A little post in which I make an odd analogy...

I'm about to compare a poet's changing style to different styles of theatre lighting. If there was  a category of blog post entitled 'It's my blog, I can write about whatever the hell I like', this would most certainly be filed under it....

Seamus Heaney said that, like Yeats, he became well known for the style of work that he developed when he was young, only to develop a very different style in his early thirties. He said this shift took place between, on the one side, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) and, on the other, Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). 

I was sleepily reading Opened Ground in a train station recently when I realised that I was imagining the these two styles in terms of the two different lighting states I had set up for a play at the Alma Tavern recently. So, the descriptive, explicatory amplitude of Heaney’s first two volumes is, in lighting terms, a warm wash with straw and orange gels (albeit a wash with some dark shadows). Under these lights, Heaney plays the young hero in front of a backdrop of Derry countryside. In Wintering Out and North, the world is seen under a new, picked-out, sharp-edged, lunar light. Under the cold spot, Heaney is a shadowy visitant to his museum exhibits. 

No Channel to the Station: Why I Can’t Write

        I've been trying (and failing) to write a poem for an anthology about Bristol artworks. The fact that I've been unhappy with everything I've written has made me think very hard about what I think poems are and where I think they come from.


          The stronger the impulse behind the poem, the more form is necessary, because it corrects excess. A welter of subconscious associations, a jumble of unbidden imagery, what is whim-driven and obscure, is overblown - and despite it seeming a pure expression of individualism is actually too commonplace to be communicated. Still, this jumble is necessary, because it's made of images, colours and sounds in the form of words or whole phrases. For me, these are the primal soup or raw data of poetry; the channel’s waves and its tumult, and Leander lost in the middle. Channel seems right, as it also describes something visual, all encompassing, surround-sound, widescreen, perhaps overwhelming. And if I wrote these associatons out as they came, it would reek of insanity. Whatever it had in force would be enervated by flounder. Plus I don’t like seeming mad.

         The importance of a form to a poem is analogous to the importance of not saying to people everything you could possibly say to them. Decorum, politeness and plain social conventions actually act with the power of sleep or death or gravity or a strait-jacket, and they make life tolerable. So an important corrective for me is the stanza. It’s a place to stand – Leander’s feet finding a station, a shifting sandback, a momentary stay against the waves’ confusion. I should clarify that it’s not the shape itself that is useful, it’s the process of putting things into shape. ‘Station’, connected in its meaning to stand and stanza, seems right too. Station suggests the less obtrusive, mannerly quality that I like in radio. It requires the winnowing processes of thought, logic and reason. It also needs humour, whereas the original impulse has nothing humorous about it. Alternatives must be considered and their suitability weighed, and all the cunning and guile that a tricksy selection of words requires actually takes you from the personal into the communal. This is the exact opposite to the force from which the poem originally arose.

        But, of course, you cannot live entirely in the logical, the communal, the light. There would be nothing underneath. The obscure and unrhymed impulse needs to be there, but to refine your language is to reach out; it is sanity and communication. The poem that results still contains the impulse that lay behind it, but that impulse has been leavened and sweetened. I would give the negotiation between these two feelings a name but I’m prevented from doing so by the fact that I don’t want to be anything like a young Harold Bloom (‘This access point to literary creation I shall call neologorrea…’, etc.)

            So trying to write with a prescribed theme, I am finding what I put down is all shape and no force; all compulsion and no impulsion. I am trying to write to order, and I have been struck dumb. I very much the definition of poetry given by Tommaso Ceva, a Jesuit priest: ‘A dream dreamed in the presence of reason’. I have too much reason to write and I can’t dream.