The First Poets Read online

  The colonial diaspora of English complicated and enriched things, bringing new energies and refreshing old. The early chapters of the book pursue a more or less linear chronology; later chapters make increasingly complex connections across times and continents. Injustice is done, and undone. The spurns that patient merit takes in its own age can be repaid tenfold in a later age, as in the cases of John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frank O’Hara and James K. Baxter. The poets themselves are the chief narrators and critics so that we get to know them well before we reach their home chapters. Modern theorists portray canons as repressive constructs, and they can be, they have been. Each age has its history of deliberate omissions. But so long as our sense of canon is open and unstable, seeking to include rather than omit, it is a generous principle that underscores our sense of poetry as an open continuum.

  Of the four voices that speak in the first chapter, Derek Walcott and Les Murray remain defining presences. Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky have died, and despite their legacy the sense of coherence imparted, at the end of last century, by this international poetic “superleague” (a journalistic term Blake Morrison coined for them, which helped rigidify a popular sense of where the Anglophone main stream ran) has weakened. “A time has come to speak unapologetically for a common language and to speak a common language of poetry. Almost.” My optimism fifteen years ago may still be prophetic, unless indeed the time that had seemed about to come has gone. The world of Anglophone poetry feels to me, as a publisher and editor with an international remit, more fragmented than it did in those bright days before the millennium turned, before 9/11 and the phosphorous and sodium dawns of the twenty-first century, with renewed nationalisms and bigotries, and a recrudescence of prescriptive aesthetics of various kinds keen to define, secure and exclude.

  And the academy has continued to tighten its hold on every limb and organ of poetry: a majority of Anglophone published poets nowadays acquired their skills in writing schools and have in turn become teachers of poetry. The discourse (that very word, discourse, reeking of chalk dust) that surrounds poetry is often voiced in terms peculiar to the specialisms of the academy. Not that all critical and creative programs promote the same decorums: there is variety in the degree of emphasis each lays on aesthetic, political and commercial outcomes. And just occasionally in Britain a provocation elicits a unanimous response. On 1 June, 2014 spokesmen for the poetry constituencies were invited to be ruffled by the Guardian, and they obliged. The journalist Jeremy Paxman, clearly not feeling too fresh after chairing the judging panel for the Forward Poetry Prizes, having read 170 collections and 254 single poems, said: “I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn’t happen, because it’s the most delightful thing. […] It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.”

  Much of what he is reported as saying was intended to elicit the outrage that becomes news. Poets, he suggested, should be summoned before an inquisition of “ordinary readers” to explain themselves and justify their practice. Senior prize-winning professor poets from writing programmes rushed to the defenses. How frail those defenses have become. Professor Michael Symmons Roberts declared, “There is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” and reassured Paxman that, “We are still a nation which feels it needs and reaches for poetry at key moments; what has been lost is the habit of buying and reading books of poetry,” that we turn to poetry, as we go to church, for consolation: funerals, weddings… and it survives on the radio. Contemporary poetry is not useful in these terms.

  Professor Jeremy Noel-Tod cheerfully quoted Frank O’Hara, “If they don’t need poetry, bully for them. I like the movies too.” Still, there was a whiff of triumphalism: “Frank O’Hara was once patronised as a niche poet of the New York art scene. Fifty years later, he’s being recited by Don Draper on Mad Men and is one of the most influential voices around.” Not only radio: poetry makes it on to TV, too. Dr George Szirtes in the Guardian of 2 June went atavistic. “Poetry is as ancient as language itself, and the sense of the poetic precedes language. Animals could be charmed by music; mere drumming can heal the sick.” Language, which some believe is a crucial ingredient of poetry, hardly figures in his primeval argument. “The poetic even penetrates to football commentators who exclaim ‘Sheer poetry!’ at a particularly wonderful moment. They tend not to exclaim ‘Sheer prose!’ We feel poetry rather than understand it. We know it’s there because it gets under the skin of the conscious mind.” Not a felicitous metaphor, we might think. And this was as good as the argument got.

  Poems can themselves reveal even more about poetry’s history than a poets’ prose. Nothing illuminates Chaucer’s so clearly as the poetry of Spenser, or Spenser’s as that of Milton and early Blake, or Milton’s as that of Wordsworth. Whitman lives, changed, in Pound and Lawrence, Herbert in Coleridge and Dickinson, Byron in Auden and Fenton. Each achieved poem is a gathered energy that transmits itself, undiminished, to attentive receivers. Its energy is generated by its occasion, which may be love or thanks, lament, rage, celebration, observation, or simply an engaging semantic accident or a rhythm; but it is also charged by poems that hover around it as echo, memory or example. Parody, homage, theft, adaptation: the generous energies are diminished only by ignorance. This is the singing school that mattered in the time before creative writing programs, its doors always ajar, its blackboards written and over-written, the books on desks and window ledges full of bright markers, marginalia, bus-tickets, gum-wrappers, love letters and pressed heather. It is the school that matters now, a free school requiring intelligence and imagination.

  The Match

  JOSEPH BRODSKY, DEREK WALCOTT, SEAMUS HEANEY, LES MURRAY

  While the Irish football team played the Soviet Union in 1988, four English poets were confined in a radio studio in Dublin—it was the Writers’ Conference—to take part in a round-table discussion. English-language poets, that is, for none of them accepts the sobriquet “English” and one has vehemently rejected it. In the chair was an anglophone Mexican publisher, me.

  First of the four was Russian. Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel Prize winner, was attempting that almost possible Conradian, Nabokovian transition from one language to another, writing his new poems directly in English. Jet-lagged and impatient to return to the soccer, he expressed strong opinions on politics, religion, poetry and sport. In his essays he has argued that, as imperial centers corrode and weaken, poetry survives most vigorously in remote provinces, far from their decaying capitals. One thinks of Rome. Now that the British and American claims to the English language have loosened, the art of English poetry continues to thrive. The bourse may still be in the publishing centers of London or New York, but the shares quoted there are in poetic corporations with headquarters in New South Wales, St. Lucia, County Wicklow...

  There is a triumphalism in this line of argument: emancipation. The postcolonial is as much a fashion in literature as the Colonial is in home decoration. Brodsky might have conceded (he did not) that ethnicity, gender and sexual preference can themselves be provinces or peripheries in which, even at the heart of the old geographical centers of empire, poetry can grow. It is an art that thrives when language itself is interrogated, from the moment John Gower challenged himself, “Why not write in English?” to Wordsworth’s asking, “Why not write a language closer to speech?” to Adrienne Rich’s asking, “Why write in the forms that a tradition hostile to me and my kind prescribes?” History and politics can play a part: they propose questions. In poetry the answers come not as argument but as form.

  Over a century and a half ago America began to establish its independence, kicking (as Edgar Allan Poe put it) the British grandmama downstairs. Early in this century Scotland began to reaffirm its space, and Ireland too, a space that is firstly political and then cultural. We can speak of sharing a common language only when we possess it, when it
is our language rather than theirs. For the Jamaican poet and historian Edward Kamau Braithwaite the English of the educational system in which he was raised, the English of the poetic tradition, is theirs. For many black writers in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, it was theirs. For working-class English writers such as Tony Harrison it was theirs. When writers interrogate language, they set themselves one of two tasks: to reinvent it, or to take it by storm and (as the novelist Gabriel García Márquez puts it) “expropriate it,” give it to the people, often for the first time. “I hate relegation of any sort,” says Les Murray. “I hate people being left out. Of course, that I suppose has been the main drama of my life—coming from the left-out people into the accepted people and being worried about the relegated who are still relegated. I don’t want there to be any pockets of relegation left.”

  A time has almost come—the round-table discussion was early evidence of it—to speak unapologetically of a common language, at least for poetry. Instead of affirming separation and difference, we can begin to affirm continuity—not only geographical but historical, analogies and real connections between Eavan Boland and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Allen Ginsberg and William Blake, John Ashbery and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Thom Gunn and Ben Jonson, Elizabeth Bishop and Alexander Pope. The story that includes all poets can be told from the beginning.

  The second poet in the studio that afternoon was Derek Walcott, born in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1930, of a West Indian mother and an English father.

  I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

  I had a sound colonial education,

  I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

  and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

  His was a francophone and Roman Catholic island; he is from an English-speaking Methodist culture. “Solidarity” is not the issue for him that it has become for Brathwaite. He distinguishes between English, his mother tongue, and the form he used at home, his mother’s tongue. He might have courted approval had he chosen to affirm himself in terms of race, but he chose instead to identify himself with all the resources of his language. After all, English wasn’t his “second language.” “It was my language. I never felt it belonged to anybody else, I never felt that I was really borrowing it.” In a poem about the shrinking back of empire, he writes, “It’s good that everything’s gone except their language, which is everything.” “They” have left it and now it is his. Shakespeare, Herrick, Herbert and Larkin belong to him just as they would to an English person. There’s no point in denying the violence and dislocations of colonialism, but if, given what history has already done, a writer responds by rejecting the untainted together with the tainted resources...

  The third poet at the table was Seamus Heaney. Born in the north of Ireland, he has complained of being “force-fed” with “the literary language, the civilized utterance from the classic canon of English poetry.” At school, poetry class “did not delight us by reflecting our experience; it did not re-echo our own speech in formal and surprising arrangements. Poetry lessons, in fact, were rather like catechism lessons.”

  He has tempered his views since he wrote of the “exclusive civilities” of English. At the round table he declared that the colonial and post-colonial argument is “a theme; it’s a way of discoursing about other things, to talk about the language. It’s a way of talking about being Protestants and Catholics without using bigoted, sectarian terms, it’s a way of talking about heritage. But the fact of the matter is that linguistically one is very adept.” He remembers as a child with “the South Derry intonation at the back of my throat” being able to hear, as he read, even though he could not speak it, the alien and beguiling intonations of P. G. Wodehouse. Language can be a medium of servitude; but it can also—properly apprehended—become a measure of freedom. “A great writer within any culture changes everything. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce and Ireland fifty years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and changed.”

  The fourth poet, the Australian Les Murray, is a witness to the abundance of the English language and to the freedoms it offers. Born in 1938 in Nabiac, rural New South Wales, he was an only child and grew up on his father’s dairy farm in Bunyah. His mother died when he was a boy. In solitude he developed a close affinity with the natural world. Australia is a predominantly urban society; Murray is thoroughly rural. In 1986 he returned to Bunyah to farm, to live with the poetry of gossip, what he calls “bush balladry,” and to work for “wholespeak.” He takes his bearings, emblematically, from Homer and Hesiod: the arts of war and of peace (Hesiod’s Works and Days embodies the principles of permanence, while the Odyssey with its endless wandering and a world subject to strange metamorphoses, and the Iliad with its sense of social impermanence and conflict, illuminate the principles of change).

  A voice exists for every living creature, human or beast. It is one of the poet’s tasks to listen and transcribe: the voice (the diction, syntax and cadence) of the cow and pig, the mollusk, the echidna, the strangler fig, the lyre bird and goose, the tick, the possum, “The Fellow Human.” The past is included in the present, and the fuller its inclusion, the less likely relegation will be. Murray works toward an accessible poetry, telling stories, attempting secular and (he is a Roman Catholic) holy communion. An anti-modernist, he might respond to Ezra Pound’s commandment “Make it new”: “No, make it present.”

  Four writers in English with different accents and dialects, detained in a small recording studio in Dublin, deprived of the big match, all more or less agreeing on the integrity of their art, its place in the world, and on the continuities that it performs. Released at last (the match, alas, was over), the poets returned to Dun Laoghaire for dinner. Their conversation was raucous: a competition of salty tales and limericks (“There was a young fellow called Dave / Who kept a dead whore in a cave”). Neighbouring tables tutted and simmered, and a literary critic from Belfast in her indignation reported the poets’ boisterous manners back to the Times Literary Supplement.

  A time has come to speak unapologetically for a common language and to speak a common language of poetry. Almost.

  Our Sublime Superiors

  “We all know where we are not at. We all know who our sublime superiors are,” says Derek Walcott. I had better declare a material interest in this common language of poetry and give a health warning.

  When I was nineteen my father told me to pursue law or some useful vocation, anything I liked, he said liberally, even the Church or the army. What about publishing? Certainly not: speculation, gambling with uncertain futures or merely repackaging the past. When I became a publisher he advised me again: I was not to publish poetry. He echoed the Mr. Nixon of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”: “And give up verse, my boy, / There’s nothing in it.”

  I became a poetry publisher. Mr. Nixon was right—and wrong. The nothing can be very nearly the everything. But my father disowned me. We still exchanged letters, but he no longer took an interest in my future. I had none. I’d made myself a prodigal. I had also made myself free to adopt my own antecedents. I went in quest of them, and they were not easy to find. They survived—if at all—mostly in footnotes, obscure monographs and technical books.

  The earliest were called scribes; they later became known as scriveners, printers, booksellers, and finally publishers. They worked in Southwark, then at St. Paul’s, in Paternoster Row, Bloomsbury, the Corn Exchange, St. Martin’s Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road. Now we’re scattered, like poets, to the round earth’s imagined corners: Sydney, New York, Toronto, Jo’burg, Delhi, Wellington. Those who specialize are poor and have been poor for centuries. Why? So that poets—a few of them—can prosper. Publishers get written out of the story and poets live forever. Servants of the servants of the Muse, from the days of scriptoria to the world of desktop publishing, we are dogsbodies of the art: we edit, correct, scribe, typeset or key, print
, bind, tout. Are we remembered?

  How many of us can you name? William Caxton? Good. Maybe Wynkyn de Worde, just about. And after that—ever heard of Tottel, Taylor, Murray? You might recognize a name, but only because of Wyatt or Clare or Byron. On the whole, as far as readers are concerned publishers are the aboriginal Anon. Gossip about us is sparse and generally unpleasant. If we misjudge a writer or commit a small human or financial irregularity that touches his or her biography, then we come alive, villains of the piece, alongside unfaithful spouses and wicked stepparents.

  We were the first readers of almost every poem that traveled beyond the charmed circle of a writer’s intimates. We said what would go in and in what order, we said change this, drop that (or we silently changed and dropped), we abridged and expanded. We assembled anthologies. We decided when a writer should go public, how long a book should live, how widely it should circulate. We commissioned, gambled, lost and sometimes won. Our childhoods, our money worries, our sexual arrangements, our one-night stands with a promising manuscript and our long nights by taper or sixty-watt bulb getting it right for poets, so that they might shine like stars in the perpetual nighttime of your attention, count for very little in the histories.

  How a poem arrives at a reader has an effect on how it is conceived and written. The ballad sheet, the illuminated manuscript, the slim volume, the epic poem, the “representative anthology,” the electronic poem or performance piece—each makes different demands on the poet and has a distinct technology and market. Poets of the fourteenth century, dreaming of their work passing from hand to hand, have a different sense of their destiny from poets hammering away at word processors or rapping under strobes. Technology is a part of imagination. Parchment elicits one attitude from a writer, paper another. The very textures (not to mention prices) are part of the equation. The cost of eloquence. A quill, a biro and a keyboard download a poet in different ways, at different speeds. Without succumbing to “historical materialism,” we can register those differences. The gynecologist William Carlos Williams with quill on parchment would not have responded to the plums in the refrigerator as he did, or written all those little and big poems between patients, swiveling round from his consultancy desk to a typewriter impatient for his attention; and Shakespeare with a word processor might have left better texts and at least have run a spell check. Creative technologies evolve (not always for the better). So does language. So does publishing.