The truth about writing

...and always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on...

Basil Bunting

what I learnt etc part three

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

(Robert graves)

what I learnt as a writer in residence part two

We talk about poetry in ways that are not only different to other arts, but which are detrimental to poems. I’ve never heard anyone say “Music sucks.” Or “Music is sooooo boring” or “I don’t like Music.’

I’ve heard people say “Folk music sucks” or “Wagner is boring” or “I love Bing Crosby and not Frank Sinatra”. But people talk about “Poetry” as if it were a homogenous thing: “I hate poetry”, ”Poetry is soooo boring/difficult/incomprehensible”.

We have a “peak industry body for “Poetry” in Australia.

And inside the academic discourse, teachers talk about “the power of poetry”. Poetry does this or that.

But it doesn’t.

If there is any “power” in poetry lies in the way individual poems mean something to readers. “Poetry” is a meaningless abstraction which cures warts, stops wars or infects readers with unwanted ideological viruses. And which doesn’t exist in the real world.

Oh, I also learnt I can still talk the hind legs off a donkey.

Steve said: "Bert Jansch Is dead".

We were tuning up, and I said, don't be stupid, that's not remotely funny....







But he is.

Dead.

So I never met the man but I've been listening to him since I found "Rosemary Lane" in the city record library in 75 or 76. And I haven't been able to think of anything to say. Then I remembered Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things
For All things counter, original, spare, strange;

and that about sums it up really. So thank you Mr. Jansch. And safe travelin'

Bit late but it needed saying all the same.
Thank you.

What I learnt as a writer in residence part one

I was standing in a classroom, looking at the unfamiliar faces.
Nothing new there, I’ve been doing this for twenty five years. I know the drill. I know I’ll get out of here alive. I’m a total stranger, so there’s enough curiosity and generous courtesy to get me through the first five minutes. That’s all I need. I know that I’ve got a better than good chance of making the next eighty minutes work. The deviants up the back will have something to laugh at, the brightest in the class will have something to think about and I’ll pitch it in a way that keeps them all interested and entertained and informed.
I’m going to speak to five classes, and I know that if this school is like every other one on the planet I can guarantee that by the time I get to class number three I wilI have already have a vague reputation to live up to and I can use that to bank on.
I feel sick, but there’s nothing new there either: fear is a performance enhancing drug and I feel like throwing up everytime I walk into a class room, no matter how sure I am of the class or the material.
So what’s weird is that I’m not here as the expert English teacher, or the curriculum expert, I’m not even here as someone who knows a great deal about the history of poetry: I’m here as someone who writes poems and reads them. And I’m here to talk about poetry from that perspective to a group of kids who are five or six weeks away from the end of school and that means that statistically in the five classes I speak to there will be only one or two students who will ever buy a poetry book. The others might for a wedding or a funeral, but poetry is something they do at school and as far as they are concerned the sooner they can get away from both the better.
I don’t blame my profession. English teachers do what they do because it’s what they have to do. The people who write syllabi might not know their arse from their elbow but they have the power to impose their ignorance on all of us.
English teachers are not there to make poets, make students love poetry or train fledging literary critics.
But ……
I’m standing in a space that is utterly antithetical to everything I’m about to say…

What is a poem?

‘Poetry is a verdict not an occupation’ or in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (1993. P.35): ‘The work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art’.

This is true of all arts, but poetry is unusual in that in the 21st century, not only does the writer have to negotiate critical judgements imposed by others who may not share his or her poetics, but writing a poem does not necessarily allow him or her to claim the title of Poet, and writing a poem does not necessarily mean he or she is producing Poetry.

The writing is nothing more than raw material, an offering to be ignored or taken up by the machinery of legitimization, whose patronage is based on numerous factors, none of them the value of the writing because it has no intrinsic value to anyone other than its writer, neither commercial nor cultural, outside the process.

It is simply scribble until it has been recognized by those with the authority to recognize it as a poem and then transformed into ‘poetry’ by the process of publication, review, critical reception, academic commentary and consecration: the process of institutionalization that characterizes the discourse of Poetry.

The value of the writing depends entirely on its acceptance into this discourse, and the fact that it is recognized or accepted first as a poem and then treated accordingly. The limitations of its stand alone value are easily seen from the reader or critic’s perspective in Fish’s ‘How to Recognize a poem when you see one’ (Fish 1980), and Richards’ discussion of his “Protocols” (Richards 1929). From the writer’s perspective in the often incomprehensible process where a poem, rejected by one journal is published by another and in the practice of some editors who accept the submission and then feel free to change the words on the page before publication without consulting the writer or even as a condition of publication.

The field exerts its own gravitational force, bending the trajectory of self-editing towards a finished product that will be more likely to have a chance of being accepted. The writer is constantly being told to study the market, read the journal before submitting etc. But even then there is no guarantee; most writers have looked at journals that have rejected their work and wondered why the pieces in the journal were accepted. However, as a writer there is little one can do about this process except accept it as a fact of life or become an editor or publisher.

"Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances" by R.F.Foster.

I think one could fairly describe R.F. Foster's output as prodigious. The amount of reading that must have gone into his two volume biography of Yeats alone is almost frightening to contemplate. He somehow managed not to be buried by the details and he is consistently enjoyable to read. Neither of which can be said for Gordon Bowker's new biography of Joyce.

Two examples from Foster's new book: "Words Alone".

The first nails The Boys Own quality of Dracula while simultaneously taking to task some of the more outrageous readings of the book:

In many ways Dracula reads more like John Buchan on mescaline than anything Irish. Its primary identity is as English (or British) shocker rather than Anglo-Irish meditation-however wittily the count and his earth boxes may be interpreted as a metaphor for declining Irish landlords. 105

We could argue whether Uncle Silas is Le Fanu's "masterpiece". Foster's topic in chapter three, "Lost in the Big House: Anglo-Irishry and the Uses of the Supernatural" predisposes him towards the novel as it is always going to be more useful to his analysis than "In a glass darkly". But I like this:

Thus the Styrian lesbian Vampire Carmilla allegedly turns into an 'autochthonous manifestation of the female nation, reaching out from portraits and ruined castles to fascinate and destroy the expatriate English, confined, as Laura is in the novella by a sterile world of patriarchal rationality where no young men are permitted because no continuation is possible.' Perhaps the connection between nation and narration can be taken a step too far.

The reproof is in the juxtaposition of controlled syntax with what precedes it more than in the diplomatically phrased comment.