Easy listening

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.