Devoted to the Impossible

Henry Moore

In the book Life Work Donald Hall recounts the last conversation he had with the sculptor Henry Moore. Hall asks “Now that you’re eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?”

With anyone else the answer would have begun with an ironic laugh, but Henry Moore answered me straight: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

T. S. Eliot – who was ten years older than Moore – captures something of the mechanism which makes the sort of creative life that Moore describes a good life. 

“That excitement, that joyful loss of self in the workmanship of art, that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work.” T. S. Eliot in ‘Matthew Arnold’ from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p.108.

But of course the mathematician and the scientist are equally creative and can be absorbed in their task every bit as joyfully as the painter or the writer. In his 1956 book Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski writes:

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations – more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

p.29 

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

p.30

Who has the time?

Eliot at his desk at Faber & Faber

T.S. Eliot, from the age of 29 until he was 37, worked at Lloyd’s bank. This was from 1917 until 1925. His hours would have been 9:15 am to 5:30 pm Monday to Friday, plus one Saturday a month. There were two weeks of vacation a year. During this period, which starts around the publication of his first book Prufrock and Other Observations, he published the collection Poems 1920, influential essays such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and in the year 1922 he published The Wasteland as well as founding the quarterly The Criterion which he edited for the next 17 years.

Recall Cyril Connolly’s observation that “we cannot think if we have no time to read.” Eliot in a letter of 29 April 1927 (in Vol 3 1926-1927) to editor of The Evening Standard writes how contributors to The Criterion are “supporting themselves and their families in the Civil Service, or in museums, or in universities, or in banks and commercial houses, and are thus able to think, and read, and write independently of a livelihood.” As Stephen Collini observes in his recent book Common Writing, “Several kinds of social and economic change thereafter combined to bring about a much sharper contrast between a university post and these other occupations; in the early twenty-first century we hardly think of a job in a bank or a commercial house, or even perhaps in the civil service, as allowing much leisure to ‘think, and read, and write’ about literary and intellectual matters.” Perhaps the absence of television or the internet might also partly explain how normal employment could leave time for literary pursuits, that and — amongst the middle classes — the universal use of servants, live in domestic staff and ‘dailies’ to tend to the business of running a household. The lighting of fires, the cleaning of the house, the laundry, the shopping, the preparation of meals: all this was done by domestic staff.

In her book The Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service, Alison Light states that “without all the domestic care and hard work which servants provided there would have been no art, no writing, no ‘Bloomsbury.’” Rosemary Hill, in her LRB Review of that book starkly describes Virginia Woolf’s last months:  “With the winter her state of mind deteriorated and as her final illness began she found comfort in cleaning, telling her doctor that she had ‘taken to scrubbing floors when she couldn’t write’. Leonard hoped the mechanical tasks might be therapeutic and encouraged her to help Louie Everest, their daily, who was somewhat surprised: ‘I had never known her want to do any housework with me before.’ Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put the duster down and went to drown herself.”

Plagiarism?

I've had several "what do you think?" questions about the current crescendo in revelations of plagiarism in the poetry world, and attempting to set my mixture of thoughts on the matter down is as good a reason as any to revive this long comatose blog.

First it seems that there are a range of 'offences' being brought to our attention: in some cases the perpetrators have simply stolen somebody else's work and, after small alterations, have passed it off as their own. Then there are cases where some greater degree of rework has been done, and lastly there are instances where the accused has made a "mash-up" of as many as 50 other sources.

For me, the only clear-cut case is the first - where someone has passed another's poem off as their own, possibly with minor alterations. This is without any doubt utterly unacceptable.  The other cases are potentially more interesting ... is it conceivable that a piece of writing with many borrowings could be more than the sum of its parts? In rare cases I think the answer might be 'yes', and the implication of this is that we should perhaps look more closely at the final resulting product, and at the same time temper our judgement of the methods of construction.

Borrowings are nothing new. I remember Peter Porter once saying he was dismayed to find that what he considered to be one of the best lines in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland had been directly lifted from Dante: "I had not thought death had undone so many." Eliot, it must be said, did include an end note with a reference to the original.

I have previously mentioned a wonderful essay by Felicty Rosslyn in an old P. N. Review (No 111 from 1996). At that time I was commenting on a poem by Harry Mathews which was an uncredited reworking of an admittedly famous poem by Thomas Wyatt.

Rosslyn's essay is about Pope's translations of Homer, and I'll reprise a little of it here. Rosslyn demonstrates how the opening of Dryden's Iliad (1700):

The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound
Whose dire effects the Grecian army found.

was clearly in Pope's mind when he wrote in his 1715 version:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess sing!

Two days after Pope's Book I appeared, a rival - one Thomas Tickell - brought out his own translation, which began ....

Achilles' fatal Wrath, whence discord rose,
That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber'd Woes,
O Goddess sing.

Pope angrily annotated his copy of this, but admired the clear initial focus on Achilles, and the unnumber'd woes. His 1736 edition has a rewritten opening:

Achilles' Wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!

The modern reader may feel somewhat uncomfortable when it is realised how Pope's translation was built upon the work of his predecessors and contemporaries. Much the same is true for the King James Version of Bible, whose anonymous team of translators relied heavily upon earlier translations. The 'collaborative' nature of Pope's translations based on the work of others and in the end involving the work of a team of assistants, much like a Renaissance master painter with his school, does not sit entirely comfortably with the modern conception of the individual creator. We dwell still in the shadows of Romanticism with its cult of the individual rebel genius ... think Beethoven, think Byron, think Picasso or Stravinsky. Yet Stravinsky understood well the value of constraint in the creative process and this links him back to the pre-Romantic Bach with his heavily constrained fugues.

The recent quote unquote scandal of Andrew Slattery, Graham Nunn, and other Icaruses burnt by their strange rush to the poetic limelight, copying lines and whole works of others, passing them off as their own, and even winning major prizes, has brought news articles speaking of the plague of internet-fuelled plagiarism. But where precisely is the problem? Presumably this is primarily an issue of psychology, perhaps a tragic tale of ambition outstripping talent, or something morr commonplace like carelessness or cheating. Peter Bakowski has suggested it might be akin to the psychology of kleptomania. But some commentary would have us think there is a problem with today's poetry ecosystem. Is it perhaps that poets read too little and forgeries can too easily pass undetected? Full marks, by the way, to Anthony Lawrence for spotting Slattery's reused phrases. Is it that the taste of the day allows an evocative and suggestive surface pastiche of plausible sounding phrases to pass muster as a poem? John Ashbery explicitly championed a Chinese whispers approach to meaning, and has been influential in setting the tone of the times (is 'Zeitstimmung' a word?).

Derek Walcott once remarked: "you know you just ravage and cannibalise anything as a young writer". So is plagiarism a young man's caper? David R Morgan is now 58 but his prolific plagiarism started in his late twenties, thirty years ago. It seems like a bad habit he couldn't kick, and which he returned to in times of stress. If the internet is to be trusted, it seems Nunn (b 1971) is in his early 40s, Slattery (b. 1980) and Christian Ward (b 1980) are both in their early 30s. I can't find any information on C. J. Allen., one of whose victims, Matthew Welton, has finally spoken out here at the Carcanet blog.

I hope it is obvious that no one should pass off the work of others as their own. Someone once, I am told, took some of Peter Bakowski's poems, changed their titles and published them as his own. Sadly, this is the sort of thing that seems to have occurred in many of the recently publicized cases. For instance here is an example, first the original

SAVANNAHS by Eric Ormsby

Acknowledge the savannahs of our origins,
Those smooth, descending pastures to the sea

Then the 'reworking'

WHAT THE HERON KNOWS by Graham Nunn

away from the savannahs
Of our origin
Those smooth, descending
pastures to the sea.

Alexander Pope took words and phrases from others and produced a better version in the end, but here Nunn seems to have simply mucked up the original poem which had sound syntactic and semantic cohesion; the pilfered reworking seems a mess. In this case, if I had been the original writer, I suspect I might be even more upset at the mindless vandalism, than in the outrageous theft and false pretences.

Where do mash ups sit in the spectrum of plagiarism? Having not yet read the prize-winning Slattery poem which is apparently a mash-up of 50 sources, nor seen an account of the borrowings, I can make no comment, other than to say I do find it somewhat surprising that a poem constructed by such means was the best available to the judges of the prize: it feels as if any meaning or sentiment in the poem would have to be external and accidental, but one must remember Stravinsky's game of notes, and understand that we might be equally surprised to learn that a great piece of music could be based on a theme built from the German note names of the composer's name B-A-C-H.  So difficult as it may be, we really should disregard any hype about the method of making, and look to the created work itself. The Wasteland is part mash-up, part parody, yet is still regarded by many as one of the more significant poems of the 20th century.

Singular Intensity - Concentrating All Her Gifts

Mark Doty described Lynda Hull's all-or-nothing approach to writing, and how this worked on him as an influnce: "She worked at her art with a singular intensity, and in each new poem she'd raise the stakes as high as she could, putting everything at risk, putting herself into her coruscating, elegant texts. So one had to live up to that, poems had to matter that much."

I am reminded of Richard Aldington's recollection walking through a graveyard with T. S. Eliot and discussing Thomas Gray's Elegy. Eliot remarked that "if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."

And I also think - with closer relevance - of Van Gogh's remarks about working furiously because the opportunities for work do not recur, and working quickly like an old lion who kills with a single blow of the paw, and his talk of the delight, and the troubles, cares and disappointments, and the times of helplessness, that go with the calling of an artist.

I remember reading some of Lynda Hull's poems in litmags towards the end of 1993 and being struck by them, the way whole worlds were created with rich detail, and the way deep feeling seemed part of the fabric of each line. I was thinking of writing to ask for some poems for a magazine I was editing, but procrastinated. Months went by and then by chance I heard that she had died.

Ashbery's exponential fancy

John Ashbery's linguistic playfulness can be seen as the natural extension of that oldest of poetic ploys: metaphor. Take for example, the poem 'A Kind of Chill' from the collection A Wordly Country (2007): it begins ...

He had a brother in Schenectady
but that was long, long ago. These days, crows
punch a time clock on a forgotten tract of land
not far from the Adirondacks. ...

The image of crows on a tract of upstate New York land is jammed together with the human blue-collar routine of punching a time clock. The lines operate in the standard manner of metaphor: as Pound pointed out in his notes on the 'ideogrammic method' it is where the images overlap that the second-order meaning emerges.

But Ashbery proceeds with a metaphor on a metaphor:

not far from the Adirondacks. They keep fit
and in the swim with lists of what to do tomorrow.

Now we have X is like Y is like Z ... the chain is indefinitely extendible and in the manner of the game Chinese Whispers - known as 'Telephone' in the US, I believe, and significantly the title of Ashbery's 2002 collection - this can lead meaning into remote regions.

Ashbery's raw materials are ready-made phrases from a wide range of contemporary usage - "keep fit", to be "in the swim", "long, long ago" - and he rearranges these elements in fresh ways. The development of the ideas and images is primarily through association, and is in this way musical. The approach fits with Coleridge's definition of Fancy ...

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Ashbery piles fancy upon fancy, and rather than 'theme and variations' we get variations on variations on variations. His beginnings never know his ends.

Twenty years

How thin and disengaged seem those words of Eliot from East Coker: "Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres" - not the least helped by the odd distancing caused by the switch to French - when set aside Manès Sperber's similarly simple phrase "those twenty years of the postwar period that were to change into a prewar period quickly enough."

Which verb for a scrutiny?

And as I scrutinised the down-turned face
With that pointed narrowness of observation
We bear upon the first-met stranger at dawn

Sound familiar? That's Eliot In the second typed draft of 'Little Gidding', perhaps unconsciously echoing Milton's "narrower scrutiny" in Paradise Regained. Eliot reworked this in the third typed draft:

And as I bent upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the first faint light

John Hayward - with whom Eliot corresponded at length during the process of revision - wrote in the margin 'scrutinised / bend a scrutiny?'. Perhaps it was an idiom with which Hayward was not familiar. I found an old page from the Palmyra Democrat (New York) of the 1890s with the phrase "He bent a scrutiny". "He would bend intent scrutiny to the dial" appears in Louis Joseph Vance's first in a series of novels about a jewel-thief turned detective - "The Lone Wolf" (1914), and Mrs Woodrow Wilson uses the figure in her 1917 book 'The Hornet's Nest' (a title which was incidentally used by former President Jimmy Carter for his novel about the Revolutionary War).

The phrase appears again in Vernon Watkins' poem 'Swedenborg's Skull'

Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends
His piercing scrutiny

In the end Eliot decided on fixing a scrutiny rather than bending one.

As I fixed upon that down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

Details compiled and what the language keeps saying

"What is the language using us for?" asks W. S. Graham: the theme for the variations he composes at the start of Implements in their Places (1977). There are things the language keeps saying, or perhaps things that our so similar minds express with the blunt tool of the language. But when a poet repeats or echoes these universal tics is it resonance or cliché? In the opening poem of Pleats (1975), Andrew Crozier writes:

held in the direction of home
for the time being
while everything behind us dims

And it captures well something of the pathos and fragility of a homeward journey through failing light, and much depends on those words "everything" and "dims", in which Crozier echoes countless similar formulations: "till all is dim" (Wordsworth), "till all the paths were dim" (Tennyson), "the world grows dim" (Yeats), and so forth.

Crozier breaks free of the language's formulae with the addition of specific details:

a hedgehog in the gutter
a hearse goes by the other way

Crozier's poem reminds me of the fourth and final of Dannie Abse's 'Car journeys' poems from Funland and other poems (1973).

Driving home

Opposing carbeams wash my face.
Such flickerings hypnotise. To keep awake
I listen to the B.B.C. through cracklings
of static, fade-outs under bridges,
to a cool expert who, in lower case,
computes and graphs 'the ecological
disasters that confront the human race.'

Almost immediately (ironically?),
I see blue flashing lights ahead and brake
before a car accordioned, floodlit, men heaving
at a stretcher, an ambulance oddly angled, tame, in wait.
Afterwards, silent, I drive home cautiously
where, late, the eyes of my youngest child
flicker dreamily, and are full of television.

'He's waited up,' his mother says, 'to say goodnight.'
My son smiles briefly. Such emotion! I surprise
myself and him when I hug him tight.

Here Abse's accumulated details of observation serve his telling of a story in a succinct, vivid and emotive way. Everything is focussed on clearly conveying the narrative, distractions are minimized; the almost Martian compact visual image of the 'car accordioned' does not interrupt the fictional dream (to use John Gardner's term). Unfortunately, real life added an unpleasant resonance to this poem: in June 2005 Dannie and his wife of 54 years, Joan Abse, were driving home after a poetry reading when their car was involved in an accident; Joan died at the scene.

But details do not have to be compiled in such a focussed way. John Ashbery's collages of language, despite (or perhaps because of) their non-sequiturs and juxtapositions, the dream-like changes, manage to suggest multiple meanings. And his phrases do lodge in the memory ... "And in the garden, cries and colors" (from 'Last Month' in Rivers and Mountains (1962)).

Eliot - in typically magisterial and somewhat paradoxical mode - wrote: "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all." Eliot describes here an approach which Christian Wiman has characterized as that of "poets of culmination", as opposed to "poets of observation". Ashbery is far down one end of that spectrum; he takes ordinary emotions, or more particularly the ordinary phrases and turns of phrase that flock and swarm in our ordinary lives, and 'works them up' into new things. In his latest (not counting the selected) A Worldly Country (2007) he piles the phrases up high. Here are some snippets from the poem 'So, Yes' ...

all the stepchildren
it took to get here

...

It was right to behave as we have done,
he asserts, sending the children on their way
to school, past the graveyard

...

we're lost in a swamp with coevals
who like us because we like to do things with them.

...

All this language operates within some sort of force-field, a presiding consciousness, or the perhaps the tutelary spirit of the language. What is the language using us for? So, yes, the language keeps saying the same things, and we ordinary people keep saying the same ordinary things, but the possibilities of combination are endless, and new meanings are always springing to life.

Horses' Mouths

Reginald Shepherd reminds us of Allen Tate's essay where he discussed 'Ode to the Confederate Dead' and says that he is far from an expert on his own poems. Once I discovered by chance that one of my poems had been used in a Year 12 (VCE) examination paper (no one had informed the poet) .. when I got hold of the paper, which included at least one multiple choice question asking what the poet had intended, I found myself quite unsure of what the examiners thought would be the correct answer, as I recall two of the four options seemed plausible, but neither hit the mark.

A recent post by Jane Holland describes some rough notes she made on the composition of long poems. This prompted me to dig out my old copy of Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets, and it struck me how much useful and interesting is this sort of simple work record than the more common commentary and interpretation. Getting a glimpse of a poet's revisions, and explanations in correspondence of various phrases, lines, and passages, provides more insight than a shelf of criticism. Gardner's book shows how Eliot was - amongst other things - striving for clarity. And surely this is true even of many 'difficult' poets: Geoffrey Hill in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin wrote "I have no ambition to be famously - or notoriously - obscure. The difficulties of daily living get in the way and my poems, unavoidably it seems, collide with the densities of common existence"

Spatial model of tradition

Alfred Corn writes about replacing the temporal model of tradition (modernism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism) with a spatial model; he describes a one-dimensional space, a spectrum, ranging from avant-garde to "regular speech-based modes". Corn mentions Hakan Sandell's 'retro-garde' movement.

There is a vague two-dimensional spatial metaphor behind Eliot's concept of tradition in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', although it is not at all clear what the axes of this space might correspond to. "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." The image conjured seems to be something like a sculpture park of the canonical. Eliot continues "The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations." A river through the sculpture park?

I have recently be reading some of the work of a UK poet Sean Elliott, which often employs a simple clear unvaried iambic pentameter line, at points reminding one of Larkin, or Dannie Abse. Abse's Funland collection has many such apparently 'old hat' lines - "And silence matched the silence under snow" sticks in the memory - but the poems aren't old hat at all: they work.

The whole territory is available, poets do not necessarily have to work at some frontier, except of course for the temporal frontier of the present. The relationships between the poems that already exist are highly subtle and complex - involving all manner of influence, allusion, formal concerns, subject matter, genre issues, and so forth - there is possibly some mathematical way to model this and derive some multi-dimensional or fractal-dimensional space to house all these poems. But maybe the disorganized bookshelf and the stray echoes and reflections in the reading mind is the best system of all.

Oh the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

- from The Fire Sermon

I was looking today at Lawrence Rainey's annotated edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and was surprised to see a reference to a popular American ballad called 'Red Wing', the chorus of which starts:

Now the moon shines bright on pretty Red Wing

The breezes singing, the night birds crying.

and no mention of the WWI music hall 'ding dong' sung to the same tune ...

For the moon shines tonight on Charlie Chaplin

His boots are cracking, for the want of blackn'ning

And his little baggy trousers they want mending

Before they send him to the Dardanelles.

Isn't it likely that it was this version that Eliot - a keen fan of the Music Hall - would have heard?

On Eliot's recording he chants the words to the following rhythm which, at least as far as 'daughter', is a rough match to the song. (No attempt has been made to annotate the near monotonous but slightly rising pitch of his rendition).

An interesting line of connections which supports the music hall version as being the source, is that Jean Verdenal, Eliot's close friend and dedicatee of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) was killed in action in the Dardanelles in the doomed Gallipoli campaign. The Prufrock dedication reads :

To Jean Verdenal

1889 - 1915

This was revised in 1925 collection to include an explicit reference to the Dardanelles, and a Dante epigraph:

For Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915

mort aux Dardanelles

Or puoi la quantitate

Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda,

Quando dismento nostra vanitate,

Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda.

(Roughly, awkwardly, word-wise: 'And now the quantity, you can understand, of the love which scalds me, when I don't think of our emptiness, treating the shadows like a thing solid')

Eliot's only comment about the Ms Porter lines is that they were reported to him from Sydney, Australia - and given the strong Australia / Gallipoli connection this raises further speculations on the Dardanelles/Mrs Porter link.