Tonight I thought I would share a mystery with my readers.
Back in 2012, or maybe 2011 - around when I first started writing The Stone and the Star - I somehow came across this blog, The Spindrift Pages. I don't know how this happened: I might have stumbled across it, or someone might have clicked through to my blog from it, or the blogger might have followed me.
15 posts appeared in 2011, 14 posts in 2012, and then they stopped in March 2012. Most of the posts are original poems. The blogger's name, at least on the blog profile, is Beetle Taylor (possibly a car name??) and they described themselves as "19 years old, between school and university, in the middle of nowhere, with endless supplies of books to read, thanks to thursday market. Hoping to write a poem a day (at the very least) for a year...and hoping that someone might read them!" I commented a few times, so we had some warm but very slight interaction.
The point that I am building up to is that the poems are absolutely remarkable. I think there's a little Sidney Keyes there, a little TS Eliot, a little Wallace Stevens: older but good influences, perhaps not the most original, but this poet was very young. They are authoritative, coolly observant, fond of light alliteration, beautifully shaped, and not facile in the least. I've returned to them a few times in subsequent years, reading a poem or two and wondering if the writer would come back. So far, no.
Assuming that the basic biographical details, at least, are correct, this poet is probably 26 now, and I sincerely hope they are still writing poetry. I have wondered if they started a blog under a different name or their real name, if they moved on to other things, or indeed if they are okay. I've also wondered if this could be someone I know online or in real life.
Do read and enjoy The Spindrift Pages, and if you have a clue to the mystery, let me know.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the launch of Alice Oswald's new collection, Falling Awake, at Southbank. A collection of mostly nature poems, it is also a book of high-level anxiety, with a tick tick tick of paranoia throughout. "It's as if the whole book is a kind of parking meter," said Oswald, noting that all of the poems are in some way about time. The reading, as always with her appearances, was not actually a reading, but a hypnotised/hypnotic recital.
Nature poetry can be really dull - well, this applies to any subject for poetry, but perhaps it has been my misfortune to read a lot of really dull nature poetry. Alice Oswald is never dull, not just because of the paranoia (which I have also noticed in her earlier work), but because her work partakes of a kind of super-perception. In April I went to an event celebrating Christopher Logue's War Music, a version of Homer's Iliad. Along with classicist Bettany Hughes, Alice Oswald was one of the speakers, on the basis of her own Memorial, which is another groundbreaking version of the Iliad. In the course of the discussion, Oswald mentioned that when she read the Iliad in the original ancient Greek, there was a sense that she was not just reading a powerful description of a river, or a battle, or a leaf - but that she was actually seeing these things directly, through a kind of periscope into another time and another mode of perception. I would describe her own work in a similar way; this super-perception makes me think of the title of Wallace Stevens' poem 'Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.' It is also like the moment when out of the corner of your eye, you see a face in the crowd of someone you thought you had lost - in a way which is more than imagination, a physical shock strikes you, and then you realise it wasn't them, after all.
Reaching this level of intensity through the power of the written word is unusual even in poetry - amongst the poets I love who succeed, I would name Oswald, Paul Celan and Vasko Popa, and the latter two I can read only in translation. There are others, but even with the greatest of writers, I think this is rare. I think it helps enormously to be a writer who can recall the extraordinary intensity of childhood experience (not all writers can), and through a combination of effort and unconscious reach, perceive adult experience in this way, as well.
Here are a few poems from Falling Awake: BODY FLIES ASIDE
Watchful Rabbit, Hackney Road. London. Photo by Ewan Munro. Used under Creative Commons license
Anyone who doubts that rabbits can be scary need only watch Donnie Darko or read parts of Watership Down. Then there's Michael Sowa's painting Happy Easter. And also, this poem:
My faithful blog readers may not be entirely surprised to hear of my ongoing astonishment that there is no epigraph from 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts' in Richard Adams's Watership Down. It seems so perfect a fit, in so many ways, that I can't understand how Richard Adams overlooked it. I can only assume that he couldn't fit it in, or that he was not aware of the poem when he wrote his famous novel.
The two Watership Down characters which this poem immediately reminds me of are the sinister Black Rabbit of Inlé, who is a sort of grim reaper in the rabbit cosmos, and also the megalomaniac General Woundwort. (In one passage, Bigwig dreams about Woundwort: "And over all, as big as a horse in a field, aware of all that passed from one end of the world to the other, brooded the gigantic figure of General Woundwort.") This comparison may be a bit simplistic, though. The rabbit in the poem is not necessarily a scary rabbit, or at least not an evil rabbit. It is Rabbit: primal and animal.
The poem has an edge of surreal humour which is not unfamiliar from reading Stevens's other poems. Why does the rabbit see itself growing bigger and bigger, "humped higher and higher, black as stone"? Why the vision of the cat slipping away like an insect - "the little green cat is a bug in the grass"? The imagery of red and green seem to me to suggest a prism, the breaking of light into component colours. This could be a reference to the differences between animal sight and human sight; also, perhaps, the shifting mood of the rabbit picking up on the subtle natural shifts around it.
Mainly the impression I carry away from this poem is that of another dimension which wild animals inhabit. This is a human viewer trying to describe a state of mind which humans do not experience. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to observe wild animals will know that through their trancelike, indifferent gaze they inhabit a world very different from our own. Perhaps, in a rabbit's mind and through its senses, there are moments when it feels itself becoming "a self that fills the four corners of night". Once again, Wallace Stevens is playing with shifts in perception.
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow...
-Wallace Stevens, 'The Snow Man'
The line "One must have a mind of winter" has been running through my mind a good deal lately. I take this as one of the signs of midwinter (or late-winter, I hope) madness. It's true that I shouldn't have much to complain about; it's not even snowing in London right now and the evidence very much suggests that I would be ill-adapted for a winter in eastern Canada or New England. (And if I ever go to Antarctica, I will have to wrap up very well.) But still, the dark and cold are driving me a bit bonkers. I will jump for joy on the day when I leave work at 5:30 PM and it is noticeably a bit lighter outside.
'The Snow Man' is a particularly serene poem, to an almost disturbing extent. It seems to show some sort of Zen annihilation of the self at work. It is, at any rate, exceptionally evocative, and it conjures up images just like the one in the painting by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, above.
Poetry is not nearly so impenetrable as many believe; but in general it requires some effort, and some poetry more than other poetry. The work of the iconic modern American poet Wallace Stevens has no doubt defeated more than a few readers in its time. I remember coming across 'Anecdote of a Jar' in university and I distinctly recall a feeling of bewilderment and irritation. I couldn't decide if I liked it, and I couldn't quite figure out what he was getting at. But my response was not indifferent.
I don't yet feel capable of writing much about Stevens's overall body of work and I'm not sure if I ever will. It is safe to say, though, that he was constantly preoccupied with the ways in which perception shapes reality - or is reality - and vice versa. Titles of his poems include 'Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is', 'What We See Is What We Think', 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird', and 'Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself'. I find many of his poems rather maze-like; you're not sure whether to begin at the beginning or to work back from the conclusion. But you want to try. At least I do.
A few months ago, I read this fascinating article from the New Yorker, "What Mitt Romney Might Learn From Wallace Stevens". Of course, this was published in the run-up to the US presidential election, although I would say its intent is only partly political. Stevens was conservative in politics and life, a wealthy businessman who likely seemed practical and even boring to many. But he wrote poetry which was deeply imaginative, abstract and philosophical. I like the concluding words of the article: "Stevens believed that the best in the world (which he called 'poetry') came forward when we allowed the imagination to roam free. But ever the realist, he saw that the shore - a firm, real, substantial shore - was a place it continually 'returned' to to rejuvenate itself."
I think that I am intrigued by Wallace Stevens, and loved this article, in part because I am fascinated by people who are able to live both in the "real world" (the corporeal world, anyway) and the inner world of imagination. I am always impressed by those who can get a lot done in the real world. I don't feel I am one of them, although some who know me might disagree; maybe it's a question of perception (again!). It's too easy to get trapped in my own mind, or to go exploring in some realm that others can't know or understand. Others, to the opposite extreme, are so engaged with the "real world" that their inner life is neglected or nearly non-existent. Wallace Stevens seems to have done both to an amazing degree, and he certainly has my admiration for that. At the very least, he must have been a lot more organised than I am.
In 'The Idea of Order at Key West', Stevens describes a Muse-like woman singing by the sea, and he suggests that she creates or at least shapes the world around her as she sings.
[...] It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
Alongside "Ramon Fernandez", a symbolic figure who may be a politically engaged critic known to Stevens, the poet describes a "blessed rage for order" which gives meaning and purpose to all that he sees around him. This is a world that in a sense becomes teleological through art.
The "rage for order" resonates with me because art can indeed be a way to chart a path through chaos. Those who know me well know that I don't like "drama" in the real world; any time it has touched me closely, it tends to be destructive and to blow my inner world into fragments, meaning that I have an even harder time than usual functioning in the outer world. I have realised that the arts are important to me because they are a way to access and explore "drama" - powerful and sometimes destructive human emotions - in a controlled environment. I think that this was partly what Stevens was getting at. The title of this blog, from Rilke, is The Stone and the Star, and I think it revolves around similar dichotomies; inner and outer worlds, restrictions and freedom, reality and imagination.
On a lighter note, I did want to point out that the American progressive-metal band Queensrÿche took the title of one of their early albums, Rage for Order, from this poem. I think Queensrÿche at their best did a pretty good job with the inner/outer worlds thing, actually. They're certainly strong on the wailing vocals and searing guitars, but their lyrics often provide searing social commentary and philosophical musings. Here is a live video of them playing 'Walk in the Shadows', from Rage for Order:
By the way, in case anyone is wondering...I really do like this kind of music in a largely non-ironic way. It's the influence of my brother, who is another English major - not all English majors are into Leonard Cohen, let's put it that way. I think that this further illustrates one of the points of this entry, actually. In general, I use poetry to go farther into the inner world; music, on the other hand, takes me out of my head and farther into a sensory "real world". (Although I'd be lying if I said it wasn't yet another form of escapism.)
