by Peter Robinson
Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 88
Perhaps I'm not the only reader who, on receiving a new issue of Poetry Ireland Review, turns immediately to Dennis O'Driscoll's 'Pickings and Choosings' to see what poetry's great and good (and the others too) have had to say for themselves in recent months.Doubtless I'd be a better person if the new poetry were my first resort; but reading poetry requires an investment of energy and understanding that isn't always on tap at the end of a tricky working day, and I wouldn't like to approach new poems as Helen Vendler appears to do: 'It's like being a talent scout for an opera company, when all you can say about the voice you hear is, "No, it has no carrying power, it hasn't any capacity to stay on pitch, it hasn't any sense of innate rhythm, it hasn't any expressive color, it hasn't interpretive power... it's just no, no, no."' Before we all despair of pleasing the impresario, let's not forget that if 'no, no, no' is all you can say, then you're probably not usefully managing your time. Her presumption of perfect pitch and judgment is equally hard to credit or take; and, after all, it's so much more courageous to risk a 'yes, maybe', now and then, with some struggling young hopeful. Vendler has a reasonable reputation for explaining why long-established poets are worth reading; she's not so famous for spotting who among the complete unknowns may prove good in the longer run.
Her assurance is not only contradicted by the history of poetry and the full contents of many a remembered poet's complete works, it's put in its place by Charles Simic, whose quotations - some penned as aphorisms - are usually on the money: 'It is absolutely amazing how many great poets started as seemingly talentless half-wits.' Vendler similarly appears to be keeping up standards when she writes: 'When one remembers how many separate talents go to make a formidable poet - talents musical, imaginative, psychological, visual, intellectual, metaphysical, temperamental - one wonders that the thing is done at all.' She should raise her expectations of obscurely unlikely people with their 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Her own colloquial slide could also use some attuning: like the king in Hamlet, poets have doubtless been called 'thing' before, and many probably wouldn't mind being 'done' by the right person if occasion arose - as the formidable Joseph Brodsky notes: 'You can spend a lifetime, twenty-five years, in a concentration camp or you can survive a bombardment of Hiroshima and yet not produce a single line, whereas a one-night stand gives birth to an immortal lyric.' Maybe it does. Yet just as it isn't the camp or the bomb, so it isn't the stand that produced the poem. If it were, red-light districts would surely have more stationery shops in their vicinities.
O'Driscoll's anthology is packed with such stuff as quarrels are picked on - and that's one of its virtues. Another is that if you don't like what one writer claims, you can always rummage the book for its antidote. In many cases there's no need to contradict, debunk, or gainsay - because another quotation has already done that for you. Sometimes there's no need even to rummage: the editor has thoughtfully placed them next to each other. Don Paterson's 'Poetry is like solving a crossword puzzle in which you are also the compiler' hardly catches the excitement and unexpectedness that poets report feeling when new work comes along and comes right; as if in reply, Paul Muldoon immediately asserts: 'I don't believe in poetry as crossword puzzle, as being necessarily difficult.' In response to Gregory Orr's 'In order to write well, a poet needs to go to that place where energy and intensity concentrate, that place just beyond which chaos and randomness reign,' you might find yourself imagining a tiny space between the piles of unmarked homework and the sink full of greasy washing up, or recall André Breton's mot about how poetry like love is made in bed; but, don't bother, Michael Longley's riposte is better: 'If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there.' Mind you, the thought of Breton's remark does make me wonder what an anthology of poetry quotations that took the ages as its fishing grounds would read like.
In his Introduction, O'Driscoll evokes and fends off the analogy between his collection and media opinion-feed when he notes that 'The best of these quotations are "sound bites" only in the sense that they sound out ideas memorably - encapsulating larger debates in bonsai form - and that the adjective "sound" means "judicious".' Fair enough, but 'The relation of statements about poetry to the poem itself,' Dave Smith suggests, 'is approximately the relationship of sexual instruction handbooks to sexual intercourse.' These snippets from innumerable poetic equivalents to the advertising blurbs on the back of The Joys of Sex must then have an even more tenuous relationship with what Smith also calls the poem's 'felt reality' - something I prefer to think is the equivalent of making love, not sexual intercourse. This isn't, after all, a collection of crafted aphorisms by different hands, although some of the quotations are, and on the page they all look like it. Most of these pronouncements are excerpted from newspaper prose, interview talk, from lunges into generalisation in mid-review, or when writing a preface or introduction. O'Driscoll's range of sources is extraordinarily capacious - from Harpers and Queen to the Irish Farmers Journal... unless that's the journalistic equivalent of Dorothy Parker's 'the gamut of emotion from A to B'.
But could it also be that anthologising these bite-size chunks from people's writings has altered their meaning? In issues of the magazine their selection may perform a role like the lines of lesser events scrolling across the screen below the newscaster's talking head. You can skim them to see what people are sounding off about, and then go back to the big story in the body of the magazine. Sequenced together here in just under two hundred and forty pages, they can't help accumulating broad cultural significance. Reading them can, for instance, start to feel faintly tiresome, as in the section called 'What is it anyway?' where most of the entries begin 'Poetry is...'. That was when the thought crossed my mind that this book might be a sight more valuable if the same intelligences were sounding out a wider range of subjects - 'beyond all this fiddle', as it were. Speaking of which, here's Robert Crawford: 'As far as politics is concerned, the poet's most important work is to fiddle while Rome burns.' Most of the poets I know are too worked off their anapaestic feet to loll around in a palace doing that; and the man capable of dedicating one of his books 'To Scotland' would presumably be less inclined to fiddle while Edinburgh burned. Willy-nilly, this anthology - not dipped into, but read from cover to cover - does start to look like a mirror held up to the nature of the current poetry scene.
O'Driscoll has also caught a lot of people with their guard momentarily down. Here's Hugo Williams from his TLS column: 'If a thing isn't commercial it has a kind of holiness about it which exempts it from responsibility. Poems are chits that get you off work.' Nice work if you can get it, but most poets can't get it even if they try; and, more importantly, what sort of holiness is it that has no responsibility? Not the salvation through good works kind, that's for sure. Donald Davie shows himself suffering in the valley of the shadow of salvation by election when he observes: 'Many are called but few, very few, are chosen; it is a lesson that we are happy to learn about everybody's lifetime except our own.' Sure it is; but perhaps the real lesson is to write poetry because you like doing it, not because you long to be accommodated into some anthological heaven or hell of posterity. Jorie Graham is cited in Newsweek (maybe she didn't say it then) as announcing that 'For every lie we're told by advertisers and politicians, we need one poem to balance it.' Ah, so that's what's been keeping the creative writing programmes busy over there. But then again, what was it Plato said about poets and liars? Whole swathes of this compulsive reading feel like a combination of Karl Kraus's samplings from the then current journalism to demonstrate his language's corruption, and Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées reçues.
Michael Hofmann tries to keep his head when all around are losing theirs: 'I am hostile to the very idea of poetry, so to speak, in the plural, as a collective mass or enterprise' (which might be a misprint for 'collective or mass enterprise'); he's hostile to 'Poetry as a certain good.' This is true of all abstractions from activities. Nothing human is a certain good; examples of it have to be evaluated. Seamus Heaney, the writer granted the most quotations here by a long chalk, can usually be relied on to speak up for its benefits, as when on the facing page to Hofmann's hostility he asserts: 'If you've got one person responding to poetry, you have an autobiography; if you have 20 people, you have the beginning of a culture.' Hofmann's prescription for avoiding writing 'bilge' from mere 'ambition' is also a bit rich: 'You need a pure heart, a good ear, and a wicked vocabulary.' It won't be long before that modish and self-defining use of 'wicked', if read, will require a footnote; and, while no one would quarrel with 'a good ear' (one for Flaubert's dictionary), if Hofmann has a pure heart he should be put in the imaginary museum: he must be the first poet in the history of the world who hasn't got one that's a Dante's comedy of ambivalence, contradiction, conflict, intolerance, obsession, envy, resentment, and worse. After all, that's what poets use as a help to understanding the other people who also have hearts but may or may not be poets. Perhaps the mystery of making a poem rests in people, who feel themselves especially alive when trying to do it, permitting themselves to engage an ordinary heart and a practiced ear in judging what are the proper words in the right order for that particular creative occasion at that specific cultural moment; and it has to be done at a run with trained instincts, not by consciously deploying concepts, however retrospectively relevant. Vendler can hardly be faulted for attempting to remark that very good poems are not easily written. Hofmann has probably been distracted by the superficial wit of balancing 'pure' of the heart with 'wicked' of the vocabulary But then, not only does 'wicked' cancel out (because, in case you didn't know, it means 'good' in teen-talk), but also the heart of a poem is the words.
Though O'Driscoll wouldn't perhaps relish the role, in his anthologising he appears like the walking conscience in Browning's 'How it Strikes a Contemporary'. The thought of him alighting on your unguarded utterances might help save you from the mockery of the ages; but for some of us, alas, it's too late, as when the current British poet laureate announces that 'Poetry... is a hot line to the emotions.' Hey, that sounds exciting. Mind you, he also says that 'Poetic manifestos invariably say "yes" and "no", but poetry itself "maybe" and "perhaps".' This is not what Ezra Pound thought when he damned the use of 'perhaps' in his marginalia to The Waste Land manuscript. Haplessly characterising various English predicaments, Motion's notions have poetry urgently shouting uncertainties down the phone to a crowd of prosopopoeia - 'the emotions' -like those in Gray's 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College'. Other comments immortalised here have the air of graffiti, or prompt the desire to scrawl ones like the legendary and true 'Ginsberg revises!' said to have graced the New York subway. John Kinsella's one entry (perhaps consciously echoing Marianne Moore's 'Poetry') reads: 'To write poetry you don't have to like it' - to which this defacer felt tempted to add 'but it helps.' To other quotes my bosom returned the instinctive echo of laughing out loud, as when Liz Lochhead answers the interviewer's question 'Does it make any difference to you being a woman poet?' with 'I don't know. I've never tried being a man poet!' Maybe the odder are the better: 'Nobody writes poems about parsnips' (Anna Pavord); 'Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley' (Charles Simic); 'Writing poetry is like trying to catch a black cat in a dark room' (Robert Greacen). They have the marked advantage of provoking thought without necessarily inviting rebuttal.
There are, needless to say, many observations worth further pondering. Caitriona O'Reilly truly notes: 'The problem with sentimentality is that if it is not risked then the poem can entirely lose emotional register.' Perhaps this is a variation on T S Eliot's view that poetry isn't made from original emotions, but from fresh combinations of ordinary ones. I also like the torque in her describing this thought-provoking advice as both a 'risk' to be run and a 'problem' to be addressed. Equally the thought that sentimentality means wanting to have an emotion without being willing to pay for it also applies to writing poetry. Tom Lubbock's one entry goes some way to explaining why poetry readings are punctuated with what Michael Hamburger glumly calls 'the titter of recognition' when he writes that 'While an audience can laugh if amused, there are no conventional noises for being moved or provoked to thought.' True; but there is a noise which audiences make when they realise they should have been moved or provoked to thought, but have been wrong-footed because they were expecting another laugh. It's a sort of 'hum' sound with a lengthened vowel; it means the poet had better put a funny one in right now before he or she loses them altogether while preferably recalling that, as Marie Heaney is cited as saying, 'There's no such thing as a short poetry reading.'
In the end, though, perhaps it's Paul Farley's comment that sounds the sorriest and most telling of the complaints against this sound bite' age: 'Poets of my generation - born in the early 60s onwards - ... haven't had criticism; they've had marketing.' Very true; but poets of my generation, born about ten years earlier, have seen the age of criticism go into perhaps permanent hibernation; we've seen the age of marketing make a farce of practically everything we hold dear; and we've had to head for higher ground so as to let the tsunami of promo and all it takes with it sweep by. As Heaney, whose volumes also sport plea-bargaining quotes, properly remarks: 'There is a disgraceful abdication from truth in the words that are wrapped around books' - and he's not even referring to the laughably attention-seeking titles that get put on contemporary poetry about to go down in our flood of publication. Taking the longer view, Brodsky at least allows us to hope that we may be able to evolve beyond this market-driven phase: 'The charge frequently leveled against poetry nowadays of being difficult, obscure, hermetic, and whatnot indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly; the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society got stuck.' Since it's also true of unregulated market forces that they don't necessarily produce the best results for the consumer (the classic example being the supply of donated blood), who could ever have thought the market place alone would deliver the best poetry to the people who might most want and need it? Equally; you could be forgiven for thinking that the minuscule amounts of money to be made from the art would have inoculated it against our present culture-wide malaise. Not so, Gresham's Law applies to poets too.
Dennis O'Driscoll has, over the last twenty years and more, performed the Herculean task of picking through a vast morass of secondary and ancillary material about poets and poetry - a great deal of which, I have to confess, had passed me by. Whether he and his publisher Neil Astley meant it or no, The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations is an economically packaged tour round the horizon of the state we find ourselves in now. Somebody should give its editor a medal.
About the Author
Peter Robinson was born in the North of England in 1953. His many books of poetry include Selected Poems (2003), Ghost Characters (2006), and There are Avenues (2006), and he has just published two collections of translations: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba. Unititled Deeds, a book of aphorisms and prose poems appeared in 2004, and his selected interviews Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art in 2006. After eighteen years teaching in Japan, Peter Robinson will become Professor of English and Americal Literature at the University of Reading (UK) in April 2007.
About Dennis O'Driscoll
Dennis O'Driscoll's latest books are New and Selected Poems (Anvil Press, 2004) and The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006). An American edition of the latter book, Quote Poet Unquote, is scheduled to appear from Copper Canyon Press in 2008. A new collection of his poetry is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2007.
Editor: Peter Sirr
Assistant Editor: Paul Lenehan,
with the assistance of Miriam Heymann
Copyright © 2006 by Poetry Ireland Ltd
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
