Ruskin, Davie, Graves: a ramble inspired by the AAWP conference 'discussion of process'.

I read Ruskin’s “On Modern Painters”, especially the section “of Truth of water” ( Vol 1, section V) where he castigates landscape painters for  throwing a blob of color on a canvass and exploiting a tacit agreement with the viewer that that blob means: ”Water; with or without reflections”…Ruskin said it looked nothing like light on water, and went out with a notebook and pen and carefully described what he saw. [1] It’s a powerful antidote to modern theorized claims about the Prison House of  Language or the slippage of the signifier. Starting with the admission that no one will ever manage to paint the sea, he then praises those who get closest. Nice metaphor there. 

As Ruskin says about painting the sea (Vol I part two, section v, ch1 point 5), it’s impossible, it can only be suggested by means of ‘more or less spiritual and intelligent conventionalism’(Vol 1 page 355). 

 A poem is a conventional literary category, and so there is a general sense of what a poem is and should do, and while that obviously varies across different versions of ‘poetry’, there are dominant assumptions about what a poem should be: in terms of diction, subject matter, and treatment despite the various movements over the past two hundred years.  In fact, given the lyricization of poetry over the past two centuries, we have fallen such a long way since Chaucer could write about everything and anything. Put against the works of the great medieval poets, most modern poetry seems flat and anemic.  

These often unspoken definitions, internalized over the years, exert a significant pull on the writing of any piece, they are part of the way in which I recognize that I am writing a poem,  so the paradox arises that to write a poem one must adhere to the conventions, but I want to avoid the conventions, but if I avoid too many of them is it still a poem.  

And that had merged with a distinction Donald Davie makes between two types of poems[2], one of which he calls “literary” but which I think of as the ‘Poetic Poem’: it’s the one where the poet is being self consciously ‘poetic’ ticking the right boxes,  and having poetic thoughts which no one,  let alone the poet, has ever had during the experience it purports to describe. Done well it can be interesting.  Done badly , which it so often is, the poem is the verbal equivalent of Ruskin’s blob of color…we accept that  someone is having a poetic moment and don’t enquire too closely about the truth of it.  We respond as well trained seals, especially if the subject matter is about some kind of individual trauma. We parade our sensitivity by responding to poems which invite us to sympathize with the poet and which don’t challenge us ot consider our assumptions or values.  

Whatever happened to the "Affective Fallacy"? Or, as Sir Geoffrey Hill put it in a discussion of Owen, "The Poetry had better not be in the Pity'.

That’s another issue. Robert Graves made a simple but useful distinction in poetic Unreason. If we ask if a poem is successful then there are two answers: successful for the poet, and successful for the reader.  Far too much poetry may well serve as therapy for the poet, but offers the reader nothing except the opportunity to wear his or her politics or ideology on their sleeve or to parade their own sensitivity.  Come to think of it,  I.A Richards called these  “stock responses” though I don't think he was talking about ideology. There is, somewhere, a fine poem by Thom Gunn about this all.

It may make sense one day. 

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[1] I don’t claim to have read all six volumes of Modern Painters.

[2] In Under Briggflatts (1989) ‘One fertile in associations and analogies , that may be called ‘literary’; and another , that goes immediately into prosody, to be called poetic’. (128) 

'To Be Incarnational' by Tom Sleigh: David Jones, WIlfrid Owen, political poems and how to see

To Be Incarnational

BY TOM SLEIGH

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246740

In an article which explores and celebrates David Jones as a model for writing about anything, though the  focus is on war, Sleigh writes:

'I’m not sure how far I want to press this next point. It goes past Jones and Owen, though it’s more closely related to Jones’s understanding of how to represent, not war so much, as what Seamus Heaney once called “the music of what happens.” Jones said that he didn’t intend In Parenthesis to be a “War Book” — only that it “happens to be concerned with war.” That distinction seems essential — 
when he says, “We find ourselves privates in foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly inimical, hateful, to us,” he is stating a basic human problem — how to find formal goodness in a hateful life. So he isn’t setting up shop as a war poet, or a political poet, or any kind of poet. He isn’t motivated by Justice, his poem doesn’t require sponsorship by any of the “Monumental certainties that go perpetually by, perpetually on time,” to quote Randall Jarrell. Which can’t be said of a lot of the poetry being written today about politically charged abstractions, like war, poverty, racism, and other forms of injustice.

About seven years ago I became restless with my own use of these abstractions — and began doing journalism in places where everything’s all right until it’s not all right and then it’s too late — and discovered that this kind of risk, the taking of calculated chances, settled me down. I want to say this tentatively now, but one reason why 
I was attracted to poetry is because I’ve always wanted more than just my own dailiness. And I’ve always gone to art, and now my experiences as a journalist, to find that something more. But if the pursuit of justice has become part of that search, it’s a secondary pursuit that I’ve learned along the way, not something that I started out with.

However, as a contradictory part of that pursuit, I’ve found that my politics and biases in writing about politically charged subject matter are fairly useless in writing poetry. If  I’m dealing with such material, I want to discover my subject as I write, and not have it arise from some prefab stance, or hell of opinions that I simply populate with more opinions. Jones’s use of clashing vocabularies and tones, melding of  Welsh myth with the everyday concerns of the infantryman, his elided categories, like pastoral combined with detailed observation of  barbwire, achieves a music that can express the difference between what you ought to feel and what you do feel — not iron smashing against iron, but the difference between exploring a political emotion, say, rather than a political conviction. A political conviction weaves no web, traps no chaotically buzzing flies — it’s hygienic, and easily put aside when the moment of outrage or conversational animus has passed. A political emotion is recalcitrant, contradictory, and involves you with silver wrappers and nutritional biscuits with odd names like Plumpy’Nut. And that involvement with the material world weaves an ever more responsive web of circumstance and contingency. 

To be faithful to a political emotion you have to keep yourself open to lots of different frequencies so that whatever ethical statement you arrive at comes as part of the texture of whatever form is driving your language forward. And it’s this language as it arrives that relieves you of having to stand guard over your own opinions and convictions, and gives you access to reaches of thought and feeling you might not otherwise imagine. Which is risky, unpredictable, and not always easy to reconcile with your day-to-day political, emotional, or intellectual entanglements.'

It's a fine article and the comparison of Jones with Owen as witnesses is particularly good.