Poetry? Maybe

Most people ignore most poetry

Because

Most poetry ignores most people

Adrian Mitchell was the author of the poem whose title I borrowed for the collection of this past year’s blogposts – and this is the inscription at the beginning of the book of his collected poetry…..

My posts may tend to be on the long side - but this is not for want of trying to cut to the chase. Oscar Wilde’s retort that “the best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” is a lovely example of the focused epigrammatic approach which was such a feature of Clive James’ writing.

I have decided views about writing genres – with a rather strong preference for essays (and short stories). I sometimes wonder whether my lack of interest in fiction betrays an element of autism – although in 2010 I did an interesting list of the novels which had appealed to me in the previous decade.   

But a couple of years ago I went so far as to suggest that the flood of books had reached such a point that we needed to consider rationing at least non-fiction books

Given the popularity of Twitter and the fear that our attention span is declining, one might have imagined that poetry might appeal to the younger generation. But I don’t sense any sign of this…

When then is it that so few poets appeal to us? I have a few favourites - Bertolt Brecht, Norman MacCaig, TS Eliot, WS Graham, Charles Bukowski, Marin Sorescu and Adrian Mitchell. What is it about such poets which allows them to “reach parts other cannot reach”?

In Bukowski’s case the answer is obvious – he wrote about low-class life in a bawdy way and made not the slightest concession to the poetic structure. It seemed like a flow of semi-consciousness….

Norman MacCaig and Marin Sorescu – from opposite ends of Europe – shared a wry, humanist approach to nature and events. See MacCaig’s “Smuggler” and Sorescu’s “Asking too Much?” - the latter about a man commuting between Heaven and Hell and unable to choose between a book, a bottle of wine and a woman

Bert Brecht and Adrian Mitchell – on the other hand - were both highly political

My favourite poem is probably Brecht’s “In Praise of Doubt” which you can find in this collected edition of Brecht’s poetry.

WS Graham and TS Eliot were pretty apolitical but I have always been fond of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets not only for its Zen like sense of time and the puniness of our efforts but for its references to the fragile nature of words – thus, in “Burnt Norton”

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

decay with imprecision, will not stay in place

You can read the entire poem here

and later (in East Coker) a section I use a lot –

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

Little wonder, therefore, that Eliot was a great admirer of a little-known poet from my home town (Greenock) in the 1940s, WS Graham who also wrote a lot about words eg

Speaking is difficult and one tries

To be exact, and yet not to

Exact the prime intention to death.

On the other hand, the appearance of things

Must not be made to mean another

thing. It is a kind of triumph

To see them and to put them down

As what they are. The inadequacy

Of the living, animal language drives

Us all to metaphor and an attempt

To organise the spaces we think

We have made occur between the words.

Update; when the post first appeared, I quite unforgivably omitted Tom Leonard from the list. He died, sadly, in February 2019, but his website richness is still available and the letters in particular give a true sense of Glaswegian literary life. His most famous poems were in contemporary street Scots – my favourite being “The Six o’clock News” which you will find my scrolling down this excellent extended tribute