First a quote, not from the book:
The poet as makar[sic].
Not as sage or seer, or recorder of the human condition or shaper of texts
suitable for the educational system, or cultural analyst or popular
entertainer, or even as spy. These, and many other activities are all valid but
peripheral.
The poet as
someone who makes or composes poems. Poems as constructions, as patterns of words
which when heard (or in our culture, predominantly read, but nevertheless
finally heard in what might be called ‘the Inner ear’) give us the experience
of something we label as poetry. And which other sorts of verbal expression do
not. (Gael
Turnbull, 'The Poet as Makar' )
What might poetry have looked like before
the rules made it a pedant’s game to misquote. One
answer is Tom Pickard’s Hoyoot (2014), his collected poems and songs published by
Carcanet.
And before going further, not only do
Carcanet need to be applauded for publishing this but whoever saw to the back
cover got the blurb right. He or she
wisely kept the ringing endorsements from Bunting and Ginsberg that graced the
back of Tiepin Eros, Pickard’s
selected, and then added comments from Paul Macartney and Annie Lennox. This might
look like a grab for a different market, but in reality it’s a testimony to the
breadth of the collection.
What characterizes Pickard’s poems as a
reading experience is that you’re never sure what’s going to be on the next page.
Most single author collections settle to a recognizable form and subject
matter, but Pickard’s don’t. He is one
of the few English poets who can write directly about sex in all its forms and
variations without sounding coy or crude or clinical. The political poems rage beside carefully observed pieces that
let the wind and the birds into the landscape, and the intricate mess of human
relationships is dealt with in all its baffling complexities.
His style is his own, but like any well-developed style evokes its own
ghosts. There’s occasionally a whiff of
the Mersey poets, without their self-conscious desperation to be wry. Most often he writes like a hard core imagist
from 1912, except it’s hard to imagine a hardcore imagist with a sense of humor
or rage and a willingness to write directly about the world as it is.
He had the minimalistic style under control
from the start.
Adultery
sitting in firelight
your face in shadow
the little gold glint
of your ring.
At times the ghosts of the high modernists
drift in the background, but Pickard writes poems with both feet in the
daylight world of jobs and joblessness and messy relationships and blackberry
picking, not in a theoretical library or a seminar room. This is not poetry that deliberately
references other poetry with a knowing wink.
Holding this all together is the pared down
traditional ballad, with its economy and rhythm, obvious in “The Ballad of
Jamie Allan” his ballad opera which closes out the book, but throughout the
collection.
These three elements combine to make
something that is stripped down and spare, but moving rhythmically and at its
best melodically.
Before the fools made poetry a pedant’s
game, to misquote, a poet might not need to carry a whole baggage of cultural references
and academic expectations; or spend its time worrying about conceptualizing the
art: a poet might be an intelligent, eloquent, independent human, full of
curiosity with a gift for arranging words into memorable patterns. The makar
lives outside the library, reflects on life, and organizes those reflections
into patterns of words. So the poems are
angry or tender, bemused, political, personal, a way of responding to and
organizing a life. The skill and
knowledge are in the craft and the making, and it would be a horrible mistake
to think Pickard is artless.
The poems are then offered to the reader, with
out apology. They offer a space for thinking through and in language, which
requires nothing from the reader but an honest openness to the words on the page.
Somewhere in this book each reader, if he
or she is honest, is going to find poems he or she finds offensive, or dull or
pointless. This is not a euphemism for that old reviewers tic: the collection is uneven. I think this is a good thing.
Poetry that is always being polite and clever, soliciting quiet poetry orgasms
from those in the know, the kind of poetry you need a library or a degree in
poetry to explain, is all very well for writing essays about in a library or
for buying for your elderly maiden aunt, but it’s becoming an utterly pointless
self-perpetuating exercise.
Finally one of the many things I have admired
about Pickard’s poems since I first encountered them is a strange ambivalence.
On the one hand these are often very personal poems. It’s difficult not to read
them as personal responses to personal situations. We’re light years away from
Eliot’s claim that the aim of art is to escape from personality.
But despite this, the poems are not what
Geoffrey Hill recently described as the poetic equivalent of a selfie. The
pared down language, the rhythm and the melody seem to be heading towards a
hard won anonymity. The non-Pickard poem which reminds me most of Pickard is:
Westron Wynde when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed agyne.
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