CURRENT POETRY: ITS EMERGENCY MEASURES

The next thing to note is that all writing shows allegiances. Novelists and playwrights understand that convincing dialogue requires the jargon and turns of phrase that distinguish the various trades. An engineer or lawyer indeed knows on going through the mail whether a letter is from a fellow professional, and responds in similar terms. Journalists who change newspaper also change their style, and must do if the sub-editor is not to be kept irritated and unnecessarily busy.

And very different is Richard Moore's In the Dark Season, equally good, but employing the Romantic imagery that Williams detested: {26}

Conclusion? Only that poets who wish to place work in magazines of their choice must be alive to these distinctions.

Many poets of the Romantic period and later believed that imagination offered access to a knowledge superior to that given by rational analysis, and this view is an important strand of Modernist and Postmodernist poetry. Poets will often use imagery to explore something beyond normal apprehension, and try by linked images to 'say things' or produce effects not achievable otherwise.

Compare the syntax that produces something that extends beyond immediate experience in this snippet from Archibald MacLeish: {27}

with this extract of a poem by Paul Celan, which relies on striking but enigmatic images: {28}

The MacLeish piece is accomplished, and more so if the classical associations are brought to mind, but the Paul Celan poem is the more powerful, with a nightmarish quality, as though we were living quietly after some dreadful event — which indeed we are: Celan is referring to the holocaust and its long shadow. And however strange they seem, many words and phrases, even in this translation, do seem 'correct' or acceptable.

So: does this example release poetry from a need to employ words in everyday meanings? It must seem so, but there is a cost. Celan's successful poems were comparatively few, and grew increasingly obscure to his death by suicide in 1970. Ezra Pound, who used a similar but less troubled system of 'ideograms' doubted in the end whether their deployment in the Cantos had been successful. Perhaps all that these attempts show — and I offer the thought merely as a suggestion — is that poetry needs all the powers it has traditionally assumed, which means a language fuller not essentially different from its everyday usage.

Merrill points to the minimal view of the world seen by pilot/poet, and the spiritual quest implicit in the airy phrasing. The poem opens with A series of white squares, each an hour's flying time, each with instructions in pencil: the organized adventure, and fittingly closes with a square that remains out of reach. On one level a child's game, where the instructions never quite answer to experience, but on another perhaps — a doubtful perhaps, as the poem evades easy categories — an extended analogy for life itself. And that is all. We cannot in the end say what the poem is about, or the exact meaning of "Of all those things external to the task at hand, we clutch what we can." Why should we do that? And what exactly is the poet/pilot looking for? We are not given answers, but simply led on into a perplexing but often hypnotic kaleidoscope of images only loosely associated. The interest is the journey, not what we make of it.

The speaker is gazing across river flats, which glisten in the light, wondering what to make of the scene. To facilitate a dialogue he introduces the It would be here, which appears in lines 1 and 8, and takes the reader through what is mostly description to line 23. Then follow three sections. Lines 24 to 27 say, broadly paraphrased, that we need to make sense of these impressions, however much that hurts. Lines 28 to 31 say the understanding can only be in terms of light. And the concluding lines refute the previous conclusion, introducing a they that says such a scene cannot be penetrated by anything. Before we turn to the last, puzzling lines, we can note the quiet tone, and a stress which, though it varies from two (Each ángle's additíon) to five (Íts necéssity a geómetry of únderstánding) per line, seems somehow to give the lines equal weight. Also the many acute observations: the mirage-effect of birds seen in the dazzle (the birds glints / Of turned glass), the heavy glare (Heaping up in weight, the sky Pressured by its fullness), the light glittering on the water at a distance (Green turning powdery). There are some things to question ( sacred Vistas, dampness) but at this level the poem largely achieves its aims: evocative and exact description.

Now comes the real point. The speaker is not simply observing these things, he is imagining what lies beneath (The movement of ray and eel-grass / In the outflow. . .), what could be recorded by instruments (Toxins graphed), or what has an abstract resonance (slow spillage / As across an icon). The last introduces a hint of menace (What we know hurts us), which is given a sharp generality in the first of the three final sections (geometry of understanding, etc.). Then we are told (penultimate section) that our very observing of the scene is through light, though we add our own interpretations, the light itself saying nothing (speechless). Without that interpretation we can't see anything, or say what will be intelligible to other people (they said). The poem is commenting on itself, which is usual in Postmodernist work, though this is less playful than most.

Each genre develops its own expectations, but in a novel or feature article the observations serve a purpose. In the 'behind enemy lines' article that begins with It was still dark when we slipped quietly out of the village of Bagh-e Kargha and took up positions in the dry wadi. . . the reader is being prepared for battle: dark, quietly, positions. If, later in the article, we learn that the enemy was nowhere near, and that the troops spent a week crouched in uncomfortable positions before the order came to move on, we'd be exasperated. Yes, that may indeed have been what happened, but it doesn't make a story. Contemporary poetry follows other rules. It tries very hard not to say the obvious, to maintain a cool tone and create a wary dissonance with expectations. It most certainly does not play on feelings, and shuns traditional forms for that reason, because of their emotive power. We can call this intellectual honesty if we wish, but we can still ask what role is played by such phrases as: the light soaring, the light molten, the light finds its measure, heaping up in weight, the sky pressured by its fullness, where everything is below surface, below light's press. A novelist would develop some of these in ways that prepared us for the story:

And when I took the bus back, and stood looking across the bay where the boat had gone down, I realised that I had not been lightheaded or drunk with the freedom of being at the helm that afternoon, but had felt instead the threatening pressure of the light, that it was in fact that brilliance and not me which made the decision to venture still further out.

Or brought out some aspect of a character:

I am not, as I say, an unsociable character, but someone more aware of the changing seasons. My host was still chattering, but I could feel the light finding its own measure, flattening this seaside town into dabs of white and pink as it rose above the glinting silver of the bay.

Or hinted at things being different from what they seemed.

Even the clouds, if you looked carefully—and I was looking very carefully after the last revelation—were heaping up their weight, pressing down on the ordinary lives of Weymouth hoteliers and their guests.

We accept 'fine writing' not for itself, but for what it achieves, what it can draw into the story and add in extra dimensions. That in its different way was what we once expected of poetry, which didn't tease us with clever thoughts, but developed the suggestions of individual lines into something larger than what brings this particular poem to a premature end. By contemporary standards, Estuarine is an excellent poem, intriguing and accomplished, but would have been better still without the Postmodernist posturing.