I like what Clive James has to say about Plath’s suave swing and what it is that activates a poem, or sustains one. On two recent occasions I have sat listening to people – first scientists, then academics – talk about the “poetic” when what they meant, in terms of content as well as style, was a kind of background music or easy listening. The scientists wanted something fuzzy from the word, the academics something sweet.
The second of these occasions was a conference on the great German melancholic W.G. Sebald, whose prose work Rings of Saturn is a metaphysical wander along the coast of East Anglia.
I spend a lot of my time in this part of the country, bits of which have been falling into the sea for centuries. Sebald writes in a kind of collapsing present tense that captures the precarious nature of this place. The smallest shift of light and the atmosphere plunges, your mood sags, and the tremendous view – nine-tenths sky – becomes more like a cliff face than open space. Another small shift, tension is restored and the world regains its swing.
The “poetic”, like the musical, is not about ease (or sweetness or fuzz). It depends upon tension. It is in the impulse behind a poem, in the relations between its parts, in how it resists, how it adds up, how it swings, and if it does so suavely.
This is England. There will be more talk of weather.
beautiful! thank you for posting this.
I grew up in Buffalo- land ‘o snow…sort of like growing up in the butt of the joke, which ironically is on those who have never experienced all four seasons so acutely. That experience makes poetry.
On this side of the Atlantic, we run into the same sort of thing. The newspaper– The New York Times, for instance– is daily chocked with references to poetry, a dance is “pure poetry,” a baseball player moves “like poetry,” a novel is poetic. The source word– poetry– has no meaning of its own; there are no reviews or discussions or citations of poetry. But the corollary and metaphorical meanings proliferate. Everyone knows something that is like poetry, but no one has any idea what poetry is.
That’s all very familiar, Forrest. It’s also a word people turn to as a last resort, when they are nervous and embarrassed but feel obliged to say something. “You’re a poet! How …. poetic!”
“Poets . . . are not only the authors of language & of music, of the dance & architecture & statuary & painting: they are the institutors of laws & the founders of civil society & the inventors of the arts of life & the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful & the true that partial apprehension of all the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion….
“Language, colour, form, & religious & civil habits of action are all the instruments & materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonime of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, & especially metrical language which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man.”
Sebald makes a fantastic example of what’s truly poetic, rather than prosaic evocations of fuzziness or sympathetic urges. His books work like wonderful nonfiction machines. German engineering gone literature? Sometimes, fiction is beauty, and beauty, fiction.