Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker: Poetry Takes Flight

There are times when I'm not reading a great deal of poetry (or, less than at some other times) but it still finds its way into my life. (It always does that.) A recent example was when I read the book Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker.

Flying isn't particularly my favourite subject to read about. I fly at least a couple of times a year, usually more, but have struggled with it for years to the extent that each flight is anywhere from uncomfortable to a major ordeal. Oddly enough, this was partly what impelled me to read Skyfaring. The description attracted me: an experienced pilot evokes the perspective shifts, the emotional challenges and rewards, the friendships and unusual messages, and the pure beauty of flying.

I really wasn't disappointed with the book and I would certainly recommend it for a nervous flyer, at least one who can bear the thought of reading about the experience they dread. There is such an air of wonder and serenity about it that it had a noticeably calming effect on me (and yes, I did read parts of it on long plane flights a few weeks ago, between London and the west coast of Canada.) The writing is exquisite. I particularly enjoyed some of Vanhoenacker's descriptions of night flying (not my favourite time to be flying, due to a weird psychological cocktail of reasons.) Such as this:


In the high night...are many phenomena we cannot see so clearly, if we see them at all, when the sun is up. There are nameless ships of cloud that seem to sail best under a bright moon. There are vast lobes of lightning, flashbulbing out from deep within the grey matter of distant equatorial thunderstorms, while on the windowpanes St Elmo's fire, a kind of static that appears in startling bursts of flat blue veins, flickers like Prufrock's 'nerves in patterns on a screen'.


And...there's the other reason why I enjoyed Skyfaring. It opens with, as epigraph, the latter half of one of the poems in Derek Walcott's Midsummer sequence, a poem that actually is about flying (and landing):


It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home -
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that stands still as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.


Vanhoenacker obviously has a rich appreciation for literature: as well as Walcott and TS Eliot, Philip Levine, Robert Frost, 'Dark Night of the Soul' by St John of the Cross, all appear along with other poems and poets. A book well worth reading, then; but it did make me think that to enjoy flying, you really have to be a pilot - or at least sitting in business class.

Thomas, Frost, Farjeon: The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

"He looks on English things impatiently, but also as a lover might look upon his beloved for the last time. He seems always conscious that a world is coming to an end, though he never says so, it is his tone and it is the tone of his poems; which has taken us fifty years to hear." (P J Kavanagh)

"He is the father of us all." (Ted Hughes)


Last night I went to see The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, a play at Islington's Almeida Theatre about World War I poet Edward Thomas (Pip Carter), his great friends and poets Robert Frost (Shaun Dooley) and Eleanor Farjeon (Pandora Colin), and his wife Helen Thomas (Hattie Morahan). It was written by Nick Dear and directed by Richard Eyre. The play is just ending its world premiere run in London, and it has been extremely well reviewed. I found it to be one of the most powerful and moving plays I have seen in the last few years.

I think the first poem I read by Thomas was probably 'Rain', and probably some years ago. While beautifully written, it remains one of the most suicidally depressing poems I have ever read, and it didn't exactly encourage me to read on in his body of work. However, his name is one which recurs the more you delve into English and British poetry. Witness the quotation from Ted Hughes, above. Many great poets, including the likes of Dylan Thomas, Auden, and Heaney, cite him as an enormous influence, or even a catalyst for their own writing. At the same time, he is not exactly a household name, although I think he is now being studied for GCSEs or A-levels (unfortunately, this may not endear him to a future generation of young readers.)

I booked my ticket for The Dark Earth and the Light Sky several weeks ago, when I realised that it was a) about poetry and poets, and b) was likely to sell out because of how well it has been received and because the Almeida is a small theatre. I gradually, started reading a few more of his poems, and discovered that my initial impressions of him were very limited and rather inaccurate. I had seen him as a poet very much of his time, and mainly pastoral. (I also knew that while he was considered a "war poet", and he died in the war, his poems weren't mostly about the war.)

What I found when I actually bothered to read the poems properly was that Thomas was indeed heavily influenced by the pastoral, and in many ways his language was of its time. However, the shifting perspectives and emotions, the dreamlike blurring of times and places - these are all very modern, very powerful, and sometimes rather shocking. You may start reading one of his poems thinking that it's a nice but slightly depressing piece about the countryside; only to end up gasping for breath, sucker punched by a daring but accurate emotional shift, or a perceptive leap which you would never have thought of but which rings entirely true.

The words "extreme vision" came into my mind when I read some of his poems. He pushes the possibilities of what I would call the "alternative seeing" that poets possess, to their uttermost limits. English poet and critic John Lehmann called it an "intensity of vision" which outstripped that of most of his contemporaries. He chose to write with a vocabulary and apparatus of maps and places. Robert Macfarlane wrote: "To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses - between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal - occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events."

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky also employed shifting perspectives. We don't hear much of Thomas's own interior dialogue, except when he addresses the mysterious "other man" who seems to have governed some of his most important decisions. We see Thomas through the eyes of his passionate wife Helen, who loved him unconditionally and was nearly destroyed by the coldness and animosity which were part of his ongoing depression. These scenes were often painful to watch, as was the confrontation between Helen Thomas and Robert Frost, who felt that Helen had betrayed her husband's memory in her frank memoirs. Frost mainly saw Thomas as a remarkable poetic talent, but also reflected on his depression and said: "He didn't want to die, but he didn't want to not die." The shape of their friendship was carefully depicted in only a relatively small number of scenes. I was astonished by how much of the play involved discussion of the craft of poetry. Thomas, consumed by self-loathing, was convinced he couldn't write; Frost encouraged him by pointing to his remarkable nascent talent, and describing poetry as essential, more important than the patriotism engendered by the war, "a momentary stay against confusion." Meanwhile, Eleanor Farjeon nursed an unrequited (?) crush on Thomas and delighted the audience with her vivacity. The interactions between these individuals and Thomas, and their direct addresses to the audience about the man they knew, build up a more complete, rounded picture of a poet who still remains elusive in many ways.

Thomas constantly looked back to pre-industrial times, and found himself trapped between a desire for the pastoral ("I remember when there was lavender on Lavender Hill," he says to his uncomprehending father) and a drive to become engaged with the real world, to prove himself worthy of England, to become "a conscious Englishman." This was what led him to enlist, at least in part. The scene where Helen and Eleanor go through Thomas's effects after his death at Arras in 1917 had me and, I think, much of the audience in tears.

The staging was very bare, but effective. One of the reviews I read suggested that in many respects this was a play that shouldn't have worked particularly well, certainly in structural terms, but worked extraordinarily well.

At the end of the play, Thomas steps forward and speaks this poem.



LIGHTS OUT (Edward Thomas)


I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

Jim Newcombe's 'Crepuscular Canticle': "A Covenant With The Things Of This World"

 

Today's entry and poem have been contributed by Jim Newcombe.

Jim and I worked together on transcripts for the Royal Courts about five years ago, and discovered a common love of poetry. We still see each other once in a while at poetry and art events or exchange messages about dire or sublime moments in our poetic lives.

Probably the most Byronic individual I know, Jim also manages to be somewhat Blakean, Wordsworthian and Hughesian. His Facebook updates make a day at work sound like The Canterbury Tales and a night on the town sound like Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Jim is also a published poet and he has contributed this beautiful and rather Derek Mahonian poem, 'Crepuscular Canticle', along with his comments on the poem's genesis and thoughts on the state of modern poetry and art.


The following poem evokes an evening of having the house to myself, and hence it's a celebration of solitude, even privacy. Although the tone of the poem is contented, it nevertheless carries, perhaps only for its author, a tiny note of retrospective disquietude, in that it remembers a time when I lived with my daughter. Her mother and I separated when the little one was only a year old, so the fleeting evocation of her by her absence in this poem stings me a little now, four years after it was written, because it remembers a time that can never be recalled in life. I miss her clambering over me in the mornings, for instance, after she'd woken up and I'd rescued her from her cot in the adjacent room, crying out of fear or loneliness or imaginary monsters: things that can make grown-ups weep. But to say it can never be recalled in life is only to say what is true for all parents: we witness a swift evolution, all natural beauty being brief, each phase supplanting the former, and the older we get, the swifter our own evolutions seem to be. The physicists say time is relative, and tempus fugit becomes truer the older one gets. Still, the poem is written in the present tense, and I'm imposing subsequent autobiography where none exists in the text. All that aside, the poem needs no explanation.



CREPUSCULAR CANTICLE (Jim Newcombe)


I pour another drink and dim the lights,
once more salting your absence with solitude
as you drive from London on your way to Bath.

Into my tumbler of Havana rum
plonked icecubes snap and echo against glass
and bob like seals. Against the slatted window

the lamplight's yolky yellow glow fuses with
cobalt noon haze, the gentle sound outside
of splintery ringlets in the puddled rain;

the sodium glare of the PC screen
lunar, uninspiring. I pour big slugs, let
my mood with dark liquid diffuse, expand.

"Be thou mindful to entertain strangers..."
The pale flicker of a pirouetting moth
tripping the light fantastic. Enter, Erato.

Taking the Gregorian Chant as my cantata
then Górecki's Third Symphony, these ghostly airs
invoke an ambience of sacred ritual.

This territory's limits are my freedom -
the double bed, the steep and creaking stair.
We who can count our blessings have so much.

The book in hand, the empty glass refilled
and the long, clockwork zeroes of the day
are smoke-rings dissolved in resinous air.

I lift a tiny outfit and inhale
the biscuit and warm dust of baby-smell
by the scent of which her absence is appeased.

Tonight I celebrate nothing more besides
a book, a drink, a lamp, the here and now -
a covenant with the things of this world.


As can be seen, the poem is written in unrhymed pentameters, the tone open, intimate. Whether reading or writing verse I have a general preference for metrical form; on the eye and on the ear it merges into a mathematical and musical nexus and writes itself more indelibly into the memory and the central nervous system. It connects us with something ancient, with the drum rhythms of our first tribal societies, the beating of the mother's heart in the womb, and as a consequence I'm unhappy about how much contemporary verse has lost this affinity with song and ceremonial structuring. If I peruse a book by an unknown author and my page-skim finds no metrical structure or craftsmanship I very quickly lose interest and put the book back on the shelf. Poetry is more than a string of images. Like Robert Frost, the first thing I do is look for the rhymes, though admitting this will make me no friends. Barely any contemporary magazine which publishes poetry prints anything that doesn't sound, to my fraught and biased ear, anecdotal, homogenous, slipshod, pedestrian. I haven't read a competition-winning poem in my lifetime that has meant anything to me. This is not to claim that I myself can produce the work I'd like to read. As Chaucer wrote, "The lyf so short, the crafte so long to lerne."

I dislike drafting poems on computers, not least for what they've done to my vision. I dislike being sedentary in general and will take standing over sitting, being outdoors over being indoors, motion over stillness. Admitting this as an obscure writer is like a sculptor saying he hates stone, except that really a poem is an oral thing to be committed to memory - what Yeats called "a mouthful of air" - and is as potentially inert as any script before actors enhance its drama, or as inert as a Haydn score before the musicians conjure magnificent music seemingly out of nowhere.

"Execution is the chariot of genius," said Blake, and works of genius hover above the age; they contain their age more than their age contains them. We have this 'democratic' notion nowadays, post-Dadaism, that we are all artists and that we can prove this with the absolute minimum effort of execution. Someone will scrawl with an agitated hand a five-minute doodle - not worth the cognomen of a tabloid cartoon (this is not to denigrate cartoonists) - and have the audacity to proclaim themselves an artist.

To claim that art which reflects modern life in its superficial and commercial aspects is meaningful and vital seems to me a diminishment of the potential of what was once the best synthesis for our humanity. To have made screen prints of tinned beans may have been to do something new, but that doesn't mean it was of indispensable value. Making a mass-produced product of a mass-produced product is merely a debasing irony and serves no enlightening cultural edifice. Admittedly, it may not claim to. Indeed, much of modern art with its ironic distancing makes barely any claims at all. "It doesn't mean anything," the self-styled artist will say, or "it means what you want it to mean" - statements which are risible evasions. Likewise, for anyone to state that representational art no longer is worthwhile because photography has rendered it pointless, or because the Old Masters excelled in it, is the sidestep of a swindler and a charlatan. A true painter who feels impelled to paint the fish on her plate is impelled to do so to record the subject with her feeling inward nature. Replicating a disintegrative worldview neither imbues the artist with a gift of vision nor enlightens anybody else; it merely retches a void stomach.

Nobody needs the vacuity of our age mirrored to them in post-modernist irony, unless as a satirical integration, which is better done by comedians. What we need, I believe, is someone possessed of an uplifting and transforming vision. Compare the works of art commissioned by the Medici to those authorized by Saatchi to see how far we have fallen. The name of Saatchi is a corrosive on modern culture; theirs is a deeply cynical enterprise, as fraudulent as any promulgated by today's bankers, as equally spiritless and philistine. There are also the followers of Francis Bacon (not the great Elizabethan, but the twentieth-century painter whose vision of humanity was a sudden spasm of tormented flesh) who submit that accidents have value, who find virtue in error. I can think of no great master of whom this could be said. Nothing was left to chance; the mastery and control was itself attained through aemulatio. The coarser brushstrokes of Titian and Rembrandt don't betray a lack of finish; they are a deliberate counter to the technical culmination of Michelangelo, Raphael and Correggio. Man may believe he has killed God, but the work of great artists is a homage to the original act of creation. Today's iconoclasts - though they would not admit it - suffer from the Oedipus complex, the past masters being giants of unkillable paternity. Why should a public pay heed to an art that displays not even the merit and discipline of craftsmanship? When someone picks up a guitar, it's not unreasonable to expect they can play chords. All this finds a parallel in contemporary poetry.

Anyhow, I shall stop this diatribe before I start to sound reactionary. Suffice it to say, in poetic terms I go along with Coleridge when he said that the strength of the genie comes from his having been confined in a bottle. I realize the danger of sounding my resistance while displaying here a quiet and unassuming offering of my own, since some will interpret a note of afflatus in what accompanies it, as though my own efforts are a reckoning of some sort. If I fail to reach "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation" - as inevitably I do - then interpret my stance more as a baptist in the wilderness anticipating one who is to come.


Jim Newcombe lived in the heart of the Midlands before migrating to London in 2006, where he can be found on ragged evenings wandering Soho, believing a poet requires liquid purification to compensate for the unyielding tensions of an unstable muse. He works for a legal firm for his beer and bread, the formality of the profession veiling the shambolic life of a writer. He has had work published in Staple, Poetry Nottingham, Tears in the Fence, The Bohemian Aesthetic, Shot Glass Journal, The Poetry Box, Mobius and The Recusant.



Poem and essay © Jim Newcombe, 2012