – bees – cease mists – with – him – fill – still – until – think – will – brimm’d mellow – fruitfulness6 – friend – bless – bend – swell – shells – set – never – cells

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    25 fruitfulness – bosom – maturing – fruit – fruit Close – how – load – round – flowers all – core – gourd – more – more – warm – o’er sun – run – plump – budding – summer This list encompasses all the stressed vowels in the opening two lines, and it’s perhaps significant that there are only five other vowel sounds in stressed syllables in the whole of the remainder of the stanza, occurring in thirteen words, all of which bar one are themselves in repeating sequences (conspiring – vines – ripeness; thatch – apples – clammy – has; moss’d – cottage; hazel – later – days; and the sole unpatterned vowel, kernel). One could also argue that in some lines it’s the variation of initial consonants, a kind of anti-alliteration, that is pleasing – ‘To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel-shells’ – though probably only as itself a variation from the Patersonian norm of consonantal patterning. What I have just undertaken is a completely unscientific procedure, and only a comparative exercise using a large quantity of data could reveal whether Keats’s deployment of vowels is unusual in comparison with unmarked prose (or, perhaps, poetry one might think of as unmusical, such as Pope’s Epistles or Thomas Hood’s comic verse) – and even then we couldn’t be sure if the vowel patterning is an important source of the lines’ musicality. Many of the repetitions I have noted occur over a distance of several words (the only repetition which would count as one of Paterson’s salient moments of emphasis, perhaps, would be ‘moss’d cottage’, though it’s not clear why that phrase should be emphasised), and some of the patterning is accounted for by the rhymes. Nevertheless, my subjective impression is that Paterson has tried too hard to produce a single rule for musicality, and that neither his poetry nor that of other lyric poets fully bears out his theory. That Paterson’s ‘rule’ seems not to be as universal as he would wish doesn’t mean, however, that we can ignore this part of his Ars Poetica. By raising the issue of the contribution made by vowels and consonants both to the experience of musicality and to the semantic depth and complexity of poetic writing (he has more to say about the particular effectiveness of the two kinds of sound than I have space to summarise here), he encourages his readers to attend closely to the aural experience of poetry, and offers a way of thinking about poetic sound that makes a welcome break from what had become a rather repetitive discourse. His discussion includes many trenchant formulations that challenge sacred cows – and challenge the reader, too, to accept his arguments or find better ones. The essay ends with a riposte to the current dogma of ‘making it concrete’: Paterson deftly exposes an underappreciated connection between the use of abstract language in a poem and an airy, consonantlight music that has an appeal and power of its own.

II Paterson’s title for the second of his two double essays is ‘The Domain of the Poem’. Only the second part of this essay carries a separate title, ‘The Poetic Contract’ –

26  d e r e k attrid g e though it is perhaps just a typesetter’s decision that prevents the initial subtitle of the first part, ‘Trope’, from serving as a heading for the whole of this part, since tropes are what this part is all about. We are now firmly in the domain of meaning, and once again Paterson displays extraordinary originality in his development of a way of talking about the peculiar density and effectiveness with which the successful lyric poem deploys the semantic dimension of the language. He acknowledges a debt to the theory of cognitive blending advanced by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, with other references, implicit and explicit, to the accounts of linguistic meaning by Roman Jakobson, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Lakoff, but his theory is, finally, all his own. The circumscription of his object of study that I mentioned earlier is evident again in the choice of names for the question that opens the first part of the essay: ‘What makes Heaney/Yeats/Bishop/Dickinson/Frost so great?’ The aim of the essay is to explicate fully the answer he proceeds to give: ‘The remarkably high degree of integration that we find in the thematic domain.’ As we shall see, integration is a sine qua non for the Patersonian idea of the lyric poem. By ‘trope’ Paterson understands any means whereby the poet uses the existing components of the language to move one idea towards, or into, another: in other words, tropes are machinery which make possible the operation of inventiveness in the domain of meaning, whereby hitherto unthought concepts and unexperienced feelings may be brought into existence.7 And by ‘meaning’ Paterson does not wish to imply some stable guarantee external to language but rather an unstable process that occurs during the activity of reading, a point of view with which I am wholly in sympathy. I am also in agreement with his insistence that reading is not simply a matter of the words themselves, but also a matter of making inferences about the author and reflecting on their importance to the reader. In other words, the dogma of the intentional and affective fallacies is itself a fallacy. Paterson is anything but an Empsonian maxi-reader, however; in a sentence I would like to have every literary critic read before undertaking the analysis of a poem he asserts: ‘My definition of overinterpretation is the avowal of the presence of effects which you neither felt nor intellectually registered in the process of your open and direct engagement with the poem – but instead discovered in your post-reading critical vivisection’ (DP1 83). Paterson’s emphasis on invention is complemented (and sometimes countered) by an emphasis on integration, as suggested in the answer he gives to his opening question. The key notion Paterson develops in his account of the thematic coherence of the lyric poem is conceptual domain. I will give my own simplified and concretised version of Paterson’s sometimes rather abstract formulations, at the risk of coarsening and distorting his arguments. We’re invited to imagine the shared understandings of a language community as a three-dimensional (or perhaps four- or five-dimensional) space within which swarm a vast number of clouds all made up of meanings, some clear and sharp, some vague and hazy. These clouds are conceptual domains. They overlap and fuse with one another, and they are in constant motion as the consensus of what is available as a meaning and how meanings relate to one another changes with time. At the core of each cloud is a concept; around each concept, growing fuzzier and fuzzier as they get further away, are its connotations and attributes.8 The concept is not an image, as in the Saussurean model, but a complex

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    27 of essential attributes, the features without which the concept would cease to be itself. Thus the concept cup, perhaps, requires only the attributes holds liquid, small, with handle, used for drinking; other connotations in the cloud around the concept – made of china, for drinking tea, one-handled, for example – are less firmly attached to it, and will only be activated in particular contexts. (We can’t name these connotations and attributes without using further words and hence introducing further concepts, of course, each of which has its own cloud of meanings.) To say that every user of a language possesses such a constellation of interfused conceptual domains offers a more accurate picture of an individual’s knowledge of the language’s semantic dimension than the more traditional image of the internal lexicon or dictionary. Each user’s version of the totality of conceptual domains is different, the differences lying particularly in the outer reaches of the domain, where the association with the core concept is loose. It is within this teeming space that tropes operate to make connections between attributes not already sanctioned by the language system. There are two major types – Paterson acknowledges Jakobson’s pioneering work here9 – depending on whether the attributes connected are within the same conceptual domain, giving rise to metonymy, or in different conceptual domains, generating metaphor. The terms ‘metonymy’ and ‘metaphor’ are actually narrow exemplifications of two much broader tendencies within meaning relations, but they are clearly especially important in the discussion of poetic language.10 The trope of metonymy operates on the combination of a concept plus an attribute by omitting the concept and leaving the reader to deduce it from the attribute; metaphor involves finding a correspondence between concepts in two different domains. In the lyric poem, however, something new enters the picture: the poem constitutes a specific conceptual domain, a kind of mini-version of the wider, or generic, domain. (Specific domains aren’t just exemplified by poems: meanings are always limited by particular contexts – thus at the swimming pool the word diver has a different set of attributes from the same word at the bird-watching hide.) Since it is part of the contract between poet and reader that every detail of the poem will be significant, reading involves construing and constructing the specific domain – Paterson also calls it the thematic domain – of the poem that will provide the context that allows the individual metonyms to make sense; and this means that a poem always has to be reread, probably requiring several readings until the nature of the thematic domain is established. (Of course, this is not a process that has a definite end.) In this way metonymy, or intra-domain relations, functions as the default device of poetry. Metaphor, by contrast, creates links between different conceptual domains. (Simile is no different from metaphor when approached from this angle.) Like metonymies, metaphors are interpreted in terms of the specific domain constituted by the poem – that is, in moving from the given term to its implied meaning we are guided by the thematic context. And, as with metonymy, it’s a two-way process, a version of the hermeneutic circle – we build up our sense of the domain from the details, and understand the details in terms of the domain. Here, as at many points in these essays, Paterson has advice for the poet (which can be converted into criteria for judging the success or otherwise of a poem): choose the vehicle for your

28  d e r e k attrid g e metaphor from a conceptual domain neither too far removed from the poem’s own thematic domain – which will result in flashiness and rupture (as in the once-fashionable ‘Martianism’) – nor too close to it – which will result in the merely obvious. To convey the movement of a deep-sea creature neither a bus nor a lobster would serve very well as vehicles. In the second part of ‘The Domain of the Poem’ Paterson turns his attention to the contract between the poet and the reader, which he describes as having three separate stages: A poem is usually a) written as a poem; b) presented as a poem; then c) read as a poem. It is written as a poem, with the built-in polysemic density, lyric integration and originality we require of it; presented as a poem – conventionally through its lineation, whose most immediate visual consequence is to declare the self-importance of the text, and through its use of the vast panoply of obvious and identifiable poetic ‘effects’; then read as a poem, from that state of mild paranoia that more-or-less defines the poetry reader. (DP2 74–5) In a footnote to this passage, Paterson makes an intriguing suggestion about the importance of speed of delivery: in normal conversation, the rapidity of speech means that we conceive of the phrase rather than the word as the site of meaning, and we barely experience the referentiality of the lexeme; in poetry, however, the slower delivery allows words to ‘rise again to their function of referentiality’ (DP2 75 n. 4). We may note, again, that Paterson’s interest is in a particular type of poem; ‘polysemic density’ and ‘lyric integration’ are not the goals of all poetry, and there may be types of poem that gain by being read at conversational speed. He acknowledges the particularity of his focus in a later footnote, after repeating his claim that to read a poem is to attempt to resolve the entire work within a consistent frame through the formation of a single thematic domain: ‘With the usual qualifications. There are poetries and reading-conventions where “unified statement” is not automatically assumed to be the poem’s ambition. Horses for courses’ (DP2 76 n. 6). The pages that follow contain what is perhaps the heart of Paterson’s argument about the writing and reading of the lyric poem. The introduction of yet more specialised vocabulary, and the inherent difficulty of conceptualising what happens when we engage fully with a poem, mean that these pages make considerable demands on the reader. Paterson introduces a new opposition into the discussion: an opposition between abstract and concrete concepts, noting that a trope that moves from the former to the latter (sweetness used to mean honey) is a metaphor, moving from one conceptual domain to another, whereas one that moves in the opposite direction (honey used to mean sweetness) is a metonymy, moving within a single conceptual domain, since sweetness is an attribute of honey. This double movement is seen to be central to the way the reading of a poem happens. We first read the concrete details of the poem in terms of possible abstract attributes – we would read honey as sweetness (without ceasing to read it literally as honey). Each such detail seeks out a thematic domain for the poem which will enable it to flourish. As we read, these different abstract possibilities begin to converge, until a fully

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    29 fledged thematic domain emerges, which in turn recharges the details with its newly found power. I’ll quote a chunk of Paterson’s prose, at the climax of the argument, to give a sense both of the claims being made and of the strenuousness of his prose in this part of the essay: So here’s the big idea, such as it is: the supercharged semic field of the thematic domain is, in a sense, self-sustaining, as it constitutes a semiotic feedback loop. It is intra-domain on the way out, with salient detail and image implying their shared abstract concerns; inter-domain on the way back, with those summed abstract concerns hypostatizing the same detail as symbol. There is a net gain in this loop, so it does not immediately settle into equilibrium, as long as it receives as input the reader’s own interpretative energy, their own rereading; this is ploughed into the circuitry of the TD [thematic domain], which then recharges the symbol like a battery cell, and allows its deepening, widening, resonant interpretation within the simultaneously-broadening range of the TD. (DP2 81) Paraphrasing roughly, our initial reading of poetic detail is metonymic, as we search for possible connections within the cloud of meaning surrounding each term, moving from concrete to abstract – this is one aspect of what Paterson calls oversignification, whereby the reader of a poem looks for far more potential meaning than in the case of everyday language interpretation. As these connotations coagulate, through a process of selection and refinement, into a single framework of meaning, the interpretative movement begins to move in the opposite direction, from the newly formed specific domain to the details, which now begin to work as metaphors, their abstract implications reinterpreted as symbolic contributions to the abstract meaning of the whole poem. Let’s try out the Patersonian approach on a simple poem, pretending that we have never encountered it before. Crossing the Bar Sunset and evening star   And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar,   When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep,   Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep   Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell,   And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell,   When I embark;

30  d e r e k attrid g e For though from out our bourne of Time and Place   The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face   When I have crossed the bar. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson) We encounter several details in the poem that invite metonymic expansion towards the abstract. From the literal meaning of the title we move to suggestions of an obstacle overcome, a stage passed. Sunset implies beauty, ending, a shift from positive to negative; evening star beauty again, and a closing down; and the two terms work together to emphasise the sense of transition. One clear call introduces a new set of abstract associations: clarity of motivation, imperiousness, vocation, compulsion. Moaning of the bar brings in ideas of danger and sorrow, though these are ideas explicitly rejected by the poem. Put out to sea evokes the thought of making a start, journeying, encountering possible reverses. And so on through the poem: the inevitability of tide (its implication of destructiveness countered by asleep), the sense of triviality in sound and foam, of depth and immeasurability in boundless deep, of transition and ending again in twilight and evening bell, of finality and shutting down in dark, on to the Pilot – guidance, assurance, skill – face to face – intimacy, arrival at a conclusion. Most if not all of these abstract associations work together to create a conceptual domain populated by ideas of overcoming a final barrier in answer to an inevitable destiny, rejecting possible implications of sorrow and showiness, and receiving intimate and trustworthy guidance. Reinterpreting these abstractions as metaphors for the concrete reality of personal death, we return to the details, now reading them as symbols evoking the affective experience produced by the speaker’s imagining of the death that lies ahead. The concrete elements don’t lose their literal power or their abstract associations, but they’re now infused with deeper meanings which resist exhaustive paraphrase. The idea of a tide turning back towards the sea, so full that it produces no sound at the sandbank and permits perfectly safe travel for the boat setting out on its journey, understood at the same time as a way of talking about one’s future death and the response of one’s fellows, is an idea that brims with emotions too subtle and complex to be spelled out in literal terms. If one were to use Paterson’s terms to criticise the poem, it would be to point out how quickly the reader moves through these stages in the reading process. The most successful poem, Paterson argues, exploits the possibility of tension between the tenors and vehicles of its metaphors, and works by indirect hints and clues to lead the reader to an experience of the affective and semantic complex that is the poem – a complex that can’t be paraphrased or stated in explicit analytical terms. Paterson’s own poems offer many illustrations of just this indirectness leading to a richness of meaning that exceeds any possible paraphrase. In Tennyson’s poem, the correspondences between the concepts in the two operative domains – the setting out of a ship to sea across a sandbar and the death of the individual – are too obvious to open up new spaces and make new connections in the conceptual and affective fields of the reader. However, the question arises of whether poems – or even all lyric poems – work in this way. There are poems which deal abstractly with abstractions, and

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    31 poems which deal concretely with concrete materials, in neither case inviting the metonymic-metaphorical back-and-forth movement between abstract and concrete that Paterson prizes. There are poems whose richness lies on the surface; an example might be Paterson’s own ‘Song for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze’ in Rain or ‘The Alexandrian Library’ in Nil Nil. Paterson’s account strikes me as a brilliant description of how a certain kind of poem works, and it may be that this is the kind of poem that produces for the attentive reader the most intense combined emotional and intellectual experience in a short space of time; but in the house of poetry there are many other rooms, all well worth visiting. From this bold attempt to describe the operation of the lyric poem Paterson moves, perhaps even more boldly, to ‘A Taxonomy of Metaphor’. I don’t intend to deal with this part of the essay, concerned as it is more with description than analysis; Paterson himself notes that what he offers is only one of many possible taxonomies.11 The essay ends with a considered critique of modes of poetry that refuse the impulse toward unity and integration which is so central to Paterson’s conception of the poem – a more temperate appraisal than the aforementioned attack on ‘postmodern poetry’ in the anthology edited with Simic. Paterson points out, rightly to my mind, that a unified thematic domain for any given poem is something the ‘vast majority of readers working within the received English frame will attempt to form’. This habitual mode of reading is not, he says, ‘something that can be challenged without renegotiating the cultural sign of “poem”, which connotes [. . .] a semic space in which one may productively oversignify’ (DP2 91). Deviations, fragmentation, surprises of various sorts can only be experienced against this background of an urge to unify. There is a large body of poems in which resistance to unity is so strong that no reader, however ingenious, could create a single whole – though it is noteworthy that most of the heroic attempts made by critics to analyse such poems work on the principle that there is some kind of unity, however fitful and fleeting, to be found. Paterson’s parting shot is against the naive view that disruptions in poetic language can effect disruptions in the authoritarian state; but he ends with the positive hope that by offering not the breakdown of meaning but alternative meanings poetry can challenge dominant conceptual structures and thus have a beneficial effect.

III This summary of Paterson’s leading arguments in the sections of his Ars Poetica so far published has been necessarily selective; many other points about the writing and reading of poems are made there, some of them highly technical, some of them sweepingly metaphorical. No doubt the other sections of the book to appear in due course will exhibit the same combination of the scientific and the poetic, and readers like myself will find parts to agree with warmly and parts to take issue with.12 The published essays alone constitute an ambitious and important contribution to our understanding of how lyric poetry works; I can’t think of any leading poet

32  d e r e k attrid g e who has offered such a detailed, original, and technically astute account of his or her art. (Eliot, of course, bequeathed a number of striking ideas about the practice of poetry, as well as some highly influential critical judgements, but in spite of his training in philosophy he can hardly be called a systematic thinker on the question of poetics.) Most of my disagreements with Paterson stem from his tendency to overstate whatever claim he is making and his habit of treating a particular variety of the lyric poem – one that he has made his own – as if it were the only kind of poem that exists or should exist (a slightly worrying bent, given his status and influence in the contemporary poetry world). These are two sides of the same coin, and are no doubt the price we pay for the intellectual commitment and energy that has gone into these discussions. Paterson might well agree that his account leaves out a great mass of poetry, and that his interest is in the short, potent, lyric that calls for many rereadings and that leads the reader into hitherto unknown territories of thinking and feeling through its handling of sound, rhythm, metonymy and metaphor. With this qualification, one can look forward to being given much to ponder, put to the test and learn from in the Patersonian Ars Poetica when it finally makes its public appearance.

no tes 1.

Don Paterson, ‘The Lyric Principle’, Parts 1 and 2, Poetry Review 97:2 (Summer 2007): 56–72; and 97:3 (Autumn 2007): 54–70: (last accessed 18 March 2013). References will be given in the form LP1 and LP2. ‘The Domain of the Poem’, Parts One and Two, Poetry Review 100:4 (Winter 2010): 81–100; and 101:1 (Spring 2011): 71–95. References will be given in the form DP1 and DP2. The first Poetry Review essay appears on Paterson’s website, in slightly modified form. Also on the website is Paterson’s 2004 T. S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, covering some of the same ground as the Poetry Review essays, and some other notes on poetry: (last accessed 11 December 2013). Occasional indications of Paterson’s theoretical approach occur in the volume Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber, 2010), though for the most part he resists a theoretical discourse in his comments. His bad-tempered and perhaps hastily written introduction to the anthology New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004), co-edited with Charles Simic, is best left unread.   2. The last fifteen years have witnessed something of a glut of introductions to poetry, including, among the books by poets, Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Ruth Padel’s 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life (London: Chatto, 2002), James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry (London: Penguin, 2003), Jeffrey Wainwright’s Poetry: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2004), and David Caplan’s Poetic Form: An Introduction (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007). Such books all have their strengths and weaknesses (I have discussed some examples in ‘The Case for the English Dolnik’), but none attempts the full-scale rethinking of poetic theory undertaken by Paterson.   3. See Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–77.   4. I have discussed this part of the essay at some length in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 4, testing Paterson’s arguments

d o n pa ters on’s ars poetica    33

  5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10.

11. 12.

against his poetic practice. In this chapter I also consider Paterson’s championing of ‘mainstream’ poetry, and compare his work – both poems and theories – with that of J. H. Prynne. Paterson argues that poets create groupings of phonetically related sounds, and readers respond to them, without necessarily possessing any knowledge of the science that thus classifies them. Normally the final vowel of fruitfulness would be pronounced as schwa, the reduced vowel common in English speech which, as Paterson points out, is usually infrequent in verse perceived as musical; however, in the poem it rhymes with bless. My own version of this constitutive feature of the literary is articulated by means of the terms alterity, inventiveness and singularity. See The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), passim. Paterson distinguishes between attributes, as passive associations locked into the core concept, and connotations, as active associations generated by the core concept; but for the most part the two may be used interchangeably (DP1 86 n. 4). See Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 67–96. Paterson correctly observes that synecdoche is just one type of metonymy. He pours appropriately cold water on the ‘myth’ of the ‘four major tropes’ familiar from Northrop Frye, Hayden White and others, noting that irony is not a trope at all, but a feature of expression (DP1 90–2). One of the most thoroughgoing is Christine Brooke-Rose’s A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958). One section will doubtless be on poetic metre. As a foretaste of Paterson’s approach to this subject, I can’t resist quoting from Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Paterson cites Helen Vendler’s contention that Sonnet 126 is not iambic but a mixture of trochaic and amphibrachic, and continues, This is the sort of nonsense that can arise when you proceed with a great ear but only a partial understanding of how metre actually functions. There are no feet in English verse, only metrical patterns [. . .] The poem is in duple metre, like every other poem in the entire sequence [. . .] Can everyone please stop marking in the feet, and imagining caesurae where there’s no punctuation to indicate a pause? I know it’s fun. But they’re just not there, folks. (377)

2 Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet Hugh Haughton I

I

n the introduction to his Faber anthology 101 Sonnets, Don Paterson offers a quasi-biological, quasi-mathematical explanation for the cross-cultural and transhistorical currency of the sonnet form.1 Noting that poets have been writing sonnets for 750 years, and in English for about 450, he argues that, ‘if some thirteenthcentury Italian had not “invented” the sonnet, someone else would have: we would have arrived at the sonnet as we arrived at the wheel, out of evolutionary necessity’ (xv). For Paterson, this is partly a result of poetry moving off the tongue and onto the page: ‘the visual appeal of an approximately square field of black text on a sheet of white paper must have been impossible to resist. Which is what a sonnet is, first and foremost: a small square poem’ (xvi). In his essay, close attention to the literary history of this particular square poem, with its familiar alternative traditions of Spenserian and Shakespearean forms, is combined with a materialist-psychological story about the dynamics of the sonnet. This is no less structuralist in its attention, for it turns upon the ‘turn’ or volta at its heart on the principle that ‘the human brain craves disruption and variation just as much as it craves symmetry and repetition’. Here Paterson insists that the division between octet and sestet, an eight-line unit followed by a six-line one, is ‘quite close to the mathematical ratio known as the golden section, or golden ratio’ (xviii). This chapter explores Paterson’s use of this analogy with regard to sonnet form in its many derivations through his career, considering the craving for flexible symmetries and disrupted ratios – in particular with regard to music and poetry, literary form and the principle of variation. Paterson notes that the golden ratio (a mathematical ratio of approximately 8.5, or 1.618) derives ultimately from the Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 21, 34, 55 etc.), and that both are ‘omnipresent in nature: in the whorls of a pine-cone or the seedhead of the sun-flower’. He alludes to the ‘spell’ the golden ratio has cast over all the arts, evident in the proportions of classical architecture or pyramids, in pictorial compositions by artists from Leonardo to Seurat, and in music, where in the chromatic scale ‘if you divide the thirteen notes from C to C at the golden

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   35 section, you land at the eighth, the dominant – G’, with the relationship between tonic and dominant providing ‘the basis for practically the whole of western music’ (101 Sonnets xviii–xix). According to Paterson, ‘the golden section is a division we can’t help making’, and since songs demand balance, its ‘most explicit m ­ anifestation – there are plenty of others – is in the division of the sonnet, our square field’ (xix). He notes that strictly speaking there should be thirteen rather than fourteen lines on this analogy, but explains the anomaly in terms of the need for balance, and songwriters’ preference for even-numbered lines, and the aesthetics of symmetry. Having set up his stall with the golden ratio, Paterson concedes that we should bear ‘in mind that our sonnet form sits amid the confluence of several forces – ­tradition, theory, accident, private innovation, and the more mysterious natural harmonies’. Despite this, he puts his Platonic and neurological model at the heart of his 1999 anthology, giving sonnets a very privileged place in the poetic universe. He reverts to the same model a few years later in his ‘Afterword’ to his translations of Rilke’s fifty-five Sonette an Orpheus, where he comments that ‘fifty-five (like thirteen) is a Fibonacci number, and intimately related to the Golden Ratio, of which the sonnet form is the most obvious literary manifestation’.2 Paterson is one of innumerable contemporary poets in the British Isles who have turned to the sonnet, from Geoffrey Hill (in Tenebrae, 1978) and Seamus Heaney (in Glanmore Sonnets, 1977, and Clearances, 1986) to twenty-first-century sonnet sequences by Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald.3 Most of these poets are represented in Paterson’s anthology. We might argue that his interest in sonnets depends as much on other twentieth-century writers’ uses of it – from Machado and Rilke to Heaney and Hill – as on ‘evolutionary necessity’. In a recent essay on ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, Stephen Burt notes among their most obvious characteristics: ‘formal play’, exemplifying the idea that we ‘make the very orders we seem to find’; ‘a sense of history, because we recognize the sonnet as a form with its own past’; and ‘a commitment to dailiness, to impressions without an overarching order, each in its separate frame’.4 These terms are useful in thinking about Paterson’s sonnets, though in his case they are underscored by an increasingly troubled sense of framed ontological investigation, enacted as borrowings from and re-appropriations of literary and musical forebears. Sonnets not only populate all of Paterson’s original collections (particularly his first, Nil Nil), but provide the focus of his Faber anthology and two large-scale investments in the work of other writers: the 2006 Orpheus, which offers a complete ‘version’ in sonnet form of Rilke’s great Die Sonette an Orpheus, and his 2010 Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, an edition of the complete Sonnets of Shakespeare.5 In the first, Paterson translates all Rilke’s sonnets in rhymed form, and makes them his own via an accompanying essay on the Orphic cycle, a note on his translation practice and a reprise of his numerological sonnet theory. In the second, Paterson calibrates his creative energies in creating a blow-by-blow account of each of Shakespeare’s sonnets, offering a translation by other means in the form of colloquial biographical and metrical commentary. In this project his creative and critical writing takes shape and is mutated through extended hermeneutic dialogue with previous commentators including Helen Vendler, John Kerrigan and Stephen Booth. Paterson

36  h u g h h au gh ton has devoted himself to many forms across his career – ballads, songs, noir Scottish versions of Borgesian fables, and lyric miniatures. Nevertheless, his various investments in the sonnet form – as practitioner, translator and critical commentator – testify to its peculiar magnetic force in his oeuvre.

II Even excepting the volume of Rilke translations, a head-count of sonnets (or poems in fourteen lines) in Paterson’s collections throws up considerable numbers. Nil Nil has twelve (including a translation of Rimbaud); God’s Gift two (including ‘Candlebird’ after Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf); Landing Light six (including a version after Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’); and Rain three, including ‘The Landscape’ (after Desnos) and Miguel (after César Vallejo). Five of these sonnets in Paterson’s books are translations, and there are another six in The Eyes, his metaphysical sequence distilled from poems by Machado, as well as the full fifty-five in Orpheus. If we add these to 101 Sonnets and the edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this demonstrates as great an investment in other people’s sonnets as in his own. The sonnet is an inherently inter-textual vehicle, but all the same there is an unusually vicarious dimension to Paterson’s metamorphosing of its golden ratio. Nevertheless there are self-begotten sonnets in all Paterson’s collections as well as numerous poems of similar dimensions, of ten or twelve or sixteen lines that ask to be read in relation to the missed norm (or golden mean) of the sonnet.6 When not writing some variant of ballad or song, both of which depend on the forward momentum provided by short stanzas, or wrestling with syncopated long poems like ‘The Alexandrian Library’, Paterson frequently adopts a square-ish shape that suggests kinship with the sonnet. In his 101 Sonnets he speaks of ‘all the non-­fourteen-line variations on the sonnet’, naming ‘sonnetinos and double sonnets, cryptosonnets and curtal sonnets’ as well as Meredith’s ‘sixteen-line sonnets’ in Modern Love.7 He also tells us: ‘The truth, these days at least, is that the sonnet is in the eye of the beholder,’ and in insisting on the most flexible, elastic and polymorphous definitions of the sonnet, he alerts us to the protean nature of the template, and its protean relationship to the comparable shapes deployed by his forebears. In Paterson’s first collection, Nil Nil, the sonnet works as a key structural principle for the book as a whole, projecting his voice from the outset into contact with his precursors. The second poem, ‘Morning Prayer’, is a sonnet ‘after Rimbaud’, while the fourth, ‘Exeunt’, forms a darkly vernacular four-sonnet sequence, which opens with an account of a craftsman at work: ‘He poured the warm, clear guck into the mould / in which he’d already composed, with tweezers, / dead wasps on an everlasting flower / or ants filing over a leaf’.8 The other poems in the sequence invoke a ‘columbarium of files and dockets’, a filled ‘grave’ and ‘a wheezy concertina’ – all equivalents of the opening ‘mould’ that contains and preserves as the sonnet form is famed for doing (4–6). What these poems preserve, however, are dark ‘daily’ snapshots of mortality. Yet the many variant permutations suggest mortality as especially ripe ground on which to meet the alterable versionings of mathematical structuring

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   37 principles, and the dead of literary history. For example, the octet of the first of these poems, ‘Drop Serene’, frames a portrait of someone preserving ‘dead wasps on an everlasting flower / or ants filing over a leaf’, embalming them as a ‘row of blebs on his mantelpiece’, ‘like a hiccup in history, scooped out of amber’ (4). In the sestet, however, the poet presents us with an ambiguous freeze-frame image of the man intent on preserving these natural minutiae: ‘He was out in the garden, digging the borders / when it caught him, in a naturalistic pose’ (4). Whether the ‘it’ refers to death (as the title ‘Exeunt’ suggests) or the camera, the sonnet leaves him in this pose, as if scooped out of amber himself, and subjected to another kind of embalming by either the camera or the poem, ‘caught’ forever in a ‘naturalistic pose’. The sonnet’s form is a variant of the Spenserian model (abbacddc bdedbe), with that final ‘pose’ pararhyming with ‘kept pace’, foregrounding the sonnet’s frame as it freezes the pace of the moment in a final ‘pose’ beyond time. The other ‘Exeunt’ sonnets are marked by equally muffled rhymes and capture comparably charged enigmatic scenes: undressing a lover in Aubeterre, the funeral of a ‘palsied sylph’ of a woman, and (in ‘The Electric Brae’) a man dying. The dying figure is presumably the poet’s father, and is initially described as hearing a grim music, as ‘For three days and three nights, he has listened / to the pounding of a terrible jug band / now reduced to a wheezy concertina’. Viewed in intensive care, we are told a clear tent ‘becomes his father’s clapped-out Morris Minor, / rattling towards home’. Death is never mentioned, but the poem ends with an eerie tableau which suggests an obscure narrative of departure and home-coming: On an easy slope, his father lets the engine cough into silence. Everything is still. He frees the brake: the car surges uphill. (6) The final Shakespearean couplet transforms the phantasmagoric car-journey into an image of death, a miraculous free-wheel ‘uphill’. Bodily mortality is at the heart of all four sonnets; they are packed with physical memories but the emotions they evoke are stored away in oblique metaphoric transformations like this one. ‘Heliographer’, another father-son Paterson sonnet, opens with another childhood memory, looking out with his father over ‘our tenement, the rival football grounds, / the long bridges, slung out across the river’ (Nil 7). None of the first six lines rhyme but the poem gradually morphs into sonnet form, giving the final epiphany an unexpected shapeliness: ‘I tilted the bottle towards the sun / until it detonated with light, / my lips pursed like a trumpeter’s.’ A number of Paterson’s early formal negotiations with the sonnet consider how musical ‘resonance’ measures up against the world, relishing the dissonant music that results. They are not translations, but they take their cue from literary transformations and revisions, delivering both faithful repetitions of and rivalrous variations on literary patterns and precedents. In the slim, metrically flexible poem ‘Shhh’, for instance, minimally assonant rhymes in the octet change gear in the sestet (Nil 37). The poem’s assonantal flexibilities are inspired by an elusive ‘she’, a muse-like figure who ‘puts her lips to your ear’, causing ‘a mild chaos’ as the poem tries to tune itself

38  h u g h h au gh ton to ‘the white noise / of the wilder elements’, and to elusive, erotic murmurs which ‘you cock your brain to catch’. The final statement – ‘I no longer believe what I hear’ – hints that the sources of the poem’s enigmatic sound-world are something suspect, perhaps even to be resisted. Differently again, ‘Graffito’ aligns itself to street art, offering a bawdy make-over of sonnet form. It is an account of ‘guilt trip erotica’, with ‘the imperatives of sex and Calvinism / locked in an argument, original as sin / but still compelling’ (Nil 46). ‘Original sin’ precludes originality, but sonnets are compelling because they set originality against the form’s origins. It opens with a swaggeringly rhymed quatrain: Her volte-face left him feeling idiotic, a tourist with a map he couldn’t read, thumbing apart a bashful A-Z after some retracted street – guilt-trip erotica, (46) The sonnet specialises in being ‘locked in an argument’; this particular sonnet encloses the explanatory autobiographical sestet (cdedec) – about ‘the stuff that makes him go weak at the knees’ – within two (abba) quatrains, and also finishes with a counterpart of the opening quatrain, where ‘sciatica’ in line eleven chimes with ‘erotica’ in line four as well as rhyming with the final word ‘hieratica’: his ragged thumbnail scrawled an X in red across her arse’s silky-smooth hieratica. This concluding quatrain sandwiches the sestet within two parts of a bifurcated octet, providing a formal equivalent of the ‘backside’s glorious schism’. ‘Hieratica’, according to the OED, is ‘Papyrus of the finest quality, in ancient Egypt appropriated to sacred writings’. The poem is an ironic appropriation of the sacred for the profane, as the poet cheekily adapts the sonnet as a playful vehicle for commentary on personal erotica. Paterson’s versions often wittily appropriate the structures of eros in earlier writers. We re-encounter the mischievously erotic in ‘Candlebird’ (after Abbas Ibn al-Ahnaf), from God’s Gift to Women (55). Like ‘Graffito’, it turns the currency of the love sonnet into a self-reflexive Patersonian shape that is both canny and uncanny. The lyric is named for a species of sea-bird that is ‘so saturated in oil the whole bird can be threaded with a wick and burned entire’: If tonight, she scorns me for my song, You may be sure of this: within the year Another man will say this verse to her And she will yield to him for its sad sweetness. ‘ “Then I am like the candlebird,” ’ he’ll continue, After explaining what a candlebird is, ‘ “Whose lifeless eyes see nothing and see all, Lighting their small room with my burning tongue;

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   39 His shadow rears above hers on the wall As hour by hour, I pass into the air.” Take my hand. Now tell me: flesh or tallow? Which I am tonight, I leave to you.’ So take my hand and tell me, flesh or tallow. Which man I am tonight I leave to you. The double quotation marks create a strange hall of mirrors with multiple speakers and auditors, in which the translated quatrain from al-Ahnaf crosses between the separated quatrains of the sonnet as well as being imagined recited by rival lovers. The rhymes are muted, irregularly spaced and elusive. You hardly hear or connect them until at the end they echo each other in the repeated phrase in and outside quotation marks in the last four lines. As Peter Howarth observes: ‘Turning this into a sonnet about quoting is an inspired idea; after all, what has the love sonnet been doing for the last four hundred years if not appealing to direct feeling while being perfectly aware that to do so is to repeat a gesture, with voice and echo indistinguishable?’9 Talking about a ‘small room’ epitomises the paradigmatic sonnet shape. In other words Paterson’s poem about a love-poem makes room for the Abassid poet al-Ahnaf’s quatrain, while also turning an English three-quatrain poem into a sonnet by repeating the last two quoted lines of the third quatrain with minimal variation. If this sounds hideously self-conscious, it is also strangely moving. We are left with that enflamed image of the lover burning like the oil-soaked bird, and the eerie choice of deciding between ‘flesh and tallow’. There’s pain as well as art at the heart of this. It makes us conscious of how a contemporary artist or lover can artfully use pain to persuade the beloved (and his audience) to respond favourably by redeploying sonnet form to draw attention to his adaptation of earlier writers’ erotic adaptations of its lyric ‘mean’. Something similar happens in Paterson’s 1999 book The Eyes, a beautifully flighted musical suite made up of versions from the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado.10 It would be hard to over-estimate the influence of Machado on Paterson’s later work, including his developing notion of the sonnet as a metaphysical genre. For now, however, I want to focus on the relationship Paterson’s versions set up between music and poetry and the oscillations between them. Alan Trueblood notes: ‘The fact that in New Songs we find Machado first seriously cultivating the sonnet (at a time when it was elsewhere being superseded in favour of more flexible forms) is indicative of a new interest in formal schemes correlated with conceptual substructures.’11 The poem ‘Siesta’ is a good example, which offers, in one sense, a remarkably faithful rhymed translation of the Spanish but is also marked by a fluidity and fluency very different from Paterson’s own early sonnets, as we can see at the close: To the God of absence and of aftermath, of the anchor in the sea, the brimming sea . . . whose truant omnipresence sets us free from this world, and firmly on the one true path,

40  h u g h h au gh ton with our cup of shadows overflowing, with our hearts uplifted, heavy and half-starved, let us honour Him who made the Void, and carved these few words from the thin air of our faith. (Eyes 43) Writing in Machado’s aftermath, Paterson transforms the assonantally paired ‘Dios de la distancia y de la ausencia’ into ‘the God of absence and of aftermath’. In doing so, he suggests an airily belated sense of negative harvest: the ‘brimming sea’ flows metaphorically on to ‘our cup of shadows overflowing’, producing a shadowy English fluency out of Machado’s ‘la copa de sombre bien colmada’. The rhymes of ‘half-starved’ and ‘carved’, ‘faith’ and ‘path’ carve out a definite outline for the Spanish poet’s ‘Nada’, as the Scottish poet finds a comparable biblical register for this theology of emptiness in ‘honour Him who made the Void’ and ‘our cup of shadows overflowing’ (with its memories of the 23rd Psalm). The sonnet honours both the Void and the Spanish poet who had honoured it before him, of whom Paterson said elsewhere: ‘I can think of no writer so obsessed with the suppression of his ego.’12 Another sonnet, ‘Poetry’, invokes ‘one spark of the planet’s early fires / trapped forever in its net of ice’, setting up an analogy with the net-like grid of the sonnet form itself. Here Paterson’s version establishes its own flexed verse net. Its final image of water that ‘sings of nothing not your name not mine’ formally intertwines both names, a sign that Machado was a transforming influence on Paterson’s vision, helping transfigure the bitterly negative autobiographical tonality of the early sonnets into a distinctive poetics of negative transcendence. Such transformations emerge throughout The Eyes, a volume Paterson calls ‘really one poem’ and which ends with two sonnets: ‘The Work’ and ‘To the Great Zero’ (53–4). By adding a title to the first of these (it is just Sonetos 1 in the original), Paterson gives the book the sense of a complete artistic project. Its opening assertion that ‘My heart was where a hundred dusty roads / crossed and then ran on’ is framed against the closing reference to the heart’s ‘melancholy work  / with honey gathered from a hundred flowers / and the hundred sorrows of the gathering dark’. The number ‘a hundred’ aligns the first and last lines, and the final rhyme of ‘work’ and ‘gathering dark’ works along the grain of Paterson’s sense of how poetry works. The ‘gathered honey’ is balanced and framed against the ‘gathering dark’, infusing the Spanish ‘luto de la tarde denigrida’ (‘mourning of the insipid evening’) with a sense of increasing darkness that is both metaphorical and meteorological, as if it was not only getting darker but that darkness was itself harvesting the world like the poet.

I II Not darkness but its opposite figures in the title of Landing Light, Paterson’s 2003 collection, but of course that ‘landing light’ also presupposes darkness in the house or at some landing place. In Paterson, the act of framing repeatedly enables him to smuggle sonnet-play into poems that appear not to fit the requirement of the form, and in this collection, we continue to find acts of self-conscious sonnet-smuggling.

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   41 Early in the volume the sonnets ‘Waking with Russell’ and ‘The Thread’ are celebrations of un-misgiving fatherhood (5–6). The first of these takes the form of a love poem from father to son: Whatever the difference is, it all began the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again, possessed him, till it would not fall or waver; and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered. (Light 5) The poem sets up an alternating ababababababab rhyme-scheme that generates a wave-effect, oscillating between masculine and feminine rhymes, where the endword of line one (‘began’) genetically triggers the string of ‘again’, ‘grin’, ‘mezzo del cammin’, ‘ran’, ‘on’ and ‘men’, while the end-word of line two (‘lovers’) generates a contrasted string, where ‘waver’ is followed by ‘rediscovered’ and is echoed in ‘ever’, ‘giver’, ‘river’ and the final ‘forever’. Many of Paterson’s early sonnets hinge on his relationship to his father, and this sonnet about a father’s love for his child ends with a line that, coming as it does after the masculine camaraderie of ‘How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!’, would not be out of place in an erotic or romantic sonnet: ‘I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.’ Something about the relationship between form and intimacy, literary and literal inheritance is being discovered as well as ‘rediscovered’ here, as the poem is ‘lit’ up by its play of oscillating masculine and feminine patterns in which ‘the smile poured through us like a river’. ‘The Thread’ operates in a not dissimilar paternal vein. The Petrarchan octet celebrates the miraculous survival of Paterson’s young son Jamie, who, the opening tells us, ‘made his landing in the world / so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth’ till ‘They caught him by the thread of his one breath / and pulled him up’ (6). The opening rhyme-words ‘world’, ‘earth’ and ‘breath’ establish the poem’s frame of reference among primal realities, as the poet sets up the family formation of ‘you and me and Russ’ in terms of an image of ‘the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us / roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill’, with his ‘two-year-old’ Jamie ‘somehow out-revving / every engine in the universe’. The rhymes of ‘Russ’, ‘us’ and ‘universe’ thread the three of them into the larger cosmic scheme of things even as the poem anchors them locally to ‘Kirrie Hill’, and the familial images of ‘our tiny house’ and ‘the white dot of your mother waving’. That final image (with its rhyme on the boy’s ‘revving’) is the unifying ‘thread’ which holds the whole family group together, turning the poem into a snap-shot braced within the traditional frame of the sonnet. Landing Light is a book much preoccupied by such shadowy distinctions between form and frame, sound and vision. We can see these in play in ‘The Box’ (an Apollinaire-like calligramme of a guitar) and ‘The Light’, a Petrarchan sonnet, which, in its account of intellectual vocation and the via negativa, reads like a poem by Machado (34; 71). The form of the latter once again frames a space, in this case a novice’s room with a prayer mat that he is in the act of leaving:

42  h u g h h au gh ton    It lay there, frayed and framed in a square of late sun. And out of pure habit – no, less, out of nothing, for I was nothing – I watched myself sit down for one last time. (Light 71) The sonnet focuses on the prayer mat as an illuminated ‘square’ space that bridges the quotidian and the metaphysical. Its ‘framed’ shape helps define the meditative as well as the physical space of the sonnet, even as the lines throw weight on its ‘frayed’ nature. Such space, I argue, is critical to the design of many of Paterson’s poems (sonnets or otherwise). They frequently blur the distinctions between the lyrical and musical, as well as physical and metaphysical, spaces they frame. In ‘The Black Box’, Paterson’s most extended exploration of poetic form, the human capacity for organisation is given shape through a series of oscillations between poetic and musical lexicons (Light 72–8). Referring simultaneously to a plane’s flight-recorder and the technology of electrical sound-recording, the title metaphorically tests the idea of a flight-recording against that of the kind of musical recording embodied in poetry: ‘let’s hear, in our discourse, no ignorant talk / of “echo chambers”,’ Paterson writes: ‘the truth / can only reach us from the horse’s mouth: / that poet’s fetish’ (72). Not the voice-box but the box, the technology, the acoustic space, is what counts. Having invoked ‘bleak quadratics of the spirit’, the poem talks of ‘the unique stanza of our friends’ in the final paragraph, foregrounding the fact that this is another of those Paterson poems which plays numerologically with variable stanza-lengths (12, 6, 18, 12, 8, 13, 14, 13, 14, 7, 18, 5, 26, 9, 12 and 5). It’s not clear how deliberate these variable shapes are, but it is striking that in the middle there is a run of sonnet-scale blocks, with two fourteen-line units setting up a model of ‘our box’ which is both in verse and the ‘inverse’ of the flight-recorder, ‘a departuary, or antiterminus’ (74). Paterson is a guitarist of course, and earlier in the volume ‘The Box’ typographically mimics the shape of a guitar. Here it turns out that ‘our box’ is ‘the means by which we can extend / our voices to the stars’, creating ‘an interface / between this room and every other possible / through which we can elect to send a signal – / a voice, a cello or a saxophone –’ (74–5). In other words, the poem conjures the space of the box into a metaphorical vehicle for musical space travel. It is hard to tell how much the poem is an account of music and how much its music is an account of poetry. The second fourteen-line unit both helps and hinders such an enquiry. When the poet talks of the ear hallucinating to relocate the sound of the cello or voice, his lines hold open both ideas as they conjure imaginary spaces: vast eyesores no man would build, except to be a strange cathedral for one song; or in those rooms we’re always locked outside – the mountain, matchbox or the needle’s eye – but can still thread with the disembodied voice. (Light 75) That account of ‘a strange cathedral for one song’ recalls Paterson’s ‘Afterword’ to The Eyes and the ‘custom-built churches in which the poem’s own voice – or the

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   43 poet’s, if he or she mistakenly conflates the two – can sing freely’ (56). The poem’s multiple-shaped stanzas mirror those rooms we are locked inside or spatial alternatives to them. In his ‘Afterword’ on Machado, Paterson argued that ‘self-reflexion i.e. writing becoming aware of itself as writing’ takes place through the ‘inevitable consequence of the serious play of the human imagination’ (Eyes 59). If the unrhymed sonnet offers a kind of aesthetic blue-print (or black-print) of ‘serious play’, this is framed, in ‘The Black Box’, against the older spiritual continuum called up by the poem’s affirmation that ‘In the world, my mother’s house, are many mansions’ (Light 77). With its play on John 14.2 (‘In my father’s house are many mansions’), the poem conjures a site of worldly and maternal dwellings rather than otherworldly and paternal ones. The sonnet might be one of these multiple architectural mansions. Certainly, it acquires subliminal force as a paradigmatic site of ‘serious play’ that probes the relationships between aural, linguistic, visual and spatial structures. Paterson’s versions show a musical buoyancy and architectonic imagination rarely found in translations. His 2006 Orpheus offers an astonishing English mirror of Rilke’s elegiac sequence.13 Paterson calls Rilke’s book ‘a meta-essay on the possibilities of the sonnet form’, and says he did the translation to ‘make a rhymed version for my own use’, helping him memorise it so he ‘could carry it around in my own head’ (65). Orpheus produces a strong sense of renewal, in which Paterson develops his own speculative ontology, opening up a new stage in his intellectual journey through his revisionary account of Rilke’s revisionary account of Western metaphysics. The volume is also a musical transposition of the notion of ‘true song’ articulated in the fifth sonnet Paterson calls ‘Leaving’: Raise no stone to his memory. Just let the rose put forth each year, for his name’s sake. Orpheus. In time, perhaps he’ll take the shape of this, and then of that – and yet we need no other name: Orpheus, we say wherever the true song is manifest. He comes and goes. Therefore are we not blessed if he outlasts the flowers a few days? But though his constant leaving is a torment, leave he must, if we’re to understand. So even as his voice alters the moment, he’s already gone where no one can pursue; even the lyre cannot ensnare his hands. And yet in this defiance, he stays true . . . (7) Paterson’s subtly enjambed lines and solid Petrarchan-style rhyme-frame capture the persistent elusiveness (or ‘constant leaving’) of Orphic song; though ‘no one can pursue’ him, the poet’s voice generates a strong sense of ‘the shape of this’ even

44  h u g h h au gh ton as Orpheus disappears. The different shapes invoked here might suggest the many different translations of Rilke’s Orphic words as well as our different incarnations of Orpheus, but they also foreground the importance of shapeliness to song, a shapeliness built in to the sonnet as its imaginary and provisional dwelling-place in this extraordinary English sequence fathered by Rilke’s German one.

IV It may be that despite – or because of – his fascination with the form, Paterson is obliged at some level to resist it, or at least to dwell at its boundaries. His 2009 volume, Rain, contains a number of poems on the verge of sonnet-hood, or which seem to be heading towards or away from the sonnet ‘norm’ without arriving. This is true of ‘Two Trees’, in which the trees of the title are mirrored in two twelve-line stanzas made up of couplets (another twinning, entwining principle). The poem describes Don Miguel’s dream to ‘graft his orange to his lemon tree’, and the fruits of his labour: ‘Over the years / the limbs would get themselves so tangled up / each bough looked like it gave a double crop’ (3). When the man who bought Miguel’s house splits the trees and replants them separately, they survive, but ‘those four yards [. . .] lost them everything, / as each strained on its shackled root to face / the other’s empty, intricate embrace’. The poet insists defensively: ‘They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout. / And trees are all this poem is about.’ They are plainspeaking lines that ask to be read as a disclaimed disclaimer; a refusal of both elegy (‘no, they did not die from solitude’) and allegory (‘trees are all this poem is about’), and which confront readers’ desires to read the arboreal anecdote in Ovidian terms as an allegory of separated friends or lovers (3). There is no necessity to treat a twelve-line poem as a sonnet, but the shape and scale of each stanza here certainly suggest one, especially if we think of Paterson’s definition of it as ‘a small square poem’. It is as if the stanzas expressed a muffled ‘ache’ to be engrafted into sonnet form and the poem to be read as a thwarted (or amputated) double sonnet. Remembering how in 101 Sonnets Paterson speaks of ‘all the non-fourteen-line variations on the sonnet’, I think we hear this as a poem written within earshot of the sonnet tradition but refusing or unable to subscribe to the fourteen-line norm. Paterson’s mathematically conceived sonnet form is one of its inescapable contexts when we read of the ‘four yards’ that separate the trees (with four times three feet making twelve feet, which is the number of lines in each stanza), and the balancing of the two twelve-line stanzas.14 So too ‘Miguel’ (after Vallejo) seems to listen back on the ‘Don Miguel’ of ‘Two Trees’ while forming a subliminal bridge to the structurally central long poem ‘Phantom’ (Rain 49; 51–7). The latter, subtitled ‘i.m. M.D.’, is an extended elegy to his friend, Michael Donaghy, another ‘Miguel’. Written in the shadow of Paterson’s elegiac Orpheus, it is built around a posthumous dialogue with Donaghy as well as with Zurbaran’s great painting of ‘St Francis in Meditation’. This dark metaphysical series of reflections on his friend’s death is largely in unrhymed iambic pentameters, but refuses recognisable elegiac form. It is cast in seven parts which

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   45 look like solid slabs of different shapes and size, like those in ‘The Black Box’. As a poem on a companion poet’s death, it is not formally designed to make us think of ‘Lycidas’ or ‘Adonais’; indeed it seems bent on avoiding regular stanzaic form and elegiac convention. Nevertheless, the first section is twenty-seven lines long, as is the second, and these are followed by an unrhymed thirteen-line poem followed by a fourteen-liner, with the two together making another twenty-seven. The central fourth section, like the middle parts of ‘The Black Box’, is of sonnet length if not necessarily in sonnet form, making us glance back at the first two twenty-seven-line sections, which, with their reflections on rooms and frames, suggest architecture, and might possibly be parsed as falling a line short of an elastic double sonnet. Paterson’s theory that the sonnet corresponds to the ‘golden mean’ strictly suggests a poetic form of thirteen rather than fourteen lines: these unusual twentyseven-line poems might be construed as double sonnets, built on the Fibonacci principle. The fourteen-line centripetal balancing fourth section (there are three sections before it, and three after) plays a crucial structural role in the design. It is itself about design. In this case, the poet’s arrangement of ‘these words’ takes place in relation to Zurbaran’s arrangement of his picture ‘in the frame’, which caused ‘at least one fainting fit at the unveiling’: In the same way I might have you read these words on a black moon, in a forest after midnight, a thousand miles from anywhere your plea for hearth or water might be understood and have you strike one match, and then another – not to light these rooms, or to augment what little light they shed upon themselves but to see the kind of dark I laid between them. (Rain 54) Paterson speaks of Zurbaran arranging ‘torch- or window-light / to echo what he’d painted in the frame’, and his poem imagines a poetic equivalent. When he refers to ‘these rooms’ they suggest not only the dark interior of the Zurbaran painting and the place it hangs, but the stanzas of the poem in which the poet asks the reader to ‘read these words’ in relation to ‘the kind of dark I laid between them’. The unrhymed sonnet is architecturally shaped, with a first quatrain ending with ‘frame’, followed by an end-stopped couplet ending in the word ‘literal’, the punctuation providing us with what is effectively a sestet. The last eight lines of the poem – beginning ‘In the same way I might have you read these words’ – can be read as a one-sentence octet, ending on the ‘dark I laid between them’. In this way, the unrhymed sonnet offers an equivalent of the picture-frame (as in Rossetti’s ekphrastic ‘Sonnets for Pictures’), an instance of the ‘miraculous little form’ or ‘box for their dreams’ Paterson called the sonnet in 101 Sonnets (xxvii). This is a poem about the eye of the beholder in many senses, and it may also be using the frame to put the sonnet itself in the ‘eye of the beholder’ as ‘one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take’ (101 Sonnets xi, xxvii). Such negotiations over design and viewing-relations come to a head in sections

46  h u g h h au gh ton six and seven of the poem. Here Paterson sets down ‘the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet’, first addressing and then being addressed by him, and probing at the limits of poetic form in a world where ‘we come from nothing and return to it’. The penultimate section (composed of eleven-, ten-, ten- and twelve-line paragraphs) seems to move towards the condition of the sonnet as it ponders questions of origins and destinations: It made an eye to look at its fine home, but there, within its home, it saw its death; and so it made a self to look at death, but then within the self it saw its death; and so it made a soul to look at self, but then within the soul it saw its death; and so it made a god to look at soul, and god could not see death within the soul, for god was death. In making death its god the eye had lost its home in finding it. We find this everywhere the eye appears. Were there design, this would have been the flaw. (Rain 57) The lines (attributed to the deceased Michael Donaghy) resist conventional rhyme, but they revolve around a set of repeated terms – ‘death’, ‘god’, ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘eye’ and ‘home’ – that return like rhymes that would be quite at home in a metaphysical sonnet, a travesty, say, of one of Donne’s. Such conceits create echoes of each other, riffing off early modern lyric conventions and setting poetic design against hypothetical cosmic design. We could say that the subliminal refusal of this twelve-line poem to accept fourteen-line design adds intensity to the disquieting circularity of its rhetorical and discursive structure. Nevertheless, when the voice of Donaghy resumes in section VII, it takes up a different colloquial key, addressing Paterson directly in the tone of a verse-letter, ‘Donno, I can’t keep this bullshit up.’ We might ask who is framing whom here? The italicised lines in Donaghy’s voice are interrupted by two lines in Paterson’s, which intervene in Dantean style at the start of section VII: The voice paused; and when it resumed it had softened, and I heard the smile in it. (58) We might be tempted to read this intervention as the concluding pair of the twelveline stanza that ends section VI (making it a dialogical sonnet), but it only serves as a bridge to Donaghy’s posthumous address to the poet: ‘And don’t let them misread those poems of mine / as the jeux d’esprit I had to dress them up as / to get them past myself.’ Here Donaghy’s voice confronts the living poet about the aesthetic ambition that lurks in any elegiac poem: I knew the game was up for me the day I stood before my father’s corpse and thought

m u si c , tra n sla tio n an d the  p ate rsonne t   47 If I can’t get a poem out of this . . . Did you think any differently with mine? (59) The subject is the relationship between ‘the little human art’ and ‘the great sun’ as well as the great dark, and Paterson’s poem juggles with many different poetic forms as he tries to confront it, endeavouring to find an order that will do justice to absent lyric presences without merely echoing them (both his dead friend and earlier poetic figures). In this last section the poem moves beyond the sonnet, but the whole cycle still wheels, in some sense, around the central poem, IV. The whole poem turns on the idea of the sonnet as repetition and return, even as it distorts replication in its ambition to ‘think [. . .] differently with mine’, a process of simultaneous betrayal and fidelity. What such work keeps returning to and teasing out is a set of complex, longstanding lyric relationships between ‘the little human art’ and ‘the great sun’. These are central metaphysical concerns of what I have called Patersonnets. Whether or not we accept Paterson’s notion of the sonnet’s mathematical relation to the ‘golden mean’, we are conscious of the way it keeps returning in variable incarnations throughout his work, mediating between the poetic past and present. Like the world, it’s ‘old, but never seems outdated  / and every year arrives like something new, / though it has come so often’.

n otes  1. Don Paterson (ed.), 101 Sonnets (London: Faber, 1999), p. xi.  2. Don Paterson, Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006), p. 62.  3. See Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber, 2006); Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (London: Faber, 2007).  4. Stephen Burt, ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, in A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 245–65 (p. 246).  5. Don Paterson (ed.), Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber, 2010).  6. See the two thirteen-line poems in his Machado versions in The Eyes which could be seen as curtailed sonnets: ‘Road’, which speaks of ‘no map or Northern star / just a blank page and starless dark’, and is asymmetrically built around four rhyme-words (38), and the unrhymed ‘Sleep’, which speaks of dreams that ‘set down a web of paths’ (45).  7. Paterson (ed.), 101 Sonnets, pp. xxiii–iv.  8. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), pp. 2–4.  9. Peter Howarth, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, London Review of Books 35:6 (21 March 2013): 31. 10. Don Paterson, The Eyes (London: Faber, 1999). 11. Antonio Machado, Selected Poems, trans. Alan D. Trueblood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 14. 12. Paterson, ‘Afterword’, The Eyes, p. 55. 13. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop (1922), first translated by J. B. Leishman (1936); later by C. F. MacIntyre (1960) and Stephen Mitchell (1985).

48  h u g h h au gh ton 14. Paterson argues the sonnet ‘is a kind of mini-cycle, a one-octave scale as opposed to the full gamut, a symbolically curtailed 12x12, its own tail in its mouth on the thirteenth line (yes, okay, the fourteenth) . . .’; 101 Sonnets, p. xx.

3 No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson Edward Larrissy

N

il Nil, the title of Don Paterson’s first full-length collection, which was published in 1993, offers a number of clues to the understanding of his oeuvre. Paterson’s work has often investigated the various time-honoured games that can be played with numbering, scoring and duplicating, and frequently turns its attention to paradoxes that surround the use of quantifying terminology such as ‘nil’, ‘zero’ and ‘double’. Such games keep leading back to the question of whether there is any objective principle supporting our cherished ideas of coherence, meaning and value. In his work, we cannot find belief in a creator, or indeed any transcendent principle – although that is hardly an uncommon feature of contemporary poetry. Yet if Paterson does indeed assume meaning to be absent, it is worth noting that through his focus on games, scores and numbers, absence is emphasised, rather than, as so often, taken for granted or glibly noted. Secondly, we are repeatedly asked to contemplate the absence of meaning in human fact, large or small. One question this chapter poses is why Paterson would write poetry at all, since this too seems to amount to a mere game: the artist plays with the verbal apparatus of meaning, but fails to derive any. He floats the idea that he is unable to raise the lyric score above zero, and is locked into stalemate. At other times, Paterson’s work indicates that writing poetry is self-validating play in the face of the void. There are moments when the satisfaction to be gained from the technical mastery of art seems to outweigh the emptiness of meaning’s absence. The title Nil Nil raises the question of whether poetry involves the stalemate of ‘nil’ meeting itself – a no-score draw – or whether the game is the thing that makes the contest worthwhile, so that there is a win in simply playing. The latter possibility is raised in a particularly forceful and pointed way by the long poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’, Part I of which appeared in Nil Nil, and of which two subsequent Parts appeared in the later books, God’s Gift to Women (1997) and Landing Light (2003).1 A protracted and mysterious narrative confronts and incorporates much that is squalid, ludicrous or petty in a ‘sensitive, paranoid, derelict romance’, as Paterson puts it in Gift (47). This is a phrase that Alan Gillis, with reason, cites as identifying ‘Paterson’s aesthetic more generally’.2 In Part I, we are on a train journey through ­­unprepossessing

50  e d w a r d larrissy or derelict areas of eastern Scotland to Cowdenbeath (a town that has lost its oncedominant mining industry), where the speaker is said to alight. He has passed at first through the countryside, ‘a land with no history, / there being no victors to write it’ (Nil 26). One way of decoding this is as a reference to the lack of a clear narrative about what the land is, so that thematically it offers an allegorical correlative to the poem’s air of inscrutability. Entering urban landscapes on the way to Cowdenbeath, the speaker passes a ‘closed theme-park, a blighted nine-holer, / the stadium built for a cancelled event’ (Nil 26). This is how the poem introduces Paterson’s beloved trope of the game as possible, though vulnerable, source of meaning. But of course the chief trope of the poem is a dark variant on the venerable topos of the relationship of book and world (as the title indicates); a relationship which, as we discover, is intricately bound up with the question of games and playing. The epigraph to Part I, provided by Paterson’s invented alter ego, François Aussemain, points us in the direction the poem will take: ‘Nothing is ever lost; things only become irretrievable. What is lost, then, is the method of their retrieval, and what we discover is not the thing itself, but the overgrown path, the secret staircase, the ancient sewer’ (Nil 25). The logic of this argument is not entirely secure, but its import is clear: we will not rediscover the authentic experience or thing, but we shall, if we make the effort, discover a pathway which bears a tangential relationship to what we think we seek or have lost. The pathway will offer resistance and a clutter of detail, and we experience it as bearing witness to its inadequacy to the role of true and radiant origin (‘ancient sewer’). The three examples given are all pathways: even the sewer is a conduit. The poem is to be a disillusioned quest romance. We shall never arrive, but we shall discover the path in all its flawed variety. After alighting from the train, the speaker proceeds to ‘the northernmost tip of a council estate,  / the last Pictish enclave, where beaky degenerates  / silently moon at the back of the shops’ (Nil 26). He passes through a tenement, past ‘the wrecked pay-phone, / the windowless box room’, and encounters the puzzle of the abandoned thirteenth allotment outside twelve apartment doors (27). Entering this weed-grown and ill-omened place, he rediscovers the business card of ‘Harry Sturgis: Remaindered and Second-Hand Books’ (28). Subsequently, he descends into the basement where this emporium is located, ‘where a rain-sodden carton of slushy romances / has decomposed into one big one’ (28). The long list of titles still intact includes Spunk, Diabetic Desserts All the Family Will Love, The Volapük Scout Manual and many more, alongside graver works including the Bible and Stanyhurst’s Vergil (29). One seems, for a moment, to discern ‘a lost Eddic cycle’ in the combination of ‘Leechdom and Wortcunning; Living with Alzheimer’s  / and Tatwine’s gigantic Aenigmae Perarduae’ (30). But the bewildering array of subjects and treatments discourages synthesis or grand narratives, and in the end the narrator’s voice becomes an ‘ur-bark’, and Yahweh ‘just the noise that they made when the chisel slipped’: instead of the sense-making origin, we find the inanition of sense (31). The mysterious, tawdry and baffled quest romance in search for a centre of meaning recalls some of the long poems of Paul Muldoon, and in particular perhaps ‘Immram’, from Why Brownlee Left (1980), a poem in which the narrator hunts for a lost father figure through an array of locations reminiscent of a cynical noir detective

po stm o d ern g a m es in don p ate rson   51 film. This aspect of Muldoon’s work is often seen as characteristic of a postmodern sensibility, in that it combines a preoccupation with experience as narrated with an insistence that there is no grand narrative that can act as source of truth.3 The connection with Paterson’s work seems real enough, even though Paterson is reluctant to be associated with postmodernism, although any assessment of his dislike of the term is bedevilled by questions of definition. In the introduction to an anthology he edited with Charles Simic, New British Poetry (2004), Paterson sets up a distinction between poets of the ‘Mainstream’ and ‘the Postmoderns’, and of the latter he asserts disapprovingly that ‘Mostly [. . .] their work is incomprehensible’.4 The one example he gives of a postmodern poet is that of Denise Riley.5 There is little clarity about the precise meaning of such a description. Another term, about which there is also scant consensus, might seem just as appropriate to Riley’s linguistically estranging techniques, namely ‘neo-modernism’. This is a term which, with its overtones of discovering new realities by subverting old ones, harks back to the idealism of the modernist avant-garde, and seems at odds with the irony we tend to associate with the term ‘postmodernism’. At the same time, critics have been, in practice, attributing ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernist’ attributes to a range of writers who are not obviously ‘incomprehensible’ and seem to be eminently ‘readable’ in Roland Barthes’s sense.6 These writers may display self-conscious irony, reflecting a sense of the role played by narrative in what represents itself as truth-telling. They may also display a scepticism about ‘grand narratives’, to recur to the oft-quoted but very serviceable term used by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition.7 Yet, as we shall see, there is sufficient seriousness in Paterson’s account of love, art and morality to render problematic any association with the thin description of postmodernism. But I want to begin with art, for there is another feature which Paterson shares with Muldoon, and one which must count heavily in any estimate of his work. Namely, Paterson’s sceptical narrative bent is conveyed by means of a virtuoso and craft-conscious mastery of form. In the first section of ‘The Alexandrian Library’, much of the text is couched in a cunningly loose four-beat anapaestic rhythm. I say ‘rhythm’ rather than metre, since the looseness renders this term more appropriate, and is intended to ensure sufficient latitude for the effect of a natural speaking voice to be weighed against the just-perceptible metrical idea: ‘As the train slithers out, you hang from the guard’s van / to watch the tracks flailing from under the wheels’ (Nil 25). It is quite a feat to maintain the artifice over many pages. This is not the only virtuoso feature of the poem. At the point where the speaker sits down to think in the thirteenth allotment, the poem metamorphoses into a shaped stanza, expanding the line from a single word to two words, and gradually returning to the four-beat line until it contracts again to a two-word line. The effect on the page is reminiscent of Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’. There are three other similar passages. Meanwhile, the poem ends with a pair of short couplets. Even when conveying the impossibility of finding a secure ground for truth and value, the poet’s scepticism takes shape through impeccably structured and energetic creative artifice. To return to the chief metaphor of the poem, the book is constructed with the utmost ingenuity, invention and intelligence; but the other features of the poem take pains to remind us that the world that the book cannot help but refer to remains mysterious.

52  e d w a r d larrissy This recognition, then, is one of Paterson’s prime themes. A compelling and pithy summary of the artistic predicament – in which formal order comes face to face with metaphysical disorder – is enacted in the shape of the four-line poem ‘Handspring’, in Rain: How me of me, I know, to blame it all on that little hampered run, that running tiptoe and the whole world swung up on your fingertips as if it were nothing, or at least the weight of nothing.8 The poem announces itself via an intriguing notion: that the speaker is blaming ‘it all’ on a handspring. Is ‘all’ equivalent to the sum of things, and thus the opposite of the ‘nothing’ at the end of the poem? Or is it just some large and complicated array of facts? The second and final couplet, ostensibly more metaphysical, helps unlock the opening lines. The sensation of lightness, the capacity to carry the whole world on one’s fingertips like a nimble Atlas, conveys an air of deft and effortless mastery. The handspring is a powerful kind of magic: it both reveals ‘the weight of nothing’ that is hidden from ordinary perception, and conquers that vertiginous burden through dexterity and courage. One discerns the possibility that here we have a metaphor for art. Turning back to the beginning of the poem, one can now see that the blame might arise from the revelation of the giddiness of a world that can be, like child’splay, ‘swung up’, or acrobatically turned on its head. But equally, this might be backhanded blame, so to speak, as when a lover ‘blames it all’ (that is, the inception of love) on something or other. The phrase is ambiguous, and pays tribute to the two aspects of the magical feat of the handspring: unbalance, and poised mastery of it. The little ‘hampered’ run is equally ambiguous: the run-up to a handspring may look awkward and unnatural, yet these features are a necessary part of the body’s assessment of space and movement, and are indissociable from the trick itself. If it is especially characteristic of the speaker to offer such ‘blame’ – and to understand the reasons for doing so – then he is both blameworthy and praiseworthy in the same ambiguous way. Yet perhaps praise outweighs blame, insofar as these are the only questions that matter, not only for the artist but for all of us: art represents all creative endeavour. When the speaker of ‘Sliding on Loch Ogil’, like some Buddhist sage on ice-skates, spends the day ‘cleaving / nothing from nothing’, his activity is accompanied by a dream of freedom: ‘the balancing his work, the wind his wife’ (Light 4). On the one hand, this fragile poise is transmuted into an act of superficial gliding: mere skating over the surface. On the other hand, skating is a symbol of freedom and fine balance, and takes place through responding to and managing dizzying instabilities of motion. In the resulting balancing act, the meaningfulness of endeavour (or its absence) and the precariousness of the universe are inseparable. It is through experience that one comes to face the potential meaninglessness that underlies it. To feel that one is wasting one’s time in art is inseparable from the perception that one may in the final analysis be whistling in the void. Some

po stm o d ern g a m es in don p ate rson   53 of Paterson’s starkest perceptions are bound up with this sense of futility, but they also possess their own simple autonomy as a metaphysical viewpoint. ‘The recorded voice addresses its own echo’, as we hear in Nil Nil (34). This postulate of the fundamental existential fact of our relationship with futility and dizzying relativity is the one that occasionally gives birth to the idea of a contest: the no-score draw of Nil Nil, a person confronting the flat equivalence of all action, including aesthetic endeavour. The sense of so doing with bravura – ‘for the hell of it’ – is reminiscent of the notion of postmodern art’s renunciation of the modernist’s desire to shore meaning’s fragments against its ruins. The very first poem in Nil Nil, ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’, indirectly evokes this idea. The speaker sits down in a deserted pub near a ferry. He decides to play pool against himself: ‘I took myself on for the hell of it.’ Before long the ferryboat appears across the water ‘stretching, / as black as my stout, from somewhere unspeakable’. He leaves his ‘losing opponent’, his ghostly alter ego, in the pub, ‘knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time’. Or is it the speaker who is ghostly? The ferry conveys obvious overtones of Charon and the Styx. This aspect of the poem, then, suggests the unwinnable nature of the game, which he insists, in any case, is being played only ‘for the hell of it’ and is merely ‘for practice’. Since the speaker is playing against himself, the game does not conform to the idea of player versus universe. Yet the fact that he has only this game, in a universe empty and haunted by inevitable death, lends the lonely competition an aspect of life-asserting urgency, despite his insistence about the game being only a rehearsal ‘for next time’, or being performed only ‘for the hell of it’. In Paterson, this idea of a contest is often played out in subtle and quite nonliteral forms. From the same volume, the poem ‘Amnesia’ (Nil 22–3) offers an ironically amusing story in two parts. The first stanza evokes the speaker’s youth, when he was the ‘star performer at the meeting-house’, evidently a place of worship for charismatic evangelical Christians. Up the stairs in a fishmonger’s near the Mission, a dirty and malodorous brothel is run by the daughter of Blind Annie Spall, the founding evangelical, and the young man visits before his performances. Four years later, he is transformed into a hippy hedonist, ‘drenched in patchouli, / strafed with hash-burns, casually arranged  / on Susie’s bed’. The surroundings are redolent of what one might call popular high culture: ‘a sheaf of Penguin Classics, / their spines all carefully broken in the middle’. Yet one day he notices a hole in the wall above the bed – one that he used to ‘gouge [. . .] in the soft plaster’ in his visits above the fishmonger’s. It is indeed the same room, for Susie (who is not present in the first setting) finishes the poem by remarking, ‘It was a nightmare, Don. We had to gut the place.’ The point of the comparison seems to derive from the fact that the two different scenarios occur in the same house. This connotes the constructedness of human scenes, of culture, and also their transitory nature. Indeed, the two scenes resemble one another in several significant respects. They both include sexual activity, as well as more generally an encounter between the young male visitor and a welcoming female inhabitant. They both allude to the possibility of visionary experience; the charismatic religion of Blind Annie Spall versus the smoking of hash and the reading of Salvador Dali. Finally, they both allude to literature: in the first scene via the boy’s speaking in tongues, a kind of poetry; in the second via the Penguin

54  e d w a r d larrissy Classics. In this respect, they both show the male protagonist as a kind of ironised poet-hero. In the second scene such ‘heroism’ arises through his pop-star accoutrements and the fact that Susie, who clearly values her cultural signifiers, regards him as a suitable bed-mate. This doubling unbalances the speaker’s temptation to ascribe value to the latter. The hole remains, like a reminder of some fundamental flaw, and Susie has not actually read any of her Penguins. Nor is the hippy hedonist impressed by this omission, since he particularly notes it. We are inclined to wonder about his attitude to her. Not for long, though, for coolness and disconnection is implied by his stance – one hand ‘jacked up her skirt’, and the other exploring the hole in the wall behind the headboard. It is the flawed and transitory nature of both scenes that holds attention, and which leaves the contest between them hanging in the balance: nil nil. In this perspective what remains is the sense of human culture as a frail construct, struggling vainly and often unconvincingly to assert shared value and understanding against isolation, disconnection and absence. Nevertheless, the game is often seen as worth the effort – especially in the determination and abandon of taking oneself on ‘for the hell of it’. For instance, in the poem ‘Ezekiel’ (Nil 9–10), the speaker seeks and finds, by direct presentation, a novel way of registering excited appreciation of aesthetic making – drawing together music, dance and poetry, as well as excited audience response, in the vibrant energy of the dancers, who respond vibrantly at the close of the poem to the music being played. Here, ‘All time is lost in the music’, and absence or loss have become almost positive. When ‘the tune turns back to bite its tail / they pause, then stamp the floor from under us’. Ensuring this action stands as the last word, Paterson sends the poem out on a note of dynamic aesthetic response. If time is lost, by the same token it is only the time of the mundane, clock-bound self, which immersion in music has banished. The idea of mundane time keeps raising itself across Paterson’s work. It is part of how one experiences, and attempts to make sense of, the duration of the universe, and also one of the measurements through which one experiences the universe’s characteristic meaninglessness. Yet Paterson is aware that even in poetic explorations of mundane time, and of the dynamic alternative temporalities art may offer, one is not freed from time’s demarcations: the work continues to quantify and measure, score and count, and to fear that any aesthetic finale, too, ends in stalemate. Does art have the power to annihilate mundane time, through its own heightened and excited time? Or can it offer only distraction from its own eventual ending in disappointment and loss of that heightened state? It is important to Paterson to avoid any suggestion of unearned or over-optimistic uplift. In ‘Orchitis’ (Nil 13–14), he reflects on right and wrong ways of playing the traditional Irish shallow drum, the bodhrán. A kind of decadence is discovered in some modern playing: ‘the insensitive use of modern percussion / tending, as it does, to overstate / the accentual “lift”, integral to the tradition’ (14). By contrast, Seamus Ennis (a celebrated performer on the uillean pipes, as it happens) remarked (says Paterson in his conclusion) that ‘the best way to play the bodhran / was with a knife’ (14). Again there is no preaching about the meaning of this play, but it at least seems clear that Paterson is promoting an aesthetic that eschews falsely transcendent gestures. The decadent technique, with its overstating of the accentual ‘lift’, sounds

po stm o d ern g a m es in don p ate rson   55 excessive, over-emphatic, whereas the ‘knife’ connotes a punctual and unsparing exactness and precision which would not shrink from coldness or even cruelty. Yet one should also note the manner in which this conclusion is reached: by means of a learned enthusiast’s reflections on instrumental technique which are left entirely to speak for themselves, and which thus underscore the importance of thinking of art in technical terms (as opposed to having recourse to ideas about feeling or expression). Once more, this is related to the concept of surrendering the mundane self and its preoccupations with potentially false spatio-temporal structures. This dual emphasis on, and suspicion of, artistic technique finds an obvious correlative in Paterson’s own formal dexterity, and in the variety of forms he deploys. We encounter visual or shaped poetry, as in ‘The Box’ (Light 34), as well as stanzas that deftly and without strain make expressive use of different line-length, for example ‘St Brides: Sea Mail’ (Light 2–3). Elsewhere, we are accommodated to a natural and unforced mode of expression of metres that are hard to deploy unobtrusively, as in ‘The Alexandrian Library’. Throughout his oeuvre, canticles, haiku, ballads, blank verse meditations and poems more squarely in the modern lyric tradition are all present, and most exhibit a sure-footed, undemonstrative mastery. Yet skill in music and skill in poetry may in the end count for nothing: they may lose the game they take on for the hell of it, precisely because its play might be used as a form of distraction. As Paterson asks in ‘The Last Waltz’, returning from abroad where he has been engaged to play the guitar: ‘What work is so defeated / by itself, as all our scribbling in the air?’ (Light 35–8). Yet again, through Paterson’s investment in a contest, as in ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’, the specific idea of combat deploys participants that are identical with one other, and no one or nothing else is present. Such work seems to fear that the very joy of creating form is derived from a game that is pointless, empty and solipsistic. From this perspective, the artistic contest may be more meaningless than that of ordinary life, which at least imposes itself as a necessity. From another perspective, Paterson’s work cannot help but encounter something vital and active in the concept of lyric success or ‘defeat’: however solipsistic or self-consoling, art offers some escape from equally tired certainties about the universe’s absolute meaninglessness, and a fixed belief in metaphysical non-elevation. An experience that vies with that of music- and poetry-making as an antidote to cultural relativism is that of being in love. Its strength derives from the condition it assuages, as if it were a homeopathic remedy. As Paterson puts it in ‘Luing’, ‘the lover’s wound’ is ‘that cup / of emptiness that is our one completion’ (Light 1). In what sense love is thus to be described is hinted at by the idea of the ‘lover’s wound’ itself – for all lovers are wounded, if they are indeed lovers, because love makes a breach in the self’s illusion of control. The poem ‘My Love’ begins with these lines: It’s not the lover that we love, but love itself, love as in nothing, as in O; love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country, (Light 43) This sounds as if it might be the prelude to a piece of hackneyed cynicism about romance. But things, of course, are not that simple. When we are told of a time

56  e d w a r d larrissy when ‘our lover mercifully departs  / and lets us get back to the business of love again’, we might at first be tempted to an interpretation similar to that of ‘romance’. Yet the many negatives and negations with which Paterson regales the idea of ‘love’ make that position untenable. A more helpful interpretation emerges in aligning this poem with ‘Luing’, and ‘the cup of emptiness that is our one completion’. Here, the ‘business’ or commerce of ‘love’ involves an exchange, but it is the exchange of something so impersonal that it cannot easily be related to mundane existence. At the same time, this desired impersonality is not dry and lacking in affect: it is associated with a wildness and strangeness that cannot easily co-exist with normality. Love is a coin equated with valuelessness, and love is also the moon, a patron of rich dreams and darkness: ‘O the moon’s a bodhran, a skin gong / torn from the hide of Capricorn’. Through that sign of the goat, love is seen to impart an orgiastic energy. When the person one loves has become merely an habitual ‘lover’ one may be relieved at their departure. However, for Paterson, love is not merely sex: these poems attempt to describe the strangeness of the encounter with another, an encounter of which sexual discovery forms part. It is an encounter in which both partners must abandon their selves; hence the nothing of love is also a coin, a token of exchange. The loss of self in art and the loss of self in love have the paradoxical property that on the one hand they can both be figured in terms of a kind of selfannihilation, while on the other they can be seen as embodying a victory over the experience of meaninglessness and void, albeit a temporary one. It looks as if the lover’s ‘wound’ is the result of an invasion by a property of the universe, an invasion which dislodges the illusion of the self’s power, but it feels like a release. This positive experience is sometimes conceived by Paterson in mathematical terms that seem to want – but not quite be able – to add up to more than stalemate. As he puts it in ‘Renku: My Last Thirty-Five Deaths’: ‘Repeat, now: nought plus one is all; / but all less one, nothing at all’ (Rain 25). The ‘nought plus one’ is the assertion of aesthetic and ethical value in the face of possible spiritual meaninglessness, even though, alas, ‘Life is no miracle’ (‘The Day’, Rain 40). From this perspective, the sense of the miraculous can develop into something approaching a self-generating credo. Addressing his son in ‘The Circle’, Paterson can say of nature that: we are its living word, and not a book it wrote and then forgot, its fourteen-billion-year-old song inscribed in both our right and wrong – (Rain 11) Merely to state that we are the ‘living word’ of nature is not enough to convince one that value is being attributed to human consciousness, though the Romantic overtones of the phrase are telling. The contrast of the living word with a ‘book [nature] wrote and then forgot’ offers a contrast with stasis. In supplementing this point by saying that the song of nature is ‘inscribed in both our right and wrong’ the lines do not actually privilege right over wrong, but they do defer to the distinction, and assign its existence to natural causes. Combined with the sense of development and creativity suggested by ‘the living word’, the work implies that we should feel

po stm o d ern g a m es in don p ate rson   57 there is something at stake in our ethical struggles, and indeed in questions of value in general. Yet Paterson’s poetry, the ‘coldness’ of his ‘creed’ (‘The Swing’, Rain 7), shies from the suggestion that there is an objective grounding for this positive value. Indeed, concentrating for a moment on the ethical in particular, Paterson’s overt statements give no grounds for thinking that our values are more than subjective: as he says in ‘Filter’, ‘Whatever I do with all the black / is my business alone’ (Nil 3). Indeed, we are existentially and ethically alone in Paterson’s universe. In this context, notions of value – like the active celebrations of human existence experienced through art and in love – can seem like one set of illusions among others. Illusion may possess positive connotations. To attribute things positive value, or to put one’s faith in creativity, is for Paterson, as we shall see, ‘the dream’. The phrase is telling in its combined overtones of idealism and illusion. In ‘Two Trees’, we are presented with two related stanzas about what is one tree: the stanzas present two successive stories about the life of the tree (Rain 3). Immediately referencing dream, Paterson’s first stanza envisages Don Miguel getting out of bed one morning ‘with one idea rooted in his head’. That idea is ‘to graft his orange to his lemon tree’. His efforts bear fruit in the end: ‘two lights in the dark leaves’. And all the village kids know ‘the magic tree in Miguel’s patio’. Alas, as the second stanza informs us: ‘[t]he man who bought the house had had no dream / so who can say what dark malicious whim / led him to take his axe and split the bole’, and replant them separately. But the trees do not weep or suffer, as they might in some fanciful fable – ‘They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout’ – just as the net result of Paterson’s reflections on the idealist tendencies of humanity is to enforce a kind of materialist, postmodern Calvinism: ‘trees are all this poem is about.’ Some have a dream, some do not, and that is all there is to say. Some negative aspects of this view are expressed in the next poem in Rain, ‘The Error’: ‘As the bird is to the air / and the whale is to the sea / so man is to his dream’ (Rain 4). The lines are of a Darwinian cast: man’s world, equated with his dream, is ‘just the glare / of the world’s utility / returned by his eye-beam’. The dream is a direct response to the potential use-value of the environment, and any glamour it possesses derives from that use-value, not from the spurious enhancements of fancy. The ‘self-reflecting’ mind, or the intelligent mind that is aware of this fact, is ‘destined / to forget its element’. That is to say, in a kind of tragic irony, the enlightened consciousness is bound to forget the dream that is its natural element, so the poem ends: ‘and this is why we find / however deep we listen / that the skies are silent.’ At the same time, some considerable eloquence about the insecurity and dubiousness of the imagination is achieved by placing together these two poems, ‘Two Trees’ and ‘The Error’, at the volume’s beginning. If that indicates, however, the striking of an optimistic note about language’s power, it is one that is performed here, and throughout Paterson’s oeuvre, in a range of profoundly bleak and sceptical contexts. Later in Rain – in a long, philosophical elegy entitled ‘Phantom’ that is addressed to Paterson’s deceased friend (the poet Michael Donaghy) – the speaker attempts to weigh up both death and human achievement within a materialist outlook (51–9). The connection with ‘The Error’ is clear. In section VI, the shade of Donaghy describes to the speaker a little scientific myth of the origins and nature of human

58  e d w a r d larrissy consciousness: ‘Then matter somehow wrenched itself around [. . .] // It made an eye to look at its fine home, / but there, within its home, it saw its death; / [. . .] / [. . .] In making death its god / the eye had lost its home in finding it’ (Rain 56–7). This poem helps to gloss the gnomic stanza about the ‘glare of the world’s utility’ encountered earlier in ‘The Error’: we are informed that ‘Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes / as it plays across the objects of the earth / or such icons of them as your mind has forged’ (55). These lines, like much of ‘Phantom’, are identifiably reminiscent of Shelley, containing echoes of Alastor, of Adonaïs and of The Triumph of Life. Shelley’s Alastor is driven by ‘the bright shadow of that lovely dream’, the dream of a ‘veilèd maid’ who represents the ideal union of knowledge and love: the veil represents the mysteriousness and elusiveness of that ideal.9 Adonaïs combines classical elegiac tropes with metaphysical thought, and The Triumph of Life marries sceptical speculation with Dantesque encounters with shades of the illustrious dead. At one point, the shade of Rousseau compares the world to a bubble upon which the mind projects transitory images in which it is tempted to repose its trust: Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them as you may; We have but thrown, as those before us threw, Our shadows on it as it past away.10 The appropriateness of casting Shelley as a mentor resides in the harnessing of poetry to a scientifically informed philosophical bent. Shelley’s formal agnosticism makes him an appropriate forerunner of Paterson’s atheism. The poem envisages Donaghy’s achievements overshadowed by the sense of futility, of ‘scribbling in the air’. Yet Donaghy’s articulacy about this predicament is recorded with typical Patersonian agility through such ‘scribbling’: ‘what kind of twisted ape ends up believing / the rushlight of his little human art / truer than the great sun on his back?’ (Rain 59). Of course, behind this fluently transcribed perception lies the fact of death, which seems to render everything equal (at nil), including writing. A comparable deflation occurs in one of the aphorisms collected in Paterson’s The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (2007): Whenever he saw someone reading a Bible, he would spoil it for them by whispering, ‘He dies in the end, you know.’ I’m always tempted to do the same to anyone I see consulting their diary.11 Like the poem, the aphorism is not just about death, but about creativity. It is an acknowledgement that the author will die, which is also aware that writing is an activity in which one conceals from oneself that approaching end. Indeed, all writers are like Scheherazade, fending off the fateful hour, killing time by filling it with story. Such questions seem to be very much at play in Paterson’s frequent preservation of blank space – which gives the appearance of authorial muteness – on the printed

po stm o d ern g a m es in don p ate rson   59 page. It is an approach converse to that of the 1001 Nights, in which ongoing narrative (rather than silence or blankness) acts as a life-preserving force. God’s Gift to Women is a volume that makes both approaches proximate: so that we read a poem such as ‘from 1001 Nights: The Early Years’, in which Paterson directly references Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights (Gift 3), alongside works in which the poem is a blank space, left to speak for itself – such as ‘10.45: Dundee Ward Road’. The effect is recalled, as the book progresses, by further blank pages, most notably the one which follows the title ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’ (Gift 39). The joke consists in its evoking the Zen spirit of direct experience of reality, and, more reconditely, the Zen encounter with the void. Indeed, this poem is itself inspired by Zen art. The scholar of Buddhism Peter Harvey refers to the empty space in Zen art as ‘suggesting the mysterious emptiness from which everything emerges’.12 The former poem by Paterson, ‘10.45: Dundee Ward Road’, forms part of the volume’s series of clock poems, in which the titles deploy different times on the twenty-four-hour clock, and in doing so simultaneously convey how human experience is informed and organised through the construction of temporal order. One might expect that Paterson would organise these poems chronologically, but he does not: the sequence of clock times is arranged haphazardly. This strategy has the effect of making time’s demarcations (and the volume’s record of movements charted temporally, such as ‘10.45: Dundee Ward Road’) appear either unpredictable and mysterious, or hopelessly misguided. One result is that Paterson’s occasional shift towards affirmation and beauty is enhanced by the precariousness of its emergence from the void, an effect not dissimilarly encountered in the white spaces that can surround the object in a Zen painting, or in the silence surrounding the resonant brevity of the haiku.13 By this measure, Paterson’s self-delighting array of stylistic and formal adventures, his story-telling in the face of the void (compare Scheherazade), are characteristic of a ‘postmodern’ sensibility. The use of that term would not seem especially remarkable if the attribution of a contentious general classification were all that was at stake. However, the attribution reminds us of the degree to which Paterson’s sensibility is indicative of a set of concerns that have preoccupied the work of many poets of his generation: the atheism; the ethical idealism which gestures towards being paradoxically grounded in mere subjective preference; the suspicion that this idealism consists of consoling narratives or dreams; and the sense of the self’s fearfully radical isolation. At the same time, the poetry illuminates us in another respect: while Paterson’s work alerts us to key aspects of the contemporary poetry scene, what is untypical about his writing is the unflinching seriousness with which he contemplates uncertainty and feared stalemate. Paterson’s ludic ‘blackness’ and game-playing grimness in the face of the void produces affects that are unusual in the contemporary scene: often by gazing with measured and self-ironising – but not unself-indulgent – scepticism at its own temptation to draw from the idealism of the modernist avant-garde, from the ‘truth-telling’ narrative devices of neo-realism, from the consolations of self-delighting formal play, and from the shoulder-­shrugging of a self-protective postmodernism. Paterson’s poetry both does and does not render the implementations of such positions flatly equivalent: it oscillates between the

60  e d w a r d larrissy vitality of being drawn into competitive game-playing and the potential stalemate of drawing nil nil. We learn from this self-protectively chameleon condition.

NO TES  1. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), pp. 25–33; God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997), pp. 42–50; Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 47–56. Future references to these books are given in brackets in the text as Nil, Gift and Light.  2. Alan Gillis, ‘Names for Nameless Things: Poetics of Place Names’, in Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton (eds), Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 204–21 (p. 217).  3. Compare, among many other corroborations of the identification of Muldoon with postmodernism, the conference ‘Paul Muldoon and Postmodern Poetry’, School of English, University of Leeds, September 2005.  4. Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004), p. xxix.  5. Ibid. p. xxx.  6. Roland Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 558.  7. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 37.  8. Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), p. 8. Future references are given in brackets in the text as Rain.  9. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (eds), The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 13. 10. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 491. 11. Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (London: Faber, 2007), p. 33. 12. Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 278–9. 13. On Zen ‘affirmation of things in their suchness’, see Christopher Ives, Zen Awakening and Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), p. 44.

4 Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson Michael O’Neill I

D

on Paterson is a poet who relishes large, sometimes intimidating themes. Yet the expression his poems wear is poker-faced with a hint of mockery. With irony, rhythmic bravura and word-play as his weapons and sometimes shield, he is especially drawn to subjects associated with existentialism and negative theology: the apparent absence of immanent meaning, the fated vanishing of the world, and yet also the continual sense of virtual possibilities, imagined alternatives. His poetry’s value and distinction, on this chapter’s reading, derive from his exploration of the challenge posed by, and the frail but durable value latent in, ‘nothing’ and its associations. The thirty-fourth ‘Renku’ in Rain offers a slyly oblique comment on Paterson’s work as a whole: Downcast? Me? I’m overjoyed – it’s my birthday in the Void.1

Much of Paterson’s finest poetry celebrates its ‘birthday’, in the sense of its coming into being through contemplation of non-being. Riskily and bravely, the work assumes the rhetorical glamour of a mode of seeing the world and yet intimates that it is merely offering a style in the face of despair. The lure of ‘nothingness’ also lies in the way it can rebuke the intellect that would dissect, murder an imaginative effect by asserting a meaning. It lies, too, in the way it beckons to its shadowy opposite, ‘something’; ‘nothing’, in Paterson’s poetry, is trying on occasion to convert itself into an imaginative and near-religious (and post-Romantic) ‘something’. One crucial form that ‘nothing’ and ‘nothingness’ take in Paterson’s poetry is absence. Other forms of ‘nothing’, often entwining round one another, include a yearning after negative transcendence, a measured delight in the possibilities of uncertainty, a confrontation with non-meaning, and the question of the

62  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill ­­ relationship between the ‘nothings’ of imagination and a reality detected as lying beyond the scope of language, even as it is language that, paradoxically, allows us to sense what may lie beyond itself. Paterson’s work suggests that its author is aware of being the heir of other poets who have wrestled with cognate themes of ‘nothingness’; accordingly, this chapter will connect his work with a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers to show how his poetry’s success derives from daring raids on deep-seated cultural fears and hopes, both contemporary and long-standing. Paterson’s relationship with poetic traditions, it should be said, does not add up to a compliance with assumptions that underpin those traditions. His individual talent shows itself in his ability to redeploy, tussle with and on occasions critique his forebears. The turn to Rilke, discussed in section 2 of the chapter, suggests an impatience with some constrictions imposed by the English poetic tradition, and a wish to draw on the energies offered by a different mode of visionary poetics. Nothingness has preoccupied Paterson throughout his career. Combining the demotic with the philosophical, a football match and a Sartrean hint of le néant, the title poem of his first volume concludes with an attempted erasure of the self and the reader, who is sent packing: the poet will ‘continue alone, on foot, in the failing light, / [. . .] / the plot thinning down to a point so refined / not even the angels could dance on it. Goodbye.’2 Paterson’s control of sound effects is impressively evident. The ‘in’ noises attenuate from ‘continue’ through to ‘thinning’, capturing the poem’s (and poet’s) gradual dissolve into ‘a point so refined’, before the robustly monoverbal sentence ‘Goodbye’ changes the acoustic feel of the poem by reasserting presence in the act of departure. Trisyllabic feet flutter and dance as they mime their bitterly comic vanishing (‘on foot’ having more than a meta-poetic glint to it). His dance of vanishing pays tribute to the tabula rasa that precedes all writing and the simultaneous process of not finding. Usually, as here, the pursuit of ‘nothing’ in Paterson issues in the ‘something’ of an achieved poem. Paterson’s concern with nothing does not spring ex nihilo. In his elegy for Yeats, W.  H. Auden declared that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, seeming to junk a decade of work devoted to making ‘action urgent and its nature clear’, as an earlier poem (‘August for the people, and their favourite islands’) has it.3 Yet his quietist withdrawal from agitprop is also a feline tribute to poetry’s capacity to give its own kind of ‘substance’ to its ‘millions of strange shadows’. Paterson’s assertive mastery of manner combines with an awareness of poetry’s modes of feigning to give his work a distinctively post-Audenesque cast. Thom Gunn’s existentialist poetics depend on ‘nothingness’, the high diving-board from which he plunges into pursuit of significance, as at the end of ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’, which moves from attempted empathy with the unheroic ‘old women’ to an evocation of ‘the large gesture of solitary man, / Resisting, by embracing, nothingness’.4 Anticipating Paterson’s rhetorical bravura, this rhetorical ‘gesture’ knows it is ‘large’; ‘nothingness’, the poet’s most powerful philosophical cannon, has the last salvo. Gunn’s relative bravado co-exists in post-war British poetry with notes that are at once less existentially certain about the energising nature of ‘nothing’ and more in touch with a symbolist inheritance. Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’ concludes with a vision of nothingness that haunts subsequent writers. The poem seems to lift

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   63 its sights beyond the sexual concerns that have dominated it in a series of gazings (Larkin looking at ‘a couple of kids’, then wondering whether ‘Anyone looked at me’ enviously when he was young). At the close, with an effect of compensation, he has ‘the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless’.5 ‘Nothing’, picked out for emphasis at the start of the line, is an abstraction occupying the space of its own absence, a void inheriting and inhabiting a space left by God, a Mallarméan blank page on which transcendental aspirations scribble and cancel themselves. In common with other poets who hanker, however self-ironisingly, after some form of quasi-spiritual ‘meaning’, Paterson composes in the wake of Larkin’s self-questioning sky-writing. Larkin both negates religious hopes and keeps alive a symbolist belief in the value of the immaterial. Paterson is conflicted about the value of the immaterial, yet negative transcendence has a strangely post-religious allure for him, even as his is ‘a voice warning you’, as Peter Howarth puts it, ‘to expect no affirmation from the anonymous calm of pure poetry’ only for his poems to impress by staging ‘the appearance’ of such ‘anonymous calm’.6 Moreover, his work aligns him in places with Seamus Heaney, whose confrontation with ‘nothing’ in ‘The Peninsula’ serves as a meditative technique. The poem opens: ‘When you have nothing to say, just drive / For a day all round the peninsula’. Heaney undergoes a process of emptying-out, a reduction of the mind to what is, in order to regalvanise a subsequent process of remembering: ‘Now recall // The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log’. This exercise will still leave him with ‘nothing to say’ except the ability to ‘uncode all landscapes / By this’.7 The fact of perception is honoured as a tactic adopted by a fundamentally affirmative stance towards reality. Paterson, in ‘Luing’, the opening poem of Landing Light, may pay distant homage to Heaney’s poem: When the day comes, as the day surely must, when it is asked of you, and you refuse to take that lover’s wound again, that cup of emptiness that is our one completion, I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,8 Paterson sings amidst his uncertainties here, to adapt a Yeatsian phrase (from Per Amica Silentia Lunae), as is often the case in his work. The syntax keeps authority after its resonant opening, but it incorporates conditionality (‘I’d say’), unsureness (‘maybe’), and awareness of the as yet ‘unsung’. The ‘you’ blurs into self-address as the poem turns away from ‘that cup / of emptiness that is our one completion’ only to follow a course back to a kind of rebirthing (‘the fontanelles reopen one by one’) that is also a glimpse of extinction (‘knowing for certain / the first touch of the light will finish you’). Place and space have grown internalised, suggestive of an original and a final ‘emptiness’. The same volume depicts nothingness as a mode of near-absolute freedom in

64  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill ‘Sliding on Loch Ogil’, in which self-address is also at work, making for a strange dance of lyric speech as Paterson invites his ‘brother soul’ to recall ‘that day spent cleaving  / nothing from nothing, like a thrown knife’ (4). The simile is almost casually dismissive of its work of comparison; a ‘thrown knife’ may cleave the air through which it cuts, and to that extent can be said to be ‘cleaving / nothing from nothing’. Though the poem’s very brevity seeks resolutely to stay true to the intuition of ‘nothing’, the comparison works more to suggest how ‘nothing’ prompts the existence of ‘something’: here, ‘a dream of the disintricated life – / crucified and free’. This ‘disintricated life’ is, or should be, on the OED definition, freed from ‘intricacy or complication’, but the ensuing doublet of adjectives suggests complicated intricacy. Even if the final line and a half move into ‘freer’ suggestions – ‘the still man moving,  / the balancing his work, the wind his wife’ – the word ‘crucified’ carries disturbing implications; the thrown knife seems to have morphed into selfdriven nails. There may be the faintest hint of casting off an old self in order to be ‘free’, as when Paul says ‘that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin’ (Romans 6: 6). The next verse, for good measure, reads, ‘For he that is dead is freed from sin’ (6: 7).9 But any salvific hints are muted in Paterson’s work, as is suggested by the lines from Plath which he quotes as the epigraph to a version of the Inferno, canto XIII: ‘Who are these pietàs / The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing’. Returns to nothingness take on darkly comic, even self-parodic form in Landing Light: in, say, the ‘Letter to the Twins’ and its tender yet mocking invitation to supply advice which contains ‘nothing of use’ (19), or in ‘The Reading’, where destruction is wreaked on an audience before the poet takes his earnings from his patron (23–5). With a stubborn yet ebullient persistence, the volume explores the theme of the self rendered null and void through language. Its final poem opens with a stanza that imagines such an erasure: I have never opened a book in my life, made love to a woman, picked up a knife, taken a drink, caught the first train or walked beyond the last house in the lane. (Light 82) The writing, with its full rhymes and strong verbs, relishes its commitment to what the title calls ‘The White Lie’. It develops a series of imaginings into a meditation on the need for ‘shrewd obliquity / of speech, the broken word’. ‘Happiness writes white’ may be one implication of the title; there is an affirmation, in the closing stanza, of ‘the blackedged look / of things’, where enjambment again expresses an awareness of the need for ‘obliquity’. Self-annulment turns out to be not wholly possible; the volume as a whole points up as a fantasy Wallace Stevens’s snowedout hope of beholding ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’, even as there are hints of a longing for such negative transcendence in which we might be ‘no one at one with all the universe’.10 Such a fantasised person in ‘The White Lie’ ‘can touch one thing’, where negations double upon themselves: ‘no one can touch’ merely ‘one thing’; no one (where the no one is a someone) can touch a thing; no

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   65 one (in either sense) can touch anything. Strangely tender, containing moments of sudden bereftness, the poem seems to be looking at ordinary experience from the other side of a looking glass.

II Rilke’s appeal to Paterson derives from the German poet’s concern with ‘emptiness’. ‘His work’, writes Robert Hass, ‘begins and ends with this conviction of an inner emptiness’, going on to note Rilke’s approval for ‘the French word absence, in the great positive sense with which Paul Valéry used it’. Of Paterson, too, it can be said that he, in his own way, seeks ‘to turn the hut of our emptiness into something positive, into a temple’.11 Putting it like this may sound pretentious, given the laddishly demotic nature of one of Paterson’s writerly personae. But in his espousal of the Rilkean poetics of the Sonnets to Orpheus, in which the disciplined sonnet contains intimations of infinitude, Paterson bears out and explores further one of his dicta in his semi-mocking collection of aphorisms, The Blind Eye: ‘In the end, the desolate age always turns instinctively to classicism, which if nothing else legislates against certain kinds of disappointment.’12 In legislating against disappointment, Paterson embraces ‘emptiness’ in a postRilkean manner. He had already engaged with another modern master, Antonio Machado, in his volume of versions entitled The Eyes.13 The volume addresses one of its strongest poems ‘To the God of absence and aftermath’, concluding: ‘let us honour Him who made the Void, and carved / these few words from the thin air of our faith’, where the capitalised nouns enter into a dizzying dialectic (‘Siesta’, Eyes 43). Here, at any rate, nothingness is the servant of a Maker, whose infinite agency finds a repetition and replication in ‘these few words’. ‘Advice’ turns the tables on the traditional Horatian wisdom, ars longa, vita brevis, with the downbeat sense that ‘To be quite honest with you, / none of this is terribly important’ (3). The poem’s success lies in its contrived bathos; it raises the bar, then drops it to the ground with an insouciant shrug. Lack of importance turns in ‘Dream’ into awareness of the ephemerality of nonexistent fantasy: ‘And I let it slip away again / like a soap-bubble in the wind . . .’ (Eyes 8). The image has its own Marvellian iridescence, but oblivion is near at hand. ‘Poem’ enacts a similar scenario as it delights in ‘those subtle worlds, / those weightless mother-of-pearl / soap-bubbles of mine’ and in the way they ‘hover / low in the blue sky, quiver, / then suddenly pop’ (27). Here the sudden popping is the price paid for the hovering, quivering existence of the poet’s ‘subtle worlds’. But it is in the sonnet ‘Poetry’ that the volume’s concerns clearly mesh with Paterson’s fascination with ‘nothing’ and its paradoxical guarantee of authenticity. The poet                 knows the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

66  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water sings of nothing, not your name, not mine. (Eyes 28) This imagining of non-identity achieves its own ‘anonymous and serene’ inflection partly through the sonnet’s avoidance of rhyme, a rare event in Paterson’s handling of the form. The ‘pure verse’ is embodied, given a figurative form through the comparison with ‘a mountain spring’ that then occupies its own mental landscape, becoming ‘the water’ that ‘sings of nothing’, indifferent to naming, ‘Beneath the blue oblivious sky’: a sky that Paterson’s rendering brings into consanguinity with the close of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’. Though Paterson eschews rhyme here, it is a moment that rhymes thematically with the close of ‘A God’, the third sonnet in Orpheus, Paterson’s version of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.14 Rilke asserts that ‘Gesang ist Dasein’ or, as Paterson has it, ‘Song is being’ (5). But the speaker wonders whether human poets can ever ensure that this equation is realised in language, before instructing a ‘Youth’ in the difference between two kinds of poetry, the ‘sudden songs’ motivated by ‘love’s voice’ which will ‘end’, and ‘True singing’ which ‘is another kind of breath. / A breath of nothing. A sigh in a god. A wind’ (5). Paterson stays closer to Rilke’s word order than Stephen Mitchell does. Mitchell translates the lines as ‘True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind’. This has a fluid swinging ease, but its enjambment ignores how Rilke arrests and sustains his evocation of ‘ein andrer Hauch’ which turns after a full stop and line-ending into ‘Ein Hauch um Nichts’. By contrast with Mitchell, Paterson captures the way in which ‘breath’ at the end of the line carries itself forward to the word ‘breath’ at the start of the next line and finds solace and release in being ‘a breath of nothing’; there, ‘nothing’ does justice to a Rilkean but also Patersonian sense that the poet is one who must obey the imperative uttered in the first of the Duino Elegies: ‘Fling the emptiness out of your arms / into the spaces we breathe’. The way in which ‘emptiness’ can animate ‘the spaces we breathe’ motivates the off-rhyme at the close of ‘A God’: ‘A wind’ counterpoints the assertion made of love-driven poems that ‘They’ll end’ (Orpheus 5). Orphic comings and goings also bring out the best in Paterson’s versioning. Paterson, via Rilke, learns to accept the inevitability of the god’s ‘leaving’, in the word which serves as one poem’s title: But though his constant leaving is a torment, leave he must, if we’re to understand. So even as his voice alters the moment, he’s already gone where no one can pursue; (‘Leaving’, Orpheus 7) What it is that ‘we’re to understand’ is something close to mystical descent into an abyss of not-knowing; Orpheus makes his presence felt most palpably through his absences. His is, in Paterson’s near-oxymoronic phrasing, a ‘constant leaving’; yet if it is a ‘torment’, it is one that gives meaning to our apprehension of the ‘moment’,

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   67 redeemed from lack of meaning by a voice that ‘alters’ (a change finely reflected in a well-judged stress-shift). As a form of inspiration ‘gone where no one can pursue’, Orpheus is a rebuke to our condition as isolated egos. Only as ‘no one’, the line’s flip-side suggests, can the figure of Orpheus be pursued. A lesson that is felt on the pulses of these sonnets is close to the wry recognition made by Paterson at the end of one of his more extended aphoristic meditations: ‘What I think of as a fondness for being human is really just an attachment to being me, that is – to nothing at all.’15 That equation reverses itself: ‘nothing at all’ turns out to be the equivalent of ‘being me’, and reminds us, as Kathleen L. Komar notes, that the ‘quadruple negatives’ of the line ‘und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht’ (‘and never Nowhere without No’) from the eighth Duino Elegy ‘is, ironically, one of the most positive statements in the Elegies’.16 A major triumph in Orpheus is ‘The Passing’, a version of the poem which Rilke thought central to the Sonnets to Orpheus.17 The poem evokes the ‘double realm’ (‘Tone’) of being and non-being, experience and renunciation, Paterson showing himself especially attentive to the idea of the self finding fulfilment through discovery of its own imminent abolition. A poem of imperatives, ‘The Passing’ pivots on the dictate ‘Be’, a dictate which passes into its near-opposite, ‘and at the same time know the state / of non-being, the boundless inner sky’ (43). That ‘state  / of non-being’ is incorporated within being by becoming the object of ‘knowing’ and occupying an ‘inner sky’. Paterson’s fluid rhythms and exact phrasing fit Rilkean paradox like a supple glove. The poem concludes with a mathematical conundrum, where multiplying any figure by zero makes the final outcome – in this case – a positive nothing: Take all of nature, its one vast aggregate – jubilantly multiply it by the nothing of yourself, and clear the slate. (Orpheus 43) The result is an abolition of ‘all of nature’ and ‘the nothing of yourself’, and yet this is more akin to the miracle of loaves and fishes than to a zero-sum game. The multiplication sum is not an exercise in futility but a means of erasing barriers between world and self. The punning effect of ‘clear the slate’ means both to wipe away chalked sums on a blackboard and to settle accounts, to arrive at the possibility of a new beginning.18

III Such clearing of the slate is, however, less ‘jubilantly’ achieved than restlessly and often affectingly sought in Paterson’s own poetry. It is a principal theme of Rain. The fourteenth poem of ‘Renku: My Last Thirty-Eight Deaths’ seems to mock Rilkean mathematics as quantum nonsense as it offers its downbeat tongue-twister: ‘Repeat, now: nought plus one is all; / but all less one, nothing at all’ (Rain 25). This is nothing as slumped failure. Yet ‘nothing’ can also feature at the heart of celebration, as happens in the short poem ‘The Handspring’. Initially Paterson seems wryly self-accusing:

68  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill ‘How me of me, I know, to blame it all / on that little hampered run, that running tiptoe’, but on the gap between two-line stanzas, transformation occurs, hindrance vanishing and becoming strength: ‘and the whole world swung up on your fingertips / as if it were nothing, or at least the weight of nothing’ (Rain 8). The poet’s child (one assumes) becomes his covert alter ego in exercising a power that makes ‘the whole world’ seem only to possess ‘the weight of nothing’. In the preceding and associated poem ‘The Swing’, Paterson produces an unsettling ballad-cum-lullaby as he describes making a swing for a child who does not exist, who is but an uncanny dream. The child enters the poem as a sourceless absence. The poet sees the swing’s ‘frail trapeze’ holding ‘the child that would not come / of what we knew had two more days / before we sent it home’ (6). The phrasing is calculatedly elliptical, suggesting a charged non-event, and indeed Paterson goes on to show his fascination with ‘nothing’, which, as Larkin informs us, ‘like something, happens anywhere’ (‘I Remember’). A mini-allegory takes over; the rhythms rock backwards and forwards, as though cradling a something-nothing into existence: I know that there is nothing here no venue and no host but the honest fulcrum of the hour that engineers our ghost (Rain 6) The physical fulcrum of the swing has turned metaphorical and become ‘the honest fulcrum of the hour / that engineers our ghost’. As a sub-text working its way strenuously to the surface, the phrase ‘honest fulcrum of the hour’ suggests the poet is making visible the work of his hands, in the ‘hour’ of, or time devoted to, composing. The poem itself ‘engineers’ its ‘ghost’, becoming a space inhabited by nothing as the poet discovers his inability to ‘weigh the ghosts we are  / against those we deliver’: his inability to discriminate between the ghostliness of our existence in time, in which the poet can say ‘we were over’, and our ghostliness in mental space, in memory, meditation, and the meditative memory-work which is a poem. By the close, the swing is the poem: I gave the empty seat a push and nothing made a sound and swung between two skies to brush her feet upon the ground (7) The ‘two skies’ is an ingenious conceit; someone on a swing sees varying perspectives, curving domes of sky, hemispherical concavities and convexities. But it also suggests swinging between skies that are physical and mental. The poem undoes yet enhances its reflexive aspect by endowing ‘nothing’ not only with a spectral being but also with a gender, and finishing with ‘her feet upon the ground’. ‘Nothing made a sound’ might be an epigraph for that impulse in Paterson to affirm nothingness, in the spirit of a latter-day, street-wise Mallarmé, shoving word-play to the fore but not losing sight of the poetics of late symbolism. In the

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   69 process of identifying the theme of conflicted division in Rain, Robert Potts discovered ‘two Patersons, each embarrassed by and ashamed of the other: the mystical ­­poet-philosopher, essaying gnomic profundities; and the proudly self-loathing nihilist, delivering the belittling gags and jibes’.19 Yet, as this chapter has argued, the challenge posed by Paterson is to consider ways in which his version of nihilism opens up into a realm of possibilities. To adapt Potts’s phrasing, the nihilist in Paterson sponsors the discovery of ‘gnomic possibilities’. If nothings turn into ‘possibilities’ in Paterson, it is partly because his poetry never loses sight of what might be called the potency of potentiality. Such potency inheres in his poetry’s sense of having discovered or rediscovered the seductive spell of regular form. Paterson suggests both that poetry is ‘nothing’ in the eye of a capitalist society bent on getting and spending, and that such a condition of nothingness has its own value – as resistant grit, challenge, provocation. With its hinted echoes of poetic events that have been and gestures towards what might be, form, as used by Paterson, can possess a near-hypnotic yet queasily kitsch-resembling power. Even when, in the sixth poem from his ‘Renku’, he is parodying Basho’s famous haiku, his writing makes us believe he is in touch with something of the force that drove through the fuse of the original. Paterson’s deft revision reads: ‘Nothing stirs the old millpond. / The frog slips in without a sound’ (Rain 23). Like the dog that Sherlock Holmes noted didn’t bark in the night, the frog – this time – makes its impact by slipping in ‘without a sound’, just as ‘Nothing stirs’ in the poem as well as ‘the old millpond’. ‘Parallax’ appears with an epigraph from Slavoj Žižek: ‘the unbearable lightness of being no one’ (Rain 38). Paterson may allude to Žižek’s comment, in The Parallax View, on the ‘realization that, when we look behind the face into the skull, we find nothing: “there’s no one home at home” there, just piles of grey matter’.20 But the poem wrests something positive out of the oddities of observational perspective and suggests a perspective different from queasily puzzled neuro-materialism. Keats’s poet-dreamer in The Fall of Hyperion sees Moneta’s face as like ‘the mild moon, / Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not / What eyes are upward cast’, lines suspended between comfort and dismaying indifference.21 The four short-lined quatrains of Paterson’s poem play variations on this blend of contact and ignorance: the moon is ‘rolling out and rolling out / its white path to the self’, where the repeated phrase finely suggests an unribboning pathway of light, and yet the poet ‘knew I was encircled by / the blindspot of its look’ (38). The poem evokes the sudden onesidedness of the relationship; the moon may be generously ‘rolling out / its white path to the self’, but the poet becomes ‘the only thing on earth / the moon could not discern’, since it is the poet’s gaze that serves as the moon’s axis. The poem hovers over a pit of sceptical reduction: the moon only seems, on such a reading, to care for the poet, but it is I who confer meaning on it, which makes me, in its eyes, nothing. But the final stanza internalises the moon as a word, paradoxically restoring its ­otherness and relatedness to the poet: At such unearthly distance we are better overheard.

70  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill The moon was in my mouth. It said A million eyes. One word (Rain 38) It is the poem’s handling of ideas and images suggested by the idea of ‘parallax’ (‘Difference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points’, OED) that shows how form itself is a ‘long pole’ able to ‘turn’ from one perspective to another. ‘A million eyes’ look at a moon that might be seen as ‘one word’; self and object ricochet between shadow and substance, something and nothing. Nothing gives succour by associating itself with failure, which makes possible renewed ways of seeing. Consoling his child for failing to draw a perfect line, Paterson writes in ‘The Circle’: ‘But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant’ (Rain 10). The remark suggests both that nothing turns out the way we meant, and that our intention was nothing by contrast with what results from our condition of b­ ecoming – of being nature’s ‘living word’, as the poem puts it, soaring into a moment of nearreligiousness. The poet is entitled to be the voyeuristic witness of the seemingly erotic embrace of sea and sky in ‘The Rain at Sea’ by virtue of being part of this ‘living word’, even if ‘Nothing on earth was ever less / concern of mine than that caress, // if such a human word would do / for what I saw’ (13). The human is and is not part of nature here, yet he can only know through the ‘human word’ how everything connects in the very act of sensing his isolation: ‘Nothing on earth was ever less / concern of mine’. ‘Phantom’, an elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy, to whom the volume Rain is dedicated, broods on ‘nothing’ as existential fact and poetic spur (51–7). Section V opens: We come from nothing and return to it. It lends us out to time, and when we lie in silent contemplation of the void they say we feel it contemplating us. This is wrong, but who could bear the truth. We are ourselves the void in contemplation. (55) This is skilful in its cadencing and phrasing, but its air of inevitability comes from a willingness to risk something close to parody. ‘We come from nothing and return to it’ ventriloquises the tone of ancient authorities, yet Paterson is near-toneless as he invites us to consider the relationship between his stance and that of the precursor texts he invokes. Such texts might be biblical, as in the first chapter of Job: ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD’ (1: 21). But it may also take us into classical materialism, Lucretius says in De rerum natura: ‘nothing is ever divinely born from nothing’ (I. 150). Indeed, saving grace is imparted to the writing through its ideological fluidity. In such cases, Paterson’s words themselves seem to emanate from a ‘nothing’ that is itself a substantial thing.

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   71 ‘It’ does post-religious service here, shifting us from ‘God’, say, but only, we note, by the third line to ‘the void’ (Rain 55). What might be acceptable in a poem by Baudelaire (Le gouffre, say) or a standard critical account of Beckett looks decidedly passé in a contemporary poem. And yet ‘Phantom’ moves with a kind of verve between the unexaminable (who are the ‘they’ who tell us the void contemplates us?) and the near-banal (doesn’t the question ‘who could bear the truth’ limp even more ponderously for the studied want of a mark of interrogation?). If Paterson surmounts the risks he takes, it is because the writing makes us aware that all poetry is a creation at once ex nihilo and out of the materials to hand. The elegist cannot but work through the form’s conventions, and the struggle to at once be respectful of the feelings that mould those conventions and break into speech that is newly authentic takes centre-stage in section V of ‘Phantom’. Indeed, it is the obstinate conviction of a ‘something’ to which access can be found out of the ‘nothing’ which is our origin and end that provides this section with its dynamic. Now giving the sense of someone who struggles through the heat of the day rather than skating on the thinnest of ice, Paterson persists in his folly in pursuit of wisdom: There is something vast and distant and enthroned with which you are one and continuous, staring through your mind, staring and staring like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant with neither love nor hate nor apathy as we have no human name for its regard. (Rain 55) Wordsworth’s famous somethings dangle before us the problem of accurate definition as they cling to the real with authenticating obstinateness: dug-in handholds on a crumbling rockface. His ‘something evermore about to be’ in the Alps allows aspiration its necessarily illimitable quality; his ‘something far more deeply interfused’ grants a revised God-like principle in nature its discreet and all-pervading anonymity; and his ‘something that doth live’, the memory of which helps him down the via dolorosa of adult life, burns with a suitably low flame.22 Paterson’s ‘something vast and distant and enthroned’ seems on its own more rhetorically ebullient, yet it turns itself in the second line into an aspect of the observer with whom it is ‘one and continuous’. This emotionless ‘black sun’ tantalises by mimicking the status of a transcendental signifier or its dispossessed materialist substitute. Paterson seems to be unable to keep his hands out of the religious tool-box, even as he hints at materialist reworkings in accord with his assertion in his ‘Afterword’ to his versions of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve undergone a long and at times painful conversion to scientific materialism. The abolition of God was one matter, but his vast retinue of fairies and pixies (in my own case, this would include everything from ghost, soul and superstition to the seductive appeals of essentialism, humanism and the Anthropic Principle-end of intelligent design) were considerably more difficult to kill off. (Orpheus 65)

72  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill The bravado of this is more that of a post-Romantic suffering considerable tristesse than a fervent follower of Richard Dawkins. It is unsurprising to hear Paterson add that killing off God’s ‘vast retinue’ ‘left the room terribly quiet and empty’. Rilke, locating, we are told, ‘all his spiritual wonder in the life we lead now’ (66), supplies Paterson with a panacea for the quiet and re-energises his onslaught on such follies as ‘any afterlife or any reincarnation’ (67). Yet the old beliefs prove themselves to be less eradicable than this allows for. Paterson only gestures in the direction of Gérard de Nerval’s ‘soleil noir de la Mélancolie’ (‘black sun of Melancholy’). But his elegy for Donaghy is not wholly deaf to what Nerval, at the end of ‘El Desdichado’, calls ‘Les soupirs de la Sainte and les cris de la Fée’ (‘The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy’).23 The closing half of section V opens with a turn towards a celebration of thought and creativity: ‘Your thought is the bright shadow that it makes / as it plays across the objects of the earth / or such icons of them as your mind has forged’ (55). The unspecificity of ‘it’ allows for a reading that makes the antecedent the ‘something vast and distant and enthroned’ of preceding lines. This reading sets up the possibility that in some way human ‘thought’ is a ‘shadow’ of a non-human ‘something’ that is, at the same time, entwined with the human. What ‘makes’ and ‘plays’ is the ‘something’ for which ‘we have no human name’ and ‘thought’ itself. The undercutting suggestion in ‘forged’ of a deceptive making cannot disguise the surreptitious return of something like an imagination that bestows and receives, and Paterson concludes the section with a movement from manufactured or ‘forged’ cleverness to an intuition of ‘something’ more unfathomable. The book in sunlight or the tree in rain bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs. But when the mind rests and the dark light stills, the tree will rise untethered to its station between earth and heaven, the open book turn runic and unreadable again, and if a word then rises to our lips we speak it on behalf of everything. (Rain 55) Sunlight and rain preside over ‘a blaze of signs’ and, the next line implies, the mind’s restlessness. But at a time when ‘the dark light stills’ there is freedom, rising, escape from being ‘tethered’, a rediscovery of the freshness and opacity of being, and of the possibility of Orphic speech ‘on behalf of everything’. The versions of Rilke surely paved the way for this remarkable passage, which still bears the lineaments of brilliant pastiche as it passes into profound eloquence. An author haunting the delicatest ear of the poem’s mind is Wallace Stevens in his ‘Evening without Angels’, which affirms moments ‘Where the voice that is great within us rises up, / As we stand gazing at the rounded moon’. Paterson, like Stevens, is able to ‘speak’ ‘on behalf of everything’ through a process of difficult modulation as a result of which the previously sublime and indeterminate ‘it’ has resolved into a hypothesised ‘word’ that ‘rises to our lips’.

clea v in g n oth ing f rom nothing   73 The air of brief affirmation, even triumph, that is established here owes much to our sense that the rest of the elegy has grappled with forces at odds with affirmation. In the first section, Paterson offers, almost literally, a version of the dark night of the self at the mercy of ‘The night’s surveillance’ (51). The section sustains a conceit of the night as a figure watching and waiting, not exactly in a terrifying way (‘it did not stare you out of your own mind / or roll into the room like a black fog’), but as a kind but faintly chilling priest or initiator into nothingness (51). ‘Soon there was nothing in that soundless dark / but, afloat on nothing, one white cup, / which somehow had escaped your inventory.’ The poet as keeper of his life’s ‘inventory’ has entered a ‘soundless dark’, a surreal absence; the night gives the poet the cup to drink from ‘when the time came / in that river whose name was now beyond you / as was, you found indifferently, your own’ (51). Such indifference has its own repose, its own consolation for the poet’s constant search to ‘name’. But indifference does not have the final word in the volume. The idea, at once threat and lure, of ‘nothing’ is forever giving rise to the resilient affirmation of poetry itself. Don Paterson’s significance lies in his post-Audenesque ability to make ‘nothing’ in many of its implications, especially its existence within poetry as an imaginative event, ‘happen’.

N OTES For help with proof-reading this essay, the author is grateful to Dr Paige Tovey.  1. Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), p. 30.  2. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), p. 53.  3. W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), p. 157.  4. Thom Gunn, quoted from Paul Keegan (ed.), The Penguin Book of English Verse (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 985.  5. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. with intro. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, with Marvell Press, 1988), p. 129.  6. Peter Howarth, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, London Review of Books 35:6 (21 March 2013): 31–3 (31). For Howarth, Paterson makes us aware that ‘Poetry will happen despite the poet’s attempts to write it’.  7. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), p. 21.  8. Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 1.  9. In his scheme of revisionary ratios, Harold Bloom takes ‘kenosis from St. Paul’s account of Christ’s “humbling” himself from God to man’. Bloom continues in terms relevant to this chapter: ‘In strong poets, the kenosis is a revisionary act in which an “emptying” or “ebbing” takes place in relation to the precursor’; The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 87. 10. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955), p. 8. 11. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, intro. by Robert Hass (London: Picador, 1982), p. xvi. Rilke (in the original) is quoted from this edition. 12. Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (London: Faber, 2007), p. 67. See Howarth, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, for the view, shared by this chapter, that such ‘selfconscious returns to classicism’ betray the presence of ‘an expressive Romantic’; p. 33.

74  m i c h a e l o ’ n eill 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Don Paterson, The Eyes (London: Faber, 1999). Don Paterson, Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006), p. 5. Paterson, The Blind Eye, p. 22. Kathleen L. Komar, ‘The Duino Elegies’, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 91. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, intro. and notes by Robert Vilain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 330. For a valuable if brief account of Paterson’s Orpheus, see Karen Leeder, ‘Rilke’s Legacy in the English-Speaking World’, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 189–204, at pp. 200–1. Robert Potts, ‘None More Black’, Review of Don Paterson, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 2010. Available at (last accessed 3 September 2012). Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Boston: MIT Press, 2006), p. 7. The Fall of Hyperion, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 1. 269–71. The Prelude (1805), VI. 542; Tintern Abbey, 97; ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 133; in 21st-Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Sieburth (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 363.

5  Form in Poetry An Interview between Don Paterson and Derek Attridge

DA: I’ve found your essays on poetic form extraordinarily interesting, and am looking forward with intense anticipation to your full Ars Poetica. It seems to me that your subject matter is not the poem tout court but the lyric poem, and perhaps – if the term ‘lyric’ is understood in a fairly general way – a certain kind of lyric poem only: the unified orchestration of sound, meaning and feeling over a span of no more than, say, twenty or thirty lines (or, in the case of a longer work, sections that have their own unity). If this is so, it would mean that although many of your poems qualify, some do not. What would you claim is the reach of your theorising in these essays? DP: I think I’m talking about a contemporary default, a category into which about 95 per cent of poems written now seem to fall. A certain kind of poem has emerged which seems to conceive of itself as a single-celled entity, seems to aim for the total interdependence of its parts – even if we know the real poem is a far messier proposition. I’m not sure ‘the poem’ can be defined any better than poetry can, but everyone seems to know what we mean by it. Most of its conventions seem culturally fixed, and some unrevisably so. One can always think of exceptions, but they remain just that. And half the time the ‘exceptions’ to this kind of poem are really just what we’d call ‘verse’, verse being a set of parallel rules you might subject any form of speech to, poetic or not – whereas real poetic speech tends to generate those rules almost as a by-product of its own concentrated rhetoric. But I think at fifty lines or less, the poem can be ‘spatialised’ through its rereading; longer than that, it yawns towards more of a litanical or narrative exercise. That’s to say its elements can no longer be retained in the mind in a way that forms a kind of gestalt, and it moves from a project where elements are connected in parallel to one where they’re connected in series. Nonetheless I think certain principles still hold when you consider any short passage of genuinely poetic speech, regardless of the length of the poem it’s been excerpted from. DA: I’ll come back later to the question of poetry being written now, but let me ask first if you are implying that previous eras operated with different norms. Would you

76  d o n p a terson an d d erek a ttridge claim that your account of the short poem – let’s not go into the territory of the long poem for the moment – is applicable to Shakespeare’s sonnets, Keats’s odes, Dickinson’s verses, etc.? And what about Goethe, or Baudelaire, or Li Po? I’m just trying to clarify the intended reach of your theorising, before we go into the theorising itself. DP: Not really – I’d say the broad principles hold for short poems written in most eras and most cultures. Language which is both emotionally urgent and brief naturally produces certain formal rules and artefacts – linguistic innovation, trope, lyric, rhythmic patterning, etc. – through sheer rhetorical exigency, and it’s those we identify with ‘poetic’ speech. The short poem just seems to be a deliberate codification of those natural linguistic tendencies, in its attempt to make brief, powerful and unified speech adequate to its subject. I suspect that’s always been pretty much the case everywhere. So yes, I think the idea of a universal field theory of the short poem isn’t too outrageous. Though the poem remains as much ‘read in’ as written out – as much the result of whatever the reader expects to find, as whatever the poet has put there. DA: Your last point is, I think, very important. So how much training does a reader need to be able to read a poem as a poem and not something else? DP: None, I think. There’s usually enough to advertise that we have in front of us text or speech where we might productively ‘read too much in’. Lineation alone will trigger this automatically. ‘What could be so important that it would waste all this paper?’ And other things – the lyric or rhythmic qualities, say – don’t need to be consciously registered to be enjoyed; on the contrary they’re more effective if the reader’s unaware of them. Children know exactly what a poem is. A small thing that says a big thing. And I think they also know it accomplishes this work primarily through a shift in the language from denotative to connotative function, something they experience intuitively. But put most simply, I think we have an ‘oversignifying’ capability, and the poem – or the decision merely to read something as a poem – engages it. Ideally the poem will reward it, too – which I guess is the definition of a good poem, where the return is at least commensurate with the investment. DA: Let’s stick with the question of the ‘good’ poem, and perhaps bring in your experience as an editor and thus of contemporary poetry. What you’ve just said about reading poetry highlights its semantic dimension. But one of your more tendentious claims is that you can often tell how successful a poem is by holding it at arm’s length and looking at the disposition of vowels and consonants (I hope I’m not misquoting you too egregiously). I’d like to ask you to elaborate on this claim, and perhaps say something about your sense of the different work vowels and consonants do in poems. DP: I wasn’t claiming you could tell if it was actually any good . . . At least I shouldn’t have been. Good poems can succeed in all sorts of ways, and often because their way

f orm in p oe try    77 of doing things surprises you. But it’s one way of sniffing out a bad poem. All I was really saying was that if you glance at it, and notice that every three-line passage seems to contain every letter of the alphabet, then the poem probably lacks much in the way of musical coherence. If you believe (as I do) that a certain synaesthetic conflation of sound and sense is necessary to increase the power of the connotative function – on which a great poem usually depends – then any sign that a poem is plainly unmusical is likely to be a bad one. More generally, I think there’s a lyric default, a kind of normative shift which instinctively moves the language closer to music. Music requires an increase in vowel-length so that notes can be sustained, and the parallel organisation of its distinct sounds. This results in a tendency for poetic speech to a) pattern its consonantal sounds and b) increase the incidence of long vowels – primarily through minimising the schwa-count. This is often accomplished unconsciously – by avoiding too many polysyllabic words, increasing the number of content words, generally favouring an Anglo-Saxon over a classical lexis, and taking advantage of the fact that any metrical template will promote some function to content by insisting on a higher-thannormal strong vowel count. I also sense a very strong global phonestheme, which runs something like consonant = event, exteriority, definitional border (mainly through its role in semantic differentiation, but also the fact that it’s short, and ‘1D’, like an outline), vowel = spacetime, interiority, internal spirit, tone, quality, etc. (And I think, for that reason, a global move to longer vowels will also unconsciously increase a line’s connotative potential; connotation requires us to think in terms of shared qualia and tone, and the seme of tone and inarticulable qualia – what I call the ‘patheme’ – is often carried by that aspect of the line best able to carry its intonational information, i.e. its stressed vowel-length.) I think there’s also ‘pink noise’ mean sought there, where patterned consonants are balanced by varied strong vowel sounds, which also allow words to be processed along the syntagm with maximum differentiation – leaving the reader with the sense of content words being distinct both in their nature, and in the way they spatially relate to other words. So you feel each content word as spatio-temporally distinct. The default of vowel-variation means that you then have the opportunity to produce foregrounded event against backgrounded repetition. Rhyme and assonantal effect, in other words. Otherwise you wouldn’t even hear it. I think we disagree here, but I should say that I think this lyric default is a mere tendency, and therefore (conveniently) not something one can disprove by adducing examples of verse which appear to contradict it. Some poems will, and some poets shift it one way or the other. It’s something that could only be settled by corpus linguistics, though. DA: And even then, it would have to be a corpus of poems that someone decided were lyrically effective, a decision which could always be challenged by someone else who operated with different criteria . . . So I doubt if your claims could ever be proved one way or the other to the satisfaction of all readers of poetry. But they remain intriguing claims, that I hope poetic criticism will take on board. I do want to press you a little on the claim about the different function of vowels and consonants, however. In my essay for this volume, I’ve tried to show that the

78  d o n p a terson an d d erek a ttridge first stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ – which I take to be a prime example of the kind of synaesthetically dense poem you are talking about – deploys vowel sounds in a patterned way throughout the lines. For instance, all the stressed vowels in the first two lines occur from five to ten times in the stanza, and there are only five other stressed vowels in the whole stanza (all but one repeated at least once). There are also lines characterised by consonant variation. Would you say that Keats is bucking the trend here, that the stanza works because it defeats our expectation of vowel variation and consonant patterning? DP: Well, as to your first point – maybe. But I’d maintain that a few collections we considered vaguely canonical in the dullest or least controversial sense – Other Men’s Flowers and The Golden Treasury, say – would constitute perfectly adequate corpora. As far as I can hear, it’s been the same since Heraclitus. You’d only find disagreement when you get to mid-twentieth century; but even there, I’d say that the phonosemantic principle insists that semantic discontinuity is often reflected and enacted in discontinuous anti-lyric strategies (high schwa-count, consonantal heterogeneity, etc.). I guess I’m trying to prove the superiority of this approach by suggesting that it explains all others but theirs doesn’t explain mine (which I seem to recall is how McIntyre proves the superiority of a moral system) . . . But I appreciate some folk will just hear circular reasoning. I don’t think ‘lyric’ in the sense I use it is merely in the ear of the beholder, any more than ‘music’ is, in its most uncontroversial definition. It exhibits patterns of tonal organisation, at the very least. As for the Keats . . . Maybe we hear it differently. In the first six lines, say, I hear very little but vowel variation, beyond the saliences of the rhymes. Looking at the stressed and tensive vowels, I hear about thirteen different sounds out of about twenty available monophthongs or diphthongs (my Scottish accent means there will be some disagreement). Something like [i] [ɪ] [ɛ] [ʊ] [ɛ] / [o] [u] [ɛ] [ʊ] [ʌ] / [aɪ] [ɪ] [aw] [o] [ɛ] / [ʊ] [aɪ] [aʊ] [æ] [i] [ʌ] / [ɛ] [æ] [ɑ] [ɑ] [i] / [ɪ] [ʊ] [aɪ] [u] [o]. That’s not super-accurate, I know, but you get the point: other than the rhymes and the assonantal salience in ‘moss’d cottage’ they’re pretty varied, I think. Keats’s natural inclination is to juxtapose a different vowel, not reach for an assonance. That’s not to say I can’t detect a distinct assonantal colour in a slight tendency to opt for back rounded vowels; I think there’s arguably a ‘full’ phonestheme associated with them – no surprise given the ‘abundance’ theme. Nonetheless I’d maintain that such an effect is only audible at all because what is most carefully achieved here is the background default of vowel variation. As for the consonants, I think I can argue that point more easily. I’d dispute that there’s any passage here actually characterised by consonantal variation. There’s always some consonantal variation in any speech that isn’t pure Hopkins-esque echolalia, but Keats’s lines seem almost excessively defined by patterning, to my ear. But my larger point is that I’d say that nothing is really ‘characterised by variation’; what opposes consonantal patterning – in terms of its cognitive salience, i.e. something equivalent to rhyme or assonance – isn’t variation (consonants are too short for it to be noticed) but anomalous instance against the background of pattern. In, say, ‘Now that my ladder’s gone / I must lie down where all ladders start / In the

f orm in p oe try    79 foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ I hear ‘foul rag’ as a little salient, for that reason. They hinge on a liquid l/r, but the [f] and [g] sounds are relatively isolated. Or in ‘Ode to Autumn’, those hedge-crickets seem sharper for the unpartnered affricate sound. And I’d say it operates not on a line-unit so much as an ‘auditory present’ rule, so while the line might fall into the old three-second slot and exhibit more in the way of coherence, a sound still has about three seconds on either side of it to be anticipated or retrospectively echoed, i.e. to have the two sounds yoked within the same rough wavelength, and form part of the lyric weave. And I hear nothing but patterning in the Keats. (Admittedly I hear things in broad groups of nasals, liquids, glides, fricatives, the voiced/unvoiced plosive pairs and so on.) ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’: sibilants and nasals and liquids and not much else, just two light dentals. ‘Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless’ – heavy repetition of the [m] nasal in the first line; very heavy consonance with ‘bless’ and ‘bosom’, ‘fruitfulness’ and ‘friend’; prominent initial alliteration with ‘close’ and ‘conspiring’ . . . in the next lines, ‘Round’ and ‘run’; heavy fricative consonance of ‘fruit’ and ‘vines’ and ‘eaves’; close labials in ‘bend’ and ‘apples’ . . . Even what might look like an unpaired consonant – the affricate in ‘thatch’ – is woven in immediately by ‘cottage’. Even if I just confine myself to the louder alliterations and almost pararhymed close pairs: ‘core’ and ‘gourd’; ‘swell’ and ‘shell’; ‘gourd’ and ‘kernel’; ‘set’ and ‘sweet’; ‘sweet’ and ‘still’; ‘still’ and ‘later’; ‘budding’ and ‘bees’; ‘warm’ and ‘martyring’, and so on. And as for ‘For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells’, I defy anyone not to hear the hum and buzz of the bee in there; it practically sounds like one word in an agglutinative language. DA: I don’t think there can be any disputing that ‘Ode to Autumn’ relies partly on the subtle patterning of consonants for its phonetic (which, as you would rightly insist, are also semantic) effects. I did pick out a line in which I feel Keats is enjoying variation in initial consonants – ‘To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells’ – but even there, once you go beyond initial consonants, you find he is ringing the changes on [l], [p] and [s, ∫] . And I see now that your point about vowels is a point about relatively short sequences, and that you’re right about Keats’s general avoidance of assonance in such sequences. (You would no doubt say that the rhyme of ‘swell’ and ‘shells’ in a single line stands out because of its uncommonness.) Here’s the thing, though: in saying that lyric poets aim at vowel variation I’m not sure you’re saying very much more than that they tend to avoid salient vowel patterning (except for special effects like rhyme). Take the stressed vowels in your own sentences: Keats’s natural inclination is to juxtapose a different vowel, not reach for an assonance. That’s not to say I can’t detect a distinct assonantal colour in a slight tendency to opt for back rounded vowels; I think there’s arguably a ‘full’ phonestheme associated with them – no surprise given the ‘abundance’ theme.

80  d o n p a terson an d d erek a ttridge Roughly speaking, there are thirty stressed vowels here, and by my assessment fourteen different vowel sounds – one more than in Keats’s first thirty stressed vowels. These tiny examples prove nothing, of course: but I wasn’t surprised to find that vowel variation of the supposed ‘lyric’ type also occurs in a sample of non-lyrical prose, and I would expect to find it widely in most uses of the language. What was more interesting when I looked at the vowels of the whole of the first stanza was that Keats does seem to establish a particular vowel-colouring (whereas I don’t sense an equivalent consonant-colouring) – what you refer to as ‘a distinct assonantal colour in a slight tendency to opt for back rounded vowels’. A very different colouring occurs in the final lines, where a different, less full, quality of music is evoked: the dominant vowels are high, front in character rather than low, back: especially [ɪ] and [e] – hilly – crickets – sing – whistles – twitter; Hedge – treble – red – breast. I know you have much more to say on this topic, but perhaps we should move to your arguments in the second pair of essays published in Poetry Review, on the ‘domain of the poem’. I’m fascinated by your description of the reading process, and I can’t think of anyone who has developed such a fine-grained account of poetic meaning – which I believe, like me, you take to be a verb rather than a noun. Your discussion of the operation of metonymy and metaphor, working within and across conceptual domains, seems to me to be an extremely valuable way of talking about meaning and an important contribution to poetic theory. My question is: would it help a poet in his or her craft to understand and appreciate your arguments? DP: I know we should move on now, since I suspect much of this stuff is of little interest to the majority of readers, but I agree: saying ‘lyric poets aim at vowel variation’ sounds much the same as ‘lyric poets tend to avoid salient vowel patterning’; but the former takes more conscious effort to achieve, even though the statements sound roughly equivalent. Efforts are often actively taken to avoid strings of nearsimilar vowel sounds of the kind that wouldn’t offend the ear in non-lyrical prose but in poetry will seem like a vaguely homogeneous whine. E.g. the line ‘In poetry will seem like a homogeneous whine’. Other factors overdetermine this outcome in a way which makes it a distinct procedure, for example: the deliberate favouring of a stressed-vowel heavy, Anglo-Saxon mono- or disyllabic content-word lexis – or, to put it inversely, the avoidance of an overly Latinate or function-word heavy lexis (at least in short to medium-length lines) which increases the schwa-count. And metrical effect, even just at the level of lineation, will increase the stressed vowelcount – which leads to more conscious awareness of the vowel, and therefore more conscious avoidance of its unproductive, non-iconic repetition. To your question: would it help a poet in his or her craft to understand and appreciate your arguments? The short answer is probably ‘no, not much’. Not unless they have a specific interest in poetry as a linguistic phenomenon. It’s helped me enormously, but only because I like to articulate my failures and then abstract a general principle. It can lead to the formation of very specific rules of thumb, like . . . a metaphor’s vehicle ideally has neither too high a degree of nativity or alienity; the former leads to deictic confusion (the reader gets muddled between the literal

f orm in p oe try    81 and non-literal) and the latter leads to a worthless ‘martianism’ where the effect isn’t plugged into the poem’s own thematic circuitry. Students seem to like this stuff, though, and quickly import it into their criticism as quick and dirty corrective tools, which makes me think it might be worth learning. The best argument for this stuff is that sometimes the analysis can lead to the realisation that some effects have been seriously underexploited. My students always enjoy ‘isologue spotting’, i.e. looking for elements which are related (via some form of interdomain relation) within the literal origo of the poem, but are not syntactically connected. And I do think that the idea of the ‘tonal isologue’ – literal elements share the ground of tonal property – works as a good explanation of why poems ‘hold together’, and its absence why they fall apart. (I know you’re justifiably sceptical of my concept of ‘patheme’, i.e. the seme of tone or quale, but if it works, it has to work somehow.) So as diagnostic tools they’re useful, and one or two ideas may have some . . . predictive force, as it were. But some poets have no stomach for this and prefer to make all those compositional decisions intuitively – probably correctly suspecting it’s part of a drive toward algorithmic solutions, or classicism by the back door, or whatever form your anti-Romantic bête noire takes. (‘Here are my preparatory sketches, boy . . . Now you finish it.’) More prosaically, though, I’d just maintain that intuition can be consciously trained, and a lot of younger apprentice poets now respond to that idea. They see it as just a software manual, and a guide to the user interface. DA: There’s also a widespread suspicion of ‘jargon’ as well, and I fear some of those – both poets and readers – who could potentially benefit from your account of poetic meaning will switch off when the new terms start coming. So as an exercise in user-friendliness, how about you explain a bit more fully what an ‘isologue’ is, how it arises from an ‘interdomain’ relation, and where to find the ‘literal origo’ of the poem? DP: Point taken, but the idea isn’t always to be accessible. I’m not really writing for a lay audience. I really don’t think any reader’s enjoyment of a poem will be improved by any of this stuff, so making it intelligible to them wasn’t the point. Frankly, the subject of poetic composition has suffered dreadfully from being oversimplified, as if as poets it was also our job to be (in Stein’s phrase) ‘village explainers’. (I did some village explaining in that Shakespeare sonnets book, which was written solely for a lay audience – who liked it just fine – and then promptly got a kicking from the academics. You can’t please all of the etc.) It’s a weird double standard, though – I mean, no one reads Structural Functions of Harmony and complains about its obscurity, its jargon or its mandarin tone, because there’s an unspoken assumption that its not-inconsiderable difficulty is simply an adequate response to the complexity of the matter under discussion. But I am sworn to introduce a new term only where no other already exists. Though ‘origo’ is a fairly well-kicked-about word in pragmatics and deictic shift theory to denote the POV reference point; however it’s my contention that as well as pronominal, temporal and locative information, literary deixis also has a metatextual component, and has to make a further distinction between the real and imagined, the literal and the figurative – which echoes

82  d o n p a terson an d d erek a ttridge a deictic condition ­­ in living reality, that between the external ‘real world’ and an inner imagined one. There we can take the distinction for granted – unless you’re psychotic – but in literature they have to be textually distinguished. A ‘literal origo’ is therefore that component of deixis mimetic of a depicted reality, as opposed to depicted non-reality, a space which is figurative, symbolic, imagined, dreamt. Once folk understand how the idea of the conceptual domain works, the concepts of intra- and interdomain connection are far better, more accommodating and accurate ways of describing how one concept relates to another. It either relates to an aspect of itself, to some member of the set of its own concerns – or to a member of another set. This makes it easy to see that metonymic or metaphoric procedure are just subsets of larger categories – ‘intradomain’ defining all syntagmatic, arbitrary, relational connections, ‘interdomain’ all paradigmatic, non-arbitrary connections of correspondence. Taking the latter – OK, we know about metaphor, which at the conceptual level is where tenor x is connected to vehicle y within the text – or where vehicle y replaces tenor x, which we call a literary symbol. But there’s a whole other category of interdomain relation where detail x and detail y inhabit the same literal frame, and are merely juxtaposed, often without any syntactic connection. They may still form a strong ground via some shared formal or tonal qualities, just like tenor and vehicle – but there’s no dominant tenor-domain, and both are conceptually equal (hence the deep redundancy, too, of ‘source and target’ here). Which is why ‘isologue’ seemed right. Especially in its tonal form, ‘isologue’ really was like discovering a species of bug that turns out to be everywhere and had no name. So I felt justified in giving it one – logos in its sense of ‘proportion’, as in ‘analogue’, though the word’s borrowed from chemistry. Poets often form them unconsciously when the ground is just tonal, but someone like Paul Muldoon (or Timothy Donnelly, to name a younger poet) uses formal isologues all the time. Muldoon’s ‘Cuba’ is a brilliant example of a complex isologue developed to the point of conceit, where within the same narrative ‘literal origo’ the ‘real’ Cuban Missile Crisis is mapped to a ‘real’ and culturally specific sexual near-misdemeanour – through an extraordinarily complex ground, whose shared elements would contain patriarchy, threat, temptation, something like ‘Irish self-distrust’ (via JFK), self-destructiveness, brinkmanship and, crucially, ‘the near miss’. ‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest? / Did he touch your breast, for example?’ / ‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’ The one is, if you like, a metaphor of the other, but that’s just a really clumsy and contradictory way of putting it. The point is that the poem has no ‘actual’ meaning, since there is no dominant frame. It remains, simply, a complex interaction between two mappable elements, and is endlessly rich. It’s not a paradox, just an open-ended conditional relationship (of the kind, I’ve noted, that many literary critics either hate or misread, since they can’t nail the sense). Either way . . . I’m well aware of the limited appeal of this stuff, and after ‘The Domain of the Poem’ comes out I’ll write something on ways of reading, which will present some of these ideas to a general readership in a de-jargonised and far more digestible way.

6 Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry Gerard Carruthers

I

n the early twenty-first century it has become something of a rite of mid-career passage for Scottish writers formally to salute the totem that is Robert Burns. This has been the case in recent years for the likes of Robert Crawford, Andrew O’Hagan, Ian Rankin and Don Paterson, all of whom have produced anthologies of Scotland’s ‘national bard’. Generally, what these writer-editors produce in common is their choice of the Burns that they feel best speaks both for himself and for the social concerns of his day. Paterson’s Faber and Faber selection is the craftiest of all of these, resembling nothing so much as a slim volume such as he might produce of his own work. This is part of Paterson’s premeditated ‘modernising’ of Burns, whom he feels to have been appropriated as part of an embarrassing, old-fashioned package of national shibboleth: Nations in abeyance have a far greater need for the fripperies of nationhood than do active ones, and perhaps one day we will see the ludicrous post of ‘national bard’, along with the Flower of Scotland, the Gathering of the Clans and the Edinburgh Tattoo all go down the same plughole.1

Paterson’s seemingly stark selection of Burns features only twenty-nine poems and twelve songs chosen from a possible six hundred plus texts. The fourteen blank pages at the end of the paperback edition when it first appeared in 2001 caused puzzlement among a number of Burnsians that these could not have been filled up.2 Having dismissed in his introduction the cottage-industry of Burns biography, claiming that ‘the character of Robert Burns is so complicated as effectively not to exist at all – there is barely a human trait which he did not exhibit at one time or another’ and seeing not only in his poetry but in his correspondence ‘a doomed project to attempt to reconstruct Burns’s character’, Paterson is determined to let Burns breathe in a different way, on the page (Burns vii). As well as blank pages, Paterson allows two four-line works a page of their own. The tactic is very different from the numerous collections of Burns’s work which often feature multiple short poems crammed into a single page. In Paterson, each

86  g e r a r d ca rru th ers work chosen begins on a separate page. To a large extent, he chooses Burns’s ‘greatest hits (such as ‘The Twa Dogs’, ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’), but there is also an obviously individual discernment at work. ‘A Poet’s Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter’ – an earthy and tender celebration by Burns of his first, illegitimate child – prefigures Paterson’s own intense treatments of parenthood a few years later (36). The inclusion of ‘Sketch’ (58), one of Burns’s most obliquely thoughtful pieces on the creative process of poetry, shows Paterson somewhat ahead of the critical curve in recognising the text before any thorough modern critical treatment.3 Paterson’s Burns also looks slightly odd to standard Burnsian eyes in the selection’s eschewing of the most canonical songs, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘A Red Rose’, for instance. One assumes that these were too much like the large Scottish shibboleths (mentioned above) from which Paterson recoils. Instead, and appropriate to a book of ‘poetry’, he has chosen more technically interesting texts, such as ‘Mary Morison’ – in which the stanza of the octosyllabic ballade with iambic octosyllabics is syncopated differently through the text’s three stanzas for thematic effect – and ‘John Anderson My Jo’, which has a complex alliterative pattern (7; 78). Like the slightly more celebrated Burns songs not chosen, however, these poems also demonstrate Burns’s facility as a lyricist. Paterson says: One reason why it is rare for a good poet to make a good lyricist is that songwriting consists in the ruthless cancellation of so many of the effects poets prize most highly [. . .] Burns’s peerless status as a lyricist reflects a remarkable ability to subdue his expressive gift to the service of the song. (Burns xv) Paterson confesses in his introduction to unease about including any song-lyrics at all, but sees these as necessary for exemplifying to some degree the arc of Burns’s career, which moves increasingly towards song. In his account, Burns undertakes the ‘psychologically necessary’ shift to the celebration that song implies, away from the messy business of real-life love and by implication too of poetry. For Paterson, Burns’s class (and nationality) denied him the full poetic creative space he might have had. One consequence is that his English poetry (at least in ‘Augustan’, sentimental mode) is second-rate. Yet even Paterson is aware that this is not the whole story: Burns’s subscription to Augustan ideals of linguistic comportment – while disastrous for his English verse – endowed his Scots with intellectual ambition, discipline of syntax, and a deep awareness of poetic artifice – as well as doubling his vocabulary at a stroke. (Burns xi) For Paterson, then, both in song and in poetry, Burns, rhetorically, is at his best in a ‘sinewy, mongrel tongue always ready to import an English synonym, whether to raise the rhetorical stakes, or just to accommodate local exigencies of metre and rhyme’ (Burns xi). We might think of Paterson’s own ‘Augustan’ facet, at least, in terms of his accomplished powers of digression. We might also see, in his identification of Burns’s ‘mongrel tongue’, an element of the self-identification of his own poetic

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    87 voice, which is torn between assured high poetic discernment and his outsider working-class, not-university-trained, Scottish identity, as well as his perhaps more central cultural location as a musician. One example is his rapturously witty tribute to cult Georgian musician Natalie Beridze, which includes the lines:    O Natalie – I forgive you everything, even your catastrophic adaptation of those lines from ‘Dylan’s’ already shite    Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night    in the otherwise magnificent ‘Sleepwalkers’, and when you open up those low   pass filters in what sounds like a Minimoog emulation they seem to open in my heart also.4 Paterson’s musical interests here, as elsewhere, seem to suggest that modern music, rather than poetry, is the medium par excellence of the lyrical communication. Similar scepticism manifests in Paterson’s diagnosis, in his introduction, that the idea of being a ‘national bard’ in any complete ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’ sense (such as Burns can be said to be striving towards, and as he is certainly celebrated in the case of the former delineation) is a non-starter. Instead, a poet can make use of unpropitious circumstances – Burns’s marginalised class and national locations – and can build from these, nonetheless, a poetic palate of his own. With typical elegance, Paterson has reconstructed a very ‘modern’ Burns. This Burns is very much an individual talent responsive to the circumstances of life and language around him, but not exactly sitting comfortably within ‘tradition’. Paterson’s selection of Burns is the most telling site where a certain grumpiness towards his own country of birth emerges, and where literary and national identity are uncoupled in any essential sense. However, this cultural iconoclasm, as we might realise from Paterson, is necessary not only in the Scottish but in the English context too. His 2010 Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, like his selected Burns, provides a trenchant, accessible introduction to theme, metre and poetic form. Like the Burns book, it is the work of an admiring poetic practitioner. It is a place where his idea of active readership/editorship is practised and encouraged. Paterson claims: ‘Reading a Shakespeare sonnet is an act of authorship. Some of the time this will involve you violently disagreeing with the reading of this reader.’5 Towards his enjoyment of ultimate uncertainty, or at least the impossibility of completely consensual certainty in interpretation, his introduction nonetheless does not shy away from forceful opinion: The question ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record, of course he was. Arguably he was a bisexual of sorts; for all the wives, mistresses and children I’m not entirely convinced by his heterosexual side. Mostly, his heart just wasn’t in it; when it was, his expressions of heterosexual love are full of self-disgust. (RSS xiii) Paterson’s guiding, goading voice here (which explicitly brooks disagreement) implements a strategy somewhat different from that seen in his presentation of

88  g e r a r d ca rru th ers Burns. Where Burns had been suffocated in biographical treatment, Shakespeare – apropos some recent critical treatments of the sonnets – has become too pallid: ‘[. . .] sinister is the convention of reducing WS to the status of cast-member, referring to the author of the Sonnets not as Shakespeare but “the poet” – in the desperate hope that these screamingly autobiographical poems might be construed as fiction or a dramatic monologue’ (RSS xiv). In a sense, for Paterson, Burns is to be taken away from the people, and his work presented in a sculpted modern volume of poetry (where the audience for such material is comparatively tiny). Shakespeare, meanwhile, is to be given back to the people (or at least to the common reader) in a highly entertaining, informative but nonetheless robustly gossiping fashion. Paterson wishes to do away with both Burns ‘the bard’ and Shakespeare ‘the poet’, and he adopts different strategies for each, in an attempt to liberate Burns and Shakespeare from proprietorial constituencies – the people on the one hand and the academy on the other. The comparison tells us something about Paterson’s mission as a poet and critic in the national context: to tweak the noses of two cultures which, in their own way, can be claustrophobically self-regarding in their superiority: populist Scotland and refined England. Don Paterson is a man of several cross-grained contexts including those of nationality and the publishing industry. One suspects that he would like to see such things as contingent, but he is also smart enough to employ them as necessarily central realities within which he can roam meditating seriously, but also, sometimes, making a little mischief. Since the 1960s at least the Union Jack has seen some gradual, if not total, displacement in its emblem as ‘the butcher’s apron’ of colonial rule, becoming instead, in some contexts at least, a badge of ‘cool Britannia’. One of these contexts can be found in the anthology New British Poetry (2004), which Paterson co-edits with Charles Simic. Its cover is an elegantly angled part of the British national flag (making its most striking detail a thrusting white arrow) which adorns a publication by an American publisher. It is, of sorts, a ‘British invasion’ of the cultural kind, which happened in popular music in the 1960s and which has become a cliché for succeeding waves of anticipated good reception for British films, fashion and other cultural products. Of the thirty-six poets selected, ten (including Paterson himself) are Scottish, an indicator of the robust health of Scottish poetry in the early twenty-first century with fewer than ten per cent of the United Kingdom’s population living north of the border. In his introduction Paterson subscribes to something called British poetry that is ‘different from North American poetry’.6 At the beginning of his piece he is bulldog-like in the face of a spreading evil, offering to give to the American reader ‘some description of the current UK scene and its schisms’, and to discuss the threat currently presented by the ‘Postmoderns and their general ubiquity’ (NBP xxiii). He reads the sweeping trajectory of twentieth-century British poetry history as a commendable situation where ‘The Mainstream poets in this book are part of a long evolution, and are engaged in an open, complex, and ongoing dialogue with the whole of the English lyric tradition’ (xxxi). The ‘Postmoderns’ (none of whom he names), however, are interested primarily in ‘novelty [. . .] Their plan is evolutionary succession, not cohabitation’ (xxxi ). On the face of it, Paterson sounds like a previ-

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    89 ous éminence grise of the Faber and Faber publishing company. Sarah Broom reads him as ‘strangely anxious about the possibility of his own status as “poet”, whether by the proliferation of poetry on the internet or by the status of experimental poetry in universities’.7 However, it is actually Paterson’s concern with readership – and, as he sees it, a respectable ‘mainstream’ reception for contemporary poetry in Britain, in the broadsheets and on television and radio – rather than his own authorship that concerns him here. He has been part of what is arguably the most significant grouping of poets at a British university, St Andrews, including at one time or another John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Douglas Dunn and Kathleen Jamie. One would think, then, that the mainstream is safely ensconced in the academy. One might also assume that Paterson’s powerful position in publishing, and his influence in the poetry magazines (comparable to that of a number of the St Andrews ‘group’), show where the whip-hand remains firmly in control. However, it is a matter of aesthetic predilection and, moreover, concern about access to poetry that drives Paterson’s stance as he views the postmoderns, with their ‘self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism [. . .] eliminating the reader entirely’ (NBP xxxiii). For him, the ‘Po-mos’ are the elitists. A slightly discordant effect is produced by the interventionist aggression of this editorial stance, especially in terms of national identities. When Paterson (and Simic) exclude Ulster poets from the collection, they make the case that most of these self-identify as Irish, and they would not wish to appropriate these writers to Britain or the UK. But what about those they include, such as Paterson’s close colleague Robert Crawford, who would primarily self-identify as Scottish? Paterson has a strong sense of non-political, cultural British identity – which is very humorously rehearsed in one of his own poems, ‘Imperial’, chosen for New British Poetry – but his editorial manoeuvrings do not sit entirely easily with this apparent scepticism towards nationhood. In the poems, it is often personal (and sexual) politics that matter ultimately: in ‘Imperial’ two strong-headed lovers ‘[a]fter months of jaw jaw, determined that neither / win ground’ give themselves up to a night of lust, and on ‘the night we lay down on the flag of surrender / and woke on the flag of Japan’.8 As often as not in Paterson’s poetry, the pretentions, the neat symbols of the nation crumble bathetically into more important (often physical, visceral) human realities. Here as elsewhere in Paterson’s oeuvre we see a highly self-conscious awareness, indeed an unpicking, of literary history where, in this instance, lyrical romantic nationalism is dismantled in the face of another of romanticism’s priorities: the urgency of individual love. In Paterson, Scottish material, including the Scots language, is handled as if it were a subset of a wider set of themes and vocabulary available to the contemporary poet. The Scottish twentieth century’s most dominant if not necessarily most accomplished poetic voice is Hugh MacDiarmid. This sometime High Modernist – who often savagely expressed his absolute belief in the distinctiveness of Scottish nationality – stands in the minds of his many followers as a rebuke to more profligate Scottish writers who dare to be less centrally obsessed with ‘Scottishness’.9 In some ways MacDiarmid’s obsession with the ‘matter of Scotland’ has continued to influence Scottish criticism and university courses in Scottish literature rather than

90  g e r a r d ca rru th ers ­­ creative literature itself. Unlike his contemporary W.  N. Herbert, who seeks to extend MacDiarmid’s legacy with seriously engaged long poems in Scots, Paterson merely tips his cap to MacDiarmid in a couple of pastiche-texts, ‘Twinflooer’ and ‘Zen Sang at Dayligaun’, in the 2003 collection Landing Light.10 Responding to MacDiarmid’s modernist lyric, ‘The Eemis-Stane’ (1925), the second of these texts is a meditation on the lack of unity in nature and the universe (something ‘The Eemis-Stane’ searches for): For the lyart sang’s no’ staneyraw, thon gowden sang’s no’ stane an’ there’s nae burn or birk at aw but jist the sang alane. (Light 81)

[grizzled; lichen [golden

It is the song, or the poem, that provides a performative (not absolutely truthful) unity to the scene. This existentialist answer to MacDiarmid refuses the mystification of the latter’s text, which seeks to establish even as it cannot fully comprehend with exactitude an analogy between nature and human faculties: [. . .] my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift.

[blizzard

Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame [moss An’ history’s hazelraw [lichen No’ yirdit thaim.11 [buried MacDiarmid’s poem worries over subjectivity and objectivity, the personal and the absolutely real. In Paterson, such divisions are hardly worth raising as problems. For Paterson, poetic performance, and human apprehension and expression, are the point of a causal unity that would not otherwise exist. Studded with MacDiarmid vocabulary and impersonating the voice of MacDiarmid’s older lyrics, ‘Zen Sang at Dayligaun’, on one level, is a ‘five finger exercise’; on another it is an indicator of the comfortable accommodation with the world that the modern existentialist poet makes. This is not to imply that Paterson is simply complacent about the world. It is rather, as we see throughout his oeuvre, that his discomfort with it is indicated through wry (sometimes dark, sometimes comic) rehearsals and rearrangements of its parts. ‘Twinflooer’ again enters into MacDiarmidist parody insofar as it recalls ‘antisyzygy’, the supposed Scottish propensity for inhabiting opposite positions at the one time (Light 57–9). Notoriously, MacDiarmid himself took this as his initial poetic credo. Paterson’s text again inhabits the puzzled nature-engagement in MacDiarmid’s early lyrics. We have the quasi-apocalyptic (post-Yeatsian) modernist yoking of delicate plant and mythical monster:

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    91 Tho’ it grows in oor baald east alane, it’s still sic an antrin baste

[bald [rare, singular; beast

The strange phenomenon, however, is neither more nor less awful than passionate love (Shakespeare’s ‘beasts with two backs’): I pert the girss an’ there they are, the shilpit pair cried for him wha rived a kingdom in twa estates – (Light 57)

[grass [thin, weak [called [split

The text is somewhat teasing in gesturing towards the larger politics – the two ‘estates’ of Scotland and England – and towards the traditional reader who is used to perceiving, in the Scots national complaint, Scotland’s broken unity and/or duplicity in British identity. Yet the poem’s ‘actual’ subject is Carl Linneus (the Swede born in 1707, the year of the Union of English and Scottish parliaments), so that even here Paterson plays with the idea of allusion to a darkly iconic Scottish moment of yoking. He has come up with duplicity, in his double classification system of naming botanical species. The flower Linnaea borealis, named for the Swedish botanist, is also double-headed, two flowers emanating from the one stem. The text raises the possibility of two voices, Scots and English, co-existing in the one human or national identity. This is something ‘natural’, as the analogue of Linnaea borealis ‘shows’ us. Paterson gives ironic purchase on the historical disquisition of the narrator who talks of: a word haulf-swicked fae the fa’ o Babel, whitever it spelt sae slicht and nesh it jinked the trouble, and rode the jaw as the broch tummel’t t’ somehow waash up here, a trick or holy geg like the twa-in-yin breathed in the lug o the blin’fauld halflin. (Light 58)

[cheated [slight; soft [dodged [wave, breaker [tower; trembled [gag, joke [supposedly ‘the horseman’s word’ [ear [blindfolded; adolescent

92  g e r a r d ca rru th ers Paterson is having great fun here impersonating and lampooning MacDiarmid at his most portentous. A Scots word is half-cheated, or denied its place in a proper ‘full’ language, with the diminishment of Scots through the process of Anglicisation. At least, this is the way of reading with the text. However, the proposition is undercut by the invocation of Babel, the moment when all of mankind is denied a unified language. The word is seemingly delicate, set off in aimless direction by its diminished currency, and silently, punning on the water currents that have washed it up in some undetermined location. It is elusive, oxymoronic (like a holy joke), doubled in its simultaneous de-centredness and in its resilience; a more or less forbidden word breathed into the ear of a blind-folded youth. Time and again, the idea of the double language, the double identity, becomes sensual, sexually tense and exciting, and the prospect of doubling in coitus is never far away. Paterson, clearly, admires MacDiarmid’s lyric voice, and revels in impersonating it. (He achieves this with considerable skill in the use of ‘literary Scots’, of the type dictionary-dredged for use by MacDiarmid). However, Paterson also reworks the older poet’s insistence on the national damage done to, and the hidden special reserves (nonetheless), of Scottish creativity existing in subterranean fashion (in the underground, radically non-Anglophone possibilities of Scots, as MacDiarmid saw it). For Paterson, Scots is one occasional part of his heritage, not all that portable across his oeuvre. As with his treatment of Burns and also Shakespeare, Paterson in ‘Twinflooer’, seeks to fillet his poet-subject, and to deflate the formidable context (especially that of national visionary) that is built around MacDiarmid. National poets are to be winded, even when their nice use of language and their poetic voice as a thing of beauty in itself is to be enjoyed and appreciated. Paterson’s use of ‘literary Scots’, or pastiche-performance, extends also to ‘Postmodern’, in God’s Gift to Women (1997), where Tom Leonard’s ironically demotic, narrative voice is mimicked (albeit utilising east coast working-class parlance).12 Leonard is a dissenter from the MacDiarmidist idea of high ‘literary’ Scots, utilising instead the demotic argot of urban, working-class, central lowlands dialect (which is not entirely kosher so far as many of MacDiarmid’s followers are concerned). In the poem a man lends a pornographic video around his drinking buddies, until he discovers on a second viewing that this now features his own reflection previously masturbating, and so brings an added level of entertainment to those to whom it has been lent. The text ends: [. . .] he notices the reflection o’ himself, wankin awa on the screen, clear as    day. Then he stops wankin. But his reflection disnae. That’s cuz it’s no’ his fuckin reflection. He’s only jist taped himsel haein a    wank, huzzee. Dye no’ get it? Will Eh hae tae explain it tae ye? (Gift 51) We are in the territory of urban myth, of course, the ignorant pub-voice not thinking through the veracity of his story or how it is technically possible for the victim to have recorded himself. The crass male being part of ‘God’s Gift to Women’ (as Paterson sardonically has it) is here a Dundonian Scot, of a nationality that has a pronounced myth of itself as macho, violent, martial. As so often in the case of

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    93 Leonard’s narrator-subjects, the speaker in Paterson’s text is deflated, belittled even as his own swaggering voice protrudes. Of course, there is also a pretext to Paterson’s poem in its ridiculing of the postmodern. ‘Postmodern’ exemplifies its title by essaying a literal onanism, and a metaphorical one where a supposedly clever story is not clever at all. It is self-satisfying in every sense. The scenario of the text tickles the undiscerning narrator of the tale. It is ‘clever’ but stupid, as Paterson views a certain type of postmodern poetry. Paterson’s strategy here in using a working-class Scottish voice from the pub is to mock what he takes to be the smug certainty, the brutally immature delight of formalist self-satisfaction. This goading of the postmodernist by equating him with a primitive, rather gormless specimen of Scottish maleness is a bold tactic, but as with his introduction to New British Poetry, it makes one wish for an extended statement by Paterson in the detail of what it is precisely that he is condemning. In a fine critical survey of the contents of Paterson’s first collection Nil Nil (1993), Alan Gillis speaks to the title’s ‘bifurcated and dualistic nullity’.13 This is broadly true, but has nothing to do, of course, with Scottish ‘antisyzygy’. Rather, it marks out the territory between life and death, as Gillis remarks of the opening poem in the volume, ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’, where in bringing together the mythological Charon, a mundane pub-name, and tensions in perception between the ‘quotidian and symbolic’ (and between life and literature), Paterson emphasises the difficulty of aligning these particulars.14 In some ways, Paterson is a writer who worries about realism as much as any postmodernist could wish. His epigraph to the title-poem of the collection – which is ‘drawn from’ the fictional François Aussemain’s Pensées – ends: ‘only in the infinite ghost-libraries of the imagination [. . .] can their ends [past events] be pursued, the dull and terrible facts finally authenticated’ (Nil 51). Like so many Paterson poems, a string of consequential realities are followed to sketch the lack of deep causality in existence. The text takes for its ostensible theme that Scottish obsession, football, and expresses a certain sardonic humour through its title – where lots of effort, it might be thought, would result in mere attrition and little final glory. (It might be said that since Paterson was writing, not merely attrition, but abject failure has stalked the Scottish international football team.) The poem opens in memory of sorts through black and white film-record, as a team’s ancient, faded glory is reviewed. A glorious goal is scored and ‘a plague of grey bonnets fall out of the clouds’. This nicely immediate metaphor is also a portent of the thing to come: the team loses the game, and begins a ‘descent’ through the lower leagues, with increasing ignominy. The metaphor also nicely inhabits the supposedly Calvinist Scottish pessimist position; that at any moment of triumph, the Scot’s psychological response is immediately to portend its reversal, its nullification. Even the placement of the title-poem at the end of the collection contributes with delicious irony to the point being made about bathetic Scottish sensibility, and helps mark out Paterson’s persistent hallmark as a poet. In ‘Nil Nil’ Paterson, as so often throughout his work, is a riotously funny documentary realist. We see the collapse of the football club to the extent that its playing-field becomes more notable for boys’ fixtures. We view the grimy details of:

94  g e r a r d ca rru th ers the half-time satsuma, the dog on the pitch, then the Boy’s Club sponsored by Skelly Assurance, then Skelly Dry Cleaners, then nobody; stud-harrowed pitches with one-in-five inclines, grim fathers and perverts with Old English Sheepdogs lining the touch, moaning softly. (52) The humour of the perverts’ masturbating under the sheepskin-coat, ‘lining the touch’ collides poetic finesse with a situation devoid of refinement. Such lines craft high poetic humour from the ridiculous and the seedy. It is a common trait in Paterson’s poetic approach to place in general. That is a marked difference not only between Paterson and Scottish writers of his generation (W. N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie or Carol Ann Duffy, for instance), but also between Paterson and earlier writers under the influence of MacDiarmid. A key development is that Scotland is not portrayed as beaten down or seen as more in the cultural gutter than anywhere else. Unlike his highly influential ‘Scottish Renaissance’ forebears of the 1920s to 1940s, Paterson does not treat the Scottish poet as being in a specially marginalised ‘predicament’ in terms of nationality, language or identity. Rather, in ‘Nil Nil’, he treats the predicament as comparable to that for writers more or less anywhere: dealing with the ubiquitously messy reality of life, with humanity, wit and skill. Such lines attempt to ease the stubborn persistence of the ‘particular’ ‘problem of Scotland’ – of how to write from and about the nation from its allegedly marginalised position. ‘Nil Nil’ actually undercuts its initial proposition, of documentary realism, as the descent into ignominy is too sharp for any one football club. The scenario is actually a composite one of different (co-existing) levels of Scottish football. Creating a non-realistic slide into obscurity with much realistic detail, including a number of legendarily obscured club-names, allows Paterson to pour humour onto a Scottish national shibboleth. Although the trajectory of the text’s narrative is forward through time, it cunningly works backwards also: towards the end of the football tale the ‘tanner ba’’ boy player appears in the street. This effects a return to the supposed roots of Scottish football greatness of the past where, from around the 1910s to the 1960s, endless practice with inadequate facilities (using tennis and other small balls, and the road and pavements instead of a playing-field) distilled from primitive circumstances fine and tricky skills. Leaving the dilapidated football field, a boy ‘neatly back-heels it [a stone] straight into the gutter / then tries to swank off like he meant it’, and an abruptly different piece of sequentiality intrudes: Unknown to him, it is all that remains of a lone fighter-pilot, [. . .] [. . .] [. . .] He caught up with the plane on the ground, just at the instant the tank blew and made nothing of him, save for his fillings, his tackets, his lucky half-crown and his gallstone, now anchored between the steel bars of a stank (52–3)

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    95 It is a reductio ad absurdum in which the substitution of a football with the gallstone of a dead fighter-pilot is, of course, totally unexpected and tragically ridiculous. In another sudden shift, this time from film to prose, ‘Nil Nil’ ends with an italicised authorial voice addressing us: ‘this is where you get off, reader; / I’ll continue alone, on foot, in the failing light, / following the trail as it steadily fades / [. . .] / the plot thinning down to a point so refined / not even the angels could dance on it. Goodbye’ (53). The poem explodes twice over, as it moves towards its conclusion, where both the dead pilot and the very much alive ‘author’ are intruding. For much of the poem, we follow quotidian details, becoming increasingly – but not unenjoyably – aware of their artificial accumulation; their amalgamation from a number of stories pretending to be one story. By the end Paterson has produced a thoroughly syncretic construction – a kind of shaggy dog story. His narrative trajectory gives the impression of standard thematic terrain for literature – passing glory – but it is also imbued with a strong sense of the absurdity and littleness of life. The grand football team is restricted to a derelict football park; the presumably dashing fighter-pilot (icon of Britishness following World War Two) is reduced to a gallstone unwittingly kicked around on the way home from the abandoned playing-field by a little boy. This is sic transit gloria mundi with a huge grin on its face. Paterson’s late-twentiethcentury outlook in the text is one attuned to the ultimate meaninglessness of earthly endeavour, but it is also one, more grimly, in the context of a 1993 poem, closely attuned to the post-Thatcher reality of much of Britain, where former valour is rendered functionless, purposeless. The poet actually has no through-going story to tell, merely some scenes to show. When the author finally reveals himself and wanders off cod-lyrically into the twilight, the reader is abandoned. The latter has as much to do as the poet in real life in making something of the chaos all around him or her. The message is: expect the poet to play with the chaos – to render a sense of it – but not to put it right. Paterson certainly has an eye for the Scottish bizarre, a much-trumpeted quality of Scottish writing in traditionalist criticism.15 However, in some ways, as in ‘The Chartres of Gowrie’ from God’s Gift to Women, the bizarre is not so much the prophecy upon which the text draws, but the collision of the really existing elsewhere with the Scottish sensibility or landscape (11). The poem imagines the sudden appearance of a cathedral in Perthshire, as had been foreseen, apparently, by an eighteenth-century Scottish seer. The text fulfils this scenario, a magical process entirely feasible in a work of imaginative literature: a poem. Accompanying the predicted great European cathedral (Chartres-like) is a rather American geological phenomenon – a giant thunder-egg, from which the church of sorts seems to emerge. The text appropriates a past event (or prophecy) and yokes this to an unexpected geological phenomenon, alien in its belonging to another continent but also, as it were, in coming from the sky. Like a sci-fi scenario, a mysterious object from the heavens begins to come to life after touching down. No one sees its initial arrival or its coming into being: No witness, then, and so we must imagine everything, from the tiny crystal-stack,

96  g e r a r d ca rru th ers its tingling light-code, the clear ripple of tines, the shell snapping awake, the black rock blooming through its heart like boiling tar, (Gift 11) A perfectly natural process of geological formation is described. Yet, to the lay person, the scenario is set out as fearful. Although the process cannot be witnessed by a human being because of the huge amount of time involved in formation, Paterson is, in a sense, speeding up time to create the conceit of predatory intrusion, and of threat. Gradually the atmosphere of the text becomes more benign: [. . .] if we find this hard we may posit the autistic elder brother of Maurice Duruflé or Messiaen. Whatever, the reality is this: at Errol, Grange, Longforgan, and St Madoes they stand dumb in their doorframes, all agog at the black ship moored in the sea of corn. (Gift 11) We go from scary to teasing as the narrator tells us there is as much chance of sudden geological exhibition as of a cathedral appearing in the Gowrie. Catholic French composers are invoked, besides which the perhaps Calvinist Scot is ‘the autistic elder brother’, over-sensitive (‘all agog’) in the face of this wonder. That final metaphor is, by Paterson’s standards, ultra-conservative. A near-conventional lyricism settles over the final lines, which contrasts with the earlier, culture-rending parts of the poem, as well as the geology/sci-fi occurrence, and the Frenchified cathedral unleashed on the Scottish countryside. Until now, all has been imaginary, and all continues in the text to be imagination – but ‘the reality is this’: that actually ‘they stand dumb’, nothing is heard, and the thing has not happened. The human, Protestant landscape is, in reality, safe from the depredations of anything too wildly imaginative that might intrude upon it. We end with a very tame metaphor, which, had it been displaced from the riotous text in which it appears and turned up in another location, might well have seemed sinister. The large objects of the poem – weirdly formed rocks and magnificent cathedrals – exist beyond the ken of Gowrie. This is not because this Scottish landscape is essentially hostile to such things, in spite of Paterson’s invocation of a Scottish Protestant sensibility. Rather, as such work makes clear, there are inevitably real imagined possibilities beyond the localities of any particular place. Part of Paterson’s power as a poet is to be liberated from overburdening anxieties about his country of birth. What he does is to use Scotland within his imaginative lexicon both as literature and as nation, and to show that these speak to, but are not constraints upon, one another.

s c o t l a n d , b rita in an d th e else whe re of p oe try    97

N otes  1. Don Paterson, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Burns: Poems Selected by Don Paterson (London: Faber, 2001), p. xviii. This volume is referred to as Burns.  2. This was commented upon to me on at least half a dozen occasions by amateur Burnsians and even by Professor G. Ross Roy, one of the world’s leading Burns scholars, throughout 2001–2. ‘It is not as if Burns is short of poems,’ remarked Professor Roy to me in one phone conversation after he had taken receipt of the Paterson anthology for the best Burns library collection, at the University of South Carolina, in the USA.  3. See Steven R. McKenna, ‘Burns and Virgil’, in Gerard Carruthers (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 137–49, where McKenna makes a compelling case for the ‘writerly’ importance of Burns’s poem not previously noticed in criticism, though obliquely pointed to by Paterson’s selection.  4. Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), pp. 18–19.  5. Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber, 2010), p. xvii. Referred to as RSS.  6. Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004), p. xxiii. Referred to as NBP.  7. Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 42.  8. ‘Imperial’, in Paterson and Simic, New British Poetry, p. 161, ll. 5–6 and ll. 11–12.  9. Like most practising academics in Scottish literature, Paterson does not see himself as a cheer-leader for the subject, so much as an intensely interested critic and practitioner. He teaches a literature course at St Andrews with Robert Crawford called ‘Culture and Society in Modern Scotland’. 10. Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 57; p. 81. Referred to as Light. 11. Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poems, ed. Alan Riach and Michael Grieve (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 14–15. 12. Don Paterson, God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997), p. 51. Referred to as Gift. 13. Alan Gillis, ‘Don Paterson’, in Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 172–86 and 208–10 (p. 175). 14. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), p. 1. 15. From G. Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan, 1919) through many critical treatments influenced by this work, twentieth-century Scottish critics tend to emphasise repeatedly the propensity for fantasy, the supernatural or the bizarre which is seen sometimes as a ‘Celtic’ or a dissenting folk-culture quality in Scottish literature in the face of a more orthodoxly rational English literature.

7 On Spirituality and Transcendence Jo George

The call of one lone bird can make us cry – whatever sounds just once, then dies away. (Don Paterson, The Eyes)

I

n a BBC podcast on 18 September 2009, Don Paterson said of his poetical corpus that it was ‘One big book that you publish in instalments’.1 With each instalment, however, Paterson’s poetic voice and his thematic concerns have matured. For example, over the course of his twenty-year career, from Nil Nil to Rain, Paterson’s poetry has continually addressed issues of belief, from his own early loss of faith, to his increasing interest in Buddhism and his more recent fascination with antihumanist works such as John Gray’s Straw Dogs. This chapter will therefore address Paterson’s engagement with religion, spirituality and the transcendent and demonstrate that these are essential concerns in his work. If Paterson’s oeuvre is indeed one big book, then his first collection, Nil Nil (1993), is the initial chapter of that book. On first impression Paterson may not appear overly concerned with spiritual matters. As Vicki Bertram noted at the time of the volume’s publication: Like Ezra Pound, Paterson wants ‘no more poetry for ladies.’ His themes are determinedly blokeish: ‘drink, books, sleep, sex, trains, death, sport,’ as though his real concern is with proving the manliness of the genre and thus relieving his own anxieties about the effeminacy of his chosen profession.2 The term ‘blokeish’ often seems quite accurate in relation to Paterson’s early work. When asked how he came to be a poet, he once described an epiphany he had at the age of twenty-one: ‘[. . .] one night I was sitting watching TV in a rather revolting bedsit and I saw a programme which had Tony Harrison reading in a Leeds pub. It was amazing. Here were all these heavies in biker jackets greeting him over their pints.’3 Yet, as we will see, amongst the many poems about ‘drink, books, sleep, sex, trains, death [and] sport’, Paterson also finds space to address a range of spiritual and philosophical topics.

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    99 According to Colin Waters, Paterson’s take on religion c. 1993 is best described as ‘a Zen-Buddhist slant anchored to an [sic] self-punishing Calvinist inheritance (his grandfather was a United Free Church minister)’.4 The poet conjures a type of clerical grandfather in the opening lines of ‘Heredity’: Our great progenitor, still in his dog-collar, is the only innocent here, unabashed as he splays the tines on his Hitler moustache till it fits painlessly. When challenged, others declare a horse with no head, a clipper with webbed sails, a bearskinned sentry, fused to his post. A belated crack – the fangs of Dracula fall to the man they say I now resemble most.5 Paterson evokes two extremes of Scottish culture and two key tropes in the nation’s literature, Calvinism and the Gothic. As James Hogg’s The Private Life and Confessions of a Justified Sinner attests, the two are not mutually exclusive: the ‘dark, repressive force’ of Calvinism and the dark imagery of the Gothic have gone hand in hand in much Scottish fiction.6 Indeed, as Alan Bisset has noted, Scottish writers ‘have returned time and again to themes of disunity and schizophrenia’, as Paterson does here.7 His ‘progenitor’ may be an ‘innocent’, however there is also something of Jekyll-and-Hyde about him, and he is described in a distinctly threatening, near-Gothic manner, as the sinister references to Hitler and Dracula attest. One is tempted, despite the remarkably different backgrounds of their authors, to a comparison with Sylvia Plath’s famous poem about a vampiric father-figure. In the final two stanzas of ‘Daddy’, Plath writes: If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two – The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.8 Paterson’s poem bears clear resemblance to Plath’s in its imagery, although the language and modes of expression of his piece are quite different: his poem deploys a measured tone, and avoids the directly confessional, in spite of its personal subject matter. While Plath uses personal pronouns frequently, most notably an accusatory ­­ ‘you’, Paterson is noticeably sparing with them. There is only one ‘I’, and the

100  j o g e o r g e ­­ vampiric subject of the poem is referred to in the third person and by the suitably formal epithet ‘our great progenitor’. Another key difference between the two poets is biographical. Plath saw her father in no uncertain terms as a ‘bastard’; Paterson’s relationship with his grandfather was more positive. The poet portrays him as something of a role model in this piece from The Observer for 20 December 2009: I [Paterson] was a small, fat boy in a kilt [. . .] but I was still keen to impress. My opportunities were few and my models fewer, but I had Sunday school, and my grandfather. He was a minister in the United Free Church of Scotland. Standing up and telling everyone how to behave seemed like a grand job [. . .] So I taught myself to recite the names of all the books of the Bible. The old dears who read us boring stories in the windy North Halls found this trick devastatingly precocious and declared me a shoo-in for the ministry [. . .] I could see myself as the dog-collared focus of a vast, rapt stadium, where I’d rattle the books off so fast the big ladies would swoon at the miracle of it. Alas, this turned out to be much less impressive than I’d hoped, especially to women, though it took me several years to accept the fact. I should say that, blissfully, God figured nowhere in this, even as an afterthought.9 Paterson’s account pokes fun at his earlier aping of the grandfather’s precocious ministering, making his Observer readers laugh by detailing an over-earnest childhood ‘seriousness’ for what he paints as a ‘vast, rapt stadium’ of organised religion. At the same time, by transforming into comedy the child’s desire for prowess in the pulpit – and his zealous yearning to make audiences swoon by following his forebears – Paterson also indicates his adult discomfort with this earlier passion (even as he tries to avoid taking it too seriously). The account not only provides us with an insight into the religious zeal experienced by the poet during his youth, but also indicates the bearing this may have on his subsequent work. For example, in ‘Amnesia’ from Nil Nil, Paterson (renouncing religion for hard-core scientific materialism) recounts this earlier time of his life. The poem opens with its subject speaking in tongues and putting on a very convincing show: I was, as they later confirmed, a very sick boy. The star performer at the meeting-house, my eyes rolled back to show the whites, my arms outstretched in catatonic supplication while I gibbered impeccably in the gorgeous tongues of the aerial orders [. . .] (Nil 22) Here, young Paterson, ‘the star performer’, engages a comparable theatricality and self-fashioning. Self-lacerating humour plays around his account of training ‘with a stopwatch’ in order to be able to recite the books of the Bible as quickly as possible. Although the Bible is omnipresent in these extraordinary displays of religiosity, God, by the poet’s own admission, ‘figured nowhere in this, even as an afterthought’.

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    101 Indeed, as we shall see, God does not make many appearances in Paterson’s poems. More frequently than divine presence, it is the ‘gorgeous tongue [. . .]’ of the ­theological mode – and of the poet’s ‘impeccably’ delivered black comedy about the all-too-human ‘supplication’ to it – that his audience witnesses. ‘Amnesia’, evidently, is more than a wry portrait of the artist as a young ­evangelical. It also points out the perils of religious practice, which led to Paterson being ‘a very sick boy’. Indeed, the poet has publicly chastised the adults who failed to protect him from such a damaging experience. A Guardian interview with Nicholas Wroe in 2006 sees him denouncing, as he does not in the poems, the ‘responsible adults around who should not have been filling impressionable minds with that sort of bullshit’.10 It is this time of his life that the poet revisits in his forthcoming book Adventures in Clubland, where we are given a more detailed version of the events chronicled in ‘Amnesia’: Three years later. An early brush with a particularly demented brand of charismatic Christianity, followed by – a psychotic episode triggered by three-day out-of-body experience following some very bad hash landed me in hospital for four months. The trouble with depression is that the climb back is much harder than the descent: the descent is a breeze. It is also one of those few occasions where the directional metaphor is perfectly accurate, culturally unrevisable: in despair, gravity intensifies. The dreams are all of falling.11 The unambiguously personal nature of this passage marks a new departure in the poet’s work. Significantly, it is written in prose, a form that Paterson seems to find better suited to more directly autobiographical discourse. Paterson has long been an opponent of openly confessional poetry. One of his most explicit articulations of this opposition appears in ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, his 2004 T. S. Eliot Lecture. He argues that the ‘roles of the poet and reader have become blurred’ and populist poets have: made the fatal error of thinking that feeling and practice form a continuum. They infantilise our art [. . .] Poetry is a wonderfully therapeutic thing to do at amateur level; but amateur artists and musicians don’t think they should exhibit at the Tate, or play at the Wigmore. (Serious poets, I should say, don’t start off amateurs, but apprentices – just like any other vocation.) The result [. . .] has been many people feeling that armed with a beer-mat, a pencil, and a recent mildly traumatic experience they are entitled to send 100pp of their handwritten deathless into Faber or Cape. The myth is that these people are all lunatics. Many of them are well-adjusted, courteous and intelligent individuals; but writing poetry tends to bring out the worst in almost everyone.12 Is Paterson excluding himself when he says that ‘writing poetry tends to bring out the worst in almost everyone’? He is certainly making a distinction between himself and those he dubs ‘populist poets’, and he employs violent words, such as ‘armed’,

102  j o g e o r g e ‘traumatic’ and ‘lunatic’, in so doing. His concession that poetry can be a ‘wonderfully therapeutic’ amateur pastime is a way of making a clear distinction between himself and these ‘courteous’ poetic dabblers. Marking himself out as a serious, professional poet, Paterson insists that writing is a ‘vocation’, with a proper ‘apprenticeship’, in which the poet must painstakingly learn his craft. For the professional writer, it is not therapeutic. And yet personal subject matter and the semblance of autobiographical candour have appeared in Paterson’s poetry with increasing frankness over recent years. Following his Herald interview with the poet in 2009, Colin Waters writes: His [Paterson’s] publisher, Faber, is billing Rain as his ‘most direct’, as if his previous volumes had been written in some sort of Rwandan dialect. They’re onto something, though [. . .] I ask Paterson how he settles on a tone – in this case, a less playful, starker one – for a collection of poems.13 ‘There are things going on in your life that end up getting written about more than others,’ Waters quotes Paterson saying. ‘And there are times when there’s not much going on, so you make stuff up. Sometimes life comes along and provides you with subject matter, but whether that leads to you being more direct or not . . . I was more conscious that I was writing more directly, as I belatedly realised most people quite like that sort of thing.’ On the one hand, Paterson admits that he is giving audiences what they have come to expect from contemporary poetry (although this is also an example of the poet learning to develop his craft). The more self-revealing tone of Rain owes something to Robert Frost, a poet Paterson says he often returns to and is touched by, because of the ‘direct address’ that the American poet achieves. Back in 1997, however, when Paterson’s second volume of verse, God’s Gift to Women, was published, the poet’s pervasive tone was still relatively playful about its direction. Even the title is heavily laced with a self-deprecating irony that attempts to hold at arm’s length what Robert Crawford reminds us: that ‘God’s gift to women is pain’.14 On the other hand, some of the most influential texts in Catholicism are the writings of the Church Fathers. Paterson uses humour to bring these under attack in the second of two epigraphs to the collection. In this short passage, the poet provides us with a ‘summary of omitted chapters, Book 2, viii–xxiv’ from a mythical, abridged version of St Augustine’s City of God: Further precisions are given concerning the worship of divinities such as Janus, Pecunia, Bacchus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars and Apollo. Obscene rites in honour of the Great Mother are described in some detail. Attempts at a naturalistic revision of paganism are not successful. The gloom is lightened by an atrocious pun. Varro produced a theology full of learned errors.15 What Paterson produces is a precise (and funny) parody of Augustine’s explanation of the position of Christianity in relation to competing religions and philosophies. If Augustine’s mission was to refute, in the strongest terms, polytheistic worship,

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    103 Paterson’s epigraph reduces the saint’s grand project to a catalogue of the ‘Obscene rites in honour of the Great Mother’. Paterson puts on show his winsome irreverence toward the great Church Father – and by implication toward the verity of any writer, or, indeed, any god’s account keeping. At the core of this collection of poems – at least according to reviewers – there seems to be a Paterson who has never forgiven his God for walking out. To some extent, ‘Prologue’, the first poem in the volume, bears this out. It opens with the lines: A poem is a little church, remember, you, its congregation, I, its cantor; (Gift 1) The poet’s vision here is clearly ecumenical, as he blends a Christian image (‘church’) with a Jewish one (‘cantor’). The hybrid nature of this place of worship is returned to in the closing lines of the poem, where: My little church is neither high nor broad, so get your heads down. Let us pray. Oh God (Gift 2) Paterson is primarily talking about poetry, but his religious scepticism is apparent in his punctuation of the last two phrases. That full stop before ‘Oh God’, where we might more conventionally have expected a comma, establishes a tone of exasperation and mockery, weariness and despair, in relation to conventional prayer. Crawford raises the still more forceful possibility that ‘Oh God’ ‘is a collapse into nilness’ which returns the reader to the nothingness signified in the title of Paterson’s first volume, Nil Nil.16 The poet’s impatience with, and despair about, organised religion is comparably voiced in ‘The best days of your life?’, a 2005 interview for The Herald, in which Paterson declared that, given the chance, he would ‘ban all Scripture studies’, and added that ‘the planet’s craziest superstitions are not a fit subject for the young and impressionable’.17 God may have walked out on the poet long before the publication of God’s Gift to Women, but this does not mean that the poems are devoid of spirituality. ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’ (39) conducts an amusing play on the minimalist nature of Zen, which also echoes one of the most famous passages in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1757–67). There are also similarities with the expressively titled monochrome paintings of  Paul Bilhaud or Alphonse Allais, each of which presents the reader with the title and a blank page. Nicholas Wroe recollects a similar ‘live’ effect: Paterson would begin his public reading with this work, and a few moments uncomfortable silence would follow before he would announce that ‘the next poem has words’.18 As witty as this type of experimental (non) verse is, the poem is more than a mere exercise in the absurd and it takes on a greater significance when one takes into account Paterson’s own interest in Buddhist philosophy. Paterson’s ­­conceptual poet blends seriousness with humour as his blank page stages

104  j o g e o r g e unsuccessful quests for knowledge and enlightenment, and a poetic admission that he does not have answers for his readers, as he too is asking questions. Paterson’s blank space can also be seen as an example of the Zen concepts of ma and, perhaps even more significantly, mu. The poem in question appears about twothirds of the way through God’s Gift to Women and provides readers with an empty space which they contemplate and which allows them to reflect on what they have read thus far. This is not unlike the concept of ma, a kind of negative space, that offsets and lends meaning to the substance that surrounds it, like the blank white canvas that surrounds a traditional sumi ink painting. Paterson, who is a gifted musician, understands that music can only be appreciated in relationship to silence, and for him, the words in a poem, or in a book of poems, must be balanced by the absence of words. The blank page, then, also represents another type of void, which negates self and ego, and is an ultimate goal of Zen. The blank page is neither a witty, if meaningless, joke, nor a poignant statement on the failure to find answers. It hints that the answer itself is in the void. As the Zen Master Keido Fukushima (1933–2011) argues: When we look at a mountain, we tend to observe it as an object. But if we are mu, we no longer see the mountain as an object; we identify with it; we are the mountain itself. This transcendence of duality may sound like some psychic ability or spiritual power someone possesses. But that is not true. Rather, it is simply and naturally a case of being free, creative, and fresh. We become human beings full of boundless love and compassion.19 In keeping with Fukushima’s explanation, Paterson does not describe the mountain as an object; rather he has moved beyond material descriptions to a higher plane. Being one with a mountain means not needing to describe or depict it. Paterson’s own interest in Buddhism stems from its ability to ‘coincide beautifully with a certain sort of scepticism if you are of that turn of mind [. . .] Because it involves no belief. But it hasn’t found its proper articulation in the west. It will take many hundreds of years.’20 When Paterson states that Buddhism ‘involves no belief’, he is referring to the common misapprehension that it is a religious system of belief that should be set alongside Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Rather, Paterson correctly sees it as an ‘existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism’, but one with an ethical framework built on the experiencing of compassion.21 Accordingly, a range of poems in God’s Gift to Women provide us with memorably compassionate speakers. Here, for example, is the one in ‘The Lover’ (after Propertius): Poor mortals, with your horoscopes and blood-tests – what hope is there for you? Even if the plane lands you safely, why should you not return to your homes in flames or ruins, your wife absconded, the children blind and dying in their cots? Even sitting quiet in a locked room the perils are infinite and unforeseeable. (Gift 36)

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    105 In this passage, life is unpredictable and dangerous, and disaster inevitable. Paterson’s emphasis on suffering and transience may suggest a calm redeployment of aspects of Buddhist thought; a patient realism in the face of disaster. It also, however, feeds into the hands of those who would accuse his work of a self-protective pessimism and fatalism. When Paterson returns to the vanity of all earthly things in ‘Little Corona’, the speaker bursts ‘into tears’ at ‘the sudden, immaculate, irrevocable disappearance of both the singer and the song’, which is to him ‘a terrifying thing’ (Gift 40). The outburst suggests Paterson is not an unwavering champion of the tranquil fatalism often associated with Buddhism. There is also room in his work for tears of sadness and rage. Indeed, Paterson’s agnostic worldview allows him to gather seemingly contradictory facets of spiritual and philosophical traditions together without judgement or an insistent urge for unification. In ‘The Alexandrian Library’, one of the poet’s notable early preoccupations, the classical organisation of texts becomes a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life, meaning and human understanding. Paterson initially explores this subject in Nil Nil, where what is eventually to become Part I of ‘The Alexandrian Library’ appears (25–33). In its day, this Great Library contained the largest depository of wisdom that the world had seen, but in 48 bc the Library was, as Plutarch relates, accidentally burnt to the ground by Caesar. An allusion to the catastrophic event ghosts the fictional François Aussemain quotation that prefaces ‘The Alexandrian Library Part II: The Return of the Book’: ‘Of course I have done nothing more than return the world to the world again, which is the same as rendering it to God, or whatever deranged Caesar happens to be holding the reins today . . .’ (Gift 42). Is the inclusion of these historical red-herrings one of gently resigned levity about slippages of certainty? Or a desperate use of humour to fill the void produced by lost certainty and order? Paterson’s first Alexandrian Library poem is also prefaced by a quotation from the fictitious Aussemain, from the equally fictitious Pensées: Nothing is ever lost; things only become irretrievable. What is lost, then, is the method of their retrieval, and what we rediscover is not the thing itself, but the overgrown path, the secret staircase, the ancient sewer. (Nil 25) Paterson’s response to transience in his first collection is decidedly more optimistic than it is four years later in God’s Gift to Women. In the earlier version he seems to offer a revised definition of reincarnation: ‘Nothing is ever lost’. Things transmute or lead us down another, related path. Perhaps, then, as in Waters’ account, Paterson’s poetry becomes ‘starker, less playful’ from one volume to the next. This certainly appears to be the case in ‘Siesta’ (after Antonio Machado), which is the final poem in God’s Gift to Women. It is perhaps the most explicit rejection of the belief in God that Paterson has yet written. I quote it here in full: Now that, halfway home, the fire-fish swims between the cypress and that highest blue into which the blind boy lately flew

106  j o g e o r g e in his white stone, and with the ivory poem of the cicada ringing hollow in the elm, let us praise the Lord – the black print of his good hand! – who has declared this silence in the pandemonium. To the God of absence and of aftermath, of the anchor in the sea, the brimming sea . . . whose truant omnipresence sets us free from this world, and firmly on the one true path, with our cup of shadows overflowing, with our hearts uplifted, heavy and half-starved, let us honour Him who made the Void, and carved these few words from the thin air of our faith. (Gift 56) This poem, with its invocation ‘To the God of absence’ whose ‘omnipresence’ is ‘truant’ at best, merits the subtitle ‘The Atheist’s Manifesto’. But if He is in addition the maker of ‘the Void’, the poem begs a question: if He does not exist, how did He create this nothingness? This nothingness, this nullified space, brings us back to the territory of Nil Nil. That absence is again at the heart of ‘Siesta’, and it appears to make itself felt here with less playfulness. Yet the poem is not uniformly despairing. The tone of ‘let us praise the Lord’ echoes the ‘Oh God’ of ‘Prologue’. Both are sarcastic, mocking and darkly humorous. Once the speaker has acknowledged God’s absence, he is ‘free’ not only ‘from this world’ – a freedom with intimations of Buddhist thought – but also from all of the other constraints placed on humankind when a deity is worshipped and religious belief remains unquestioned. However, Paterson’s use of ‘pandemonium’ continues, troublingly, to beg consideration, in so far as it implicitly evokes Milton’s employment of the term in Paradise Lost. In Book I, Pandæmonium is described as the capital of Hell: Mean while the winged Haralds by command Of Sovran power, with awful Ceremony And Trumpets sound throughout the Host proclaim A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers: (ll. 752–7) Paterson uses the term to mean ‘chaos, tumult’, the opposite of silence: he summons images of Hell as a place of cacophony and incessant noise. (Dante’s Inferno is also such a place.) Yet, through literary history, silence, like the celestial music of the spheres, has been associated with Heaven as a place of peace and rest. In establishing opposition between ‘silence’ and ‘pandemonium’, Paterson’s atheist’s manifesto reinforces his poetic forebears’ implementations of Christian ideas about the afterlife.

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    107 During the six years between the publication of God’s Gift to Women and Landing Light,22 Paterson became the father of twin boys. His sons appear in the later poems directly as Jamie and Russell. ‘[P]arenthood teaches you more about the suppression of the ego than twenty years in an ashram,’ he writes, quoting the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.23 The suppression of ego introduced by the Hindu ‘ashram’, not unlike the mu of Buddhist thought, indicates a striving across Paterson’s life and work – that draws on different spiritual and moral philosophical traditions – for a less egocentric, more universal voice. This does not involve a renunciation of the personal. On the contrary, Landing Light contains poems explicitly about the poet’s sons (‘Waking with Russell’ and ‘The Thread’), as well as verses devoted to mythological and literary-historical twins, through which the personal becomes a gateway to an encounter with the universal (Light 5; 6; 18). ‘I certainly didn’t mean to write about the twins at all,’ Paterson remarks. ‘I was genuinely shocked to find a book littered with them, with Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus, with doubles and reflections watermarking every second page.’24 This shift gives form – and watermarking imprint – to Paterson’s pages, and, as the title of this volume suggests, new capacities for hope and shared contact: a light on the landing illuminates the darkness for the sleeping child (or adult), and a landing light provides guiding, orienting brightness. The optimism of many of this volume’s poems, especially in Paterson’s meditations on his sons, however, also guards against sentimentality. Works like ‘The Thread’ remain similar to the concerns of Paterson’s earlier collections, in their attention to the consolations and shortcomings of the spiritual quest and of divine orientation. In writing of his son Jamie’s difficult birth, Paterson confides that: All that trouble just to turn up dead was all I thought that long week. [. . .] (Light 6) Two years on from ‘that long week’, he gives thanks to ‘what higher will / brought us to here, to you and me and Russ’ (6). Yet that gratitude is directed toward an inscrutable force, rather than the Christian God. Moreover, even in the act of thanks, the lines emphasise the ‘here’ and now – and ‘you and me and Russ’ – rather than the ‘higher will’ (an abstract ‘what’). Landing Light retains a sceptical attitude toward its own implementations of the guiding power of religious faiths and practices. Comparably, ‘The Forest of Suicides’ investigates the interlacing of mythological, poetic and theological orientations and journeyings across historical time (9). Paterson’s subtitle, which refers us back to Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, is juxtaposed with his epigraph, which is from Sylvia Plath and gestures toward her refusal of solace in ‘Winter Trees’: ‘Who are these pietàs?  / The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.’25 In Paterson’s forest, the unnamed speaker and his guide enter the seventh circle, second ring of hell. ‘This place is almost too strange to believe’, with its bleeding and talking trees which house the spirits of the damned (Light 9). Urged on by his guide, the speaker enters into conversation with one of these ‘imprisoned soul[s]’ and is told of the pain and suffering it was ‘bundle[d]’ and ‘directe[d]’ toward by ‘some inverse power’ at the moment of bodily death:

108  j o g e o r g e The very instant that the furious soul tears itself from the flesh, some inverse power bundles it screaming down the sudden hole that opens in the bed or bath or floor; then Minos directs it to the seventh pit where it spins down to this starless nursery to seed wherever fortune tosses it. There it roots, and drives up through the clay to grow into the shape of its own anguish. (Light 13) Such punishment is externally imposed, but it is also self-directed (through the soul’s fury, and subsequent growth into ‘its own’ anguished shapes). Paterson does not shy from acknowledging both the pain of the self-inflicted anguish and the fact that it is perpetual: the souls of the suicides are not allowed to rejoin their bodies at the Last Judgement: ‘[. . .] And like you, at the final clarion, we’ll return to fish our bodies from the ground, but never again to wear them: such is the sin of our ingratitude. Instead, we’ll drag them down to this dark street; and here they’ll stay, strung out forever in their miserable parade – naked and still, each hung like a white coat on the hook of its own alienated shade.’ (Light 14) It is at least in part through registering the extremity and incessancy of this ‘miserable parade’ that Paterson inspires sympathy even for the half-self-imposed condition of imprisonment and alienation. That compassion is explicit in the delicacy with which his Virgil-figure addresses the ‘imprisoned soul’: ‘[. . .] – if you could bear to – say just how the spirit comes to be so caught in these terrible spasms, and if perhaps one day it might be wrested from its own knots.’ (Light 13) One might read such gentleness of tone (‘if you could bear’, ‘might be’) as an implicit rejection of the retributive rhetoric of the Old Testament God who sits in judgement over humankind. It is a compassion in accord with the mood of Paterson’s volume as a whole. Sue Hubbard writes of Landing Light: There was a raw passion that poked through the tightly packed surface of language, restrained to be sure, but of a spiritual depth and a lyric intensity I had not experienced before in his work [. . .] His poetry became known for

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    109 being clever, hard, hip and gutsy. But now, it seems, he has added a whole new dimension that lifts his writing from the realms of mere technical adroitness and wit into those of a fierce compassion and empathy.26 Many of these concerns – especially Paterson’s attention to the combination of raw passion and spiritual compassion, lyric intensity and ‘clever’ technical adroitness – can be found again in the subsequent collection of poems, Rain. It is evident, for example, in the poems about his twin sons: ‘Why Do You Stay Up So Late?’ and ‘The Swing’.27 But this formal and emotional control can also be seen in the volume’s more abstract or philosophical examinations of existential loneliness. In ‘The Day’, for example, the poet imagines, as if it were a thought-experiment, two beings ‘– say hairless, tall and dark, / but still as like ourselves as makes no odds’ from another planet trapped in the same feelings of isolation and despair that perpetually dog the human inhabitants of Earth (Rain 40). The poem begins by announcing that life has no meaning and humankind is nothing special: Life is no miracle. Its sparks flare up invisibly across the night. The heart kicks off again where any rock can cup some heat and wet and hold it to its star. We are not chosen, just too far apart to know ourselves the commonplace we are, (Rain 40) This opening also seems to be a rejection of some of the optimism seen in Landing Light, where meaning was found in the fathering of the next generation. Part of this shift in thinking may have to do with Paterson’s reaction to contemporary antihumanist thought, as seen, for instance, in John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002). ‘I have tried to present a view of things in which humans are not central,’28 writes Gray in that book: Darwin showed that humans are like other animals, humanists claim they are not. Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this, they renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises – that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith. (3–4) Paterson’s reaction to Gray’s philosophy was a dramatic one: ‘I was semi-­ traumatised [. . .] by John Gray’s Straw Dogs, as I think many were – and found a lot of it hard to refute, hard as I tried.’29 In ‘The Day’, Gray’s influence is not hard to spot, with its initial declarations that ‘Life is no miracle’ and people are nothing more than ‘commonplace’ (Rain 40). The economist-philosopher’s imprint is also seen in the following stanzas, where almost all human consolations are exposed as fraudulent:

110  j o g e o r g e ‘[. . .] We talk, make love, we sleep in the same bed – but no matter what we do, you can’t be me. We only dream this place up in one head.’ ‘Thanks for that . . . You’re saying that because the bed’s a light-year wide, or might as well be, I’m even lonelier than I thought I was?’ ‘No . . . just that it’s why we have this crap of souls and gods, and ghosts and afterlives. Not to . . . bridge eternity. Just the gap’ – she measures it – ‘from here to here.’ ‘Tough call. Death or voodoo. Some alternatives.’ ‘There’s one more. That you trust me with it all.’ (Rain 41) In the face of such stark absence, and seeming lack of hope, however, one consolation potentially remains and is offered in the line ‘That you trust me with it all’. However insignificant and ‘commonplace’ human beings may be, we still have the free will to find consolation in one another. This is made explicit in the final stanza of the poem, where one of Paterson’s aliens says in wonderment to the other: ‘even in this nothingness I found you; / I was lucky in the timing of my birth’ (Rain 42). Nothing, of course, is permanent, and the poet also, as a result, explores the nature of transience, loss and death throughout the course of Rain. This has led I. E. Sawmill to write of the collection that: Rain is often horrified and devastated in tone. One of the longest (and best) poems is ‘Phantom’, in memoriam of Monaghy [sic], whilst the shortest (indeed, a blank page) ‘Unfold’ is also i.m. The latter is less a poem, more a performance of how grief and elegy can only be addressed in silence.30 Paterson does, however, break the silence of his grief in ‘Phantom’, an elegy for his close friend, fellow writer and musician Michael Donaghy, who died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in September 2004 (Rain is also dedicated to Donaghy). The penultimate piece of the collection, ‘Phantom’ is divided into seven parts, and section six is a dream-vision largely given over to a monologue: in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet. It had lost his lightness and his gentleness and took on that plain cadence he would use when he read out from the Iliad or the Táin. (Rain 56) This Donaghy, however, has taken on a different form; indeed, in one of the many instances of the dead speaking in a Paterson poem, he appears in the guise of the ‘I-Am-That-I-Am-Not’ to the poet one night as he ‘was lying in meditation’ (56). This spectre (akin to those Dante meets in The Divine Comedy) is not a figure of hope, however, for his message is that ‘matter’

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    111 [. . .] made an eye to look at its fine home, but there, within its home, it saw its death; and so it made a self to look at death, but then within the self it saw its death; and so it made a soul to look at self, but then within the soul it saw its death; and so it made a god to look at soul, and god could not see death within the soul for god was death. In making death its god the eye had lost its home in finding it. We find this everywhere the eye appears. Were there design, this would have been the flaw. (Rain 57) In terms of a philosophy of life, we are in familiar Paterson territory. The evolutionary process described, from self to soul to god with everything leading back to death, is one which shatters any illusions we might have as to life’s meaning. The poet twists the knife in the final line, with its emphasis firmly on the first word: ‘Were there design, this would have been the flaw.’ Though this sentiment is bleak, it is also articulated with ironic, black humour. ‘Rain’, the final piece in this volume of the same name, is a lyrical and moving homage to wet weather on the big screen (60–1). It begins with the poet declaring his feelings: ‘I love all films that start with rain’, and then proceeding to explain just why this is the case. His list of evocative examples is used to support the conclusion that ‘However bad or overlong / such a film can do no wrong’. And yet, there is a far greater moral than this here, for the poet’s final vision extends well beyond the movie screen. This becomes clear when he gazes upon ‘the neon of a drugstore sign’ and ‘read[s] into its blazing line’: forget the ink, the milk, the blood – all was washed clean with the flood we rose up from the falling waters the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters (Rain 61) In this passage, Paterson skilfully mixes Judaeo-Christian and Darwinian imagery. The redemptive Flood of the Old Testament, with its intimations of the waters of Baptism, is seen simultaneously as the ‘primordial ooze’ that gave birth to the human race. Is the poet finally admitting that there is, after all, some type of grand design created through either a god or evolution? Not quite, for the poem ends with the declaration that ‘and none of this, none of this matters’ (61). Nil nil, in other words. As always, the complex intermingling of imagery, be it Christian, Buddhist, Darwinian or humanist, that Paterson draws on is not easy to reconcile. Similarly, the bleak message of the final lines of a poem like ‘Rain’ are offset with a more hopeful outlook elsewhere. Yet Paterson is not confused or uncertain in his technique. The varied imagery and shifting tone of these spiritually minded poems reveal

112  j o g e o r g e both a rigorous scepticism and an enquiring mind in matters of faith. One might argue that it is his refusal to offer easy answers or glib reconciliations between belief systems that distinguishes his work. To read Paterson’s output as ‘one big book’, as he suggests, would be to witness certain aspects of his work (such as the blokeishness that is so readily apparent in Nil Nil and God’s Gift to Women) slowly giving way to more mature concerns. At the same time, there is a remarkable consistency across his work in matters of spirituality, transcendence and faith. Indeed, regardless of his growing confidence and refinement of technique, one finds the same scepticism, and the same need to ask fundamental, and ultimately unanswerable, questions about life, death and the divine. As he writes in ‘Nothing’ from The Eyes: So is this magic place to die with us? I mean that world where memory still holds the breath of your early life: the white shadow of first love, that voice that rose and fell with our own heart, the hand you’d dream of closing in your own . . . all those beloved burning things that dawned on us, lit up the inner sky? Is this whole world to vanish when we die, this life that we made new in our own fashion? Have the crucibles and anvils of the soul been working for the dust and for the wind?31

No tes  1. Don Paterson, The Verb, radio interview, BBC Radio 3, 18 September 2009.  2. Vicki Bertram, Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Women and Men Poets (London: Pandora Press, 2009), p. 188.  3. Catherine Lockerbie, ‘Rhythms which guarantee life’, The Scotsman, 20 November 1993, p. 15.  4. Colin Waters, ‘Don Paterson lingers in the rain’, The Herald, 31 August 2009. Available at (last accessed 11 December 2013).  5. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), p. 24. Referred to as Nil.  6. Donald Mcleod, ‘Scottish Calvinism: A Dark, Repressive Force?’, The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 19:2 (Autumn 2001): 195–205 (195).  7. Alan Bissett, ‘The Dead Can Sing: An Introduction’, in Alan Bissett (ed.), Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001), p. 2.  8. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1981), p. 222.  9. Don Paterson, ‘My other life’, The Observer, 20 December 2009, p. 24. 10. Nicholas Wroe, ‘Leading light’, The Guardian, 25 November 2006. Available at (last accessed 4 November 2013). Referred to as ‘LL interview’.

o n spiritu ality a n d transce nde nce    113 11. Don Paterson, ‘Adventures in Clubland’, available at (last accessed 15 August 2013). 12. Don Paterson, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Southbank Centre T. S. Eliot Lecture, 30 October 2004. Available at (last accessed 11 December 2013). 13. Waters, ‘Don Paterson lingers in the rain’. 14. Robert Crawford, ‘Deep Down in the Trash’, London Review of Books 19:16 (21 August 1997): 26. 15. Don Paterson, God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997), p. ix. Referred to as Gift. 16. Crawford, ‘Deep Down in the Trash’, p. 26. 17. ‘The best days of your life?’, The Herald, 18 January 2005, p. 15. Available at (last accessed 11 December 2013). 18. ‘LL interview’. 19. ‘The Zen Teaching of Mu’, Kateigaho: Japan’s Arts and Culture Magazine, Winter 2004. Available at (last accessed 13 January 2014). 20. ‘LL interview’. 21. Stephen Bachelor, Buddhism without Beliefs (London: Putnam and Sons, 1997), p. 15. 22. Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003). Referred to as Light. 23. Don Paterson, ‘Forgive the tone of heavy rumination’, Don Paterson official website 2013, (last accessed 11 December 2013). 24. Ibid. 25. Plath, Collected Poems, p. 257. 26. Sue Hubbard, ‘On Becoming a Fan’, 2011, available at (last accessed 15 August 2013). 27. Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), p. 9; p. 6. 28. John Gray, Straw Dogs (London: Granta, 2002), p. 3. 29. Don Paterson, email to author, 3 February 2013. 30. I. E. Sawmill, ‘Rain by Don Paterson’, The Literateur, 26 November 2009. Available at (last accessed 15 August 2013). 31. Don Paterson, The Eyes (London: Faber, 1999), p. 20.

8 Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing Natalie Pollard I

I

n Part II of ‘The Alexandrian Library’, Don Paterson casts his speaker as a passive photographic subject. The poet-figure not only emerges in ‘a caption of light’ but is captioned and captured by it: The lens flies back, offering a view of yourself from above [. . .], stiff in a caption of light, the last in a series of bright rooms, some empty, some spartanly furnished [. . .] like an unfinished strip-cartoon of which you are clearly the punchline;1

Leading the gaze to the startling appropriations of a camera, to its uninvited flash and lens, these lines associate the photographic shot with dangerous over-illumination. Paterson imagines a device homing in on and focusing the lyric subject against its will: ‘like an unfinished strip-cartoon / of which you are clearly the punchline’ (Gift 48). If we laugh at the paranoid slapstick, we are also not to take our eye off the effects of ‘unfinished’ and overexposed. However, it is not just the flash of the camera, but also the power of the poem’s own imagining that pins the speaker down into a visual and linguistic joke. Held fast as that captive of brightness, as a ‘strip-cartoon’, he portrays himself as nakedly vulnerable with photographic bulbs going off. He fears taking shape through the lenses of others, where he will be pored over, set down (and set up) like a page of print: forced permanently to take uncertain form. Paterson’s poet imagines that being snapped by the camera and letterpressed into posterity is a way of entering into print that involves violent exposure and fixity: work and person will be dazzled into self-revelation before their time. The perspective provided is ‘a view / of yourself from above’, preserved in the infancy of composition – developing before, rather than through, your own gaze. It is an excess of illumination that blinds. Rather than guiding, light is depicted as aggressively obscuring his view.

h id ing in f ul l vie w   115 ‘[T]he light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world,’ writes Roland Barthes.2 For Barthes, photography’s dependence on light and time gestures to its reliance on their absence: darkness and loss. In Camera Lucida, his accounts of photography emphasise the moment of capture – a flash in the ­darkness – that underlines death and transience.3 The subject is frozen into place in its disappearance. His sense of the violence of stilled time, and of a darkness and deathliness that ushers in revelation, has frequently appeared in contemporary accounts of photographic form: ‘every photograph presents death, every photograph reveals “He is dead and he is going to die” ’.4 The titles of Paterson’s books articulate his long-standing fascination with the risks of seeing and being seen: The Blind Eye, The Eyes, The Book of Shadows, Landing Light, Hiding in Full View. These works explore not only the uses and abuses of the illuminated gaze, but the advantages of restricted vision, shadow, blurring, disguise and concealment. They also enact ontological fears about visual capture, performed before the poet’s avid audience. One is not allowed to forget that Paterson’s staging of the perils of spectatorship and self-revelation assumes and requires an audience, nor that his lyric dance between concealment from and courtship of others forms a set of carefully choreographed visual and spatial moves. The poet, it seems, experiences an enabling fear in these imagined scenarios of exposure and camouflage. Rather than impeding the lyric work, photographic capture, tricks of light, and fears about poetic exposure inspire and provide structuring formal and semantic principles for it. What I want to do first is look in some detail at a rarely analysed book of Paterson’s, in which photography’s ability to conceal, and play tricks with the viewer’s gaze – neither to ‘reveal’ nor to expose – is taken up as a source of inspiration for the poetry. The book, Hiding in Full View, is the product of collaboration between the poet and the artist Alison Watt.5 Paterson had been invited to accompany Watt’s paintings with a set of fourteen single-line poems, which were painted onto the walls of the Ingleby Gallery at her exhibition in Edinburgh. The show ran from late 2011 to early 2012 and was also entitled Hiding in Full View. Throughout his career, Paterson’s poems have often taken shape around a paradoxical desire to be caught out and revealed in their disguises, an urge that arises with particular complexity in Hiding in Full View. Even the title suggests an art formed around a longing to be the subject of viewing, despite knowledge of the risks associated with the fulfilment of that wish. Painter and poet exhibit uneasiness about artistic ‘revelation’ and performative acts of self-representation. They are simultaneously aware that this play on being caught and fixed by others’ gazes has inspired and helped shape aesthetic understandings. The publication, in which each of Paterson’s lines is printed in alternation with images of Watt’s monumental canvases, reproduces, to some extent, the effect of the hemistich as they appeared against the background of white space painted on the walls of the gallery. Shifting the ground between text and image, the book, like the exhibition, moves the gaze between different acts of gazing: between looking at, looking for, and looking at the self looking.6 Watt’s extreme close-up perspective in Figure 1 does not disclose its subject. We could be looking at loops and folds of inanimate material (fabric, canvas, paper), or

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Figure 1  Alison Watt, Fount, 2011, oil on canvas, 61.9 × 121.9 cm. Private collection, Edinburgh. Photograph by John McKenzie; image courtesy of the artist/Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

at folds of intimately registered human flesh. Gesturing toward the body, her work teases its audience with the idea that this might be an elusive form of self-­portraiture. It is a flirtation with intimate showcasing that continues through the volume. Watt’s and Paterson’s pieces appear in alternation; each hinting at obscured matter; each inciting the desire to peer closer – to gain a fuller view. Under such scrutiny the subject remains abstract, indeterminate. These are teasing performances that leave unsatisfied the anticipations of revelation at which they hint. Comparably, Paterson’s poems display and conceal the ‘I’ that appears in the public eye. An example is his piece ‘Behind the Mirror’, which follows Fount in the book: Behind the mirror. Just the place to hide.   I didn’t breathe. They looked so long   I died. The poet-figure confides his place of refuge (‘Behind the mirror’) to a ‘you’ that is intimately addressed, as if a confessional aside. But the impression of veracity is created by letting the initiate know that the speaker remains hidden from another group of searchers: a baffled ‘They’ toward whom ‘I’ is aloof.7 That matter-of-fact, Larkinesque frankness of tone – this is ‘Just the place’ for your encounter with the speaker – suggests confidences are being shared. But this is a ruse. Paterson’s speaker is elusively shape-shifting, elusive, and his straight-talking is in-your-face enigmatic. Throughout Nil Nil and God’s Gift to Women, the poet-figure hides from full view in his various guises as the boy next door, the Scots lad, the tell-it-to-you-straight pub-goer – with his eye as much on Dante, Virgil and Piranesi (and contemporaries such as Heaney and Donaghy) as on the knowing, neo-realist directness of, say, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn or Tom Leonard. Paterson’s collaborative book offers a succession of different shots of the chame-

h id ing in f ul l vie w   117 leon poet-figure hiding in our purview. This ‘I’ is neither entirely with us, nor being entirely itself: The lens is no one looking. Sure, no doubt;   but yesterday I stared the bastard  out. Paterson’s verbatim adoption of an unacknowledged another’s phrases (in italics) is juxtaposed with forms of resistant answering, seemingly the response of a single poet-figure in the first-person. Against this authoritative voice, his poem delivers a succession of ironic anti-affirmatives: ‘Sure’ gives the appearance of casual, easy agreement, and at the same time sounds studiedly nonchalant, rolling its eyes at being asked to confirm the obvious. Similarly, the negatively assenting ‘no doubt’ deftly articulates doubt, and a further touch of impatience. Over the ellipsis, the line delivers a direct contradictory ‘but’. Paterson’s poem establishes an answer-response structure between the italicised voice of a persuasive authority-figure and a stubbornly resistant poet-figure – but it is one in which the latter engages dissent not only against the former, but also against itself. A fluent self-contradictor, the speaker barely draws breath between his inconsistencies: ‘yes, naturally I agree . . . but no, of course I don’t’. This oscillation between a self that knows its mind and one which doesn’t seem to realise it is changing it parodies the authority which the notion of an unmanipulated, true lyric ‘I’ might still be thought to possess. If this is a nod to authorial multiplicity, it is also Paterson’s way of hiding amongst the numerous recognisable personas his work tries out. Such self-presentation promises disclosure but conducts ongoing variance and staging. The very multiplicity of snapshots offered up by the self strategically camouflages and conceals it.8 Paterson’s and Watt’s volume is both fascinated by and suspicious of selfportraiture’s obscure clarity. Their self-ironising games with hiding, seeking and over-illumination is informed by the work of the late twentieth-century American photographer Francesca Woodman, to whom Hiding in Full View is a tribute. Paterson’s poems and Watt’s paintings reconsider Woodman’s ‘use of the object in her self-portraits, and how the two elements of self and object often merge’, as Watt writes. In Woodman, the merging of the self with object and other – mirror, stone, glass, paper, building materials, dead animals – plays on the convention of the photographed subject, which, when brought out of hiding into the light, is rendered fixed and dead. Her work lends intense activity and self-awareness to material we might expect to be pinned down, flatly captured on photographic paper. Posing with skull, fox furs and viewable cases, Woodman contrasts the deathly stillness of the photographed subject and displayed prey. Her images draw on the familiar correlation between the violence of the camera – which Barthes had argued freezes one in death-like poses (like Paterson’s flash in the earlier poem) – and the view that self-portraiture is brutal self-capture, akin to taxidermic exhibition. Juxtaposing live subject with dead animal exhibit, Figure 2 shows Woodman reflected in the surface of a glass table with the fox fur, whilst she holds up an arrangement of clear glass sheets that closely resemble the pattern of mirrors inside

118  n a t a l ie po lla rd

Figure 2  Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8. © The Estate of Francesca Woodman. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

a camera. This counterpointing of death with life, mirror with window, and fixing record with onlooker’s vantage point might be read as a cry against the predatory lens and flash, and their violent appropriation of a subject who is reduced to passivity. But the photographic self-portrait shows the artist knowingly capturing herself in and as the camera’s apparatus. Gerry Badger, who writes of Woodman’s ‘act of “hunting” an image, and “capturing” it, locking up [. . .] time and space’, helpfully articulates one dominant interpretation of this metaphotographic ploy: ‘she insinuated herself into this space that is a cage, a space of confinement [. . .] she – her own prey’. Woodman’s presentation of her subject is, however, also vigorously palpable – it doesn’t feel flat, confined, fixed or dead. That is in part because (unlike the fur) the subject is both animated and performing flesh. It is also because the image shows her in an active state: it is the subject of the gaze who wryly sets up the complex photographic apparatus for exhibiting herself in a way that also hides something from

h id ing in f ul l vie w   119

Figure 3  Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–6. © The Estate of Francesca Woodman. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.Woodman. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

us, and who in so doing directs our gaze. In so doing, her piece explores how far an artist might, through controlled acts of self-representation, evade capture and confinement; partly by making it necessary for the viewer to look ‘through’ her strategic arrangement of the sequence of panes, to the woman; and partly by reinvesting the ‘cage’ and ‘hunt’ with the savage vigour of the self-consciously posing, performing human. When Paterson writes of being subjected to a look that ‘shut[s] down’ and fixes things and persons, he again summons the notion of the viewer’s violent gaze, with which ‘the full view’ and direct ‘disclosure’ are often associated. In Paterson’s forthcoming poetry collection (Faber, predicted 2015), the sequence of fourteen poems distributed throughout Hiding in Full View is to be revised and compacted as a single sonnet. I haven’t seen that version. But we can gather the unrevised poems onto one page now, and see a hidden sonnet peering out:

120  n a t a l ie po lla rd At the spiral’s heart, there is a hollow sun  by which we are constructed and undone Thirteen. Hairhead. World’s eye on a string.  Guess which way I’m looking! Wrong – wrong – wrong – A secret game. You’d quit there at the start  if you’d only known what you were playing at. What we show when we disclose, undress  is both the promise and its emptiness Beyond my hourly frame, a three-voiced song:  torque; tension; gravity; thus am I hung All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so.  Ghosts know this. That’s really all they know. We are not symbol but synecdoche  a second cut off from the greater day The lens is no one looking. Sure, no doubt;  but yesterday I stared the bastard out. We don’t exist; we only dream we’re here.  This means we never die. We disappear. We’d met lifetimes ago, he was convinced.  Yes, I thought, and haven’t spoken since. Behind the mirror. Just the place to hide.  I didn’t breathe. They looked so long I died. We blur ourselves to almost nothing, less  by moving than the eye’s own fixedness To catch your own ghost on film, here’s the primer:  locked room; open shutter; broken self-timer I threw a rock into the well of me  and waited short of an eternity The poet-figure who hides his form within view is also ontologically diffident. Fearing the reader-spectator’s appropriative wishes for complete self-‘disclosure’, he seeks a ‘place to hide’, rehearsing concerns that certain kinds of looking distortingly ‘catch’ and fix poetic persons. At the same time, he is aware of the impossibility of being trapped in this way, hence his talk of blurring, emptiness, not-existing and disappearing. His lines know, but also need to keep reminding themselves, that the ‘full’ view of a human subject is unachievable.9 He cannot be killed off by penetrating gazes, as he likes to remind us: ‘Wrong – wrong – wrong –’, ‘quit there’, ‘we blur ourselves’. But his very need to keep emphasising this through attention to the aesthetic devices (frame, symbol, synecdoche, lens, mirror, shutter) which interpose between I and others suggests his difficulty in reassuring himself. It is especially Paterson’s firmest, matter-of-fact language that sounds truculently self-defensive – ‘Sure’, ‘no doubt’ – making it difficult to assess how high he feels the stakes really are (and how seriously, at different moments, he will take them) for being ‘caught’, and lured out of hiding. ‘[I]t is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found,’ wrote Winnicott in 1963.10 His clinical essay, ‘Communicating and Not Communicating’, details a ‘sophisticated game of hide-and-seek’ played by his young patient: she had a book in which ‘she collected poems and sayings and she wrote in it “My private book”. [. . .] the mother must have read her book. It would have been all right if the mother had

h id ing in f ul l vie w   121 read the book but had said nothing’ (186). This act of hiding in full view raises the question, for Jung, of how ‘to be isolated without having to be insulated’ (186–7). Drawing an analogy between the self as it emerges in withdrawal from others, and the production of writing that is ostensibly not-to-be-seen, the analyst finds himself called to recognise ‘there is something we must allow for in our work, [. . .] non-communicating as a positive contribution’ (188). Distinguishing these acts of ‘non-communicating’ from failed communication – and also from the absolute alternatives of tell-all, or tell-nothing – Winnicott advocates that the analyst or parent must recognise the child’s or patient’s need to resist full disclosure (or full concealment). Hide-and-seek draws on the pleasure the infant has in appearing and reappearing before others, and the existential drama of being lost and found. The hidden child is especially delighted when the adult wonders out loud where she is; a moment in which she remains both unseen and acutely aware that another is on the lookout. (But consider how the game ends in ‘disaster’ if the infant is not found, and needs to announce its hiding-place.)11 In Paterson, we encounter poetic participants whose optical games – ‘hide-andseek’, ‘guess which way’, ‘eye on a string’, ‘what you were playing at’ – test out a range of disasters that occur when the pleasures of being lost and found with others are disappointed. In openly declaring themselves self-concealing, Paterson’s speakers, like Winnicott’s patient, establish ‘a private self that is not communicating, and at the same time wanting to communicate and to be found’. Paterson’s lines bet both ways. In his yearning to be discovered, the poet-figure exposes himself to ontological and corporeal danger: Hiding in Full View suggests that the consequence of capture is death (not just mockery, as it was in the earlier photographed self of Gift). Demise, however, also comes to those too well hidden. In his yearning to keep the self concealed, the poet-figure wants to gain the ‘ghost’s’ wisdom, so that in hiding he will never be discovered. In so doing, of course, he would place himself at risk of ending in the ghost’s otherworldly condition. ‘[I]t is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.’ Yet unlike Winnicott, Paterson’s hide-and-seek involves a capture that comes as much from within as without: the artist hides not just from others but from himself, in particular from the deathly fixity for which his own lines issue instruction: ‘stand just so’, ‘catch your own ghost on film, here’s the primer [. . .]’. The tune by which ‘I am hung’ is the one the poet-figure is most persuasively singing. He may well be more perilous to himself than any other hide-and-seeker. It is at least in part for this reason that the speaker performs his dreams and games of disguise to an audience, hoping to secure protection from himself by tarrying in their view. Paterson’s eagerness to avoid naked exposure is, at times, an expression of concerns of the viciousness of viewing others, but it is still more strongly an articulation of the disaster of a ‘private self’s’ interminable communication with itself – where the artist plays both hider and seeker in a hall of self-contemplating mirrors. The poet’s desire to be the subject of another’s search expresses a desire to come into being through existing for another. When he writes that ‘We blur ourselves to almost nothing, less / by moving than the eye’s own fixedness’, the artist is figured as part of a ‘we’ guilty of the obfuscatory rage to fix and know. Here, games of blurring and concealment ward off naked exposure. But in deploying the optics of protection

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Figure 4  House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. © The Estate of Francesca Woodman. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

and camouflage, the poem has the poet-figure hiding from his own desire to reveal himself to himself, to see more clearly than he ought, self-destructively to get an eyeful. Woodman’s self-staging games with the photograph and/as mirror are hidden in full view in a not unanalogous respect: they implement blurred and delicately camouflaging effects, which record traces of selves. These ghostly presences are glimpsed in states of transition and in elision of the full view – apparitions that the photographer is herself recording: Paterson and Watt reproduce Self-Portrait at Thirteen – one of Woodman’s ­­best-known works – in the opening pages of Hiding in Full View. The image of the photographer as an intelligible but also partially concealed subject works against the association of the lifting of obscurity and shadow with better comprehension of the woman viewed. Woodman’s composition directs the eye to the hazy foreground,

h id ing in f ul l vie w   123

Figure 5  Self-Portrait at Thirteen, Boulder, Colorado, 1972. © The Estate of Francesca Woodman. Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

where the hand that is making the photograph parts the light. One reads through it, up her body: guided along the long blurred lines on the right, up the arm, to the face. The picture refuses to satisfy the gaze it encourages: even as the head is set up as the focal point, the subject’s hair conceals her features. They remain masked, enigmatically undisclosed, and archly hidden. It is in a sense an anti-portrait: a way of suggesting that I exists outside its own representations, but is not entirely unknowable. The subject remains both available and ambiguous, withdrawn from and also in view. Knowingly anticipating the cliché that the artwork produces fixity and entrapment, Woodman’s images, like Paterson’s poems, depict the space of photographic capture as that of self-varying game-play. In these redeployments of aesthetic ‘violence’, the self-portraits look back, switching between hiding and seeking, evasion and disclosure. The recorded images of ‘Woodman’ appear as a sequence of transi-

124  n a t a l ie po lla rd tional figures, shifting between object, animate matter and art historical creation, as well as through different manifestations through the lens, gaze and paper record. In both Paterson and Woodman, half-hidden and half-focused material involves an opening up of the vitalities and intricacies of relations – it’s not ‘communicative failure’. Human forms are on the move: precarious figures emerging from and dissolving into their environment. Woodman’s hide-and-seek with the camera creates active scenes of haunting and liminality. So too, in Paterson, photographed selves possess ghostly vitality: they oscillate with macabre verve between death and life. In the work of both, the body is glimpsed and half-disappearing, often integrating itself into the building materials of art. It can manifest as a component of photographic or lyric apparatus (Figures 2 and 3), or through written, printed and constructed materials, such as fabric, ink and (wall)paper (Figure 5). In Paterson, the poet-figure’s vacillation between life and death leads him away from the light: ‘cut off from the greater day’. The lyric self is both ‘constructed and undone’ by the dying energy of a ‘hollow sun’. In language reminiscent of the nigredo – the primary element associated with blackest night, melancholy and despair in the alchemical tradition (and more recently in psychoanalytic thought) – Paterson’s collapsing solar mass plays on both brilliance and obscurity: its sun stands as a generative symbol for departed light and for ‘hollow’ absence.12 Approaching the end of its life, Paterson’s star hints at the poet’s entry into a death-like condition, reinforced aurally by the sequence’s chiming between ‘sun’, ‘song’, ‘undone’ and ‘hung’.13 Of course, being ‘hung’ rather than hanged, the poet is not ‘beyond my hourly frame’ in the same way as the collapsing star, even if the sequence casts him as ghostly, as well as ghosted: ‘I died’. It is not exactly as a shade in Hades that the speaker conducts his ‘secret game’ between death and life. He is ‘beyond’ his frame in being out of his depth in existential shadow-play – neither quite in life, nor quite in focus. Yet Paterson’s sequence is drawn to the potential of what might exist outside the frames of light and life, and its gravitation to the uncertain ontologies of being in-the-dark and of death-in-life suggests a betweenness that is enabling as well as disorienting. The poems associate uncertainties of being and seeing with the advantages of not being able to pin oneself – self-destructively – to any one ontological, visual or narrative perspective. They are alive to the benefits of artfully disguising ‘the true self’ from itself.

II Paterson’s work often indicates the benefits of wandering in confusion, and being led by darkness instead of light. ‘We turn from the light to see,’ he writes. ‘The world, in this bright second, / is empty, voiceless, blind.’14 The attraction to semi-opacity, and to orientation through the night, instead of the light, is reminiscent of the mystical tradition as it reaches us through Barthes. ‘And the night illuminated the night,’ Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.15 ‘[I]n order to see [. . .] well, it is best to look away or close your eyes,’ he writes in Camera Lucida, quoting Kafka’s remark: ‘My stories are a way of shutting my eyes’ (53). Within view for Barthes and

h id ing in f ul l vie w   125 Paterson is a mystical text by St John of the Cross – The Dark Night of the Soul or The Ascent of Mount Carmel – which has its roots in spiritual journeying: traversing a darkness characterised by luminosity, one learns to come to terms with bereavement, despair, the darkness of the senses and the soul. It is only after having visual faculties and desires for the outward things of the world mortified that one can enter into true understanding and spiritual unity: I II III

On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings – oh, happy chance! – I went forth without being observed. [. . .] In darkness and secure. By the secret ladder, disguised – oh, happy chance! – In darkness and concealment, [. . .] In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. IV This light guided me. More surely than the light of noonday, [. . .] V Oh, night that guided me. Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!16 In The Dark Night, the post-death path of salvation is found by turning one’s back on the light that dazzles with worldly perceptions, and blinds with desire.17 By letting himself follow the Night, rather than the Dawn, the saint receives ‘guidance’ both from inward sources, which ‘in my heart did burn’, and from the dark ‘that led me’. Barthes’s ‘ray of darkness’ and ‘luminous emptiness’ possess comparable echoes: ‘I enter into the night of non-meaning; desire continues to vibrate (the darkness is transluminous), but there is nothing I want to grasp,’ he writes. ‘I think quite calmly about the other, as the other is; I suspend any interpretation [. . .] : I am here, sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love’ (Lovers 171). Paterson’s borrowings from the mystical tradition do not result in comparable tranquility. Although his lyricism tunes into his forbear’s ‘secret [. . .] light or guide’, and on the mysticism of ‘the soul [that] has to proceed rather by unknowing than by knowing’, his speakers do not suspend anxious interpretations, nor do they allow themselves to be guided through the gloom (Ascent 1: IV, 27). The poems more often cast the self’s ‘unknowing’ wandering in the ‘night of non-meaning’ as nightmare, mental sickness, or hell. Unable gently to set down interpretative tools in order to dwell alone ‘simply and calmly in the dark interior’, they ballast their nocturnal lyric wanderings with learned (and not unself-delighted), searching literary play. Paterson thus displays an attitude toward learning, being led and human proficiency quite distinct from that of St John of the Cross. Whilst the saint humbly recognises that: ‘In order to expound and describe this dark night, through which the soul passes [. . .] it would be necessary to have illumination of knowledge and experience other and far greater than mine [. . .] neither does human knowledge suffice for the understanding of them, nor experience for the description of them; for only he that passes this way can understand it, and even he cannot describe it’

126  n a t a l ie po lla rd (Ascent, Prologue, 11), Paterson’s black nights of uncertainty and disorientation aggravate his scholarly impulse to expound and describe. It is an explicatory urge that seems to propel Paterson’s poet-figures deeper and deeper into errant physical and literary-historical terrain. In Part III of ‘The Alexandrian Library’, ‘I’:    set myself down like a paper boat till the mind is a little white flag in the current [. . .] to alight at the bridge and walk over to pay the blind man at the booth for a ball and a stick and then onto the green I read O! like a book,18 Unwilling to be guided by the darkness, the poet-figure showcases his ability to wrest ingenious poetic imagery from states of dream-like literary bafflement and confusion. I ‘set myself down like a paper boat’, ‘the mind is a little white flag in the current’, ‘I read O! like a book’. The speaker’s gleeful creative wandering through the underworld also sees him fall prey to anxieties about being exposed as blind and entirely lost. His small white flag fluttering in the deep signals his surrender to dark forces, and helplessness in the current – but it also works against that apparent vulnerability by making a powerful lyric emblem out of the poetical boat’s fragile ‘paper’ sign. The waving of his flag of whiteness puts to use the blackness of night as a contrasting backdrop for the artist’s drama of incapacity – even as he most movingly cries out for rescue from psychic shipwreck. Paterson’s work, then, harnesses darkness as potent literary symbol, ushering readers into the night of uncertainty, but his nocturnal wanderings remain ambivalent about whether they want or do not want to take darkness as their guide. The Patersonian bed is less often a place of peaceful, untroubled repose than one of disturbing sexual and night-time misadventure. Sleep similarly produces frightening hallucinations, offering little refuge from disturbed consciousness; and there is rarely untroubled sanctuary available in poetical dreaming or imaginative vision. Indeed, the poet and dreamer of ‘The Alexandrian Library’ is increasingly agitated by the idea that the literary mind is responsible for producing his monstrously tangled encounters with reality. Paterson may have in mind Borges’s ‘The Library of Babel’, in which the ‘universe’ – an infinite series of hexagonal rooms (holding books that contain all possible permutations of a few characters) – presents an unfathomable glut of literary information.19 In Paterson’s and Borges’s universe-libraries, inexhaustible textual richness provokes inhabitants’ desperate rationalisation of infinity, truth, reality and deception. In ‘The Library of Babel’, thwarted intellection drives some readers to a near-suicidal state. In ‘The Alexandrian Library’, the literary labyrinth is a haunted psychic construct – a blackly subterranean space in which the spooked lyric imagination generates further forms of irresolution: if Paterson’s poet-figure once thought to hide from the daylight consciousness in this subterranean web, he now longs to be found and led from bibliophilic confusion into the light.20

h id ing in f ul l vie w   127 ‘It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes,’ Jung remarks, ‘for no Ariadne had put a thread into my hand.’21 He adds: ‘[w]hen I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasyimages, the empirical material [. . .]’, relishing his encounter with the ‘uninterrupted intellectual chain [. . .] from ancient, gnostic, alchemical to modern thought’ (Memories 205). Paterson’s combination of ancient architectural motif with mystical understandings of the unutterably dark night is reminiscent of Jung’s exploration of the links between mythology, alchemy and the black sun, or nigredo, associated with melancholy, madness, self-destruction, blackest blackness. But Jung not only finds the ‘way’ out of the maze himself – unlike Paterson’s poet-figure, who fantasises rescue – he also discovers the thread that guides him through his reading. Amongst the psychologist’s clearest articulations of the nigredo as inspiration for psychological processes as wayfinding occurs in his discussion of ‘the right way’ to wholeness of being. The road to psychic health involves many ‘fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors’ (Alchemy 6). In proposing that ‘we turn from the light to see’, Paterson, then, touches on work conducted across mystical, alchemical and psychoanalytical traditions. Yet his picture of seeing in this way often expresses dismay at the distortions encountered in looking through a glass darkly at knowledge systems, historical and architectural forms, mapping and meaning. Greater consonance with the darkness of human understanding is shown in A Lover’s Discourse or The Dark Night of the Soul. Paterson’s poetry recasts Barthes’s easeful rest in the ‘happy night’ as bookish ‘nightmare [. . .]’, in which the poet dreams of an ‘orgy of selves in the hell / of their irresolution’ (Light 50). His drowsy lyricists cling to the illusion of a path of literary enlightenment that would draw them from the hell of narrative irresolution – of cabalistic fantasy, wayward reasoning, dark misreadings – to a place of fantasised clarity, knowledge, illumination. What, then, are the consequences of being allowed to dream on, as Paterson might put it? Is it better for his vexed slumberers to be sought and woken – even if reverie protects them from still blacker consciousness? In part, this depends on what they confront when they open their eyes. The poet might be brought out of the darkness of his unconscious to a still blacker night of melancholia, mourning or selfannihilation. In Paterson’s work, however, this figure tends to rise into a daylight shared with others. A memory of his mother summoning him out of bed as a child lifts Paterson from the self-annulling nightmares, and the underworld, at the end of ‘The Alexandrian Library’: ‘out of yer pit, Donald –’ (55). Her wake-up call brings to an end ten pages of claustrophobic wanderings through mythology, theology, mysticism and book history, which the self did not achieve single-handedly. This other is his ticket to the plain-speaking world of humdrum realist detail. Yet the poet is not just passively waiting to be found: his nightmares are banished by his bringing to consciousness an early memory of his mother’s daily routine of scolding him out of his ‘pit’. If the poet requires the voice of another – the absent presence of ‘my old dear [. . .] my mother, my ma’ – to bring him out of dream and darkness, his poem

128  n a t a l ie po lla rd also summons her from home ‘a few miles down the road from here’, to repel its ghosts of literary melancholia. In her analysis of Gérard de Nerval’s poem ‘El Desdichado’, Julia Kristeva argues that the poet engages in a hazardous over-identification with the mother-figure, seeking unity with her in the grave.22 ‘I am saturnine, bereft, disconsolate,’ Nerval writes. ‘My lone star is dead, and my bespangled lute / Bears the black sun of the melancholia.’23 The poem imagines it is with her ‘In the night of the grave’. For Kristeva, what pulls Nerval back from the tomb is not another human being, but art itself, in which the poet finds a substitute for the loss of unmediated maternal relations (169–72). Nerval’s creation of a poetic ‘network of intensities’ of rhythms, melodies and alliteration leads him away from his own self-annihilating dark night, by enabling him to wrest life from the symbolic order (170). What Paterson shares with Kristeva is the sense of the long-standing link between the dark night, mystical and alchemical traditions, the death-drive, familial relations, mourning, and longed-for fusion with the deceased. Her book, entitled Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, describes the fading star as ‘dazzling metaphor [. . .] bright and black at the same time’, ‘cherished in the absence of a loved one’ (70). However, unlike Kristeva (and Nerval), for whom aesthetic negotiation leads the artist to psychic health, in Paterson, to be restored to the light is to be guided (by others) out of literary dark strata. This is less often a self-rescue facilitated by art than a conversation with friends and family – including memories of the poet’s (living) mother. What draws Paterson away from the self-destructive impulse to seek out deathly others is the cut and thrust of interactions with known human beings. A Paterson poem often treats hiding in full view as if it were a key to psychic identity; play that fuels mental and linguistic processes. His descent into labyrinthine darkness opens an artistic space of secrecy, disguise and self-subversion – where the poetic work is connected with ancient and modern alchemical, mystical and psychoanalytical writings, as well as with the visual arts, especially painting and photography. But this entry into the black night can be a self-endangering journey. From these dark wanderings, the Patersonian self often seeks rescue and reemergence, wanting to be found. This chapter has focused on three ways in which Paterson’s poet-figures hide in full view. First, in entering states of sleep, dream and reverie, where the poet is at once there and not-there. Second, in experiences of liminal physicality, often between death and life, ghost and human. (Paterson finds particular affinity, in this respect, with Francesca Woodman and Barthes.) Third, in I-as-literary-other, where the work speaks as and with forebears, versioning and in borrowing from the canon. (These writing selves appear to speak directly to their audience, but often through the voice of another, a deceased other: this is hiding in full view as distortion, disguise and conjoining. I have in mind ‘Phantom’, a poem in which ‘Paterson’ speaks entire verse-paragraphs ‘as’ the deceased Michael Donaghy.) Paterson’s exploration of physical, temporal and imaginative spaces through the republic of letters often reroutes incipient cynicism; the work suggests it exists in the line of those who have wrestled generatively with compromised, haunted creativity. His poet-figures tread strange, dark paths through the lands of the dead not just as

h id ing in f ul l vie w   129 self-concealers, but as seekers who pursue collaborative lyric companionship in and across historical time. It is also work that desires to be pulled back – from disoriented wandering through the proliferating strata of artistic-, personal- and literary-history – by living friends and family members. The voice of the latter is often most urgently needed to call lost Patersonian lyricists out of the blackest night, interrupting their propensities for dangerously self-annulling death-like reverie. Paterson’s poetry both yearns to be within the view of audiences, spectators, and is alert to the perils of being dominated by full gazes (like Jung and Winnicott, Barthes and Woodman). His poetic selves are, perhaps for this reason, alternately lost to view and teasingly within it, inviting and self-concealing, playful and evasive. They exhibit a curious mix of abandonment and extreme caution in their bringing to attention the blind spots, blind eyes and blind fields of illumination that are at play in acts of poetic creation and reception.

N otes  1. Don Paterson, God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997), p. 49. Referred to as Gift.  2. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982), p. 84.  3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993).  4. David Cunningham, quoting Barthes’s Camera Lucida, in David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays (eds), Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005), p. 150.  5. The exhibition ran between November 2011 and January 2012 at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. The book was published by the Ingleby Gallery in 2012.  6. In printed form, too, the book design preserves the sense of poems interwoven with paint, material and the body by alternating between poems and paintings.  7. This is reinforced by Paterson’s use of italics, which leaves unclear from where ‘poet’ and ‘subject’ get their voices and knowledge, and gestures toward a competitive corrective between participants: ‘The lens is no one looking. Sure, no doubt; / but [. . .]’ (emphasis added).  8. See ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ in Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), p. 20, for another example of Paterson’s implementation of italicised voices. Also ‘The Alexandrian Library, Part I’, which moves from Greek to the Herald, Medea to Stanyhurst’s Vergil (Nil 25–33).  9. See Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, ed. and trans. James Strachey, foreword by Irvin D. Yahom (New York: Hogarth Press, 2000), p. 117. Writing of the ‘blindness of the seeing eye’, Freud describes ‘the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time’, particularly about oneself. See also Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, especially definitions of ‘Heimlich’: ‘something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret’. Also, ‘as used of knowledge – mystic, allegorical’, or alternatively ‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious [. . .] obscure’. In Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, intro. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 132. 10. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Communicating and Not Communicating: Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth, 1965), p. 186. 11. The balance between ‘privation and deprivation’ arises for Winnicott in front of an audience: spectatorship provokes feelings of being found, but in a negative form: objectivisation, exposure and exploitation. Winnicott speaks of needing to hide ‘the self’s core’, which must not be violated by a ‘communication’ that threatens to ‘seep [. . .] through

130  n a t a l ie po lla rd

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

the defenses’ of the partially hiding self (‘Communicating and Not Communicating’, pp. 187–90). See John Bally and Bo Reipurth, The Birth of Stars and Planets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 206: ‘At the end of the massive star’s life, the core collapses and the star dies [. . .] they lose most of their mass.’ Compare with the ‘black sun’ of ‘Phantom’, section V: ‘There is something vast and distant and enthroned / staring through your mind, staring and staring / like a black sun, constant, silent, radiant / [. . .] / Your thought is the bright shadows that it makes / as it plays across the objects of the earth / [. . .] / The book in sunlight or the tree in rain / bursts at its touch into a blaze of signs’; Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), p. 55. Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows (London: Picador, 2004), p. 39; The Eyes (London: Faber, 1999), p. 52. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 171. Referred to as Lovers. ‘Stanzas’, Ascent of Mount Carmel, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1947), p. 10. Referred to as Ascent. ‘to a moth [. . .] desire for the beauty of the light dazzles it [. . .] light acts rather as darkness, preventing it from seeing the harm’; Ascent 1: VIII, p. 42. Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 57. Referred to as Light. Jorge Louis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’ (1942), in Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962), pp. 79–88. ‘[T]here have always been people who, not satisfied with the dominants of conscious life, set forth – under cover and by devious paths, to their destruction or salvation’, following ‘the lure of the restless unconscious psyche’; Carl Jung, Introduction to Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of Collected Works (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 36. Referred to as Alchemy. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), p. 205. Referred to as Memories. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Gérard de Nerval, ‘El Desdichado’, quoted in Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 140.

9 Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers Peter Robinson

I

D

on Paterson’s early poem ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ wears its acted out aggression on its sleeve. It centres on the attempt by the speaker’s father to buy a hi-fi needle for a lo-fi player – resulting in a shopkeeper treating the poorly informed dad with amused contempt: ‘We had the guy in stitches: “You can’t . . . / er . . . you’ll have to upgrade your equipment.” ’1 The poem imagines and ventriloquises ‘Fidelities’, an elegiac fragment on the theme of filial piety, one as if written by the poet son of this gramophone snob: ‘I gently lower the sharp nib to the line / and wait for it to pick up the vibration’. Switching back to its roman-font narration style, it comes to a close in what is offered as a more authentically registered fidelity of sound and impact: We drove back slowly, as if we had a puncture; my Dad trying not to blink, and that man’s laugh stuck in my head, which is where the story sticks, and any attempt to cauterize this fable with something axiomatic on the nature of articulacy and inheritance, since he can well afford to make his own excuses, you your own interpretation. But if you still insist on resonance – I’d swing for him, and every other cunt happy to let my father know his station, which probably includes yourself. To be blunt. (Nil 21) ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ catches the moment when the other lights in which a beloved father may be viewed make themselves felt. If its italicised section evokes only to dismiss in parody the sensitively adjectival plain style of an upwardly mobile Movement-period poetic (Thom Gunn’s ‘High Fidelity’, for instance), its flawed paternal solidarity aligns it with the swear-word-flavoured mode of Tony Harrison’s

132  p e t e r robin son work.2 Indeed, Paterson’s ruling out cauterising ‘this fable  / with something axiomatic on the nature / of articulacy and inheritance’ is a pointed divergence from the Harrison school of eloquence. What renders its close so impactful and painful is the response being dramatised as an imagined lashing out at the nearest and only other interested party: its reader. Yet, the poet being its first reader, may the final line of ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ be understood as also self-referential? Paterson resists such slippage of pronominal reference with firmly marked positions at the start of the first and second stanzas: ‘My uncle’ and ‘My Dad’. Nevertheless, its fictive invention allows ‘I’ and ‘my’ in the italic font of the third stanza to refer to that ‘rival poet’, the versifying shop assistant’s son. Letting the ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ of the poem’s close include the poetspeaker suggests that what is required for the man’s laugh and this story to stick in the head is an internalising of the hi-fi specialist’s viewpoint, one that enjoys making sure the man with the lo-fi turntable knows his consumer station. If the poem’s speaker did not feel a sense of inflicted shame in his father’s innocence or ignorance of recording technology, then there would be no occasion to articulate. Reading the last line, ‘which probably includes yourself. To be blunt’, as a muffled or tacit self-address produces a psychological bruise more resonant because not evidently coincident with its authorial thrust. After all, when he swings for ‘him, and every other cunt / happy to let my father know his station’,3 he’s the one passing on the story that has humiliated his dad. The speaker in ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ appears bruised by the exercise of class-based consumerist relations outside himself, and the desire to lash out in such circumstances is understandable, though possibly not the best way ‘to cauterize this fable’ either, because if the ‘yourself’ in the last line refers to me (this reader with his own history of Dansette record players), then the reader may feel resentful about having been placed thus by the poem only, in imagination, to be punched by its speaker. If the son were also punching himself in the face, the lines would tacitly recognise an internalised aggression against the father, and would find an echo in the salesperson’s laughter. The speaker’s sense of shame, his desire to lash out, seem allied with panic at this challenge to his dad’s authority – which the incident, internalised, effects. Yet there remains the qualm that this is precisely ‘your own interpretation’ being foisted on ‘An Elliptical Stylus’, or, worse, that the poem’s youthfully aggressive final lines are a way of ruling such reflections out of a reader’s experience of its close. As Peter Howarth puts it, ‘the poem’s bluntness is the most sensitive pick-up of all, because it makes the sociologist or sympathiser realise they are players in the performance of class and consumerism that is still present in the act of judging or enjoying the poem’, and it is that realisation which may invite the compromised preference to refrain from either judgement or enjoyment.4

II ‘I promise I won’t actually thump the next person who mentions my “love of the sonnet form” ’ is how Paterson begins a note on it in Reading Shakespeare’s

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    133 Sonnets: A New Commentary, indicating that the thought has crossed his mind.5 Commentaries on a reader’s response to an individual poem, such as the one above, are about ‘Three things, I think: what the poem is saying; what the poem is saying about us; and what the poem is saying about the author’ (RSS xv). These are not separate but interrelated, any articulated understanding of one inflecting the other two. All three are pulled between what the poet and speaker of the poem might have meant by its words and how those same words are taken and responded to by a reader. They are also involved in staging a further relation, that between the reader as writer and others who are readers of the commentary. Such a writer can find that a tangled web has been woven not only between poet and reader, but also between that reader and further readers, ones who may have also read the poem and have their views. In the cases of well-known poems, the number of readers multiplies ad infinitum. Acknowledging so many sensibilities and minds involves addressing the language of the commentary to the objects of study and allowing readers, only superficially unaddressed, to occupy the position of those overhearing a soliloquy. This isn’t Paterson’s way, which in his Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets triangulates his reader-writer with interpretations of the object of study that make assumptions about its writer and evoke responses from an inscribed, assumed reader (‘we’) – as here in the following comments on Sonnet 141 (‘In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes’): A wretched little number continuing where Sonnet 130 left off, and one we will do the immense service of skipping over as quickly as possible. ‘Let’s go through all the senses one by one and work out what it is that attracts me to you. Ummm . . . Nothing! All my eye sees is error; your tongue doesn’t please my ear; nor do my nose and mouth care to be invited to any sensual feast in which you, m’dear, are the only entrée on the card.’ He’s even denying her sexual appeal now. Charming . . . Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone? Liar. ‘But for some reason – beats the hell outta me – my heart’s enslaved to you. The only thing I’ve got out of this is the clap, frankly.’ ‘All I hear in this poem is his disgust of women,’ Paterson concludes. ‘This guy’s really screwed up, and I don’t much want to read this poem again’ (RSS 431–3). As some reviewers of the book found, it can be difficult to respond with equanimity to such in-your-face performances, because the style flouts steadied relationship in difference (and at a regulated distance) between the poem and its reader, the commentary and its readers. Paterson frequently places himself in an inconsistent relationship with such readers, as in his admission that when attempting to say what Shakespeare’s sonnets mean to us now he had to ask ‘ “What are these poems to me now?”, since I can’t speak for you’, only to do this when he concedes: I won’t apologise for reading Shakespeare in my own way. I will apologize, of course, for the stupidity, prejudice, ignorance, bias, bad temper, bad taste, crudeness, excess, childishness, impatience and error that my reading has

134  p e t e r robin son brought to the poems, but (a) you’ll bring your own, and (b) this isn’t physics. It’s love, for better or worse. (RSS xvi–xvii) That last phrase makes the relationship between poem and reader sound contractually promissory, more like matrimony than head-over-heels. Though readers may bring character flaws to such a marriage of minds, perhaps they do so as a means for addressing them in reading and reflecting. Yet, should readers succumb to one or more items on Paterson’s list, it’s hardly for him to presume – which he not only knows, but illustrates in citing an aphorism by Antonio Porchia (1886–1968): ‘I know what I have given you; I do not know what you have received’.6 Yet it would misread this sentence to assume that you must have received less than I gave, while, since he can’t know, Porchia, who drew his inspiration from attending in and to solitude, couldn’t know for sure what he had given either. Paterson achieves his in-your-face effect in Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets by offering, despite his apologies, paraphrases not inclined to be deferential towards what he takes to be the surface meaning. It is possible to hear other things than ‘his disgust of women’ in Sonnet 141: there may only be, for instance, his disgust (if that is what it is) with one woman, the ‘thee’ and ‘she’ who figures as this poem’s unstable addressee and object of address. Take, for instance, line five – ‘Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted’ – where negation is pinned to a ‘Nor’, which word also begins lines six and seven. A counter sense is delivered by the line’s delighting of ears with its tongued tune – insinuating, in turn, that the protesting force of the sonnet dramatises an attempt to escape a self-contradictory compulsion, as if spoken by Angelo in Measure for Measure.7 To hear this doubling is to imply others: the speaker to his state of mind, the speaker to the woman he is both addressing and talking about to others, a reader in relation to both the sonnet’s voice and its subject, and that reader’s possible comments, whether spoken or written, in their relation with other readers and commentators – and, further, if poet and subject are still alive, with them too. Precision of thought, accuracy of style and tact with regard to others are sacrificed in a preference for this bloke-speaking-to-you-guys strategy.8 Paterson hopes he ‘has retained the feel of the “reading diary” that it was’ (RSS xi). Yet its private meditations are forever being interrupted by his sense of a public and of his performing for it. The book’s careering style, as in ‘O these Elizabethans and their boring chiasmi’ (RSS 434), was taken to be juvenile delinquency by some Shakespeareans reviewing the volume.9 In riposte, Paterson penned a sonnet-epigram called ‘A Scholar’, placing under its title the epigraph ‘Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli’,10 which, after accusing its target of enforcing critical fantasy as common knowledge, ­concludes: This grammarie electrifies the gate; none pass but such as you initiate. The students hurry by you in the quad attending to their feet. What can you say? You know your Shakespeare would have walked that way.11

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    135 The addressee is accused of excluding the young, the students, who pass the scholar by in the quad with heads bowed to the ground ‘attending to their feet’. The poem’s decisive assumption is that Shakespeare, who didn’t attend Oxford or any other university, would have walked in that deferential or even humiliated way – but he, it implies, would have also been ‘attending to his feet’, his iambic pentameters. Though accusing scholars who criticised his book of assuming that they ‘own’ Shakespeare, this thrust claims poets and non-specialist readers as those he resembles, and tacitly overlooks Paterson’s own acknowledged indebtedness to commentators such as Booth, Burrow, Duncan-Jones, Kerrigan, and Vendler too. ‘According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny’, as his epigraph has it: the chequered critical and editorial destiny of the sonnets might be thought to exemplify this Latin tag, but, after all, when a book’s destiny is as assured as it ever can be, by having gained a great many readers with vastly varying capabilities, then it may be truer that the capabilities of the reader contribute more to that same reader’s destiny than to the book’s. Paterson has been both blessed and cursed by having found himself from his first published collection with a large number of readers. ‘Of course you don’t like all the aphorisms,’ he writes in The Book of Shadows, adding then, ‘I don’t like all of you.’12 But in any instance of perusal only one reader is ever having the experience of reading this aphorism, so it would have to be construed as meaning that he likes some but not all of me. This equivocation comes from confusing readers with balance sheets. Unit sales can be engrossed into statistics; poetry readings can have audience figures; but the number of readers a writer has is a 1 + 1 sum without a total.

III ‘Second-guessing the reader like this may just sound defensive,’ Howarth observes, adding that ‘Paterson knew you’d think that’.13 The poet may think he knows the effect his literary personality will have on a reader while, simultaneously, deploying that personality as an index of integrity in his apparent indifference to those effects. The foreword to Best Thought, Worst Thought suggests this doubleness is most true of his aphorisms. Placing his remarks about the aphorism and notes on a few aphorists at the beginning (the variously different British edition, The Book of Shadows, has them at the end), it appears to snub its reader from the start: ‘The aphorism is nobody speaking to nobody; it’s less read than eavesdropped upon. God knows, it’s barely even written: I disown them immediately.’14 As a performance, this is busy enough – asserting selfhood by denying it, evoking readers by ignoring them, addressing them by pretending not to know they’re there, and cutting your own words dead in an immediacy that is immediately taken back by the subsequent two book publications so far authorised. The aphorisms on aphorists, too, locate Paterson’s in a tradition of wisdom, philosophy and scepticism, but, as in his comment on G. C. Lichtenberg, they underline an attention to readers’ patience not shared by its subject, whose notebooks, the Sudelbücher, were unpublished at his death: ‘German concision? He deserves even more credit than we give him’ (Shadows 194–5). A view in line with

136  p e t e r robin son his ‘nobody’ aphorism above is offered in this praise for Porchia: ‘possibly the greatest, as almost no one has read him’ (Best 8; Shadows 194–5). Yet an eye on readers speaks from this observation too. Paterson’s aphorisms are all composed with at least one reader in mind, even when protesting not to be so, as when he appears to apologise: My new book arrived, and I had no idea who had written it. Or at least I then understood why I had written it: to expel the last man. Forgive me this book; but as you can see, I could live with him no longer.15 ‘Those wholly estranged from themselves only have two real homes,’ he notes a page later, ‘the monastery or the stage’ (Blind 132). In expelling ‘the last man’ but neither adopting the tonsure nor taking up an acting career, Paterson appears a writer not as ‘wholly estranged’ as the earlier aphorism might suggest. The one above simultaneously stands and falls on its deployment of totalising exaggerations: ‘wholly’, ‘only’ and ‘real’. Instantiating what it diagnoses, the following remark by Adam Phillips notes that ‘Exaggeration, in the first instance, is a way of being taken seriously; and then one is ignored for exaggerating’.16 As if acting on this insight, the great exaggerator Oscar Wilde has his character Gilbert rein in an overstatement with ‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught’.17 Paterson’s performance as aphorist bears a greater resemblance to Wilde than Lichtenberg, for, though not an actor, he is forever on stage, even when protesting, and exactly because he is protesting, that he inhabits a monastic cell. Natalie Pollard has noted the writer’s temptation to pre-empt readers, observing of ‘can I please refer you to the afterword of the previous book, where you will find that your cynicism and distaste has not only been fully anticipated but outstripped by the author’s own’ that ‘he often manages self-critically to get in before you do, and more amusingly and unsparingly than you could’.18 This, though, is something neither Paterson nor Pollard can know – except in so far as ‘you’ is understood to be a blank cipher for any reader who is, by definition, less capable than the writer (a presumption perhaps of the status claim in making writing public, but not one to depend upon without the thought that it may be misplaced). It can never be secure in its belief that one of us yous hasn’t been more unsparing or amusing in the privacy of our own reading experience. Such a reader might weary of the assumption that any response has already been presumed and countered before we’ve been given the space to think and respond. But others’ opinions pre-empted in this way are not banished from the field by that act; rather, they constitute that part of it unavailable for use by the fast-talking writer. ‘The difference between the aphorism and the poem is that the aphorism states its conclusion first,’ Paterson asserts. ‘It is a form without tension, and therefore simultaneously perfect and perfectly dispensable. There is no road, no tale, no desire’ (Shadows 200). This is unlikely to be the case, being rather a down-in-the-mouth exaggeration for effect (again indicating the presence of an imagined reader). It is also untrue of Paterson’s best aphorisms. The sonnet’s ‘turn’ or volta he describes as

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    137 ‘a sudden shift in the development of the poem – a twist in the plot, the breaking of the argument into proposition and counter-proposition, or something quieter: maybe just a shift in tone or rhetorical pitch’.19 Aphorisms most usually depend on just such shifts of tone and pitch to achieve their changes of thought and mind. Michael Wood has observed that ‘The ideal aphorism has a gap in it, a sort of leak which its very tidiness enhances’.20 This ‘gap’ is the equivalent of the sonnet’s ‘turn’. Wood’s noting of both ‘tidiness’ and ‘leak’ in aphorisms is an equivalent of Paterson’s seeing it as ‘a form without tension, and therefore simultaneously perfect and perfectly dispensable. There is no road, no tale, no desire’ but without his selfcancelling negations. In good aphorisms the gap produces the tension, the trajectory, the narrative and desire. Like the ‘turn’ in a sonnet, it can take many forms. Wood alights on Wittgenstein’s ‘The philosopher treats a question; like a disease’, adding that Erich Heller calls its medial punctuation ‘the most profound semi-colon in literature’.21 In this one by Paterson the gap is indicated by my interpolation: ‘If I do not constantly evince an attitude of self-disgust,’ he writes, ‘it’s due to nothing more than a lack of stamina’ (Shadows 131). The conclusion is stated after the comma. The ‘turn’ is in the latter’s not being ‘due’ to what is contained in the first, but coming as a ‘twist in the plotting’, an unexpected but appropriate leap to a conclusion. Aphorisms cannot be syllogisms. They can also talk to each other in a reader’s memory more than they do on their books’ pages, as when the ‘self-disgust’ one above communicates with this: ‘Yes I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far more elegantly; but let’s face it, you weren’t listening then either’ (Blind 84). Its retort evokes the heckling reader and puts him or her down with the second clause, and is thus wittily self-fulfilling in that the ‘either’ implies you weren’t listening now, so didn’t hear the put-down, or you weren’t then, before making the comparison with those earlier aphoristic thinkers – because it was the writer who made them, conjuring up the shadow of a rivalry even as it’s controlled by the apparent modesty of attributing both priority and greater elegance to them. Though the writer can’t lose, he can’t, wriggle as he might, win either – allowing readers to glimpse a different figure, the compulsively attention-seeking writer with his darkened dream of a readership, a readership that he must court by flaunting an indifference towards.

IV ‘Not enough to say that aphorism is not for everyone’, Paterson avers. ‘It is the elite form nonpareil, being for precisely no one’ (Shadows 203). He had also written, earlier in The Book of Shadows: ‘We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs’ (5). W. S. Graham’s 1949 Notebook observation adds a twist to this notion of an author’s need: ‘To show you need something from another person destroys any chance of receiving it. People love him who does not need love.’22 Paterson has repeatedly criticised what he calls ‘the Postmoderns’ for

138  p e t e r robin son adopting such a ‘no-need’ relationship to readers, and he has accepted the risk of putting such readers off by manipulating them in his self-disgustedly needy evocations of their collusive role.23 In his management of such relations, he frequently dramatises authorial need by staging its apparent absence, while the notion that elites write for no one rather contrasts with his also addressing them as an agglomerated ‘we’. His antagonism towards what he calls ‘the Postmoderns’ is thus paid a backhanded compliment in his excursions into aphorism – that supposed ‘elite form nonpareil’. And he underlines this ‘for no one’ idea with the following: A book of aphorisms makes no pretence to engage the reader in any sort of dialogue; to judge by its tone of relentless asseveration, it has no opinion of them. The relationship so dehumanized, this is the one occasion where the ‘voice’ has been wholly renounced: the book is no more or less than just that, a dead object, a res. What the reader feels is a kind of ultimate contempt, that of ink for the human, the mineral for the animal. (Shadows 197) The relentless performativity of Paterson’s aesthetic stance is implied here by his inclination to take its absence for inertness. As at the end of ‘An Elliptical Stylus’, this is only too aware of its tonally needy dialogue with a reader, something it is also compelled to deny, as in its (subsequently edited out) renunciation of ‘voice’.24 It is as if the writer were perpetually having to be rude to readers’ faces as the one way of retaining their attention, to the point that this aphorism’s similes don’t do what it appears to need them to: the mineral can’t be contemptuous of the animal because contempt is not an ultimate absence of relation. ‘Sense is the carrier-wave of truth. A tautology in all company but that of the Postmoderns, who it will one day strike with the force of a revelation’ (Blind 117). Paterson writes of these lumped-together poets as if in a fight to the death, compulsively distorting what he says about ‘them’, in so far as they exist as a singularity. Nor is it difficult to imagine arguments that might be launched back at this aphorism, along the lines that there are more things that can produce and count as ‘sense’ than are dreamed of in his philosophy. ‘In hell, the Postmoderns are awarded a huge, sensitive and critically informed general readership. I wish them sales; I wish them the book group . . .’ (Blind 6). The twist in this aphorism is produced by its first two words. He would torment his ‘elitist’ enemies with the readership that he ambivalently ‘enjoys’. So ‘the Postmoderns’ don’t appear to want readers: they cling to their exclusion, wedded to rejection. But Paterson will torture them with understanding and acceptance. He will disable the main plank, as it might be, in their claim to significance, the romantic cliché of genius not understood. In his introduction to New British Poetry, Paterson argues for a similarly lumpedtogether non-‘Postmodern’ poetry by claiming exclusivity for its attention to a reader’s role. These poets remain deeply engaged with the messy business of communication with a real critical readership – a[n] extremely vulnerable situation, fraught with all

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    139 manner of self-consciousness dangers: self-impersonation, second-guessing, dumbing down, sexing up, gratuitous displays of learning and allusion – in other words, the inadvertent projection and amplification of their own social neuroses, against which they must be constantly vigilant. This dialogue is open-ended; by contrast, the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely.25 Paterson can show towards his elected enemies a grudging respect for extremism with regard to readers he identifies in difficult poetry’s strategies. Thus, interviewed in 2013 by Ahren Warner, he finds moral fault with Geoffrey Hill and integrity in Jeremy Prynne: ‘if you think the point you’re making is a moral or ethical one . . . it strikes me as plainly unethical to present it in language likely to confound the reader. Actually it strikes me as so bleedin’ uncontroversial as to be barely worth saying. Though as we know not everyone shares that point of view. Stand up, Geoffrey. Far more time for JHP these days, as his language actually honours his project.’26 But not all poetry is written to make a point. Both experience and the experience of poetry may invite clarity by occasioning interpretation. Being ‘bleedin’ uncontroversial’, Paterson’s knockabout plain speaking risks entertaining at the expense of clear thinking. Though there are grains of truth inflecting this characterisation of a supposed difference between more complexly internecine tribes in his introduction to New British Poetry, poets from both fiercely contrasted groups, as Paterson notes,27 make claims for an ‘open-ended’ relationship with readers. Lee Harwood, for instance, provided one such claim in comments on Roy Fisher’s The Ship’s Orchestra, whose author ‘leaves areas in his “story” open for the reader to decide, to make a choice in his or her own imagination about how it could be. It involves the reader, offers the reader numerous possibilities.’28 Yet a further issue is not whether the reader is allowed a role or not, but what kinds of role are made available, the characterising of which may range from the compulsion cravenly to collude to the occasioning of autonomous self-change and growth in self-knowledge. Nor is it difficult to find so-called ‘Postmodern’ poets who tacitly and directly address readers, inviting them into mutually enhancing relationship. ‘The heart does hurt / and that’s no metaphor,’ Denise Riley writes, with hinterlands of assumption embedded in her use of ‘does’, adding that ‘It really is / that “throbbing muscle” you can’t say / since that’s “steel comic-sex meat” ’ – where ‘you can’t say’ and her phrases in quotation marks imply the hurt she addresses by alluding to song and ­self-healing in the second stanza’s interleaved rhyming ‘beat’: but it does hurt top mid-left under my shirt with its atrocious beat.29

140  p e t e r robin son Paterson describes Riley as a genuine talent ‘working recognizably within the English and European lyric traditions’ in his T. S. Eliot Lecture ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, but one ‘drowned by the chorus of articulate but fundamentally talentless poet-commentators’.30 More discriminating than his anthology introduction, such denigrating by association equally applies to his so-called ‘Mainstream’ poets – a reminder that a reader’s attachment will most likely be first to individual poems, then poets, and in this the reader is obliged to overlook, though ‘the choice isn’t yours’, what Fisher has called ‘just / the dirtiest brawl you ever saw’, precisely because it discourages approaches to those poems and poets.31 Paterson expresses a further ambivalence in his anthology introduction towards this argued-for writer-reader collaboration, in that it is said to throw this ‘Mainstream’ poet into a sea of troubles with regard to self-absorptive creative difficulties. What’s more, as Pollard observes: ‘Putting the case for equity more forcefully, Paterson adds that “the poem is an act of collusion”. In this context, “collusion” is an instructive, though not an entirely felicitous term: it suggests a body of invited addressees, pitted against marginalized or silenced others.’32 Such a body of ‘invited addressees’ again mimics the polemics and practice of his elected enemies. But a composing poet can’t pre-select readers, however conscious of them, or collaborate until the poem is finished and they are invited to read. What’s worse, you can only collude with them, or get them to collude with you, in relationships that are, by definition, not freely offered, open invitations to activate the poem’s verbal experience within those unpredictably different lives.

V Paterson’s conflicted ideas of relations with a reader appear, with divided drama fully displayed, in an essay containing much good sense and advice called ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’. Its epigraph is from the Pensées of one fictional François Aussemain: ‘The reader may be witness to the miracle but may never participate in it; poetry must remain a private transaction between the author and God.’33 But in reading, ‘witnessing’ means ‘participating’, and if the ‘miracle’ isn’t happening to a reader when reading, then it’s not witnessed either. The reader is excluded from this ‘private transaction’ when Paterson gets onto those dons des dieux from which poems begin: So what usually happens is that I get this wee phrase in my head that I can’t leave alone; sometimes it’s original, sometimes a cliché or some bit of received language I’ve discovered something new in; it constantly surprises me when I think about it, and that’s completely essential – if it doesn’t surprise me, I can’t expect it to surprise the reader, which is the whole point of the exercise: to blow the reader’s mind. (‘Dilemma’ 157) The turn of this sentence into gesturing exaggeration ‘the whole point of the exercise’ and ‘blow the reader’s mind’ again shows care for thought losing focus at

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    141 the point when it solicits a reader’s commitment to the writer’s ‘cool’ with some now dated-sounding pop phraseology. Reading poems does not resemble taking drugs even at the greatest intensities of aesthetic engagement because loss of motor control or self-awareness is not present in, and wouldn’t helpfully contribute to, the exchange. Of course, Paterson doesn’t really mean ‘blow the [. . .] mind’ except in its reduced cliché ‘admiration’ sense, but, this being the case, it might have been better to use words that served both to focus the writer’s thoughts and to help those of a reader. Paterson knows that the whole point of the exercise is not to blow the reader’s mind, as his essay’s epigraph indicates, and nor does it appear to be when he later writes: It’s taken me a pathetically long time to realise that the transcendental joy of poetry isn’t getting your book published, reading to an audience of deeplymoved young women, getting your face on the box, winning a prize or anything else – it’s the business of composition that blows you away, and the more you can do to savour it, the better. (‘Dilemma’ 159) Again a Janus-like moment occurs in the prose where composition ‘blows’ the poet ‘away’, a manner of putting it simultaneously protesting that all the reader-, audience-, market- and society-related aspects of poetry are irrelevant to the death-like bliss of writing poems, and, in the very idiom he uses, appealing to the consensual agreement of those ‘deeply-moved young women’, as it might be, or other impressed readers. Not that he can’t have it both ways, of course: he evidently does, at one point in his essay going all the way to the other end of the spectrum when he allows that considering a reader’s time and patience helps him to ‘murder his darlings’ by removing from a draft anything that smacks of his ego: ‘I also try to keep the poem as short as possible, for two reasons: firstly, if you choose a form that’s slightly too short for the material you’ve collated, it acts as a kind of automatic filter for any stuff you’re attached to for sentimental, or more often egotistical reasons’ and the ‘other reason is simply that concision is a courtesy to the reader, who, you should remember, always has a thousand better things to do than read your poem’ (‘Dilemma’ 160). At such moments readers are in the company of a poet familiar with the issues of his craft, one balancing responsibilities to himself, his materials, the poem under construction, and the recipients for whom it must move by being read, as is also underlined by the acute and helpful comments in ‘A Note on Metre’ from Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, comments such as this resistance to actors’ ‘highly individual and subjective readings, which can often actively deny the listener their right to their own reading’ (RSS 497). Somewhere within the self-and-other torments of Paterson’s public persona there is a writer of poems that don’t protest too little or too much, poems that are in an appropriately poised relationship with a reader – as, for example, here in the second and concluding stanza of ‘Two Trees’ with its tacit invitation to sound the poem’s hinterland of feeling:

142  p e t e r robin son And no, they did not die from solitude; nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit; nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring for those four yards that lost them everything, as each strained on its shackled root to face the other’s empty, intricate embrace. They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout. And trees are all this poem is about.34 This ending doesn’t transcend his difficulties with a reader, a reader who is also by no means expected to witness rather than participate in this miracle: it transforms them into an asset by realising in the texture of the poem’s experience a reader’s role in its work of feeling and implication. The last line of ‘Two Trees’ is so poised as to invite the precise opposite of what it asserts, while sufficient suggestion is given in previous lines by the denial method of ‘nor’ (shared with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141) to allow a reader sufficient reason to think that its speaker is strategically ‘protesting too much’. ‘And trees are all this poem is about’ points to the back-story of its meaning by insistently not admitting that it’s even got such a tale. Yet there is a further possibility, one in which ‘stuff that shows you off, rather than the poem’, as he says of material to cut in ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’, has not been fully removed (160). If you take the last line at its word then the entire performance is an object lesson in this poetry’s fictive illusionism, by which a reader is rhetorically tricked – as perhaps I have been – into being moved to ponder a hinterland that simply isn’t there. ‘Miracles are by definition uncontrived,’ as he also writes; ‘a contrived miracle is just legerdemain’ and ‘no one believes in that stuff’ (‘Dilemma’ 162). Still, whether it’s a miracle or a sleight of hand depends not only on what a reader finally feels about the experience of reading ‘Two Trees’, but also, if miracle it be, upon that reader’s having taken part, and taken part not collusively, but ­creatively.

No tes  1. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), pp. 20–1. Referred to as Nil.  2. See Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1993), p. 76, and, for instance, Tony Harrison, ‘Them and [uz]’, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 133–4. Paterson’s equivocal view of the latter appears in ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), How Poets Work (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), pp. 155–66, at p. 161; referred to as ‘Dilemma’. In ‘Tony Harrison’s “Continuous” poems [. . .] he should have known when to stop writing’ because ‘eventually [. . .] all he can really tell you is that he’s crying on the page again’. Paterson admits that ‘I’m terrified of repeating myself’, and indicates his consciousness of a reader (‘all he can really tell you’) in the internalising of that terror.  3. Natalie Pollard notes of ‘The Reading’: ‘“your coupons [faces] [. . .] / I’ll have nailed [memorised] by the end of this poem” that “Coupons” is Scots for “faces”, from the receipt that is regularly “punched”’; Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 219, citing Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 24.

pu n ch in g you rs e l f in the f ace    143  4. Peter Howarth, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, London Review of Books 35:6 (21 March 2013): 32.  5. Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber, 2010), p. 485. Referred to as RSS.  6. Ibid. p. xvii. Paterson cites W. S. Merwin’s translation, with a semi-colon replacing the medial full stop, in its original, which is differently inflected by the comma-ed off tags ‘I know it’ and ‘I don’t know it’: ‘Qué te he dado, lo sé. Qué has recibido, no lo sé’; Antonio Porchia, Voices, trans. W. S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003), pp. 60–1.  7. See Angelo’s soliloquy, Measure for Measure, II, ii, 168–92.  8. Paterson uses ‘you guys’ when commenting on Sonnet 85 (RSS 244). The elective affinity between vulgarly phrased directness and popular appeal goes back at least to Philip Larkin’s High Windows (London: Faber, 1974), p. 30: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.  9. See Alastair Fowler, ‘Canon Fodder’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 January 2011, and subsequent correspondence. 10. ‘According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny’: verse 1286, Terentianus Maurus, De litteris, De syllabis, De metris; see (last accessed 14 January 2014). 11. Don Paterson, ‘A Scholar’, on his website: (last accessed 30 June 2013). 12. Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows (London: Picador, 2004), p. 202. Referred to as Shadows. 13. Howarth, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, p. 32. 14. Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work and Death, Aphorisms (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2008), p. 2, and The Book of Shadows, p. 191. The former is referred to as Best. For Paterson’s aphorisms located in a tradition, see James Geery (ed.), The World’s Great Aphorists (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 297–8. 15. Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (London: Faber, 2007), p. 131. Referred to as Blind. 16. Adam Phillips, Monogamy (London: Faber, 1996), no. 25. William Blake set the standard for the self-performing aphorism: ‘To Generalize is to be an Idiot’; ‘Annotations to Reynolds’, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1957), p. 451. 17. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 222. 18. Pollard, Speaking to You, p. 221. She cites Paterson, The Blind Eye, p. 73. 19. Don Paterson (ed.), 101 Sonnets (London: Faber, 1999), p. xiv. 20. Michael Wood, ‘Start Thinking’, London Review of Books 24:5 (7 March 2002): 11. 21. Ibid. 22. W. S. Graham, ‘From a 1949 Notebook . . .’, Edinburgh Review 75 (1987): 36. 23. See the collusively or confrontationally buttonholing ‘Prologue’ and ‘Postmodern’ in God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997), pp. 1–2 and p. 51. 24. See Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought, p. 4. 25. Don Paterson, ‘Introduction’, in Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004), pp. xxxii–iii. 26. ‘“Clarity is the way to go”: Don Paterson talks to Ahren Warner’, Poetry London 74 (Spring 2013): 35. Available at (last accessed 2 January 2014). 27. Paterson, ‘Introduction’, New British Poetry, p. xxix. 28. Lee Harwood, ‘Admiring Mr. Fisher’s Patent Cabinet’, in Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (eds), News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000), p. 51.

144  p e t e r robin son 29. Denise Riley, ‘It Really is the Heart’, Selected Poems (London: Reality Street Editions, 2000), p. 108. 30. ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Southbank Centre T. S. Eliot Lecture, 30 October 2004. Available at (last accessed 11 December 2013). 31. Roy Fisher, ‘Sets’, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), p. 146. Derek Attridge’s heartfelt conclusion to a commentary on the poetic theory and practice of Don Paterson and J. H. Prynne relevantly states: ‘I am suggesting that, as poetry readers (and perhaps as poetry writers too), we can benefit from attending carefully and generously to the many voices in the continuing conversation, including those that make what we feel to be exaggerated and one-sided claims’; Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 100. 32. Pollard, Speaking to You, p. 220. She cites Paterson, ‘Introduction’, New British Poetry, p. xxx. 33. Paterson, ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’, p. 155. Paterson takes this from his heteronym for The Book of Shadows, p. 122. 34. Don Paterson, ‘Two Trees’, Rain (London: Faber, 2009), p. 3.

10  The Publishing of Poetry An Interview between Don Paterson and Matthew Sperling

MS: You’ve been Poetry Editor at Picador since 1997. How did that association begin – was Peter Straus the connection? DP: It was so long ago I can barely remember . . . Peter (who’s now my agent, but was then publisher at Picador) had already decided to publish Robin Robertson’s debut collection. I got a call from Jon Riley, who was at Macmillan in those days – and he proposed starting a small, perfectly formed list and asked me to edit it. It’s now the same size as the Faber front-list, I think, with around thirty-two poets. MS: When the Picador list started, you took on some poets orphaned by the closure of the OUP poetry list (Peter Porter, Sean O’Brien, Michael Donaghy); you’ve published debut collections by poets like Robin Robertson, Paul Farley, John Stammers, Frances Leviston, Rachael Boast, and also books by poets who’ve previously been with other publishers. Is there a typical manner in which a new poet will come across your radar? DP: Typically, it’s word of mouth. It’s also by far the most reliable way; there’s very little talent going round at any one time, and the jungle telephone’s ringing off the hook when it shows up, meaning you’ll often hear about folk from several sources at once. A poet, an editor or an academic will drop a line and say . . . you want to keep an eye on this one. So the A&R part of the job is just keeping an ear to the ground. Talking to people, asking for recommendations, and making sure you’re in touch with younger poets, especially. Ploughing through slush piles or reading hundreds of magazines has always been the most inefficient way of doing it, and guarantees a snowblind loss of perspective. Poets who are with other publishers approach me directly from time to time. I don’t poach, though. MS: Is there something like ‘Picador poetry’ that you could characterise? And how do you think the complexion of the Picador list has changed in the fifteen years it’s been running?

146  d o n p aterson an d m a tth ew sp e rl ing DP: I hope anyone would have trouble characterising Picador poetry. I hope it would be defined by variety, but we’re all our own blind spots. So God knows how effectively I’ve compensated for mine. But I like the fact we can publish Kate Tempest and John Kinsella, Tim Donnelly and Kath Jamie. I make a point of trying to publish against my own taste, so the list has a lot of poetry I admire, as well as poetry I love. Love can be a narrow, fickle and self-obsessed thing – and if you’re guided by love alone, you’ll end up making the list in some warped version of your own image. I’d like to publish more experimental work, but there are huge sales issues, and we have no state subsidy. I’ve got accountants instead. So sales of less than five hundred or so units mean it’s not really a viable book for us – but three or four hundred are the correct sales for some difficult books, so long as they’ve gone to the most receptive three or four hundred readers. We’re just the wrong kind of publisher for those books, and our way of targeting that sort of small readership is inefficient. I’m pleased to observe that we publish more women than men, now, and we’ve arrived at this without any sense of affirmative action. (Some have argued this was just what was required after the almost absolute male domination of the lists over the last hundred years, but it’s the wrong approach in the arts entirely.) There just happens to be, in my humble opinion, a greater number of interesting, bold and various women poets writing these days, and still too many self-conscious and intellectually insecure blokes who sound much the same. It’s not a golden age for the young male poet, for some reason. MS: Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a subsidiary of the Georg von Holtzbrinck group, which has consolidated annual revenue of about two billion pounds. How do the pressures of market viability affect you as an editor? T. S. Eliot wrote in 1952 that ‘whereas with most categories of books you are aiming to make as much money as possible, with poetry you are aiming to lose as little as possible’, but is this still the case within a large commercial publishing group?1 DP: It’s exactly the same, and I keep a copy of that little address you’re quoting from near at hand, because it remains the wisest description of how to run a poetry list in the commercial sector. My bosses know that a successful poetry list is one of the most economical ways to sustain the literary cachet of the imprint, mainly through the disproportionate amount of broadsheet exposure it gets. I know Anthony Forbes Watson, Macmillan’s Managing Director, holds the poetry list up as a model of responsible publishing in an economic downturn, something as a Scot I’m naturally pleased with. But I’ve also enjoyed huge support from the Picador publishers over the years: Peter, Andrew Kidd, and the current incumbent, a brilliant publisher called Paul Baggaley. We pay no big advances, but work hard to make sure the poets receive some meaningful royalties; Macmillan also allow me to conduct a little internal net book agreement, and argue for loss-making titles if others show a good return. Accountants, on the other hand, will go . . . it costs x to run this building for a year, y to pay the salaries of everyone involved in the publication process, and we publish z books. So (x + y) / z = how much a book has to earn to break even. It works out about 25k. Ninety-eight per cent of poetry books will never make that.

th e pu blishing of p oe try    147 But if you’re allowed to consider the whole list as a wee independent economy, you can make it work. MS: Eliot also discussed the importance for a poetry list of having a balance of the ‘three classes’ of poets, in terms of sales: the poets ‘who actually make some money’, the poets who ‘have proved their worth’ critically and ‘ought not to show more than a small deficit on a book’, and ‘the poets on whom you are losing money’, whom you stick with if they have ‘exceptional merit’.2 Does this hold for your experience at Picador? DP: Again, I follow the guy to the letter. The final category is, of course, the most important – because these fine poets might otherwise go unpublished, and any editor should be most proud of those difficult or unpopular poets they manage to keep in print. Nonetheless there’s a point where I’d recommend the poet goes to a smaller press who’re better geared up to take the loss, as my priority has to be the health of the whole system. This isn’t to say other editors have it easy just because they have Arts Council support. Michael Schmidt runs his operation in much the same way, and I think that’s why Carcanet have enjoyed terrific longevity. MS: You said in 1999 that ‘overpublication’s a serious problem, as it just makes the good stuff all the harder for the casual or innocent reader to get to’.3 Do you still think so in 2013? Has it got worse? DP: It’s awful. But the situation now is even more worrying: what used to be selfevidently bad is now confusingly mediocre, and separating that stuff from the good requires real critical discrimination. Alas this is a skill and a language we’ve largely lost, as the academy has encouraged more neutrally descriptive approaches and methodologies. The workshop culture and creative writing machine have produced an epidemic of surface competence. These poems all look, smell and sound like poems now. They’re still written in the absence of any native talent, though, and back in the day you could tell they sucked a mile off. But we still shouldn’t be publishing this stuff. I’m delighted people are writing better, of course, as it gives them more pleasure, and more respect for the art; but it’s gone hand-in-hand, alas, with encouraging a lot of unrealistic and inappropriate ambitions. MS: In ‘The Rat’, the young poet’s masterpiece turns on the hapless editor and taunts him – ‘For all the craft and clever-clever / you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever’4 – suggesting that the author-editor’s position is a pretty conflicted one. Previously you’ve said that Editing doesn’t help my writing one bit; all you’re doing is dredging up bits of machinery that normally sit below the waterline of conscious operation, then taking them to bits, pointing and poking at them . . . so it’s harder for you to go back to your own stuff and be unselfconscious and instinctive about it all again [. . .]5

148  d o n p aterson an d m a tth ew sp e rl ing And an aphorism in The Blind Eye has only one piece of advice for the budding poetry editor: ‘open all the mail away from your face’.6 Is there an upside to editing? In terms of, perhaps, being part of a knowable community of other writer-readers; learning from them; even being creatively spurred by rivalry? DP: It has to be its own reward, really. At best, it’s an act of midwifery, and you end up as proud when the X or Y’s book does well or wins a prize as if you’d written it yourself – though stupid or bad reviews provoke violently protective or defensive reactions too. I do old-fashioned line edits, and of course learn a lot in the process, mainly through jealousy. I’ll read a line of Kath Jamie’s I’d kill for – but from the privileged position of being able to see it as having arisen through dynamic process. So maybe I have a better chance of figuring out the delicate mechanism on which the success of these lines depends, I guess. Though mostly I’m detained in two things – trying to work out a) what the poem’s own ambitions are, and to what extent and in what manner they’ve fallen short; and b) the difference between what the poet intended and what they’ve actually said. So you have to ask poets what they meant, which is an unusual privilege, and makes for an interesting conversation. And sometimes a rather disturbing one. Accidental elision is the main problem these days, and we all do it because the reader stopped calling us on it: they assume the poem contains some productive difficulty – but part of our modernist inheritance is that we’ve been taught that this productive difficulty is most often signalled by discontinuities, for which they now have far too high a tolerance. Alas, half of our discontinuities arise through loss of perspective. We’re too close to our own work, and leave out key contextualising details. Mainly deictic. This sounds like a little technical thing, but it’s a huge problem, and epidemic. If no one calls us on stuff, we all get slack. MS: I’d like to ask about class and the poetry world. Your early poem ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ offers out its own readership, for their likely class condescension: I’d swing for him, and any other cunt happy to let my father know his station, which probably includes yourself. To be blunt.7 – which I take as a self-wounding counterpart to Derek Mahon’s lines in ‘Afterlives’: ‘What middle-class cunts we are  / To imagine for one second  / That our privileged ideals  / Are divine wisdom’ (later, and surely regrettably, revised down to ‘middle-class twits’, then ‘shits’).8 The New Generation poets were, somewhat loosely, promoted as challenging the Oxbridge-London bias of the literary world with a new burst of regionalism and demotic vigour: your ‘scourge-of-the-middleclasses, hammer-of-the-Oxbridge-hegemony turn’.9 But a decade later Andrea Brady accused you, in your introduction to the Graywolf anthology, of ‘strut[ting] around like poetry’s Neoconservative chief of staff, reinforcing the interests of the poetic establishment through hysterical conjurations of threats’, while being hamstrung by your ‘desires for both bourgeois commercial success and the endorsement of the elite’.10 What gives? Is a poet’s sense of his/her relationship to society and readership

th e pu blishing of p oe try    149 inevitably going to be marked and deformed by what Richard Sennett called ‘the hidden injuries of class’? DP: Ah yes, Derek’s strange revisions. Still, ‘shits’ is better than ‘twits’ . . . ‘twats’ would be an intermediate improvement in the meantime. Maybe he’ll work his way back to ‘cunts’ one letter at a time . . . What gives, indeed. Anyway, forgive me the long answer, but the question is important. It’s true: I do tend to refine whatever position I’m holding into self-caricature, which is a bad habit. Andrea’s first comment was accurate, but if you’re looking for real ‘hysterical conjurations’ and some context for my own strutting ten years ago, you might first look at the stuff that was coming from the ampersands throughout the nineties and early ’00s, and to which I was reacting. Sean O’Brien – a more capacious intelligence I have yet to encounter – routinely declared a fool; various public calls for my own controlled explosion; effigies of Peter Porter, recreationally burned at conferences; Billy Collins loathed on principle, since his vast readership must indicate that his work is crude and simple-minded; Seamus dismissed as a minor bone-and-bog poet no better than forty other Celtic lyricists, who’d acceded to his position by sinister avuncular charm alone; Donaghy receiving violent anonymous threats (complete with disgusting BDSM jpegs) warning him off when he dared stick his head above the parapet . . . trust me, I could fill a book. Nothing but a steady torrent of ad hominem and paranoid bile. So I got curious as to what would happen when I slung a bucket back in the opposite direction – though it was scrupulously not ad hominem. It turned out they didn’t like it much. I regret it now. I don’t regard them as they any more, and got to know and like too many of them personally, and think the division we created between us entirely false. I’m not a natural or very talented hater. As accurate as I think many of the statements in that essay were, I pretty much lowered myself to the level of the worst of their own trolls. Though you’re perfectly correct to identify that neocon barking as insecurity, and locate it in my lowly origins. (I can disprove my ‘allegiance’ to a conservative aesthetic pretty quickly, though, as I worked in the musical avant-garde for many years.) The literary avants are just about the last liberal cohort to persist in thinking of the working classes as politically radical; though I can think of no activity more self-deluded and ‘bourgeois’ – and more dependent on tenure and trustfund for its indulgence – than the belief that ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry can be a force for popular political change. But the working class is a class by default only, and are broadly aspirational, and would like their children to get the fuck out of it and meet the queen one day. We’re bred to aspire to be nothing but a pillar of the conservative establishment. However there were also more thought-out reasons for writing that intro the way I did. It was written for a US market which has zero interest in UK poetry – and whose last encounter with it had been Keith Tuma’s Oxford book, which gave an account of the UK scene that was predicated on the almost sociopathic idea that ‘readership’ is equivalent to ‘literary irrelevance’.11 But mine was an equally biased account. The reasons were complicated, and some of them personal. Donaghy, to whom I was terribly close, was eating himself alive with the obsession that the anti-poetry

150  d o n p aterson an d m a tth ew sp e rl ing ­­ barbarians were at the gate. I’d make a far more balanced book now, but at that time it wouldn’t have been the one to publish. We needed to put together a book of poetry that non-poets and non-academics were actually reading in the UK. And I should also say that Charlie Simic, the co-editor, supported all of this a hundred per cent. He was working in universities where people actually said things like ‘I’m no longer interested in the primary text’. However . . . as for my ‘desires for both bourgeois commercial success and the endorsement of the elite’: that’s so many kinds of wrong. Every word in that phrase is hiding some uninterrogated assumption. What’s bourgeois about commercial success, exactly, and why is commercial failure a guarantee of your left-wing credentials? What on earth is ‘commercial success’ in poetry? There’s the ultimate in relative concepts. Who are these ‘elite’? There’s no elite in the contemporary field. Nor does anyone ‘endorse’ anything in a meaningful sense. But even if they did – why would that be antithetical to shifting a few units? I’m afraid it’s one of those accusations that tells us too much about the accuser. But Andrea was dead right to be annoyed, since that was the intention. I’d spent a decade listening to the mainstream get it in the neck, and somehow feeling obliged to take it meekly and unprotestingly. But I really, really don’t think there’s any point in stoking these enmities any more, and I haven’t for ten years. I’m trying to atone by doing my little bit to bring both sides together now. We have a lot in common, share a love for many of the same things, and often regard the same texts as key. And it really is a knife-fight in a phone box. For the record, though: I’ve had discreet approaches from a great many of the major players in the UK avant-garde, many of whom I’d have been delighted to publish, if I could’ve taken the hit. So much for this alleged commitment to the anti-bourgeois integrity of the little presses. They seem to care as much as I do about their books reaching the widest possible audience – and I could not respect them more for that. However I really do know what books sell; there are some folk who even now hark back to Iain Sinclair’s stewardship of the Paladin list twentyfive years ago as if it was some kind of golden moment in British poetry. They were really good books, too – but for absolutely the wrong publisher. The list’s collapse wasn’t down to a failure of nerve on Paladin’s part. You can blame Rupert Murdoch’s accountants all you want, but anyone’s accountants would have pulped those books. The publishers were misled as to their sales potential, had no means of levering the kind of broadsheet coverage that would have maxed the target readership anyway, and printed twenty times more than they could possibly sell or warehouse. The exercise guaranteed that no metropolitan publisher would go near the avants for twenty years, for fear of being similarly stung. There’s only one way of doing this: you crosssubsidise your difficult books with your accessible and popular ones, and you get a big fat nul points for running a potentially viable list into the ground on the basis of your cultural principles. Eliot would’ve told him that. MS: We should talk about books, finally, since this is really what publishing is about. In 1999 you predicted ‘we’ll go on publishing books because they’re such a perfect design – lovely, analogue, human-shaped things, like wrist-watches’.12 That was before the tablet computer and the e-reader were invented (and the kids today have

th e pu blishing of p oe try    151 iPhones instead of wrist-watches). Is poetry still resistant to digitisation though – will the fetish-character of the poem always find a match in the fetishised physical book-object, among the few enthusiasts for such things? DP: Not especially resistant, though it’s intimately tied to format in a way that presents some especial technical problems. Forcing page-turns at stanza breaks has only recently been sorted. And I am worried about the fact that, say, the epub3 format lets you convert from html5 – which means that the temptation to ruin the purity of the reading experience with dancing visuals and embedded audio might prove overwhelming. So long as they remain optional, fine. And certain devices can’t present poetry without killing it. Smartphones. But tablets and Kindles – especially now we’ve sorted many of the scalability issues – are capable of making it look really good. I’m sitting here reading Jack Gilbert on a paperwhite Kindle, and there are a few turnover problems with the lines, but that’s it. So we can still make the poem look fetishisable, though you couldn’t enjoy a poem on a device you didn’t also find beautiful, I think: poetry is too sensual an experience for the text not to bleed with the format. For that reason print publication will hang on longer in poetry than anywhere else. But there’s also been a little boom in bespoke publishing, and I think we’ll see a healthy little market in specialist and collector’s editions, which may revive the fortunes of the paper library a bit too. MS: Are you closely involved with design aspects of your own books, or those of your authors (house styles permitting)? DP: Design – well, there’s not much to it. You can only balls it up. In commercial publishing, you don’t let poets design their own cover, unless they’ve a) an eye for it and b) understand that the only point of the cover is to get readers who don’t know your work to pick it up, since they’re then four times as likely to buy it. Pretend to consult by offering four alternative covers, three of which are crap. Then it’s dumb stuff. Securing a good enough weight of paper from the printer so it doesn’t bleed and you can’t see through it, reasonable point size, decent margin, title centred on the median and not the longest line, observe stanza breaks at page-turns, put twopage poems verso-recto, and that’s it. And never, ever insist on filling a sixty-fourpage extent if the poet has only written fifty pages of decent poems. No one minds blanks. We’re looking at printing some books in a cut-down royal just now, which will give us a big left margin and a lovely sense of space round the poem. MS: Your own publishing practice as a poet seems largely based on the model that became dominant maybe in the fifties: individual poems in magazines, leading to a slim volume every four years or so, with the title of one of the poems for its overall title. Can you imagine this changing? DP: Yes, the career-path thing is changing, though very slowly. It takes a while for new media formats to appropriate to themselves the same solidity and seriousness we unthinkingly grant the old, and they have a lot to prove. But because ego and

152  d o n p aterson an d m a tth ew sp e rl ing ambition don’t change, folk still cling to the security of the CV, the apprenticeship served in the magazines, the cover letter, the celeb endorsement, the first slim vol as a symbol of real ‘debut’. There’s no doubt that it’ll change, but there’s also no doubt that given the complex nature of the change – it’ll be surprising. Something will happen we didn’t anticipate. I foresee the return of anon, but anon like you never saw them before – and I think computers will start to work as useful tools, at least once we move away from silly wee aleatoric programs and programming input becomes more expressive, as it is in music. But they’ll start with a revival of the cento, I think, which is a halfway house between human and algorithmic composition, and is emerging from rap anyway. This interview was conducted by email between January and October 2013.

no tes  1. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Publishing of Poetry’, The Bookseller, 6 December 1952, p. 1,568.  2. Ibid. p. 1,569.  3. Andy Brown (ed.), Binary Myths 2: Correspondences with Poet-Editors (Exeter: Stride Publications, 1999), p. 92.  4. Don Paterson, ‘The Rat’, Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003), p. 32.  5. Brown (ed.), Binary Myths, p. 92.  6. Don Paterson, The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (London: Faber, 2007), p. 118.  7. Don Paterson, Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993), p. 21.  8. Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 1 (‘cunts’); Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1991), p. 50 (‘twits’); Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999), p. 58 (‘shits’).  9. Don Paterson, ‘New Gen Diary’, Poetry Review 84:1 (Spring 1994): 61. 10. Andrea Brady, ‘Meagrely Provided: A Response to Don Paterson’, Chicago Review 39:3–4 (Summer 2004): 396–402, at 397, responding to the introduction in Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004). 11. Keith Tuma (ed.), Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12. Brown (ed.), Binary Myths, p. 97.

Select Bibliography

WORKS BY D O N PA T ER S O N ( in C hr o no lo gi c al Or de r ) Poetry and aphorism — Nil Nil (London: Faber, 1993). — God’s Gift to Women (London: Faber, 1997). — The Eyes: A Version of Antonio Machado (London: Faber, 1999). — The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2001). — Landing Light (London: Faber, 2003; Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004). — The Book of Shadows (London: Picador, 2004). — Orpheus: After Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006). — The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice (London: Faber, 2007). — Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work and Death, Aphorisms (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2008). — Rain (London: Faber, 2009; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). — and Alison Watt, Hiding in Full View (Edinburgh: Ingleby Gallery, 2012). — Selected Poems (London: Faber, 2012). — ‘A Scholar’, Don Paterson official website: (last accessed 30 June 2013).

Prose and editorial — and Jo Shapcott (eds), Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century (London: Picador, 1999). — (ed.), 101 Sonnets (London: Faber, 1999). — (ed.), Robert Burns: Poems Selected by Don Paterson (London: Faber, 2001). — and Clare Brown (eds), Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words (London: Picador, 2003). — and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004). — Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber, 2010). — Ars Poetica, forthcoming. — Adventures in Clubland, forthcoming.

154  d o n p aterson : con tem porary critical e ssay s Essays — ‘New Gen Diary’, Poetry Review 84:1 (Spring 1994): 58–61. — ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), How Poets Work (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), pp. 155–66. — ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Southbank Centre T. S. Eliot Lecture, 30 October 2004, (last accessed 11 December 2013). — ‘The Lyric Principle, Part 1: The Sense of Sound’, Poetry Review 97:2 (Summer 2007): 56–72, (last accessed 11 December 2013). — ‘The Lyric Principle, Part 2: The Sound of Sense’, Poetry Review 97:3 (Autumn 2007): 54–70. — ‘The Domain of the Poem, Part One’, Poetry Review 100:4 (Winter 2010): 81–100. — ‘The Domain of the Poem, Part Two: The Poetic Contract’, Poetry Review 101:1 (Spring 2011): 71–95. — ‘Forgive the tone of heavy rumination’, Don Paterson official website 2013, (last accessed 11 December 2013).

Interviews and newspaper articles — and anonymous, ‘The best days of your life?’, The Herald, 18 January 2005, (last accessed 11 December 2013). — and Nicholas Wroe, ‘Leading light’, The Guardian, 25 November 2006, (last accessed 4 November 2013). — and Colin Waters, ‘Don Paterson lingers in the rain’, The Herald, 31 August 2009, (last accessed 11 December 2013). — The Verb, radio interview, BBC Radio 3, 18 September 2009. — ‘My other life’, The Observer, 20 December 2009. — and Ahren Warner, ‘ “Clarity is the way to go”: Don Paterson talks to Ahren Warner’, Poetry London 74 (Spring 2013), (last accessed 2 January 2014).

W O RKS CITED Armitage, Simon, ‘Life on the line’, The Guardian, 5 June 2004, (last accessed 21 November 2013). — and Robert Crawford (eds), The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 1998). Attridge, Derek, ‘The Case for the English Dolnik, or, How Not to Introduce Prosody’, Poetics Today 331 (Spring 2012): 1–26. — Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). — The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). Auden, W. H., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977). Bachelor, Stephen, Buddhism without Beliefs (London: Putnam and Sons, 1997). Bally, John, and Bo Reipurth, The Birth of Stars and Planets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

select bibl iograp hy    155 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993). — Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982). — A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Vintage, 2002). — Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Bertram, Vicki, Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Women and Men Poets (London: Pandora Press, 2009). Bissett, Alan, ‘The Dead Can Sing: An Introduction’, in Alan Bissett (ed.), Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001), pp. 1–8. Blake, William, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1957). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Borges, Jorge Louis, Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962). Brady, Andrea, ‘Meagrely Provided: A Response to Don Paterson’, Chicago Review 39:3–4 (Summer 2004): 396–402. Brinton, Ian, Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry Since 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958). Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Brown, Andy (ed.), Binary Myths 2: Correspondences with Poet-Editors (Exeter: Stride Publications, 1999). Burt, Stephen, ‘The Contemporary Sonnet’, in A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 245–65. Caplan, David, Poetic Form: An Introduction (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007). Corcoran, Neil (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Crawford, Robert, ‘Deep Down in the Trash’, London Review of Books 19:16 (21 August 1997): 26. — and Mick Imlah (eds), The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Cunningham, David, Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays (eds), Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005). Eliot, T. S., ‘The Publishing of Poetry’, The Bookseller, 6 December 1952, pp. 1,568–70. Fenton, James, An Introduction to English Poetry (London: Penguin, 2003). Fisher, Roy, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2005). Fowler, Alastair, ‘Canon Fodder’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 January 2011, (last accessed 23 January 2014). Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, intro. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 121–62. — and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, ed. and trans. James Strachey, foreword by Irvin D. Yahom (New York: Hogarth Press, 2000). Geery, James (ed), The World’s Great Aphorists (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). Gillis, Alan, ‘Don Paterson’, in Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 172–86 and 208–10. — ‘Names for Nameless Things: Poetics of Place Names’, in Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton (eds), Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 204–21. Graham, W. S., ‘From a 1949 Notebook . . .’, Edinburgh Review 75 (1987): 36.

156  d o n p aterson : con tem porary critical e ssay s Gray, John, Straw Dogs (London: Granta, 2002). Gunn, Thom, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1993). — ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’, in Paul Keegan (ed.), The Penguin Book of English Verse (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 985. Hames, Scott, ‘Paterson and Poetic Autonomy’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 245–54. Hamilton, Ian, and Jeremy Noel-Tod (eds), The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Harrison, Tony, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 2007). Harvey, Peter, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Harwood, Lee, ‘Admiring Mr. Fisher’s Patent Cabinet’, in Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard (eds), News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000), p. 51. Heaney, Seamus, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998). Howarth, Peter, ‘Degree of Famousness etc’, London Review of Books 35:6 (21 March 2013): 31–3. Hubbard, Sue, ‘On Becoming a Fan’ (2011), (last accessed 15 August 2013). Ives, Christopher, Zen Awakening and Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992). Jakobson, Roman, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–77. — ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 67–96. Jung, Carl, ‘Introduction’, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of Collected Works (London: Routledge, 1968). — Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). Keats, John, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970). Kinzie, Mary, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Komar, Kathleen L., ‘The Duino Elegies’, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 80–94. Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems, ed. and intro. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, with Marvell Press, 1988). — High Windows (London: Faber, 1974). Leeder, Karen, ‘Rilke’s Legacy in the English-Speaking World’, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 189–204. Lindsay, Maurice, and Lesley Duncan (eds), The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Lockerbie, Catherine, ‘Rhythms which guarantee life’, The Scotsman, 20 November 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). MacDiarmid, Hugh, Selected Poems, ed. Alan Riach and Michael Grieve (London: Penguin, 1994). Machado, Antonio, Selected Poems, trans. Alan D. Trueblood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). McKenna, Steven R., ‘Burns and Virgil’, in Gerard Carruthers (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 137–49.

select bibl iograp hy    157 Mcleod, Donald, ‘Scottish Calvinism: A Dark, Repressive Force?’, The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 19:2 (Autumn 2001): 195–205. Mahon, Derek, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999). — Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1991). — The Snow Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Morley, David, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Muldoon, Paul, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber, 2006). Nerval, Gérard de, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Sieburth (London: Penguin, 1999). O’Brien, Sean, ‘Contemporary British Poetry’, in Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to TwentiethCentury Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 571–84. O’Neill, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Oswald, Alice, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (London: Faber, 2007). Padel, Ruth, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life (London: Chatto, 2002). Phillips, Adam, Monogamy (London: Faber, 1996). Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1981). Pollard, Natalie, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Porchia, Antonio, Voices, trans. W. S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003). Potts, Robert, ‘None More Black’, Review of Don Paterson, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 2010, (last accessed 3 September 2012). Reiman, Donald H., and Neil Fraistat (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 2002). — and Nora Crook (eds), The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Riley, Denise, Selected Poems (London: Reality Street Editions, 2000). Rilke, Rainer Maria, Selected Poems, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, intro. and notes by Robert Vilain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). — The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, intro. by Robert Hass (London: Picador, 1982). — Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop, first trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1936). Robinson, Peter (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). St John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, in The Complete Works, vol. 1, ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1947). Sawmill, I. E., ‘Rain by Don Paterson’, The Literateur, 26 November 2006, (last accessed 15 August 2013). Smith, G. Gregory, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan, 1919). Stafford, Fiona, ‘A Scottish Renaissance’, in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 230–44. Stevens, Wallace, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955). Tuma, Keith, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). — (ed.), Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Wainwright, Jeffrey, Poetry: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2004). Waters, Colin, ‘Don Paterson lingers in the rain’, The Herald, 31 August 2009, (last accessed 11 December 2013). Wilde, Oscar, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 213–79. Winnicott, D. W., ‘Communicating and Not Communicating: Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth, 1965), pp. 179–92. Wood, Michael, ‘Start Thinking’, London Review of Books 24:5 (7 March 2002): 11. Wordsworth, William, 21st-Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Wroe, Nicholas, ‘Leading light’, The Guardian, 25 November 2006, (last accessed 4 November 2013). Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View (Boston: MIT Press, 2006).

Index

Note: bold entries refer to illustrations. al-Ahnaf, Abbas Ibn, 38, 39 Allais, Alphonse, 103 aphorisms, 16, 135–7, 138 Attridge, Derek, 144n Auden, W. H., 62 Badger, Gerry, 118 Baggaley, Paul, 146 Barthes, Roland, 16, 51, 124–5, 127 photography, 115, 117 Beridze, Natalie, 87 Bertram, Vicki, 98 Bilhaud, Paul, 103 Bisset, Alan, 99 Bloom, Harold, 73n Boast, Rachael, 145 Booth, Stephen, 35 Borges, Jorge Luis, 126 Brady, Andrea, 148, 150 Broom, Sarah, 89 Buddhism, 103–5 Burns, Robert, 10, 14, 88 anthologies of, 85 Paterson’s Robert Burns, 85–7 Burnside, John, 4, 89 Burt, Stephen, 35 class, 148–50 cognitive blending, 26 Cohen, Leonard, 107 Collins, Billy, 149 compassion, 104, 108–9

conceptual domains, 26–7, 82 consonants, 24, 25, 76–80 Crawford, Robert, 4, 85, 89, 102 darkness, 124–5, 126, 127, 128 digitisation, 150–1 Donaghy, Michael, 44, 46, 57, 70, 110, 128, 145, 149–50 Donnelly, Timothy, 82, 146 Duffy, Carol Ann, 94 Dunn, Douglas, 4, 89 Eliot, T. S., 4, 32, 146, 147 Ennis, Seamus, 54 Farley, Paul, 145 fathers/fatherhood in Paterson’s poetry, 37, 41, 107 Fauconnier, Gilles, 11, 26 Fibonacci series, 34, 45 Firth, J. R., 11, 22 Fisher, Roy, 139, 140 football, 93–4 Freud, Sigmund, 129n Frost, Robert, 10, 15, 102 Fukushima, Keido, 104 Gillis, Alan, 49, 93 golden ratio, 34–5, 45, 47 Graham, W. S., 137 Gray, John, Straw Dogs, 15, 98, 109 Gunn, Thom, 62, 131

160  i n d e x Harrison, Tony, 16, 131–2 Harvey, Peter, 59 Harwood, Lee, 16, 139 Hass, Robert, 65 Heaney, Seamus, 13, 35, 63, 149 Heller, Erich, 137 Herbert, George, 51 Herbert, W. N., 90, 94 Hill, Geoffrey, 16, 35, 139 Hogg, James, 99 Hood, Thomas, 25 Horace, 21 Howarth, Peter, 39, 63, 132, 135 Hubbard, Sue, 108–9 isologues, 81, 82 Jakobson, Roman, 11, 23, 26, 27 Jamie, Kathleen, 4, 89, 94, 146, 148 Jung, Carl, 121, 127, 130n Kafka, Franz, 124 Keats, John, 69 ‘To Autumn’, 24–5, 77–80 Kerrigan, John, 35 Kidd, Andrew, 146 Kinsella, John, 146 Komar, Kathleen L., 67 Kristeva, Julia, 128 Lakoff, George, 11, 26 Larkin, Philip, 13, 16, 62–3, 68 Leonard, Tom, 92 Leviston, Frances, 145 Lichtenberg, G. C., 135 Linneus, Carl, 91 Lucretius, 70 Lyotard, Jean-François, 51 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 10, 14, 89–90, 92 Machado, Antonio, 39, 40, 65 Mahon, Derek, 148, 149 metaphor, 27–8, 80–1 metonymy, 27, 28 Milton, John, 106 Mitchell, Stephen, 66 Montreal International Poetry Prize, 4 Muldoon, Paul, 4, 12, 35, 50–1, 82 musicality, 24, 25, 77 mysticism, 125 national identity, 14–15, 89, 91 Nerval, Gérard de, 72, 128

nigredo, 124, 127 nothing and nothingness, 13, 61–5, 69 Auden, 62 emptiness, 65 in The Eyes, 65–6 Gunn, 62 Heaney, 63 in Landing Light, 63–4 Larkin, 62–3 in Orpheus, 66–7 in Rain, 67–73 O’Brien, Sean, 145, 149 O’Hagan, Andrew, 85 Ondaatje Prize for the Royal Society of Literature, 4 Oswald, Alice, 35 pararhyme, 24 Paterson, Don amateur/professional poet distinction, 101–2 aphorisms, 16, 135–7, 138 authorial need, 137, 138 autobiographical discourse, 101, 102 career-paths of poets, 151–2 class, 148–50 clock poems, 59 commercial success/failure, 150 concealment and self-disclosure, 115, 116–17, 120, 121–2, 129 confessional poetry, opposition to, 101 critical attention to, 7 critical neglect of, 7–8 darkness, 124–5, 126, 127, 128 death, 30, 37, 46, 58, 111, 124 digitisation, 150–1 dreams, 57 fathers/fatherhood in poetry, 37, 41, 107 futility, 52, 53, 58 games and meaning, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55 grandfather, 100 humour, 7, 14, 15, 93, 94, 102 images of, 1 influence on poetry in the UK, 4 light, 114, 115, 124, 125, 128 love, 55–6 mastery of form, 51, 55 meaning, 12, 49, 52–3, 56 metre, 33n multiple roles of, 3, 4, 5 national identity, 14–15, 89, 91 nature of art, 6

inde x   161 origins of desire to be a poet, 98 overinterpretation of poetry, 26 photography, 15–16, 114, 115–17, 124 postmodern poetry, criticism of, 10, 16, 23, 51, 88, 89, 93, 137–9 quantifying terminology, 12, 49 reader-relations, 2, 16, 132–3, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 scientific materialism, 71 Scottish literary tradition, 14–15, 85, 86, 94 straight-talking style, 133–4, 139 value, 4, 54, 56, 57 violence, 16 see also nothing and nothingness; Picador, Paterson as Poetry Editor at; poetic theory; religion and spirituality; sonnets books and collections Adventures in Clubland, 101 Ars Poetica, 4, 11, 21, 31–2; see also ‘The Domain of the Poem’ (essay); ‘The Lyric Principle’ (essay) Best Thought, Worst Thought, 135 The Blind Eye: A Book of Late Advice, 58, 65 The Book of Shadows, 135, 136, 137 The Eyes, 8, 36, 39–40, 42–3, 65–6, 98, 112 God’s Gift to Women, 12, 36, 38–9, 49, 59, 92, 95, 102–6 Hiding in Full View, 11, 15–16, 115–17, 119–20, 121, 122 Landing Light, 8, 12, 36, 40–3, 49, 63–4, 90, 107–9, 127 New British Poetry (ed.), 51, 88, 89, 138–9 Nil Nil, 12, 36–8, 49, 53, 93–5, 98 101 Sonnets, 34, 35, 36, 44, 45 Orpheus, 5–7, 8, 35, 36, 43–4, 66–7, 71 Rain, 8, 12, 36, 44–7, 67–73, 102, 109–11 Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 33n, 35–6, 87–8, 132–5, 141 Robert Burns: Poems Selected by Don Paterson, 85–7 essays and lectures ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (T. S. Eliot Lecture), 101, 140 ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’, 140–1, 142 ‘The Domain of the Poem’, 7, 11, 25–31 ‘The Lyric Principle’, 7, 1 ‘The Sense of Sound’, 21–4 ‘The Sound of Sense’, 24–5

poems ‘The Alexandrian Library’, 31, 49–50, 51, 55, 105, 114, 126 ‘Amnesia’, 53–4, 100, 101 ‘Behind the Mirror’, 116 ‘The Black Box’, 42, 43 ‘The Box’, 41, 42, 55 ‘Candlebird’, 38–9 ‘The Chartres of Gowrie’, 95–6 ‘The Circle’, 56–7, 70 ‘The Day’, 56, 109–10 ‘Dream’, 65 ‘Drop Serene’, 37 ‘The Electric Brae’, 37 ‘An Elliptical Stylus’, 129n, 131–2, 138, 148 ‘The Error’, 57 ‘Exeunt’, 36 ‘Ezekiel’, 54 ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’, 53, 93 ‘Filter’, 57 ‘The Forest of Suicides’, 107–8 ‘from 1001 Nights: The Early Years’, 59 ‘A God’, 66 ‘Graffito’, 38 ‘The Handspring’, 52, 67–8 ‘Heliographer’, 37 ‘Heredity’, 99 ‘Imperial’, 89 ‘The Last Waltz’, 55 ‘Leaving’, 43–4, 66 ‘Letter to Twins’, 64 ‘The Light’, 41–2 ‘Little Corona’, 105 ‘The Lover’, 104–5 ‘Luing’, 55, 56, 63 ‘Morning Prayer’, 36 ‘My Love’, 55–6 ‘Nil Nil’, 93–5 ‘Nothing’, 112 ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’, 59, 103–4 ‘Orchitis’, 54–5 ‘Parallax’, 69–70 ‘The Passing’, 67 ‘Phantom’, 44–7, 57–8, 70–3, 110–11, 128, 130n ‘Poem’, 65 ‘Poetry’, 40, 65–6 ‘Postmodern’, 14, 92–3 ‘Prologue’, 103 ‘Rain’, 111

162  i n d e x poems (cont.) ‘The Rain at Sea’, 70 ‘The Rat’, 147 ‘The Reading’, 64 ‘Renku: My Last Thirty-Five Deaths’, 56, 67 ‘Road’, 47n ‘St Brides: Sea Mail’, 55 ‘A Scholar’, 134–5 ‘Shhh’, 37–8 ‘Siesta’, 39–40, 65, 105–6 ‘Sleep’, 47n ‘Sliding on Loch Ogil’, 52, 63–4 ‘Song for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze’, 31, 87 ‘The Swing’, 57, 68, 109 ‘A Talking Book’, 1–2, 3 ‘10:45: Dundee Ward Road’, 59 ‘The Thread’, 41, 107 ‘To the Great Zero’, 40 ‘Twinflooer’, 14, 90–2 ‘Two Trees’, 44, 57, 141–2 ‘Walking with Russell’, 41, 107 ‘The White Lie’, 64–5 ‘Why Do You Stay Up So Late?’, 109 ‘The Work’, 40 ‘Zen Sang at Dayligaun’, 14, 90 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 11, 26 Phillips, Adam, 136 phonestheme, 11, 22–3, 77 photography, 15–16, 124 ‘The Alexandrian Library’, 114 Barthes, 115, 117 Hiding in Full View, 115–17 self-portraiture, 117–18, 118, 122–3, 123, 124 Woodman, 117–18, 118, 119, 122–3, 122, 123, 124 Picador, Paterson as Poetry Editor at, 3, 10, 145–6 book design, 151 classes of poets on list, 147 commercial pressures, 146–7 editing, 147–8 finding new poets, 145 overpublication, 147 Picador Poetry Prize, 5 Plath, Sylvia, 10, 15, 64, 107 ‘Daddy’, 99–100 poetic theory, 11 abstract and concrete concepts, 28, 30, 31 characteristics of poetry, 22 conceptual domains, 26–7, 82 focus on lyric poetry, 22, 75

integration, 26 inter/intradomain connection, 82 isologues, 81, 82 meaning, 26 metaphor, 27–8, 80–1 metonymy, 27, 28 musicality, 24, 25, 77 object of analysis, 22 oversignification, 29, 76 patheme, 77, 81 phonestheme, 22–3, 77 poet-reader contract, 28 reading poetry, 28–30, 76 relation of sounds to sense, 22–3 short poems, 75–6, 141 sound patterns, 24–5 thematic domains, 27, 28–9, 31 tropes, 26, 27 value to poets, 80–1 vowels and consonants, 24–5, 76–80 poetry competitions, 4–5 Pollard, Natalie, 136, 140 Pope, Alexander, 25 Porchia, Antonio, 134 Porter, Peter, 145, 149 postmodern poetry, Paterson’s criticism of, 10, 16, 23, 51, 88, 89, 93, 137–9 Potts, Robert, 69 Prynne, J. H., 11, 16, 139 Rankin, Ian, 85 religion and spirituality, 15, 99, 111–12 agnosticism, 105 Buddhism, 103–5 childhood/youth experiences, 100–1 compassion, 108–9 damaging effects of early experiences, 101 in The Eyes, 112 in God’s Gift to Women, 102–6 impatience with organised religion and spirituality, 103 influence of anti-humanist thought, 109–10 in Landing Light, 107–9 mystical tradition, 125 parody of St Augustine, 102–3 in Rain, 109–11 scepticism, 103, 111–12 Riley, Denise, 11, 16, 51, 139–40 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 5, 7, 43, 44, 62, 65, 66, 67, 72 Robertson, Robin, 145

inde x   163 St Andrews, University of, 3–4 St John of the Cross, 125–6 Sawmill, I. E., 110 Schmidt, Michael, 147 Sennett, Richard, 149 Shakespeare, William, 87–8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 58 Simic, Charles, 51, 88, 150 Sinclair, Iain, 150 sonnets, 11–12, 35–6 definition of, 34, 44 evolutionary necessity of, 34 in The Eyes, 39–40 in God’s Gift to Women, 38–9 golden ratio, 34–5, 45, 47 in Landing Light, 40–3 in Nil Nil, 36–8 in Orpheus, 43–4 in Rain, 44–7 resistance to, 44 variations on, 36, 44–7 Stammers, John, 145 Sterne, Laurence, 103 Stevens, Wallace, 10, 64, 72 Strauss, Peter, 145, 146 Tempest, Kate, 146 Tennyson, Alfred, ‘Crossing the Bar’, 29–30

thematic domains, 27, 28–9, 31 time, 13, 54, 59 Trueblood, Alan, 39 Tuma, Keith, 9 Turner, Mark, 11, 26 Valéry, Paul, 65 Vendler, Helen, 35 vowels, 24–5, 76–80 Waters, Colin, 99, 102 Watson, Anthony Forbes, 146 Watt, Alison, 15, 115–16, 116, 122 Wilde, Oscar, 136 Winnicott, D. W., 16, 120–1, 129n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 137 Woodman, Francesca, 15–16, 117, 123–4 House #3, 122 Self-Portrait at Thirteen, 122–3, 123 Space2, 119 untitled self-portrait, 117–18, 118, 119 Wood, Michael, 137 Wordsworth, William, 71 Wroe, Nicholas, 101, 103 Zen, 59, 103–4 Žižek, Slavoj, 69 Zubaran, Francisco de, 44, 45