Peter McDonald's Lecture to mark the 2015 launch of Pn Review.

Notes from a provocative  lecture by Peter MacDonald. The text is in the current edition of PN Review but you can hear it at the link below. I hope I'm not misrepresenting his argument by quoting bits I want to keep for my own consideration.

http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk/peter-mcdonalds-lecture-to-mark-the-2015-relaunch-of-pn-review/

He begins with a discussion of Yeat's famous quote:

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.

MacDonald comments:

'the work [Per Amica Silentia Lunae] was written when Yeats was fifty-one, and published when he was fifty-two years old. He had been publishing poetry since he was nineteen years of age, and critical prose since he was twenty-one, so his statement here has a good deal of time and experience behind it. Yeats by this time knew a few things, that is to say, about both poetry and quarrelling'.

Macdonald  goes on to observe that most people quote the first sentence and not the second. He doesn't point out that the number of readers of Per Amica Silentia Lunae must be very small or that Yeats can spin the word 'self' through enough sub devisions to confuse most readers. But for Macdonald, the key point is the role of uncertainty and disagreement. An uncertainty and disagreement which he sees as lacking in both modern poetry and criticism:

'It’s far, too, from what passes for the truth now, almost a century after Yeats made his formulation. So much so, that it is entirely plausible in contemporary poetic and critical culture to replace ‘quarrel’ with ‘agreement’: nowadays, we make out of the agreement with others, rhetoric, but of the agreement with ourselves, poetry'.

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Quoting from Elizabeth Bishop writing to Robert Lowell:

'Yet amid all the noise of the tenured ‘explainers’, the professors and the poet-critics and the critic-poets at work here, there, and everywhere in a booming university system that makes good money from the humanities, Bishop knows exactly what is never being mentioned:

The trouble is – excuse my clichés – as people grow older, non-artists, that is, they do have to steel themselves so much, forget so much and try to pretend that everything’s all right so much. They are afraid, probably rightly, that poetry – any art – if they take it hard, might upset them – so they pretend they like it while at the same time they resist it absolutely.

'Fifty-two years later, this is one of those truths which remains unsayable; to air it now – whenever, say, yet another anthology makes its marketing pitch on the promise that poetry can change your life for the better – would be understood simply as quarrelsome, the work of an elitist, a spoiler, or (at best, and condescendingly) a useful gadfly. Yet it is a great poet writing to another great poet; I myself think that what Bishop says here is true. If people really understood most poetry, or understood what it takes to write most true poems, they would be shocked rather than inspired. The truth is, everything is not ‘all right’; and real poetry tells this truth. Few creative writing courses, it is fair to say, have been founded on such a premise; nor does it sell many books, or make many careers'.

If the new proposed Australian literature syllabus is anything to go by, we will continue to teach students to 'resist it [literature] absolutely'.  We will churn out passive users of second and third hand opinions  and reward them for telling us what they think we want to hear.  Exactly why we're doing this remains the overwhelming question which no one seems to be bothered to answer.

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Looking at the state of institutionalised literary studies, which seem to be on shaky ground at present he comments:

'The humanities, on both sides of the Atlantic, may be making a lot of pained noise at present; but the essence of their complaint is that they are not loved enough. It would seem never to have occurred to the most vocal mourners that their disciplines did not come into being in order that they should be loved; nor indeed that the society from whose instinctive values (including the values that attach to tradition and art) they have declared themselves so completely apart, and to which they remain in their own estimation so insistently superior, has truly no obligation to show them its affection.

When what were once disciplines of thought and study conceived and practised in terms of disinterested knowledge decide that their success is measured by prestige, peers, and patronage, and that their prime task is to ‘interrogate’ their own past, along with the past and the present of their fostering societies, and their fundamental shared values of aesthetic, social, and civil traditions, then they have no right to be surprised when those who foot the bill tire of their interrogations, and ask some hard questions of their own'.

A Strong Song Tows Us by Richard Burton (part two)

In “A Strong Song Tows Us” Richard Burton attempts to account for Basil Bunting’s ‘disappearance’.  “Mention Bunting to a literate, educated young person these days and you will be met by polite incomprehension. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s and 1970s he was arguably the world’s most celebrated living poet.”(p7)

Burton investigates the disappearance. He lists as reasons: regionalism (Bunting is ‘a northern poet’) religion (Bunting is a ‘Quaker Poet’) voice (I don’t understand this one), his association with Pound, difficulty, difficulty of getting short bits of long poems in anthologies, but finally plumps for “auto-regionalisation” as the main cause. (p17)

I think he’s wrong. This is not a criticism of his book. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the way poetry works in the modern world.  Quality of poem as poem is not the issue. The shrinking of poetry from the public domain into academic institutions means that what gets read at school and taught at university, sets up a perverse kind of brand loyalty and what is read at school has more to do with what schools have to do, than with any kind of poetics. If no one ever published another poem, schools could continue blithely teaching their compulsory version of poetry because it have never borne much relationship to how poems operate outside.

 Burton demonstrates this when, discussing ‘war poetry’.  He writes:

“We now think of the poetry of the first world war as overwhelmingly critical of political and military leaders’ strategy and tactics, articulating a sense of the hopelessness of valour in the teeth of insuperable horror, but that is largely because the poetry that has survived (because it is the best) was written by poets-Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves- who subscribed to the view that it was the futility and horror that needed to be in a  perverse sense celebrated. If fact of the 2,225 poets who published during the years of the war hardly any expressed the views that have for generations of students defined it’s poetry.” (61)

It’s the bit in brackets that betrays him:  ('because it is the best'.) 

Is it? On what grounds?

In terms of getting a reaction from students, if your class doesn’t respond to ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ you might want to join hands and contact the living: does that make it a great poem? Schools use Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath not because they are great poets,  but because their poems get a reaction and can be discussion starters for ‘Meaningful issues”.  After all, isn’t great literature supposed to be about important stuff? 

The problem is that discussing poetry, as poetry, requires both knowledge and a high level of verbal sophistication. Burton has this, as he demonstrates reading Bunting. He is able to explain why Villon is worthy of our attention, not because of its content, but because of its rich verbal texture.

But how many people in a class room can do that?  How many have ever heard of Yeats’ objections to Owen’s poetry and could navigate that criticism? or Geoffrey Hill's "the poetry had better not be in the pity". How many have actually asked themselves if their choice of poets is about the quality of the poetry, or because in one way or another, they still are “Sandwich board men [and women] of the revolution", in the case of “War Poets” representing values we’d like to think we’d have in that situation. 

Poems get chosen partly because of the syllabus requirement, but partly because of the values they espouse. Are those four poets Burton names really ‘the best’?  Are there really no good pro war poems written by one of the 2,221 other poets?

Bunting is not appearing any time soon on a school curriculum. Imagine the essays they’d make you write, at seventeen. Briggflatts is a great poem: discuss. Imagine trying to explain what “the greatest British Modernist’ might mean in terms of taking a class through I am agog for foam, or Briggflatts, or Villon. I don’t think there are many people who could do that. And I don't think many people would see the exercise as worthwhile. Once you've proven how good it is, what do you do next? Analyse the discourse of nationhood or masculinity it it?

For a poet to live in the academy he or she has to be useable.  And Bunting for all his brilliance, is resolutely not useable. It's one of the reasons he's brilliant.

Revisiting Auden's "In Memory of W.B.Yeats" and not liking the experience..

The Kind of conversation you might dream of having, late at night, four people enthusiastically discussing why Yeats was so very very good. The conversation spinning out to Eliot and then to Auden.  

It’s hard in such a context to defend my intuition, especially when I hold the people who were disagreeing with me in such high regard. It’s harder to insinuate the essential however, and support it from a memory running on empty so late in the evening.

But I don’t like Auden’s poetry. Never have. Perhaps it’s just residual social resentment.  Perhaps he just reminds me of some privileged upper class twit who after his private school trotted off to rooms in Oxbridge where he felt empowered to pronounce on a working class he’d never met.  Admittedly these are dumb reasons for not liking poetry.

But I don’t like his elegy for Yeats. So I came home and reread Yeats’ complete poems, one collection a day, and then reread Auden’s elegy. If it’s great it will sustain scrutiny at the level of word choices.

 It’s the second part that’s hopelessly wrong..

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

You were silly like the rest of us. A glib judgment which hides the grounds of the judgment.  In what way was Yeats silly? The OED gives 6 meanings for Silly:

1 1)   deserving of pity compassion or sympathy (Obs)

2 2)   Weak feeble frail, insignificant , trifling

3 3)   Unlearned , unsophisticated, simple, rustic , ignorant

4 4)   Weak or deficient in Intellect , feeble minded, imbecile

5 5)   Lacking in judgment or common sense, foolish, senseless, empty headed.

6 6)   Stunned, stupefied, dazed as by a blow

So apart from the first one, which is now an obscure dialect usage, which of those terms apply to Yeats?  Unless you are ignorant of the man’s life and writing the answer is NONE.

The same might be asked of the glib poeticizing of the second and third lines: The parish of rich women, physical decay/Yourself. These are offered as things his gift survived. 

What does ’parish’ mean in that context and why ‘rich’ and why were they a threat to Yeats’ gift? 

 Did Lady Gregory jeopardize his poetry, or Maud Gonne, or Olivia Shakespeare?   Did Yeats himself in some strange way jeopardize his gift as the poem states?  Was there a poet who ever worked so hard at being a poet, and who’s collected poems, lined up chronologically, are a testament to his ability to go on getting better at what he did.  Whatever gift Yeats had, he worked hard at perfecting it.

Why Mad Ireland?  How was Ireland any more mad than England or Germany in the same period.

Auden is guilty not only of being glib but of padding his line. Metrically he may be very good but it’s too easy to find an adjective to keep the beat.  Adjectives are the tools of the opinionated.  They simultaneously judge and absolve the poet from giving the grounds of the judgment.  A great poet would have chosen the adjectives carefully. Bunting would have simply left them out.

The same disease is evident in the lines:  “Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still”…

It sounds good, if you feel comfortable with a country being personified as a mad woman…I don’t… but what could it possibly mean in this context. Poetry stops the rain? Or Yeats thought he could improve the weather and was wrong?

 Auden may be metrically brilliant, but if I were as good as he was, I’d write something worth reading.