by Clive James
The crescent moon, to quote myself, lies back,
A radiotelescope propped to receive
The signals of the circling zodiac.
I send my thoughts up, wishing to believe
This is only the first stanza of a conclusion that spreads over two stanzas, but let’s break into the flow and see how it works. My own first judgement was that an otherwise unstoppable advance had interrupted itself. On a second reading, I still think so. When I mentioned that I had only one reservation about the poem, the phrase ‘to quote myself’ was it. He isn’t quoting any other part of the poem, so what is he quoting? Investigation reveals that he is quoting another of his poems: ‘Nocturne’, the second part of a two-part sequence called ‘Day Work’, which was collected in his previous volume, Lost in the Foreground. A poet need not necessarily be asking too much when he asks us to read one of his poems in the light of others in the same volume, or even in other volumes. In the later Yeats, to take a prominent instance, there are plenty of individual poems making that demand. But when a poem has successfully spent most of its time convincing us that it stands alone, it seems worse than a pity when it doesn’t. It seems like self-injury: a bad tattoo. It was the poem itself that made us wish it to be independent, so it has revised its own demand.
Edgar’s poem can have this flaw and still remain intact. (Presumably the crack in the golden bowl did not stop it holding fruit.) But it’s definitely a blip in the self-contained air of infallibility. The perfect has momentarily become less-than-perfect, with the sole advantage that one is forcibly persuaded that the word ‘perfect’ might mean something. (If it means ‘stand-alone’, ‘independent’ and ‘self-contained’, then those are already better words.) But the argument continues despite the backfire. The motor hasn’t stopped running. It powers the radio telescope of the moon, which is listening to the stars, appearing here in their old-style, pre-scientific form. What does he wish to believe about the possible destination of his thoughts after they are beamed up to the soap paring, or nail paring, that has now become a parabolic dish? (This poet doesn’t mix his metaphors: he morphs them.) The answer is in the two-part coda’s second stanza, which is the last stanza of the poem:
That they might strike the moon and be transferred
To where you are and find or join your own.
Don’t smile. I know the notion is absurd,
And everything I think, I think alone.
He wants their two trajectories, his and hers, to join again. But we have seen that they haven’t, and now we are told that they won’t, because when he addresses her, she isn’t there, except in his head. This is a drama for one person, and it’s over. He has been talking to himself all along.
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When reacting to a poem, the word ‘perfect’ is inadequate for the same reason that the word ‘wow’ would be. But it isn’t inadequate because it says nothing. It is inadequate because it is trying to say everything. On a second reading, we begin to deduce that our first reading was complex, even if it seemed simple. Scores of judgements were going on, too quickly for us to catch but adding up to a conviction – first formed early in the piece and then becoming more and more detailed – that this object’s mass of material is held together by a binding force. Such a binding force seems to operate within all successful works of art in any medium, like a singularity in space that takes us in with it, so that we can’t pay attention to anything else, and least of all to all the other works of art that might be just as powerful. We get to pay attention to them only when we recover.
But recover from what? A spell? Here again, all the natural first words are suspect. I could say why I picked this less-than-perfect, but almost perfect, poem by Stephen Edgar out of all the scores of perfect poems by him, and out of all the hundreds of perfect poems by other people. I could say I picked it out because it haunts me. If haunting is what ghosts are good at, hanging around to rattle the pots and rearrange the furniture when you least expect it, then ‘haunt’ is the right verb. But it’s a verb that I would rather not use. I think Edgar is a fine poetic craftsman. But in that sentence there are two other words I would rather not use either. The word ‘craftsman’ always sounds like a doomed attempt to give an artist the same credibility as a master carpenter, and ‘fine’ smacks of self-consciously upmarket (i.e. effectively downmarket) American advertising, as in ‘fine dining’, ‘fine linens’, and ‘fine wine’. Well, yes, of course the poet is a fine craftsman, and of course his poem haunts you with its perfection. All these superannuated words we should take for granted when talking about any poem that is properly realized. Actually to put them back into print is like diving on a wreck, with no yield of treasure except scrap metal.
Yet we need the ideas, if not the vocabulary, if we are to begin talking about why and how the poem in question is a made object, and not a foundling. Every bit of it might well be a trouvaille – how phrases are assembled and lucky strikes are struck is an even deeper question – but all the bits are put together by someone who either knows exactly what he’s doing or else can control the process by which he doesn’t, quite. You could say that the poet, right from the start and without interruption, transmits an air of authority, but I doubt that the phrase counts for much more than all those other words I’ve been trying to avoid. (Even the author of a jingle on a birthday card has an air of authority if you like the sentiment.) The thing to grasp is that the fine words and phrases are standing in for a complex reaction. They serve as tokens for a complete discussion of an intricate process that doesn’t just happen subsequently, on a second reading, but happens initially, on the first reading. Most of the analysis that I have supplied above almost certainly happened the first time that I read the poem, but this time I have written it out.
So much can happen, and in such a short space, only because we bring our own history to the poem, even as it brings the poet’s history to us. Contained within the first reaction are all the mechanisms we have built up through reading poems since we were young: reading them and deciding they were good. (We might have learned even more from the poems that we decided were bad, but we could do that only by having first learned to recognize the good.) This mental store that the reader brings into play on a first reading is, I believe, the missing subject in most of what we call criticism. The missing subject needs to be illuminated if we are fruitfully to pursue all the other subjects that crop up as we speak further. Without that first thing, all the subsequent things might be full of information, but they will lack point. It makes little sense, for example, to say that a poem fits into the general run of a poet’s work if we don’t first find ourselves saying why it stands out even from that. We can say later that it blends in, but it had better be blending in only in the sense that it stands out like a lot of the poet’s other poems. A poem doesn’t, or shouldn’t, express the author’s ‘poetry’, and it’s a bad sign when we contend that it does. It was a fateful turning point for the career of Ted Hughes when his later poems were discovered to be ‘Hughesian’, i.e. characteristic instead of unique. The idea that a poet should be praised for producing sequences of poems, and even whole books of poems, that give us nothing but a set of exercises in his own established manner, is ruinous for criticism, and is often the sign of a ruined poet. The great mass of later Lowell is weak when tested by the intensity of early Lowell. Read ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ again – or merely recall the bits of it that you have in your memory – and then try to find anything as strong in the bean silo of History. It takes a critic who has never appreciated the strength of Lowell’s early poems to think that the later work is a development rather than a decline.
In the sum of a poet’s achievement, it isn’t enough that the same tone recurs, and often it’s a sign of deterioration when it does. Edgar, always precise about shades of colour at each end of the day, is a modern master of what I would like to call the daylight nocturne, but I would expect to arouse suspicion if I praised one of his poems for having no other char
acteristics. As it happens, almost every poem he publishes is impossible to reduce to a kit of favourite effects. The argument and its illustrations always serve each other inseparably: they can be discussed separately, but they flow back together straight away. So everything I can say about him follows from his capacity to produce the unified thing. From that initial point, the discussion can widen. We can say that Edgar suffers from the peculiar Australian critical climate in which it is widely and honestly believed that a rhymed poem in regular stanzas must be inhibiting to a sense of expression that would otherwise flow more freely. The elementary truth that there are levels of imagination that a poet won’t reach unless formal restrictions force him to has been largely supplanted, in Australia, by a more sophisticated (though far less intelligent) conviction that freedom of expression is more likely to be attained through letting the structure follow the impulse.
In that climate, Stephen Edgar’s name is not yet properly valued even in Australia. To believe that it one day will be, you have to believe that something so good is bound to prevail. But that might not happen. Australia (and here we enter into sociology and politics) has a small literary market anyway, and for poetry it is minuscule, so prizes and grants count. Though his position has somewhat improved lately, Edgar has been awarded remarkably few of either: partly because, I fear, the committees are stacked with poets who couldn’t write in a set form to save their lives, and with critics and academics who believe that the whole idea of a set form is obsolete. It would be nice to think that this tendency could be reversed by the example of a single poet. But of course it can’t. All one can do is argue for the importance of his work, and that argument must start with the certainty of our first judgement, made on a first reading: a judgement which is not yet concerned with advocacy. On a second reading we can, and must, begin to propose a restoration of the balance. There is a place for free forms: they no longer have to justify themselves. There should be a place for regular forms too, but they now have to justify themselves every time. One of Edgar’s dictionaries is a classical dictionary. He can read the ancient languages, and might have written poems with no properties except those from the far past. But his work participates in a new classicism, fit to incorporate the modern world, in which it deserves a high place. Almost any of his poems will tell us that, on a first reading. The second reading tells us why we should try to tell everyone else.
Interlude
The poem which strikes us as enjoying perfect success all on its own, and does not just rank as a typical item in its author’s inventory, has the status of treasure, and someone will always have the urge to collect the treasures into a treasure house, like the cave on Captain Kidd’s island, or the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer in Vienna. The most common form of treasure house is the anthology. The student can be confidently advised not to overlook anthologies whenever they show up on the shelves of second-hand bookshops. The further back in time from which the poems in an anthology emanate, the more likely is that era to be represented fairly. Closer to now, the question of permissions looms. Sometimes there are poets – Edith Sitwell was one such – who don’t want to be anthologized, regarding their total achievement as too grand to be appreciable by the fragment. But more often it is a question of the price. Luckily, in Britain, the increasingly vast, web-based and world-girdling sound museum called the Poetry Archive counts as an anthology that every poet wants to be in, while any publisher is glad to count the publicity as sufficient payment. The Poetry Archive is one of the many initiatives for which we should thank the generosity and imagination of Andrew Motion, who in his role as Poet Laureate took a larger view of his task than merely to pay homage to the Royal Family. He turned all the best poets of his time into a royal family, and got them to speak into the microphone. The results quickly accumulated into a treasure house. One of its most glittering features is the series of guided tours to favourite poems. When I was asked to conduct one of these tours I at first thought it was impossible to convey the full measure of appreciative enthusiasm in a single paragraph. Then I remembered that it’s exactly what we do in life: when we want to switch people on to a specific poet, we don’t deliver a complete lecture, we try to hook them with a sentence.
POETRY ARCHIVE TOUR
‘Mayflies’ by Richard Wilbur
After he came back to the US from the fighting in Europe, Richard Wilbur set a standard for post-war American lyric poetry which nobody else could quite match. Some had the sense of form, some the originality of imagery, but he had both. His stanza forms, many of them invented by himself, can be analysed forever, but his details can be enjoyed instantly. In the little poem ‘Mayflies’ there is a moment I love, when the tiny creatures, rising and descending in the air, are called ‘the fine pistons of some bright machine’. How did he think of that?
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ by Philip Larkin
Otherwise hard to criticize in his poetic greatness, Philip Larkin was sometimes called a dull reciter of his own poetry, but in fact he was good at that too. His unexciting looks were matched by an unexciting voice, but unlike almost all professional actors he knew how to observe his line endings, and never made the mistake of trying to put extra emotion into lines that already had, packed within them, all the emotion they could take. He must have known that ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ was a great poem, but he read it out with deliberate matter-of-factness, reminding us that it largely is a matter of fact. As the everyday details succeed each other, the story is built up which comes to its magnificent climax in the final image of the arrow shower – one of great poetic moments of modern times, a coup on a level with Shakespeare, and, when read out by its author, all the more effective for being merely said, and not declaimed.
‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ by John Betjeman
In this recording, it is only appropriate that Betjeman, on being asked to recite ‘Joan Hunter Dunn’, has to search for it in his book, unable to find it because it isn’t called that. The heroine of the poem, the most dominating of the poet’s long line of strapping sports girls, became so famous she stepped out of the shrine he had built for her and took on a new, permanent life. Betjeman’s poems got into the national consciousness like nobody else’s, and they did so at every level of class: it wasn’t just the gentry who relished his music. Some of the critics hated it because they thought poetry should sound harder to come by, but if they had known more about poetic technique they would have seen Betjeman to be the dedicated craftsman that Philip Larkin so much, and so rightly, admired.
‘Jerusalem’ by James Fenton
As a reciter of his own work, James Fenton has the precious double gift of speaking with unaffected naturalness while retaining all the rigorous construction of his verse forms. The exemplary counterpoint comes in especially handy when he recites ‘Jerusalem’, which is composed of verbal fragments, and would easily seem to fall apart if his voice failed to match the control of tone that holds it together. Many of the phrases come out of those areas of contemporary experience that unsettle us all by threatening to bring us into the firing line. ‘Who packed your bag?’ Fenton, who has actually seen the firing line from close up, is very generous in supposing that his readers might be as concerned as he is about a world in conflict, and his poetry in general can be said to arouse the disturbing possibility that history will give us a poetry more interesting than serenity.
‘The Red Sea’ by Stephen Edgar
Stephen Edgar is the Australian poet who most convincingly, and most rewardingly, continues and enriches the line of the orderly lyric that was established after the Second World War by Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, but Edgar has a range of pinpoint registration exceeding even theirs, mainly because he doesn’t hesitate to avail himself of a scientific vocabulary. In ‘The Red Sea’, the poem is into its second stanza before we realize the yachts are toys, and there is a new revelation at least once per stanza until, in the end, the threat of the real world arrives in the form of Macbeth’s bloodlust. The vast scale of argume
nt packed into small melodic stanzas is typical, as is the quiet voice, which reminds us that only a carefully schooled detachment could possibly see so much.
‘Machines’ by Michael Donaghy
The late Michael Donaghy was a renowned reader of his own work. He had his poems by heart and recited them without a hint of histrionics, relying always on the natural music of the colloquial American voice. As a consequence there was an often striking contrast between the ease of the delivery and the intricacy of the construction. ‘Machines’ is an artefact at least as well built as either the harpsichord or the bicycle celebrated in the narrative, the two miracles of construction being brought together in marriage in the final lines, which are understated in the writing, and even more so when he reads them aloud. As his fine critical writings continually emphasize, Donaghy was a great believer in the formal element, but he always left room for the reader to discover it.
Interlude
When talking about Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Machines’ I made the large assumption that a poem’s form can be appreciated while the work is being recited. My own view is that if the recital is careful enough, it can; but the contrary view is easier to hold, because bits of the poem, unless we already know the poem well, will snag the attention and divert the concentration. Such diversions, indeed, can be called a key requirement. What is a poem whose single moments do not arrest you? It sounds as if it might be pabulum. Nevertheless, no matter how brilliant the fragment, we are not likely to attribute poetic virtue to its author until we get some structural evidence that he or she is not writing prose. Usually, for evidence, we need a stanza; and it has always been my own conviction that you need the ability to build a stanza if you are to get into the game. A stack of stanzas would be better; but failing that, one stanza is the necessary minimum. By that measure, the author of the scurrilous ‘Ballad of Eskimo Nell’ was a poet but Jack London was not. They both wrote poems about the deadly rigours of the frozen North, but Jack London, though he longed for success as a poet, never wrote a stanza that anyone wanted to remember: his whole gift was for prose. Thus, poor guy, he was condemned to fame and wealth: a fate that most poets avoid.