WH Auden

‘I am not I’: the Slippery First-Person in Poems

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A couple of recent experiences with my own poems being posted/published on-line and kind readers then commenting on them has made me think again about the use of the first-person singular in poems – the use of ‘I’. Perhaps ‘think again’ is the wrong phrase as I have never – or at least not since my far distant teen years – really thought of the ‘I’ appearing in my poems as identical to the biographical, historical, personal ‘me’ tapping this out on a keyboard on a sunny Tuesday morning after the Easter weekend. How many millions of times have I suggested to students: let’s not make the assumption that the ‘I’ in Sylvia Plath’s poems is necessarily Sylvia Plath. And that perhaps is not the best example to give as we’ll then get into a debate about what exactly ‘confessional’ poetry is. But the fact that there has sprung up a category of ‘confessional’ suggest that the majority of other poems are not of that type. In which case the ‘I’ is to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Poems are not diaries or even journals but finely (I mean carefully) constructed mechanisms and the ‘I’ is but one of the building blocks.

Artists regularly move trees I’m told (within their frame). A painting is not a documentary. Some way back I remember reading that Auden would switch a positive to a negative for the sake of the music he aspired to. I’ve often found myself suggesting (in workshops) that the writer might try shifting the first person to the third, even the masculine pronoun to the feminine. These are just the little lies we tell in order to express the larger truth we are aspiring to and I’d fight to preserve that freedom of language and imagination, even the questions it might raise about ‘identity’. But what about the two poems I mentioned before. What was going on there?

The first poem appeared on Bill Herbert’s fascinating Ghost Furniture Catalogue site – which if you haven’t been there – go! Responses to this poem seemed to suggest the literalness with which some readers will approach a poem as voicing a ‘personal’ experience. Perhaps I was already wary of a too literal reading even in sending it out for publication. The title (‘A bedroom paranoia’) I chose wants to warn readers: there is something fantastical or imaginary here – there is a paranoia at work (that is not really the truth). One thing I’d say about the poem was that the experience – based on a real incident – had been sitting in a notebook for several years. I’d always felt there was something interesting in it – but couldn’t get it anywhere near right. I think my own learning experience was that to succeed you have to move a few trees… The opening 5 lines are (I’ll admit) close to the truth…

Pitch-dark, the carpet brushed by the door,

  hush-ush, you’re up, a while, now you’re back,

damp from the shower, waking the radio,

  and – who knew? – a king’s birthday, his anthem

x

limping on while you find clothes for the day

…. but by the time I felt I was getting close to the true poem that I wanted, the Queen had died and I had to substitute her son, Charles III, for her, in order not to make the whole thing misleadingly ‘historical’. The door brushing the carpet is something to be heard every morning. The woman rising before the (loafing) poetic voice is also not uncommon in real life. It’s the second line that is crucial: ‘hush-ush, you’re up, a while, now you’re back’. I wanted to evoke my own experience of dozing to and fro, time slipping forwards without being conscious (awake) to experience it. And that experience is taken up in the next 4 lines:

  and I roll – the pomp now fading – to take

my usual plunge, all the way to the floor,

  turning to smile at you. But the shadows

x

are vacant where you stood moments before

The first person has dozed off again for several minutes and the woman has simply gone downstairs to begin her day. The paranoia kicks in in the final 5 lines, despite the rational mind knowing what has happened. I wanted to capture (something I did feel to a degree) the sense of ‘what if’? What if the partner had gone not merely down the stairs but off into the world, away from home, never to return? I thought ‘brute stab of abandonment’ was a decent phrase for this emotional moment.

  and – though explaining this is easy

as my drifting in and out of sleep – all day

x

I’ll nurse the brute stab of abandonment,

  gone – the shock – you left no word – worse,

you were sure no word was worth the leaving.

Looking back, the verb ‘nurse’ seems important. The paranoia is largely self-inflicted, even encouraged (even as the day goes on), in a kind of picking at a scab, a masochistic inclination to ‘try out’ how that ‘abandonment’ would feel. I don’t think this is an admirable trait – but one which of us would say we have never felt? It’s here that the fictionalising comes in. I don’t think I DID feel like this all day, but I’m happy to represent ‘myself’ in this way to explore the (rather male?) emotional response. One of the comments on this poem was to commiserate with me that my partner had indeed actually left me. I guess that needs to be read as a compliment: it suggests the poem conveys the ‘stab’ as pretty convincingly ‘true’.

The second poem was recently published in Poetry Scotland and I trumpeted the fact (as you do) with a Facebook post to which there were a number of likes and comments. Several clearly implied that the reader had read the poem as autobiographical. In fact, there is less here that is personal than the previous poem. It derives from notes I made back in the time of Covid. My own father in fact died before the pandemic (a fact for which I often feel grateful… then guilty). So – as the poem discusses an absent father – the truth it is exploring is my own ‘feeling’ about an absent parent (though the cause of death is different). The title was a late addition (‘How to Address the Inquiry’), chosen as the Covid Inquiry has been taking place (to very little public response. The tone of the poem is angry:

If he was still in his armchairbeside me

I guess I’d try to raise a smile—

perhaps, for want of better, with this tale

of last night’s troubled tossing in bed

one arm snagging the bedside lamp

x

to bring it thump onto the bridge of my nose

to leave a bleb of dried blood

in the mirror this morning proving

I fought and lost—or else I might

tease him with his beloved City

x

in the fight for relegation again

or perhaps I’d pull back the curtain

you see there! a few primroses!

Plenty of the detail here is personal – the wrestling with the bedside lamp actually happened (to me – though after Dad had died), he supported (rather unenthusiastically, Bristol City), he loved his garden. The next detail is pure fiction but I felt the showing of the image to a man already dead would be a powerful one:

or I’d find my phone and maybe show

the newly done memorial bench

x

bearing his name by a tree in the park

And I wanted to let him speak for himself, to express his own anger. To me he is one of the many voiceless dead, resulting from Covid, especially those in care homes (both my parents ended in such a place and died there), those who could not be visited by relatives and friends due to contact restrictions:

and in the quiet I’d hear ashes stir

a murmuring of lips beyond cracked

and inaudible though I know the gist

that I was let down—they’re slow to act

x

letting people come they let people go

running it’ll be fine! up their fucking flagpole

then backhanding fat cat chums

with a hundred and fifty thousand lives

a fire sale fobbed me off with shit deals

x

even dangling one last Christmas before me

only to shove it—old ashy whisperer—

foldedinto yourself a dishcloth

on the drainer—a hiccupping cough

into your pillow—a last companion—

x

too old to ventilate . . .

We all read the stories of deaths of this sort. None of this is ‘true’ to my own experience (or my parents) but this is where the ‘larger’ truth surfaces, and this was my own way of trying to say something about it. The poem ends very emotionally (for me) because it returns again to autobiographical details. I DO have this picture on my mantlepiece (behind me as I type this out). I’m drawing on my own sense of loss, but I hope the dovetailing with what is fictional (for me) is effective enough. People wrote indicating their compassionating sense that I had indeed lost a parent during Covid and I want to again take this as a compliment to the technical success of the poem in its final state.

        I’ve his wedding day

on my fireplace—you should come see

how young they are with what awkward pride

he stands in sunlight at the end of the war

in his mid-twenties in his air force uniform    

Remembering Geoffrey Grigson

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, Romantic poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve recently seen announced a celebration of the work of Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985), scheduled to take place at 7.30pm, on Tuesday March 4th at West Greenwich Library. The event is called ‘In His Own Voice: Geoffrey’s Grigson’s Poetry’ and is being organised by John Greening with contributions from Grigson’s daughter, Caroline, his grandson, Joe Banks, and poets Graham High and Blake Morrison (and archive recordings of the poet himself). The event is free to attend (donations welcome), plus refreshments and books on sale. Texts will be projected on screen. As the event blurb reminds us, Grigson lived and worked through amazing times, culturally and politically, and was a prolific poet, writer, critic and editor. At the centre of English intellectual life, he knew the poetry grandees of his days and greatly admired those of the past. When he was only 27, he founded the bi-monthly journal ‘New Verse’, thus becoming hugely influential in the poetry world.  I reviewed John Greening’s selection of Grigson’s work when it came out in 2017, and this seems an opportune moment to re-post it here and on my new Substack. 

Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either.

The influence of Auden was very clear in Grigson’s first collection, Several Observations (1939). ‘Meeting by the Gjulika Meadow’ presents an enigmatic narrative in a “frontier” landscape; a meeting between two men whose conversation is in large part concerned with “the thunder / about Europe”. There are sketched fragments of personal dependencies and guilts but the whole reads as a slice of narrative that has been carefully shorn of its explicatory elements. A poem from 1946 shows Grigson using similar methods but on matters much closer to home; ‘In a Dark Passage’ draws material from the deaths of two of Grigson’s brothers in WW1 and the early death of his first wife, Frances. The situations are still relatively distanced by being told in the third person and the timings of the incidents are compressed to form a litany of heartfelt if rhetorical griefs: “O floes of ice, you float downstream / But do not disappear”.

There is certainly a very dark river running through Grigson’s work. ‘Two A.M.’, from the 1970s, records a wakefulness at night filled – as so often – by nothing but questions: “all emptiness, all gravity, / Ultimacy, nothingness”. He captures vividly the way this kind of mood, at such an hour, insists on expanding exponentially, racing to fill the world’s “Sierras, monadnocks, lakes, prairies, taiga, ice”. On this occasion, there is the possibility of an erotic reply: “At least now, with our bodies close, / Be comforted”. But even that response is absent from ‘Again Discard the Night’ from the 1980 collection, History of Him. Written as a first person narrative this time, the poem pulls no punches in its flinty and unforgiving portrait of old age waking:

… you call, the kettle gathers

And talks, and Are you all right? comes your

Usual cry, and my habit insists, without sound, Reply,

Be bright, wash, shave, dress, and this once,

Again discard the night.

Of course, Grigson’s sense of an ungoverned and likely meaningless universe matched with his frequent backward glances also calls to mind Hardy’s work. One of Grigson’s earliest poems, ‘The Children’, has an 11-line stanza of complex rhyming that Hardy would have been proud of. The children are portrayed as playing in a natural environment and in a state of temporal innocence: “They looked for no clocks, noticed no hours”. But ending each stanza, the triple rhyme words with “hours” are (ambiguously) “sours” and “flowers”. Between the third and fourth stanza, there is the kind leap in time often found in folk song (and Hardy). We have instantaneously passed many years: “The rooms were pulled down, but they always abide / In the minds of the children born in them”. These are the best lines in the poem with the much cooler closing lines rather falling flat:

They see the clocks and notice the hour

And aware that restriction of love turns sour,

They feel the cold wind and consider the flower.

It is certainly Hardy that Grigson is thinking of in ‘In View of the Fleet’. The Fleet is the lagoon behind Chesil Beach in Dorset and the poem borrows phrases from Hardy, empathetically suggesting that each poet’s vision has the same sequential locus: “Things not as firstly well, a sparkling day, and / tolling of a bell”.

John Greening suggests in his very helpful Introduction that Grigson is also capable of an “extraordinary lyricism” and these are moments when he captures this “sparkling” quality of the natural world. In ‘A New Tree’, helped by the holding up of a child to a window, the narrator sees again with a newly cleansed perception, “a sun / being fiercely / let loose again”. Delight in the natural world recurs in a key poem, ‘Note on Grunewald’. In it, Grigson also expresses the scepticism about literary achievements which must have driven much of his own, often acerbic, critical comments on the work of others. In a man who devoted a lifetime to literary endeavours, it’s hard to take wholly seriously the poem’s assertion that he’d rather live to sniff the “scent of the flowers of lime” than to create lasting “poems”. But the scent is praised in contrast to the art of “Grunewald’s spotted green-rotted Christ”. Grigson sides with (“I join”) Cowper in deciding that death holds no attraction and that he too would choose to “leave this world never”. The perceived dichotomy between a vivid inhabiting of the world of the senses and the ‘rotten’ achievement of artists is by no means Grigson’s final comment on these issues, but the poem certainly expresses unresolved tensions.

As Greening reminds us, Grigson as a critic was a feared and fearsome creature, liable to “dismissiveness and intolerance of shoddy work”. Perhaps, in his own mind, he never quite resolved his assessment of his own poems. A lovely translation from Tu Fu was perhaps chosen because it laments lack of achievement, or at least of recognition: “Writing gives me no name”.* More vigorously, ‘Lecture Note: Elizabethan period’ is an hilarious and outrageous account of a poet’s final work. While the ink was still wet on the page, he dropped dead. The poem fell to the floor only for the maid to drop it in “the jakes”. The final lines laugh cynically, sarcastically, as if this illustrates the fate of most artistic endeavours: “Now irretrievably beshitten, it was, dear sirs, / The one immortal poem he had written”. Yet this is delicate stuff compared to Grigson taking aim with both barrels in ‘Perhaps So’. The premise is that too much is being written:

Too much is told. Banish polymath Steiners

And seventy-seven other British Shiners,

Naturalists, archaeologists, publishers

Of publications in parts,

Norman Mailer

And all long-winded farts . . .

It’s hard to reconcile this voice with that of ‘A New Tree’. Interestingly, Grigson’s address to an ancestor whose name was ‘Nazareth Pitcher’ is critical on the surface, disparaging of Nazareth’s “pride”, suggesting his “lips were too thin”, that he might “be pleased” if he was to witness the parlous state of the world now (1960s). But it’s also difficult to dismiss the feeling that Grigson chose to address Nazareth because he sensed a kinship with this judgemental, sceptical and meanly satirical man.

Having said that, Grigson did admire, if very judiciously. Greening draws attention to an Eliotesque belief in tradition, that the best poems are made by “members of a long narrow community through time”. The word “narrow” here indicates Grigson felt that much of what was truly best was not appreciated by many. In one word perhaps, we see here his motivation to be harsh with what he felt not good enough and his hard work in anthologising what was. There are two tribute poems in Greening’s selection which show Grigson at his complimenting best. ‘A Painter of Our Day’ is about Ben Nicholson and has the feel of a Coleridgean conversation poem. Its tone is confiding, admiring, ranging from observations about playing with children, shared days out, discussions of Nicholson’s work, ageing and the nature of art. Nicholson seems to teach an appreciation of “what is” and an avoidance of nostalgia. But at the same time, he recognises the value of the “reiterated wisdom of perceiving”. That both poet and artist set the bar of achievement very high indeed is suggested by Grigson’s admission that, of their chosen role models, “most have been / Long dead”. I find it hard to pin down a more precisely articulated aesthetic, but these lines are revealing of any artist’s relation to his/her elders:

Suddenly when young or in our first ability

We find them, slowly we find the reasons

For our love, finding ourselves, and what we lack

As well or need the most

Finally, ‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:

You were our fixture, our rhythm,

Speaker, bestower, of love for us all

And forgiving, not condemning, extending

To all who would read or would hear

Your endowment of words.

For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy. Here, for example, in his last years, he recalls his childhood in Cornwall:

Staring down from that broken, one-arched bridge,

In that vale of water-mint, saint, lead-mine and midge,

I was amazed by that fat black-and-white water bird

Hunting under the current, not at all disturbed.

How could I tell that what I saw then and there

Would live for me still in my eightieth year?

*As a labouring translator myself, I have long remembered Grigson’s brilliant put-down in his Introduction to the Faber Book of Love Poems (1973). Explaining why he has not included any translations at all, he declares that their “unmeasured, thin-rolled short crust” would prove detrimental to the health of the nation’s poetic taste. Times have changed, thank goodness.

Goethe’s poetry – some new translations by John Greening

martyn crucefix autobiography, brief poetry review, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, German poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, religious poetry, Romantic poetry, translation, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In this blog post, I am discussing John Greening’s new translations of a small selection (9 poems in all) from the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. With the original German texts provided on facing pages, these translations are published as Nightwalker’s Song, by Arc Publications (2022). This review was originally commisioned and published by Acumen poetry magazine early in 2023. By the way, Acumen will be presenting a free to attend on-line celebration of its latest issue on Friday September 1st at 18.30 BST. It will include a brief reading of new work by yours truly, Gill McEvoy, Anthony Lawrence , Sarah Wimbush, Simon Richey, Dinah Livingstone, Michael Wilkinson, Jill Boucher, Jeremy Page, and others.

John Greening’s recent, self-confessedly ‘tightly-focused’ little selection from Goethe’s vast output is, in part, a campaigning publication. In his Introduction, Greening notes the difficulties surrounding the great German poet’s presence in English: the sheer volume of work, the range of that work, the man’s polymathic achievements (as poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic), the long life untidily straddling all neat, period pigeon-holing. Christopher Reid has called him ‘the most forbidding of the great European poets’, but perhaps the English have come to see him as a mere jack-of-all-trades? And where do we turn to read and enjoy the poetry? Michael Hamburger’s and Christopher Middleton’s translations look more and more dated. David Luke’s Penguin Selected (1964; versified in 2005)is the most reliable source. But tellingly, as Greening says, one does not find young, contemporary poets offering individual translations of Goethe in their latest slim volume in the way we do with poems by Rilke or Hölderlin.

John Greening

So here Greening sets out a selection box of various Goethes to encourage other translators: we find nature poetry, romance, the artist as rebel, meditations on fate, erotic love poems, a rollicking ballad, dramatic monologue and a very fine sonnet. I like Greening’s determination not to lose the singing. Here, he has ‘shadowed’ the original metres and retained rhyme schemes, though he sensibly makes more use of pararhyme than Goethe’s full rhyming. While not approaching Lowellesque ‘imitations’, Greening has also sought a ‘contemporary texture’ by venturing to ‘modernise an image or an idea if it helped the poem adapt to a different age’. For example, in ‘Harz Mountains, Winter Journey’ (‘Harzreise im Winter’) Goethe’s buzzard has become the more familiar image, in southern England at least, of a red kite. The carriage or wagon (‘Wagen’) driven by Fortune becomes a car in a ‘motorcade’ and another vehicle is imagined ‘winking on to / the slip-road’. There’s also an enjoyable touch of Auden in Greening’s updating of ‘crumbling cliffs / and disused airfields’ (Middleton has ‘On impassable tracks / Through the void countryside’).

Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Greening’s skills in versification are well known and he deploys them all – and you can hear him enjoying himself – in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’: ‘Broomstick – up, it’s show time, haul your / glad rags on, so grey and grimy. / Seems you’ve seen long service, all you’re / fit for now is to obey me’. Though grace notes and fillers slow Goethe’s headlong verse (the opening line in German is simply ‘Und nun komm, du alter Besen!’ – ‘And now come on, you old broom!’), Greening’s rhyming is delightful and the modernising phrases (show time, glad rags) drive the poem along with a colloquial energy which is absolutely right.

Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ – published in 1789, the year of revolution in France – is a growling dramatic monologue in which the rebel Titan (who stole fire from the gods to give to humankind) sneers and mocks the authority figure, Zeus. He belittles the top god in the opening lines by comparing him to a boy, thoughtlessly knocking the heads off thistles. Greening catches the mocking tone in the series of rhetorical questions later in the poem: ‘Honour you? For what? / Have you ever offered to lift / this agony?’ Prometheus ends – following one version of his story – by explaining he is creating the human race in his own image, ‘a new range’ translates Greening, neatly updating once more, ‘programmed / to suffer and to weep, or whoop and punch the air – / but who, like me, won’t care / about you’. In comparison, Luke’s version sounds rather fusty and less bolshie: ‘A race that shall suffer and weep / And know joy and delight too, / And heed you no more / Than I do!’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe is a great love poet. ‘Welcome and Farewell’ (‘Willkommen und Abschied‘) has a man approaching on horseback (Greening does not motorise on this occasion) through a moonlit landscape and the lover is spied at last: ‘how / I’d dreamt of (not deserved) all this’. The moment of union passes unspoken between stanzas three and four. As if instantaneously, now ‘the sun had risen’ and the parting must take place: ‘And yet, to have been loved – to love, / ye gods, such utter happiness’. It’s curious that Greening retains the rather archaic ‘ye gods’. One still hears the phrase, of course, but with more irony than I would have imagined here. The fifth of Goethe’s ‘Roman Elegies’ is a fabulous erotic piece. Written during the poet’s travels to Italy in the late 1780s, the narrator is studying classical culture by day and his female lover’s body by night. The latter nourishes the former: ‘I find I appreciate marble all the better for it, / and see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand’. As he goes on, ‘compare and contrast’, I find Greening a little cool here. There is a selection of translations by D M Black (Love as Landscape Painter, from FRAS Publications in 2006) which generates more heat:

Yet how is it not learning, to scan that delectable bosom,

  Or when I slither my hands pleasantly over her hips?

Then I understand marble; then I discover connections,

  See with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.

Faustus (by Eugene Delacroix)

Goethe’s Faust is represented here by the scholar’s opening speech to Part One (versioned, as it were, by Christopher Marlowe in the opening soliloquy of his Doctor Faustus). Greening excels in the handling of rhyme and line length, even compared to David Constantine’s 2005 Penguin translation. Perhaps most impressive of all is the sonnet ‘Nature and Art’ (‘Natur und Kunst’). Greening has the motor car in mind again in his updating of Goethe’s exploration of how the artist must labour incessantly to achieve the preparedness, the readiness to respond to Nature, to what is natural. Reading these lines, you feel Greening is translating as a skilled and experienced artist himself, triumphantly bringing a poem written in 1800 bang up to date:

It’s just a case of working long and late.

So once we’ve spent, let’s say, ten thousand hours

on steering, footwork, shifting through the gears,

it may be then some natural move feels right.

x

Creative though you be, you’ll strive in vain

to reach perfection if you’ve no technique,

however wired and woke your gifts may be.

x

You want a masterpiece? You’ll need to strain

those sinews, set your limits, drill and hack.

The rules are all we have to set us free.

For anyone yet to make the leap into Goethe-world, this little book is a terrific way into the great German writer’s work and such a reader will find Greening’s Introduction and his prefatory remarks to each of the chosen poems very helpful indeed. I recommend this collection.

‘Letter to my Younger Self’ – a third brief Royal Literary Fund talk

martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry workshops, Romantic poetry, teaching, UK poetry magazines, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As a Royal Literary Fund Fellow based at The British Library in London (though working on-line for the most part), I was asked way back in May 2020 (feels like a different world) to write and record three brief talks. One of these was on ‘Writing and Technology’ which I posted (as text and audio file) on this blog a few months ago. Another commision was to be titled ‘How I Write’ – not an easy subject on which to be clear and succinct but with a little help from WH Auden and Louise Gluck I hope I managed to say something that might be of help to all kinds of writers – poets, novelists and (the target audience of the RLF project) those writing at the varied levels of academe.You can read my blog (and hear me read the essay) here. The third and final essay was an intriguing invitation to write a ‘Letter to My Younger Self’. The recording of that piece has now been released and is available as an audio file on the RLF’s VOX site. You can read the Letter below – or listen to me read it by clicking here – or both at the same time if you’d like. Afterwards I have also posted a poem relevant to that particular biographical moment. An earlier version of this poem first appeared, a long while back, in The London Magazine.

Letter to my Younger Self

Dear Martyn,

You will have just got off the train from London Bridge. It’s 1976. The end of a day studying Medicine which you begin to hate. And now back to Eltham Park, to digs you’ve loathed since you arrived (the well-meaning landlady is no substitute for your mother). Probably you walked past that little music shop somewhere near the station, spending minutes gazing at the red sunburst acoustic guitar in the window. If it doesn’t sound too weird, I can tell you – you’ll buy it and strum on it for 10 years or more. I can also confirm your fear: you fail your first-year exams. The Medical School allows you to leave . . . But listen, that sense of failure and lostness, it will pass.

Keep on with the music, though your playing is not up to much and your singing . . . well, the less said. But writing songs will eventually lead somewhere. And the illicit books! You are supposed to be reading the monumental Gray’s Anatomy, textbooks on Pharmacology, Biochemistry, all emptying like sand out of your head. You’ve yet to go into that charity shop and pick up a book called The Manifold and the One by Agnes Arber. You’ll be attracted by the philosophical-sounding title; in your growing unhappiness at Medical School you have a sense of becoming deep. The questions you ask don’t have easy answers. You have a notion this is called philosophy. Amidst the dissections, test tubes and bunsens, you’ll find consolation in Arber’s idea that life is an imperfect struggle of “the awry and the fragmentary”.

And those mawkish song lyrics you are writing? They will become more dense, exchanging singer-songwriting clichés for clichés you clumsily pick up from reading Wordsworth (you love the countryside), Sartre’s Nausea (you know you’re depressed) and Allan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity (you are unsure of who you are). Up ahead, you take a year out to study English A level at an FE College. Your newly chosen philosophy degree gradually morphs into a literature one and with a good dose of Sartrean self-creativity (life being malleable, existence rather than essence) you edit the university’s poetry magazine, write stories, write plays, even act a little (fallen amongst theatricals!).

At some point, the English Romantic writers get a grip on you, taking you to Oxford where you really do conceive of yourself as a poet, get something published, hang out with others who want the same. Then guess what – for a teenager who’d so little to say for himself in class – teaching becomes a way of continuing to study and write while making a living. It suits. It takes us out of ourselves.

Along the way, you write some poems you are proud of. You will suffer the writer’s curse, of course: the recurrent fear of not being able to turn the trick again. But I’m sending you this to say, through all the years ahead, it is words that will infinitely enrich your life. So pick up the pad you doodle on in lectures. Write a line. Write another line. I see you hunched over a dim-lit desk, but no question – yes – you are heading in my direction.

With best wishes,

Martyn

x

How to fail at anatomy

x

This one believed

he maybe had the brains

another that he had

the right demeanour

x

but the Schools denied him

till it was too late

then reprieved him

with the offer of a place

x

that by then he knew

could not be refused

(such anticipation

had struck such roots)

x

so he has no recall

of the moment of choice

before those appalling

digs in Eltham

x

where he had to stow

his dislocated skeleton

under the bed—crammed

one side of his head

x

with tendons muscles

and pharmacol

with biochem and

bright sets of nerves

x

everything spilling out

the other side

into failure—fallen

to wandering streets

x

to stealing Everyman’s

Selected Wordsworth

he was John Stuart Mill

wishing his soul

x

saved though he felt

love etiolating

the girl from home

now a girl from home

x

her kisses like shrugs

at London Bridge

saying go your own way

at least not imposed

x

not merely allowed

and if you want to live

deliberately first

you slit the shroud

‘How I Write’ – a second brief Royal Literary Fund talk

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, poetry workshops, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

As a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, I was asked in May 2020 to write and record three brief talks. One of these was on ‘Writing and Technology’ which I posted (as text and audio file) on this blog a few weeks ago. Another commision was to respond to the intriguing invitation to write a ‘Letter to My Younger Self’. The recording of that piece is still in the RLF pipeline, but the third of these short pieces has now been made available as an audio file on the RLF’s VOX site. The given topic of this newly published piece is ‘How I Write’ – not an easy subject on which to be clear and succinct but with a little help from WH Auden and Louise Gluck I hope I have said something here that might be of help to all kinds of writers – poets, novelists and (the target audience of the RLF project) those writing at the varied levels of academe.

So – you can hear me reading the piece here.

Alternatively – or both at the same time if you’d like – you can read it below.

How I Write

Always I have to commit something to paper as soon as possible after the initial inkling of a poem. Most writers use notebooks. Some use audio recorders, others their phones. Though first drafts are always terrible, what I’m doing is laying a path back towards the first emotional impulse, a way for myself to return there. You’ll often find me re-reading notebooks to pick up such trails among barely readable, fragmentary scribbles.

These scraps are what may develop into poems. I like W. H. Auden’s view of the poem as a “verbal contraption”. It reminds me a poem (actually, any piece of writing you are doing) is a purposeful device. It needs to be an effective device and poems look to impact a reader’s feelings. This view downplays one of the commonest stumbling blocks about creative writing, which is that what poets try to do is express their own inner moods. If that’s all I focus on, I’ll pay too little attention to the writing’s receiver, my reader.

Anyway, what I want ‘to express’ is seldom fixed at this stage. It’s important I’m willing to add on – simply write more connected material – even beyond the point at which I might think the job done. That tempting voice claiming early completion may be a lazy demon or a censoring one. It’s my practice at this stage to draft loosely, with as much energy and freedom as possible. If I watch children playing, I see them enjoying an excess of energy, movement, voice, and it’s out of this that real creativity arises – new moves, ideas, developments, reformed, revised, played again, played better. So in writing, spinning off new phrases or metaphors leads not only to decorative grace-notes but often to the still-hidden, true heart of the poem. This is why poets often talk of writing as a process of discovery.

For me, most of these stages still take place using pen and paper. The shift to a screen, a keyboard remains a critical transition. On screen, or on a phone, typed lines acquire an inertial resistance to being changed. On screen, I find my eye starts to narrow down to look at the poem’s physical shape and appearance on a would-be page. Such aspects are important in the long run, but they can prematurely cool the fluidity of the molten drafting process if they dominate too early. Beware the linearity of the screen!

But once it’s there, now I’m thinking ‘economy’. A linguistic cosmetic surgeon, I cut off verbal flab, repetition, redundancy. Crossing out is my most familiar activity. The American poet, Louise Gluck, says that a writer’s only real exercise of will “is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto”. One of the keys to this is reading aloud. I go the whole hog: standing as if to deliver to an audience. Loud. And. Clear. This helps me listen to rhythm and line breaks. Actually, for any writer of poetry, prose, essays for your course, reading aloud highlights stumbling blocks of all kinds. My sense of the ebb and flow of a poem is always clarified because I distract myself in the physical act of standing and speaking. I experience my words more objectively, more as my potential reader would. Try it. It’s a revelation!

14 Ways to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ekphrastic poetry, Irish poetry, poetry, poetry workshops, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Update (June 2019): I have written more on ekphrastic choices in a recent review published in Agenda Poetry.

Ekphrastic poems (ie. poems stimulated by visual art) are on my mind a great deal as I have been planning the all-day workshop I have been asked to run at the Holburne Museum in Bath on the 25th February, 2017. This particular exhibition, ‘Breughel: Defining a Dynasty’, opens on the 11th February and was in the news recently as it will include, among many others, a newly-rediscovered painting by Peter Breughel. I’ve been reading a variety of poems derived in some fashion from the poet’s encounter with visual art and I wondered if there was a way of categorising the various approaches. There are probably many – but these 14 ways (in 5 subgroups) are what I have come up with and they might usefully serve as a way to kick-start ekphrastic poems of your own. Try one a day for the next fortnight!

Through Description

  1. Describe – and do no more. This is always the poet’s initial desire, to put into words what has caught our attention visually (and because attention has been visually caught there is something about this image or object that chimes with the writer’s subconscious). In terms of the poet’s intention, the wish to describe may be sufficient (the subconscious may do the rest). Examples might be Michael Longley’s ‘Man Lying on a Wall’ (from Lowry’s paiting of the same name) or William Carlos William’s ‘The Dance’ (from Breughel the Elder’s ‘Peasant Dance’).

imgres

  1. Describe but imagine beyond the frame – Derek Mahon’s ‘Girls on the Bridge’ (after Munch’s painting of the same name) does this, beginning with description of the scene but then wonders where the road leads away to in space, asks what the next day will bring (in time) and concludes with allusions to Munch’s more famous image ‘The Scream’: “bad dreams / You hardly know will scatter / The punctual increment of your lives”.

imgres

  1. Describe but incorporate researched materials – an easy option in the world of Google where the artist’s life or love life, the political context etc are easily accessed. Edward Lucie-Smith does this in ‘On Looking at Stubbs’ ‘Anatomy of the Horse’’, working with the gossip of local people in the Lincolnshire village where Stubbs worked at preparing the horse’s carcass: ‘His calm knife peeling putrid flesh from bone”.

imgres

Through Ventriloquism

  1. Make Main Figure Speak – the most common approach as famously done in Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Standing Female Nude’ (from Georges Braque’s ‘Bather’). Thomas Hardy makes the Elgin Marbles speak in ‘Christmas in the Elgin Room’.

 

  1. Make Minor Figure/s Speak – UA Fanthorpe’s ‘Not my Best Side (Uccello’s ‘St George and the Dragon’) might be considered a hat-trick of the category above but her decision to make all 3 characters in the painting speak, casting side-lights to and fro, means I put it here. Delmore Schwartz’s ‘Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine’ – while more free indirect speech than ventriloquism – has a similar effect, visiting each of the characters in Seurat’s picture and allowing their perspective to be aired.

imgres

  1. Make Objects Speak – this is an obvious category though I’m a bit short on illustrations of it. BC Leale’s ‘Sketch by Constable’ almost does it by concentrating attention on a tiny dog sketched in the corner of an image of Flatford Mill. Ann Ridler also comes close by largely ignoring the foreground figures and focusing on the landscape only in ‘Backgrounds to Italian Paintings’.

 

  1. Make the Artist Speak – writing about Van Gogh’s ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother’, Robert Fagles makes the artist speak, denouncing photography and preferring the expressive qualities of paint: “Of the life hereafter I know nothing, mother, / but when I paint you what I feel is yellow, / lemon yellow, the halo of rose”.

 

Through Interrogation

  1. Of the Artist – Vicki Feaver’s ‘Oi yoi yoi’ (on Roger Hilton’s image of the same name) starts with description but quickly begins talking directly to Hilton (“You were more interested / in her swinging baroque tits”). Interestingly, ekphrastic poems need not always stand in awe of the work; looking at Francis Bacon’s ‘Study for Portrait on Folding Bed’, Thomas Blackburn has a long one-sided conversation with the artist, charting a growing disenchantment with Bacon’s work, accusing him of “uttering, with superb, pretentious / Platitudes of rut, that you have said and said”.

 imgres

  1. Of the Figure/s – I have always admired Gerda Mayer’s poem, ‘Sir Brooke Boothby’ (after Joseph Wright’s image), in which she addresses with Sir Brooke about his languid pose, his copy of Rousseau, his intense scrutiny of the observer. Peter Porter’s many poems about art objects are hard to categorise but ‘Looking at a Melozzo da Forli’ (an image of the Annunciation) interrogates both image and the figure of Mary herself.

imgres

  1. Of Yourself – probably all ekphrasis is a sort of self-interrogation but some poems make this more clear. The address often takes the form of admissions of ignorance or obtuseness in the face of the image or the asking of rhetorical questions. Robert Wallace on ‘Giacometti’s Dog’ once again begins in description but asks questions about the fascination of the image, eventually concluding “We’ll stand in line all day / to see one man / love anything enough”.

 

Through Giving an Account

  1. Of Your Encounter – Wallace’s poem spills across these artificial categories and might be placed here, among poems where the poet explicitly records details of his/her encounter with the work of art. Yeats famously does this in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, looking at images of Augusta Gregory and John Synge. David Wright (who lost his hearing at the age of seven) movingly describes his visit to Rome to see Maderno’s sculpture of St Cecilia (patron saint of music) in his poem ‘By the Effigy of St Cecilia’.

imgres

  1. Of Gallery Visitors – poets often comment on the behaviour or experiences (imagined) of gallery visitors (and even the gallery attendants!). Gillian Clarke does this in ‘The Rothko Room’: “In this, / the last room after hours in the gallery, / a mesh diffuses London’s light and sound. / The Indian keeper nods to sleep, marooned / in a trapezium of black on red”.

 

  1. Of Others – admittedly a catch-all category this one, but sometimes (especially when the works of art appear in churches) the poet can be interested in speculating about the responses of more ‘ordinary’ people. Thom Gunn does this toward the end of ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ where Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion of St Paul’ is displayed. Having recorded his own response to the image he ends by staring at the old Roman women who come to kneel before it: “each head closeted // In tiny fists holds comfort as it can. / Their poor arms are too tired for more than this / – For the large gesture of solitary man, / Resisting, by embracing, nothingness”.

 imgres

Come At a Tangent

  1. Finally, the ekphrastic moment can be presented as if an after-thought, or illustration of a poem already half composed. There are famous examples of this, especially Auden’s ‘ Musee des Beaux Arts’ which spends most of its length contemplating in very general terms the way old paintings present suffering. Only towards the end does Auden refer to Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’ which he describes in some detail to suggest how “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”. RS Thomas’ ‘Threshold’ does something similar, only concluding with allusions to Michaelangelo’s painting of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. And Seamus Heaney’s ‘Summer 1969’ records a visit to Madrid as the Troubles boiled in Northern Ireland, and only latterly does the poem focus on Goya’s ‘Panic’: “Saturn / Jewelled in the blood of his own children, / Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips / Over the world.imgres

Stand-to-Arms: David Jones’ ‘In Parenthesis’ (1937)

martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Great War poetry, poetry, writing , , , , , , , , , , , ,

31kdwrvzonl-_sy344_bo1204203200_

There’s an extraordinary moment in the final pages of David Jones’ magnificent poem-novella, In Parenthesis (1937), when his hero, John Ball, dying at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, imagines the tourist industry that has since grown up around the World War One battlefields. In his last moments, he abandons his rifle: “leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas”. Jones’ footnote acknowledges the risk of this sounding anachronistic but insists he remembers such discussions among the soldiers, how holiday-makers will later be photographed “on our parapets”. It’s the unexpected sense of territorial ownership that makes him angry (not the sense of injustice at different lives unfolding so differently): he compares it to strangers “occupying a house you live in, and which has, for you, particular associations”.

entrance-to-a-sandbag-dugout

This searing, revelatory sense of the documentary – what it was like to be there – is just one of the reasons to read Jones’ book. Another extended footnote considers the multiple usage of the hessian material of sandbags. In their intended role “they constituted, filled with earth, the walls, ceiling, and even floor surface of half our world”. But it was also “utilized as a wrapping for food; for a protection to the working parts of a rifle, and cover for bayonet against rust. The firm, smooth contour of a steel-helmet was often deprived of its tell-tale brightness [. . .] by means of a piece of stitched-on sack-cloth. The sand bag could be cut open and cast over the shoulders against the weather or tied round the legs against the mud or spread as a linen cloth on the fire-step for a meal, or used in extremity as a towel or dish-cloth; could be bound firmly as an improvised bandage or sewn together as a shroud for the dead”. Such human and humane improvisation in the midst of nightmare reminds us that Jones did not intend In Parenthesis to be a “War Book”, but rather one about a “good kind of peace”. He himself gives us another reason to read his book in these contemporary times that we consider so ‘difficult’: “We find ourselves privates in foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly inimical, hateful, to us”.

51navnxu-nl-_sx331_bo1204203200_

For those interested in poetic techniques, Jones mixes prose and verse as naturally as walking and running. He is fiercely allusive throughout, particularly drawing on Shakespeare, Malory, The Mabinogion, The Song of Roland, other Welsh and Anglo-Saxon poems, Romantic and Classical poetry. TS Eliot tends to use his intertextual or allusive techniques forensically to dissect our Modern condition, how far we fall short of heroism, how far we are from spiritual pilgrimage, how sordid and smutty our lives have become. Curiously, Jones achieves something opposite, managing to elevate his fallible, cursing Tommies to some sort of reflection of the heroism of the past. The fields of northern France are compared to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in ways that establish rather than sever the links between myth and legend and the twentieth century. Bursts of shrapnel are associated with “the Thunder God” as discussed in Fraser’s The Golden Bough; the death of soldiers is rhymed with the myth of the king buried to protect and make the land fruitful. Jones’ interest in and identification with the ordinary soldiers is also expressed through his use of their words, in vivid, direct, often (knowingly) hilarious forms of demotic which put Eliot’s awkward efforts at doing the ordinary people’s voices into the shade.

antic-dispositionhenry-v-12

For a certain type of soldier, Jones tells us, trench life in 1916 with the “infantry in tin-hats, with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands”, brought Shakespeare’s Henry V “pretty constantly to the mind”. It’s from that play that one of the recurring phrases in In Parenthesis is drawn. In Part 3, Lance-Corporal Lewis sings as he walks, yet he sings softly, “because of the Disciplines of War”. Jones’ soldiers treat the idea with both respect and sarcasm on differing occasions though it’s striking that in the midst of battle, as things begin to turn against them:

 

Captain Cadwaladr restores

the Excellent Disciplines of the Wars.

3118806_orig

The book invites the reader in with knockabout drill on the parade ground at home to begin with. Then a long march to the port of embarkation, the troops looking smart as they march through town but once beyond civilian observation “with a depressing raggedness of movement and rankling of tempers they covered another mile between dismal sheds, high and tarred”. Proleptic of what lies ahead, they get lost among the port buildings, eventually waiting for departure to France in a “spacious shed [. . .] open at either end, windy and comfortless”.

Part 2 has the men marching through France, Jones capturing their first naïve witnessing of war’s destruction where a shell has fallen on the road they are pursuing: “men were busy here shovelling rubble into a great torn upheaval in the paving. A splintered tree scattered its winter limbs, spilled its life low on the ground. They stepped over its branches and went on”. One of the great themes of In Parenthesis ironically is the presence of Nature, often offering some consolation, some mythic pattern of life, death and re-birth to the soldiers, as well as (here) being subject to the destructions of human warfare. The natural processes of time, night and day, the seasons turning – also offer some consolation. Here is the magnificent opening to Part 4, John Ball seeing dawn break over the trenches:

standto

So thus he sorrowed till it was day and heard the foules sing, then somewhat he was comforted.

 

Stand-to.

Stand-to-arms.

Stealthily, imperceptibly stript back, thinning

night wraps

unshrouding, unsheafing—

and insubstantial barriers dissolve.

This blind night-negative yields uncertain flux.

At your wrist the phosphorescent dial describes the equal seconds.

 

The flux yields up a measurable body; bleached forms emerge and stand.

 

Where their faces turned, grey wealed earth bared almost of last clung weeds of night weft—

behind them the stars still shined.

 

The final seventh Part breaks more consistently into verse. Jones seldom uses line breaks to create the swaying rhythmic units of lyric verse but more usually for disjunction. His free verse recreates the soldier’s eye swinging from one thing to another, often in panic and confusion, the sudden bursting of danger from left field, from shells above, mines below. It allows him also to recreate the thrilling illogic of the stream of consciousness of his fighting men. Private Ball survives longer than many but is eventually wounded.

 

[. . .] it came as if a rigid beam of great weight flailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulk let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker

below below below.

 

When golden vanities make about,

you’ve got no legs to stand on.

 

He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.

 

He crawls away, encumbered by the weight of his rifle which he eventually leaves behind. An Ophelia-like figure, the Queen of the Woods, cuts garlands for the dying soldiers, whispering quietly to each of them, according respect (when the real circumstances of their deaths received anything but) elevating their passing to ritual. (Here is a brief animation and reading of this moment). That Jones can achieve this mythic sense, simultaneously dwelling on the clumsy encumbrance of Private Ball’s rifle, and allowing his fleeting thoughts about the future Cook’s tourists is a breath-taking moment of literary achievement. The whole is “a work of genius” (TS Eliot) and “a masterpiece” (WH Auden). For Adam Thorpe it “towers above any other prose or verse memorial of that war (indeed, of any war)”; for Thomas Dilworth it is “probably the greatest work of British Modernism written between the wars”.

 

david_jones_artist_poet
David Jones

 

I have been reading little other than In Parenthesis for the last few weeks. The narrative precision clarifies with each re-reading, as does the characterisation, the recurring motifs become more significant, the gem-like passages of exquisite poetry leap out. I have come to it very late; a reason for some regret but it is the best thing I have read in years. Perhaps the title put me off. It sounds arid and a bit tricksy. Jones suggests the parenthesis was the war itself (perhaps again indicating his real concern with how we live our peace), though he also cryptically adds “because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis”. The whole work concludes with lines taken from The Song of Roland: “the man who does not know this has not understood anything”.