In this poem, as usual, MacNeice is counting beats, or stresses, rather than syllables. Every stanza has eight lines, which alternate between 5 and 3 beats, but syllable counts vary widely. A couple of the line-breaks seem odd to me (e.g., “great / presences”, “no / road”) in service of the metre and the rhyme. The rhyme scheme is bespoke: ABXBCACA. The first and last line of each stanza end with the title word, “Entirely”, a version of a bracketing technique which MacNeice uses in several other poems to achieve a sense of closure or completeness. MacNeice manages all this while developing an interesting argument by combining everyday talk with some gorgeous lyrical flourishes. As writers, we may never “get the hang of it”, but we would surely be delighted if “the splash of words in passing” or “falling twigs of song” that we conjured were as striking as “a mad weir of tigerish waters”.
The force of the argument and its tripartite rhetorical structure have something in common with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’. In Mitchell’s song, she ponders, in turn, clouds, love and life itself and finds them all paradoxical and unknowable. In MacNeice’s poem he begins with writing (I’ll say writing, but perhaps poetry, or language is the focus of the first stanza), before turning to love, then life-as-journey, and similarly concludes that none can be mastered entirely. Life might be more boring, MacNeice suggests (in a typically stoic gesture), if things were otherwise.
MacNeice’s poem came first, of course. In ‘Collected Poems’ it’s dated March 1940. Mitchell wrote her song in 1966 or 1967, and was apparently inspired, not by MacNeice, but by a line in Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel, ‘Henderson the Rain King’. Mitchell’s song has a gorgeous melody, but MacNeice’s poem is also a pleasure to speak out loud. The iambics might be loose (like Frost’s), but they work, and in particular, they allow the rhymes to have their full effect. We hear the rhymes, and they make the poem consolingly whole, even as it argues that our understanding remains incomplete.
Peter Sansom may be handsome but his syntax is what makes him hot.
Here is a handful of sentences, stripped of the line-breaks, from poems in ‘Lanyard’ (Carcanet, 2022), which book we considered in the Finding Poetry book club. I’ll say a few words about each sentence, but it’s what they have in common that I’m keenest to display. Each is rather long, and somewhat grammatically complex, with embedded clauses and asides. Yet each is extremely efficient, conveying more, it seems to me, than is typical for the word- or phrase-count. By modelling speech and inner speech, with their momentary digressions, the sentences give us, at the same time, a lot of interesting information and Sansom’s mood, his own response or attitude to the information. It’s one of the tricks that makes the poems so touching. You could say that the writing tells as well as shows, but it does so, in my book, subtly and attractively.
“I drove thirty virtuous miles with the dozen years of our growing up, to say I’m here and sit with him in the dayroom once a week for a month, though he was there longer.” (from ‘Brian’)
I’m moved by the shame implicit in “virtuous”, and the compression of the remembered years as a travelling companion.
“We said our paths must cross in this small world, but I met you again only in poems, your own, unmistakable, and those Latin names gathered in Flora Poetica, the real meaning of anthology.” (‘Poetry Society i.m. Sarah Maguire’)
Who knew, apart from Sansom and the OED, that the original meaning of “Anthology” was a treatise on flowers?
“I pull into a nook not a passing place of a sudden to walk on the moon off-message for a while, the good news still in my still-hippy head.” (‘The Struggle’)
“Not a passing place” tracks the driver’s thought-process.
“Who’d have thought that suddenly it’s this year and here we are with the youngest, the teacher, by the pigeon cotes at Sky Edge.” (‘Pigeons’)
Every part of the sentence works together to emphasise the mystery of time’s quick passing.
“Footpaths go off in all directions, up through history and geology, keeping fit, walking from friendship or grief, or just instead.” (‘Kiosk at Ladybower’)
As it happens, the footpaths and walks work as a metaphor for Sansom’s poetry, its movements through places and times and emotions.
Christopher Reid is forced to concede, whenever he gets the blues, that he edited the letters of both Heaney and Hughes.
A man of letters. And with regards to Hughes and Heaney, Reid also edited their poems, when he managed Faber’s poetry list in the nineties. I was lucky enough to meet him wearing his teacher’s hat, on my one and only Arvon course. But it’s his own poetry that is the centre of his achievements. Speaking personally, it’s given me more pleasure than that of the two famous H’s. In the Finding Poetry book group we read ‘The Late Sun’ (Faber, 2021), and I chose ‘Death of a Barber’ to introduce the collection. Handy, because it’s available online at this link:
I think the poem exemplifies many of Reid’s characteristic qualities: it’s urbane and clear and touching; its language is accurate and musical.
Reid’s use of form is sometimes regular, sometimes, as in ‘Death of a Barber’, irregular, but he always very much honours the sound and measure of the words, including strong end-rhyme in this case (today/away, ages/cages, name/same, trim/him). This poem honours everything about the words, in fact, including their origins, thus: “as etymology tells us, / touch and tact are the same.”
Perhaps etymology, or related curiosity, can tell us something about other words in this poem, and enrich our reading of it. Let’s step through the poem, picking out some of the small felicities which give it Reid’s characteristic charm and grace. We might start with the title, which is simple and accurate, but also literary. It reminds us of ‘Death of a Salesman’, though not to the extent that we expect a close parallel.
“Not Mustafa”, the poem begins, and it’s an elegy for Mustafa. Mustafa is a popular name throughout the Moslem world, but especially in Turkey, and I guess this is a Turkish barber’s shop, in London. Mustafa is one of the nicknames of Muhammad, and means ‘preferred’ or ‘appointed’, which is apposite for this character, even if it’s a simple truth from outside the poem.
‘Titivating’ is an unusual word! But exactly right. Etymologically, it probably relates to ‘tidy’, which in turn relates to ‘timely’ (think: Time and tide wait for no man). It’s dangerously close to ‘titillating’, especially in the context of “intimate”, and “Almost a caress”. Its use, and reading, demand care, like a cut-throat razor.
In sum, the poem is a tribute, respectful of its subject, and of the poet/customer’s relation to him, as careful and attentive and efficient as the work of a good barber. All done with “professional gentleness”, which is a particularly lovely expression, it seems to me.
With the “victim of the virus” and the poet’s months of isolation, the poem is certainly of its time, i.e., the time of the Covid pandemic, but I think its broader concerns are timeless: I read it, in part, as a celebration of multi-culturalism, as well as of traditional crafts. Mustafa has passed on his trade and his skill to his colleagues, who continue to offer haircuts just as “expert”. (And “luxurious” — perhaps, as with a feast from which “festooned” is derived, hot towels are involved.) Still, the poem ends as it begins, with Mustafa’s absence. The last cut is the deepest.
Jeffrey Harrison’s collections are published in the US and not available through Griffin Books, except his selected poems ‘The Names for Things’ published by the excellent Waywiser Press, which was my own first introduction to his work. One of its blurb quotes is from James Merrill: “There is no one else for whose poems — their tone and wording and overall approach to things — I feel greater sympathy and admiration.”
Jeffrey Harrison can stand comparison with James Merrill, whose encomium shines like chromium.
I love Harrison’s poetry. In the Finding Poetry book club I discussed ‘Hitting golf balls off the bluff’, but I can’t find a copy of that which I’m happy to link to. So for this blog post I’ll discuss ‘The One That Got Away’, which is also in ‘The Names for Things’, and on the poetry foundation website (and about which I can make most of the same points):
In some ways Jeffrey Harrison’s poems seem typical of mainstream contemporary poetry. They very often relate anecdotes, which they enrich with perceptual details. I think Harrison’s anecdotes and details are particularly well chosen, and his descriptions are very well made — his imagination makes interesting turns. In this poem, I admire the way ‘nets’ are evoked first as a visual metaphor for the light pattern, only to return as devices for catching, catching the moment in this case, or rather failing to. Likewise the dripping paddle is a visual image I enjoy holding in mind as well as a metaphor for the perceived slowing of time.
What I also admire so much about Harrison is his tone (and especially his attitude to himself and his content), and his forms. He can be very funny and self-deprecating. He can also be completely, almost nerdishly, sincere, as he is in this poem and which may be why I don’t find it sentimental, despite its lushness.
And finally, form. Harrison doesn’t use rhyme, but is brilliant with metre. This poem is in blank verse, i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter. Metre is about as neglected as rhyme in contemporary poetry I think, and just as, or more, central to form. I’m interested in it, partly because I enjoy its effects, and partly because it’s so tricky to theorise (a cognitive psychologist speaking here) – it’s very easy to say roughly what is at stake, but very hard indeed to give a complete account.
The difficulty stems from the fact that in any particular metric scheme there is an ideal and there are approximations to the ideal. Also, expressing the ideal (or at least ideally expressing the ideal) is surprisingly hard, and typically uses concepts that are themselves hard to define, even if easy to grasp roughly, intuitively. Syllable, for example. Stress, for example, Foot, for sure! If you want to learn about metre, I recommend Timothy Steele, ‘All the fun’s in how you say a thing’, which expresses an unusual theory of metre in terms of relative rather than absolute levels of stress, which I find convincing.
I enjoy Harrison’s level of compliance, when he uses metre. Some contemporary formalists are too approximate, in my book. I won’t name names. I think people assume that irregularity is essential to avoid stiltedness, and I think that’s false, or at least overstated.
Let’s look at ‘The One that Got Away’ to see how Harrison handles metre.
First, consider the sentences and line breaks. The sentences are perfectly formed, varied in length and syntactic complexity (from ‘We drifted in silence.’ to the first and last sentence, each of which spreads over four lines). The line breaks do not disrupt the syntax, rather they complement it, or accentuate it. In terms of lines and sentences the poem is structured as it could be if it were smooth free verse. But it’s not: the line-sentence structure additionally serves a metric pattern, iambic pentameter. Sentence and metric line are working together.
As for the metre: I’d say, L1, L2 are perfect iambic pentameter. So are the lines beginning with ‘as if’, ‘in undulating’ and ‘The paddle’. The other lines have various substitutions (a trochee instead of an iamb here, an extra unstressed syllable there) which are never irksome, are always easy enough to read over, or through.
Surely the final, perfect line would not be quite as beautiful and affecting without all this rigour?
Louis Jenkins writes a sentence and then another. No heartaches about line-breaks.
One way I think about poems is as generalised jokes. Reductionist, for sure — but if a joke is a short text that amuses, then a poem is a short text that evokes or provokes some (any) emotional response, or a complex of emotional responses (which might include amusement).
This description of a poem says nothing about form or ‘music’, nothing about the relations between sentences and lines, or between meanings and sounds. I absolutely love all that stuff, but perhaps poems don’t actually need any of it to be successful poems. Perhaps this is a claim that ‘prose poems’ test?
Louis Jenkins’s prose poems are, for me, confirmations of this line of thought. None of his poems use any device beyond the flexibility of prose for expressing tone and content. They’re funny and moving at the same time; they seem to me to be wise as well as charming. Here are links to online versions of four good ones, which show his wit, his insight and his knack.
Of course, there’s a lot written about prose poems, what they’re at. I suppose each prose poet has their own ideas, their own motives for doing without line-breaks. In Jeremy Noel-Tod’s scholarly introduction to ‘The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem’ (recommended!), he notes that, among various approaches, “The freedom of the prose poem…can also take it…towards a plainer style, imitative of speech.” This is Jenkins’s approach, along with story-telling focus on small absurdities, a kind of reined-in surrealism.
A note on formatting. These websites present the poems with a ragged right edge, whereas in Jenkins’s books they are fully justified, as is more often the case with prose poems. The key point, I think, is that the line-ending doesn’t matter, it’s an accident of publication formatting, not part of the poem’s design or essence.
Kim Addonizio skewers you ab initio. Her first lines have tines.
These notes were written to introduce Addonizio to the Finding Poetry book club, at a meeting in which we considered ‘Wild Nights’, a selected poems published by Bloodaxe.
I don’t often like the blurb on poetry books, but the blurb on the back cover of ‘Wild Nights’ does a good job, I think, in picking out the most obvious and distinctive qualities in Addonizio’s writing: ‘provocative and edgy’, ‘intense’, ‘gritty’, ‘raw’…. but also, and importantly, ‘a wild tenderness’.
I discovered Addonizio’s work through her collection ‘Tell Me’, which was recommended by one of my first poetry tutors, Grevel Lindop. Grevel had a recent (at the time of our book club meeting) essay about Addonizio in an edition of the poetry magazine The North, in which he makes the observation about first lines that my clerihew celebrates.
Addonizio’s modal poem is very direct, aggressive almost. It’s vivid and inventive and daring. But, as Grevel points out, it can sometimes be gentler, and I’ve chosen one of these more gentle poems to discuss.
If two of poetry’s main tricks are: 1) the telling scene or episode and 2) metaphor, then an interesting thing about this poem, it seems to me, is that its key episode is doubly symbolic – it is not only telling, a remembered highlight from a marriage, but also a structural analogy for that marriage.
It’s telling that the couple drive off together for a holiday they ‘needed’, sleeping in the van, swimming naked. The description of the scene is very vivid, very cinematic. I’m watching an indie movie, first shown at the Sundance festival.
And the scenario is metaphorical in that it has the structure of the marriage— the couple are together, but not quite sharing the experience; the poet notices what her partner does not (or perhaps he barely notices but suppresses that— how deeply that sub-metaphor of his sleeping movements can be taken, if you dwell on it). The poet worries, and makes guesses about her partner’s consciousness. And of course it’s a transient interlude, like the marriage itself: it’s soon over.
Also, there are the horses. A distant noise, like thunder, a warning. Their scary approach, an unidentified threat. Their peaceful passing. Wild horses, maybe putting us in mind of the Rolling Stones song— more blues-influenced art and similar, it seems to me, in tone and mood. Wild horses couldn’t keep us together.
Addonizio certainly uses form in her work, but ‘Near Heron Lake’ is very free verse as far as I can tell, so that the only purely formal device is the line break. The way line breaks are used roughly mirrors the phases in the poem’s development.
Up to ‘You slept on’, the line-breaks come at the end of meaning-units (if you allow pass-close as a verb). But thereafter, lines are broken in a way that introduces tensions and ‘what’s coming next’ uncertainties: lines end on adjectives or verbs waiting for their nouns or objects— ‘enter/ our life’, ‘that slight/ stirring’…
until we reach ‘The next morning’, when the key episode and its tensions are over, and the line-breaks revert to stable phrase boundaries.
Everything now is ‘calm’ and ‘beautiful’, but only on the surface, and only briefly.
‘I thought the marriage might never end’ is such a double-edged expression, containing its own counterfactual (‘might’, not ‘would’) an expression that instantly undercuts its superficial optimism.
These notes were written for the book club, Finding Poetry, which I run with Griffin Books, Penarth. The second book I recommended was ‘Odd Blocks’ by Kay Ryan. This is a Selected published by Carcanet. I enjoy Ryan so much that I have all her USA- published collections. ‘Dew’ comes from the collection ‘Elephant Rocks’, and can be read on the (excellent) Writers Alamnac website, here:
‘As neatly as peas in their green canoe, as discretely as beads strung in a row, sit drops of dew along a blade of grass.’
This is the first of three sentences in the poem. Noting its properties, we learn quite a bit about Ryan’s characteristic techniques and attitudes.
* A lot of words rhyme or part-rhyme: neatly-discretely; canoe-row-dew; strung-along (the idiom formed by that last pair is not irrelevant to the poem’s theme). Ryan calls her approach to rhyme “recombinant”, but it doesn’t seem to me as unusual as she or many her critics make out. What it does, I think, here and elsewhere, is glue the poem together, make it seem more whole and discrete (like a drop of dew). It makes leaps of thought seem connected and, if not inevitable, at least suggested.
* The syntax is not straightforward, it’s rather inventive, perhaps in service of the rhyme, or of the tone. As matter of fact it uses that infamous device, the fronted adverbial – times two – though I have little doubt that Ryan, whose professional career was teaching remedial English in a community college, would dislike an approach to education that insists children learn such names.
* The sentence is broken into SIX lines. Ryan says, surely with her tongue partly in her cheek, that the starts and ends of lines are the most potent parts, and short lines give you more of them. More ‘edge’, literally and metaphorically.
* It’s figurative. You might say it mixes its metaphors, the peas (and the canoe) and the beads. But I think that once we’ve taken in the whole poem, the consistent thrust of these figures becomes apparent.
The whole poem is very brief – 13 lines (one less than a sonnet), 65 syllables (one less than half a sonnet). It’s not about the poet, there’s no lyric I in the poem, though it turns out to speak to the poet’s values, I think. Rather, it expresses an observation, and a natural cause-and-effect relation, perhaps a warning. We’re in the realm of epigram and aphorism— or, more accurately I think, of proverb, though the poem’s fresher and less earnest than ‘proverb’ seems to imply. I’d like to say that it’s an ‘exploded proverb’.
Like a proverb, this poem uses a metaphor to express a general wisdom. Like, ‘A stitch in time/ saves nine’, or ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ (this latter a meaning-neighbour of ‘Dew’) but exploded to incorporate more image and detail, and sub-metaphors that serve the whole. And, critically, something in this process makes the ‘proverb’ become subversive and sly: many of her poems are funny peculiar and sometimes funny ha ha, or at least funny smile. I think of Ryan as a champion of the wry smile rather than the belly laugh.
Alongside proverbs, the poetry touchstones here, the ones most mentioned by critics, are Emily Dickinson (brevity, abstraction), some of Robert Frost’s short poems (e.g. ‘Design’, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, ‘Dust of Snow’), Marianne Moore (oddness-of-descriptions, short lines) and Stevie Smith (willingness to be ‘silly’, lightness).
I would add to this list Samuel Menashe, who I think is closer, at least formally. Here is a complete poem of Menashe’s:
A pot poured out fulfils its spout
It’s not completely clear what the intended force of Dew’s wisdom is, but I read it as very much in line with Ryan’s approach to poetry and her attitudes to PoBiz.
I’d say the poem celebrates ‘discretely’ and warns against ‘accumulate’. The drops that stay small and independent of the other drops are the ones that survive. Better to stand alone, and to not worry about status or belonging, even as you contribute to a greater enterprise — like canoeists in a canoe, or beads on a necklace — two anthropological metaphors that put me in mind of Pacific Islanders, and signal from the very start the implicit human concerns of the poem.
This message is attuned to Ryan’s self-proclaimed ‘outsider’ status and its contradictions. (I’ve learned about these attitudes from published interviews (e.g. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5889/the-art-of-poetry-no-94-kay-ryan) and from her excellent collection of essays, ‘ Synthesizing Gravity’). Ryan seems very much her own person and writes primarily for herself (‘There is nothing so freeing as someone pleasing herself’, she says in praising a poem by Stevie Smith), yet she accepted the position of Poet Laureate of the USA, of which she said it was like being rewarded for staying in all day in your pyjamas.
This post is one of a series. The notes were written for the book club, Finding Poetry, which I run with Griffin Books, Penarth (https://www.griffinbooksonline.co.uk). The first book I recommended (in February 2021) was ‘Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’ by Billy Collins.
Billy Collins eschews semi-colons and other formal devices. He writes about mices.
‘Snow’ comes from Collins’s collection, ‘Picnic, Lightning’, and also appears in ‘Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes’. It’s the second poem at this link:
There are no mices in this poem. The poet is listening to jazz and looking out of the window. Everything seems right with the world — the weather, a snowfall, seems perfectly suited to the music, a piano piece by Thelonius Monk. But on reflection, the poet realises that music is so good it would go with other kinds of weather, and the weather is so beautiful it would go with other kinds of music, or indeed with total silence. A study in contentment, you could say.
So much for waterskiing past the poem, as Collins recommends in his well-known poem ‘Introduction to Poetry’. One thing that this speeding-by paraphrase reveals is that the poem happens in real time. What the poem is about and the poem itself are in step — the poem relates a sequence of thoughts that take a couple of minutes. This in itself seems similar to the jazz, whose composition (improvisation) and happening and experience are together in time.
Collins is not a poet who uses rhyme, but perhaps the first stanza is an exception, with the soft rhymes for snow (slow, solo, go) mirroring the irregular falling of the flakes (and the irregular falling of the notes).
The poem is just three well-punctuated, well-structured sentences, divided into 6 or 7 stanzas or paragraphs (the page-break in the book doesn’t allow an accurate count) according to topic shifts, and the line breaks all come at phrase boundaries. This is true throughout the poem, and to a large extent throughout Collins’s oeuvre.
The language is not compressed, rather it uses relaxed conversational devices: ‘I cannot help noticing’; ‘Then again’; ‘and for that matter’; ‘I have a feeling’….. The rivers of idiom are flowing freely, as Collins puts it in ‘Consolation’. Why? To control tone. I think tone is a key to Collins, though I find it quite hard to analyse. It’s usually defined as the aspect of the language that communicates the author’s attitude to the subject matter, or to themselves, or to the reader. But of course the meaning does that to a large extent, so it’s rather the colouring of that meaning, especially important when there’s some kind of mismatch between what is being said and the poet’s apparent attitude to it. Perhaps in this poem it’s that what is being said is rather cerebral and intellectual, but the tone shows that the poet is relaxed about it, passes it off naively, casually, even if it’s (as we’ll see) quite profound.
Returning to the poem’s forward movement, this begins with the snow falling; having done this mimetically with those rhymes, next Collins uses details to put an image in our head. The fence is vivid, isn’t it? — because we can so readily picture snow on a wooden fence, it’s a very characteristic and familiar visual effect.
Now we reach stanza 3, ‘As if he had imagined a winter scene’. I think this stanza makes a point about art in general, how (often) when it’s fully appreciated it allows you to look into the mind of the artist, to follow the artist’s thoughts. It’s intimate in this respect. And in a similar way, the poem makes us feel intimate with the poet. In the awful cliché, he’s ‘shared something with us’ — but not something about his biography, rather something about the way a transitory experience unfolds. His, and maybe ours.
(By the way, the Five Spot is the club mentioned in Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’.)
‘Then again…’ and the other kinds of weather — it’s odd, isn’t it, a ‘tumult of leaves’? The generally plain language is a ground on which an unusual expression stands out, itself a little tumult.
‘and for that matter’, the other kinds of music — they’re humorous choices. They sound humorous (whether or not you happen to know the bands) — they push the idea of anything-would-do but also they undercut the poem’s calm, just for a moment.
Finally, the silence, and the stirring spoon here is another brilliantly chosen perceptual detail. How do you create an image for silence? You have to illustrate the absence of sound, and if the sound that’s absent is slight, the description is more vivid!
The idea that we can perceive absence, that absence is itself a thing, is one of the ideas in Sartre’s work that gives it its title, ‘Being and nothingness’. It looks at first as though, as with the Destroyers, Collins chose to mention this book as a kind of joke, or merely to match the silence. It’s the nothing that contrasts with the newspaper’s everything. And maybe that’s right, but at the risk of being pretentious, we can note that one of Sartre’s main projects was to distinguish two modes of being — a kind of unconscious ‘being-in-itself’, centred on facticity (here with the music and the snow), and a conscious ‘being-for-itself’ that moves, transcendentally, beyond the current situation, entertaining counterfactuals. Exactly as the poem has illustrated.
Stephen Payne 