Facing the facts

Donald Hall, in an interview in 1963, remarked: “Poetry is becoming impoverished by facts.” But what did he mean? That a poem should not be considered journalistic reportage? That the facts might get in the way? 

Ian Sansom in his recent (2019) book ‘on’ Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’ (‘on’ is no doubt not really the right word here, as the book self-admittedly meanders through a landscape of thoughts the author had had over the course of 25 years spent trying to write about book about Auden) relates the story of how Tennyson stuck with 600 in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ because it was metrically better than the more accurate 700, and remarks “Poets are not historians, or statisticians.”

And of course we would not want Tennyson to have maimed his poem with an awkward scansion. Peter Porter did ‘correct’ the last line of his relatively early poem ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’ which orginally read:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a thoroughbred bay gelding who ran fast.

Which I greatly prefer to the later corrected version:

It is Australian innocence to love
The naturally excessive and be proud
Of a big-boned chestnut gelding who ran fast.

So what are we to think? I do prefer the original line, it is predominantly a phonetic and rhythmic preference I think: the balance of word-lengths, the assonance of ‘bred’ and ‘geld’ as well as the doubling of the ‘b’ sound work very well to give both a memorable line and a sense of closure. The factually more accurate line ‘big-boned chestnut’ is to me more awkward: the juxtaposition of the ‘g’ and ‘b’ sounds in ‘big-boned’ slows the line right down — the sort of encumbering effect you find Shakespeare using to slow down the end of a declamatory line, as in “And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!” from The Merchant of Venice, or Dylan Thomas uses perhaps somewhat excessively in the line “one big bird gulp” in Under Milkwood, and of course is especially useful when the phonetic effect is used to somehow enact the meaning presented in the words, such as happens with a pairing such as ‘lag behind’ or in Shakespeare’s line ‘Drag back our expedition’ — Porter’s ‘big-boned’ gives a clumsy feeling to the phrasing which ‘chestnut’ only amplifies. The echoing of ‘chest’ and ‘geld’ is not as effective as the ‘bred’/‘geld’ pairing, in part because that ’s’ sound gets in the way, and partly in the lumpy rhythm with ‘chest’ carrying a full stress, whereas the subsidiary and subtle stress on ‘bred’ in ‘thoroughbred’ leading into the almost-spondee of ‘bay gelding’ is far superior. Perhaps this is all personal and subjective, having myself come-of-age as it were partly under the spell of Pound’s rhythms and having a fondness for spondees, near-spondees, the hints of triple rhythm — never let to run away like an Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold — all the technical apparatus deployed to “break the pentameter” (which of course ended up with effects not all that different from what emerges from pentameters written along the lines of Bridges’ sensitive reading of Milton’s prosody). This is however a topic for an entirely different post.

I have digressed, but suffice to say that I prefer the two near-spondees of ‘bay gelding’ and ‘ran fast’ to the trochaic clutter of ‘big-boned chestnut gelding,’ and would agree with Hall that facts have effected some impoverishment.

But I also suspect that both Hall and Sansom are in danger of being somewhat partial in relation to various genres of poetry. I have quoted elsewhere A.D.Hope’s remark from 1965: “One after another the great forms disappear; the remaining forms proliferate and hypertrophy.” There has seemingly been a reduction in the variety of commonly used genres, but is this just a false impression caused by the vast preponderance of a certain few types just swamping and hiding from view a greater diversity?  

Rain and Pearls: Simon Turner

You Are Here, Simon Turner's first collection, is published by Heaventree Press (Coventry) and has a baffling cover without a single word on the front, no title, no author's name; the spine and back cover are normal enough. There are plenty of sequences here, including three 'Storm Journal' poems scattered through the first section. Turner shows a fluency of description, and an emphasis on images, some fresh (lightning making sound of 'tearing fabric' or thunder 'punching down behind the houses opposite') and some familiar ...

clatter of shovel-blade scraping on concrete.
Rain-pearls on the window-glass getting the light.

The rain-pearls echo Wilde in nature-poet vein:

In vain the sad narcissus, wan and white
At its own beauty, hung across the stream,
The purple dragon-fly had no delight
With its gold-dust to make his wings a-gleam,
Ah! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss,
Or brush the rain-pearls from the eucharis.

Frost also uses the image "the rain is pearls so early, Before it changes to diamonds in the sun". This is a descendant of the similar dew/pearl image, which Dryden used a few times:

'Twas on a joyless and a gloomy morn,
Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn;

As well as the image of drops of water looking like pearls, there is also the image of pearls or beads falling like rain. Browning has 'Break the rosary in a pearly rain' and Tennyson also, somewhat circularly describes the water of a fountain in terms of raining pearls:

The fountain of the moment, playing, now
A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls

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.

Between words

Read poetry aloud ... that's the general cry. Because it's in the phonetics. So much doesn't properly live when the words stay on the page. Look at the gaps between words, and how the pace of a line can be slowed or its flow interrupted by the choice of consonants that bracket those white space characters. Listen to this line from Yeats:

In this blind bitter land

'blind' and 'bitter' slow us down; it is not so easy to end one word with 'nd' and start the next with 'b'. The mouth has to take it carefully; put 'bitter blind land' and the line is utterly changed.

Tennyson provides well known examples such as:

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Of course the alliteration of 'b's plays its part, and of course the monosyllables, but the broken flow caused by bald + street and then street + breaks and finally blank + day is a significant element of the technique. And again of course there's

Break, break, break

which echoes Milton's

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.

Of course there are other ways to slow a line down, putting long quantities on metrically unstressed syllables ("what dark days seen"), or using monosyllabic words:

Times past, what once I was, and what am now.

But the selection of consonants that end one word and commence the next is a more flexible instrument. Think of Bunting and his repetitions of the same consonant: 'sweet tenor' ... you have to pause if you are to say each word clearly and correctly. In the following excerpt each line contains one such pair of repeated sounds across a word-gap:

Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave's slot

'Painful lark', 'solemn mallet', & 'grave's slot' ... the repeated consonant serves as a mini caesura to help mark each line.

I can't finish without an example from one of the greatest technical show-offs, Alexander Pope; in one line he includes rs+r, f+v, s+sh, d+l, and k+th, almost now two consecutive words can be said smoothy:

The hoarse, rough verse shou'd like the Torrent roar.