The Poem’s Bad Other(s), Sir Geoffrey Hill and Simon Jarvis amongst others.

The notion of the Bad Other came to my attention through Barbara Cassin’s recentish work on the Sophists and Aristotle’s view of this disreputable rogues masquerading as philosophers. Without getting too much into the detail of the Cassin view, she suggests that Aristotle’s contemptuous denigration related to the fact that these scoundrels were ‘doing’ philosophy in another way and were relativists to boot. This led me to think about whether British poetry in it’s current parlous state has any equivalents and why.

Because I’m vaguely aware of the fact that in Europe the O word can have a range of different and sometimes conflicting connotations, I think it may be as well to set out a few definitions. These are entirely subjective and provisional and I. as ever, reserve the right to amend them at any time and for any reason.

Poem

This is whatever the maker designates as a poem, for whatever reason or for no reason at all. An important sub-set, which doesn’t concern us here is whatever the reader experiences as a poem which is different from that which is perceived as having poetic qualities.

Other

In this instance, work which is poetry in the definition above and therefore the same as the rest of the form but which has components or aspects that are quite different and thus viewed with the same level of denigration with which Aristotle looked upon the Sophists. So, Other Work here refers to material that manages to be the same but different.

Bad.

Cassin, paraphrasing Aristotle, uses the term ‘evil’ to describe the way that what we think of as mainstream philosophy thought of its Others. I don’t understand the ‘e’ word and, anyway, it seems too portentous to describe this particular reaction which I’d prefer to describe as not being ‘proper’. There’s also something, and this is very approximate, about being a charlatan and therefore Worthy of Derision.

Having thus set myself up for a fall, the following selection of contemporary baddies hopefully and tentatively sets out some likely candidates for the above pigeon-hole in what passes for our current literary culture.

Sir Geoffrey Hill.

Here is an Other who, by means of appointment to the Chair of all things Poetic at Oxford, has been transformed from Bad to Good even as the quality of his work has, erm, diminished. The main features of Hill’s Otherly Badness spring from a reputation in academia for ferocity, for the alleged difficult obduracy of his earlier work and what some have sneeringly referred to as his ‘post Prozac’ period heralded by the publication of The Triumph of Love in 1998. There’s also the alleged difficulty of the work throughout his career which doesn’t really hang together if it’s read with the attention that it deserves.

In terms of difficulty and obscurity I’d like to provide the second and final part of Mysticism and Democracy from the Canaan collection which was published in 1996:

Let this not fall imputed to our native
                            obdurate credulities.
Contrariwise within its own doctrine it spins,
remote saturnian orb:
the imperial granites, braided, bunched, and wreathed;
                                the gilded ornature
ennobling lowly errors - exacted, from exalted -
                   tortuous in their simplicity;
the last unblemished records of service
                                       left hanging
in air yellowed with a late half light
as votive depositions
                     not to be taken down.

To my entirely fallible mind, this is strong poetry at its best but was seen by the mainstream as Wilful Trickery as evidenced by the ‘mangled syntax of the first line, the use of obscure vocabulary and the length and complexity of the final sentence.

All of this is Badness is compounded by Hill’s odd view about the relationship between Things Mystical and Political together with the fact that his political views are hopelessly eccentric and definitely Other. Unlike some of our other Badnesses, Hill produces material that looks like poetry even when it doesn’t sound like poetry. One of the most frequently quoted proofs is his response to critics in The Triumph of Love:

And yes - bugger you, Mcsikker et al, -I do
mourn and resent you desolation of learning:
Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure,
forms of understanding, far from despicable,
and further now, as they are most despised.
By understanding I understand diligence
and attention, appropriately understood
of actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement
of what is owed the dead.

It is the first two lines that have caught the attention of the Critical Crew as further proof of Bad and Other but I would argue that this fails to do any kind of justice to all of this section in the round. Some consideration of the following seven lines might reveal is that the desolation of learning embodied by MacSikker and His Friends is juxtaposed against the diligence and readerly that Hill’s work requires. Ending this is the recurring Hillian theme of ‘memorialising’ the dead.

So the Poem stares upon its Other and takes note of ‘Bugger you’. of ‘saturnian’ and of ‘ornature’ and declares Badness to be at work, continuing to condemn in this fashion until the Oxford Chair is awarded. This turn of events with its brief flurry of media interest causes the work to be cast as suddenly valuable and somehow essentially British. Of course, the irony is that the late and very prolific period have demonstrated to most of us that quantity and quality rarely go hand in hand but we are at least grateful that over fifty years of stunning work is not going to get Left on the Shelf.

An entirely coincidental digression

Whilst deciding which part of Jerusalem Deleted to use (see below) I had a look at this week’s TLS and, to my surprise found that Sir Geoffrey had penned the opening review. Being a fan, I read this extended discussion on the work of Charles Williams with increasing delight, not because of Williams but because this encapsulated Hill’s critical work at its combative best. So there I am, grinning inanely when I get to this:

I do not believe that Williams is a great poet; but he does make isolated major statements; and he is powerful and weird in essential ways. He engineers passages of poetry that obstruct and disoblige our own polemic and populist bias. “The edge of a possibility of utter alienation intrudes”, to adapt a sentence of his own about magic, quoted by Lindop. Nothing is more essential to British poetry in its present condition than that a sense of “utter alienation” should obtrude on it.

Now, had I started this on Saturday (it is now Monday), I may well have included this obtruding alienation in my title. As it is, Hill has neatly and, as ever, concisely set out what the Bad Other does and how necessary this is right now. I’m taking it that he rightly sees his own work, even as the Good Other’ as making a positive contribution and I can’t argue with the extent of the obtrusion but, as an Extremist in Most Things, I would question whether the alienation is sufficiently utter. Still, it remains weird to know that someone’s politics and faith can be so distant from my own yet view most things Poetry in more or less the same way.

Simon Jarvis as the Partially Bad Other.

Simon has a theory which, unlike the vast majority of his fellow academics, he has put into practice in his poetry. The broad outline is that writing within the formal constraints of rhyme and metre is the best way to produce philosophical or Big Thought verse. The more I think about the ‘P’ word the less convinced I am that it is either helpful or useful so I’m going to stick with thoughts that are concerned with broad principles and ideas rather than narrow ones. Of course, the Poem already considers itself to be expressing Big Thoughts quite successfully but is mistaking depth for affectation wrapped up in a distinctly Larkinian melancholia. There are many and varied reasons for this state of affairs that I don’t wish to dwell on except to point out that the Poem is most discomfited by work that follows the traditional rules in producing material that is focused entirely on serious stuff.

This badness is further solidified by length, digression and complexity, none of which the current Poem is either familiar with nor particularly keen on. There are three works that are guilty of all these Badnesses, Night Office, the middle one of these is gloriously and defiantly complex, the nature of ruins being one of its many themes:

It was my chrysalis : I can escape
now from the very feeling that a line
must mean I wear a gag or seal with tape
prose mouth or verse mouth when the words are mine
only so far as yours too. No more drape
the necklace with dead nightingales! Refine
with purer sense each word; I may walk free
from nugatory beauties, and may see

the split line on the ironstone alone
for its own moving contour : I may go
in thought through all the villages of stone
without a single symbol, since I know
I do not need a theory to come home,
nor is it necessary that I show,
by some exemplary device of hurt,
I scrub the human patinas of dirt.

There in idea every ruined brick
glows inconsolably, until these shades
fall on its surface, and the twilight's thick
slants of illuminations through the glades
dampen each damp-course like a pretty trick
of light's undying glimmer when it fades
little by little on the little cluster
of walls and buildings lit with this rich lustre.

Night Office runs for about 220 pages of rhyming, metrical verse expressing complicated ideas about faith in the present. It's also extremely digressive. All of this slaps a gauntlet around the face of the Poem in the 21st century by following on from and developing what Alexander Pope (Poet) about Poetic Constraint quite some years ago, which is probably why it's been (mostly) ignored by those who should know better.

Which brings me neatly to my next morsel of Insightful Observation, or sweeping and generalised guess, whichever is preferred. In conversation with a close friend from across the water, it would appear that those in North America are more ready to ‘engage’ with and pay attention to Bad Others than we Brits who either ignore or deride or (see below) take one look and express vehement exasperation. This sad state of affairs, as with most Bad Others, belies more than a little anxiety from the advocates and practitioners of the status quo as to the quality of the work that they advocate. Whilst this might be a Stab in the Dark, me thinks it might be worthy of more detailed attention.

Back to Jarvis and his latest work Jerusalem Deleted which was published by Enitharmon in 2015 and has ‘The modern state is a transformed church.’ as one of its three epigraphs. I’m quoting at some length to give a more rounded demonstration of Badness:

                 658
Public realm excellence in bus stop kerbs 
          antepenultimately must or gasp
             or hymn the last task of the transformed church
starring the pavement with its studs and marks
  sown through the high street where no foot disturbs

                659
my perfect flight : a nonstick alloy parks
my protocarcase in the loading bay.
        The turning apron at the covered way
Is quiet now, I wake up and feel the air
          soft on my wet face, and, as I lie there,

                660  

my cheek invents some message in the breeze
  which blows from anywhere; the distant real
speaks through its bright gag, and the thin birch trees
           induce evacuated sense to feel
        itself still fettered to the truth which frees

               661

me here from abstract freedom, which I steal
  back to my station of deleted duties
           the wrong anthology of rights & beauties.
The stones of Spalding! Mabbug was deserted.
        I rose and Wandered down the High Street. No

               662

         strap or lock held me: then to what inverted
            world, or non-polity, had this truck so
  brought and deposited me not inserted
in any social order but this row
toytown postmodern, infant greens and reds

               663

burnt at the edges where the rebel heads
         had assailed it? Retail units stood
  scratched in the thermoplastic pouch each outlet should
          pretend to speak with, and their fascias shut
vertical rhythms, at the middle, where

              664

the bad backlit acrylic sheet was cut :
         patch illuminations through the matt
   light-tongued their lost brands. In the cool dawn air
I let cold cathodes from the closed steak hut
              shine on my set face. Could I just stay there?

Having typed that out, a further thought bobs up on my horizon: there is a Badness that is bad because it demands fairly focused attention which, as with lengthiness takes some time. Jerusalem Deleted is not a drive-by read (technical term), it requires a degree of concentration and readerly focus but(and this is the point) it more than repays those efforts.

I was once one of those who baulked at the Obscure but with the increasingly reliable interweb it’s bothering me less and less. For example, the poem concerns a war between two(ish) factions who took a different view of the nature of Christ at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Mabbug referred to above is likely to be Philoxenus of Mabbug, a strenuous advocate of one of the above factions. Of course this stuff is obscure yet the information required for clarification is very close at hand. Anyway, this is the kind of subject matter that scares the Poem very much indeed because it remains firmly in the Poetry Tradition, it tests out a position made clear by one of the poem’s canonical figures and yet it expresses ideas and offers opinions and depicts the human condition at a depth that is anathema to the blandified cacophony (short, straightforward, technically inept, criminally simplistic) that gets touted as the Poem today.

One of the several badnesses in the above is that of language use in this ongoing trek through a landscape ruinated by war. The inventive cheek, the speaking real, the closed and upright rhythms and the light-tonguing patch illuminations do present challenges to the reader but they also suggest and provoke different ways of Thinking about Things which I find particularly involving.

So, Bad Others are either scorned or ignored and sometimes both. This refusal to engage with and respond to the many challenges presented by these defiers and several other makers of the Bad that spring to mind belies a very real anxiety about the Poem’s current level of inadequacy, the sad fact that it isn’t up to the task. It really isn’t. As Sir Geoffrey says an obtrusion of utter alienation is required and it is required now.

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Getting poetry

Here in the UK it was said of our last prime minister that he didn’t ‘get’ it which is one of the main reasons that he was thrown out. In the popular press our current leaders a portayed as ‘arrogant posh boys’ who don’t ‘get’ it either. In both cases this relates to a failure to understand / identify with the experiences of the ordinary citizen.

I’ve given this some thought with regard to poetry and the sad fact that most people don’t feel that they ‘get’ it in that they don’t see the point of it or how it might relate to them. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only a very small amount of verse that I can see the point of and a very small proportion of that is poetry that I feel might relate / speak to me.

For me ‘getting’ a poem is not the same as understanding it, I can work out what poems ‘mean’ but this does not mean that I can see the point of them nor does it mean that I can relate personally to them.

I’ll proceed by example, I don’t see the point of Auden, Hopkins, Rilke, Dryden and many others because they don’t seem to be saying anything either useful or different. I’ll readily admit that I might need to spend more time with these but an initial period of attention has failed to impress.

I can see the point of a lot of religious verse in that some of it is both useful and sufficiently different to hold my attention but I can’t relate to it, it says little to me about how I live my life even though I understand and appreciate the way that it says what it has to say. I’m thinking primarily of George Herbert and RS Thomas.

There are very few bodies of work that I can relate to in their entirety- only Andrew Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop spring to mind as poets whose work seems consistently ‘pointful’ and relates to my life in the clattering now. By ‘relate’ I think I mean those poems that I don’t have to think about, those that reflect / embody ways that I have thought and felt so that I know instinctively what’s going on. Writing this I realise that I could and should go on for a very long time about how I know (absolutely) the mind and the impulse that made “The Moose” the poem that it is.

Then there are those poems that I can see the point of but only bits of them speak to me. Some of these bits speak of my experiences and some of the way that I think and feel. The wedding reception scene in Keston Sutherland’s ‘Stress Position’ speaks to both my experience of mental illness and to the way that I think about it and does so in a deeply humane, unselfish kind of way. I can relate to and see the point of the strangeness of the human condition as set out in Books 3 and 5 of ‘The Faerie Queene’ even though my view of Book 5 is far away from the current consensus. I can, of course, see the point of the rest and iy is all magnificent but it doesn’t have the same complexity / nuance / strangeness of 3 and 5. I absolutely ‘get’ Milton’s discussion of evil in ‘Paradise Lost’ and this does speak to my experiences of working with people who do Bad (terrible) Things, I’m also of the view that this particular poem is the best thing ever produced anywhere but the description of Eden (whilst technically a tour de force) is quite boring (to me). ‘Maximus’ is nearly the perfect poem in that it contains so many things that tell me what it’s like to be alive, about place, process and the archive, but the material relating to myth just doesn’t reach me.

Understanding isn’t a prerequisite of getting a poem, in fact it can sometimes get in the way. Some of the work of Paul Celan and J H Prynne I can see the point of and it seems to embody how it is for me but I don’t claim to have a complete grasp of what’s being said. With Celan, obvious examples are ‘Aschenglorie’ and ‘Erblinde’, with Prynne, there are moments of absolute clarity in ‘Streak~~Willing~~Entourage~~Artesian’ and a whole range of ideas going on in ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ that do seem to speak of the now.

Here’s a bit of a confession, Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Mercian Hymns’ and ‘The Triumph of Love’ are stuffed with point and are two of the finest poems that we have (there is no argument with this as it is obviously a fact) but it is the short poems about landscape that I relate to most because (as with Olson) they put into words (embody) what it is like for me to be in a place. I’m incredibly grateful for this because it (social work term) validates and oddly anticipates the feelings that I have.

There is another dimension to getting poetry and this relates to tactics, There are some poets that write poetry that moves things forward and there are those poets that maintain a / the status quo. It is usually reasonably straightforward to identify these poets. Between 1960 and his suicide in 1970, Paul Celan wrote tactically important poems, J H Prynne has spent the last forty years making tactical / strategic interventions, ‘Howl’ is tactically crucial to an understanding of Where We are Now. I don’t agree with asingle word that Kenneth Goldsmith has ever uttered but ‘Traffic’ is something that I ‘get’ and something that is likely to be seen as quite pivotal.

We now come to to poems that I get as poems and that make tactical sense. These are very few in number because I’m a particularly opinionated individual and (I like to think) my standards are high. There is Vanessa Place whose work mirrors ‘how it is’ for me and who rattles many cages whilst pointing out how what we call poetry can begin to reclaim some degree of relevance in these provisional and vague times. There is also the work of Sarah Kelly that speaks to me but also makes a voice that must be heard above and against the prevailing din. Both of these two set up a kind of imperative (must be read / cannot be ignored) and yet they are utterly different, the only link being what they do to the inside of my head.

The importance of poetry

The arduity project that I’m currently working on has given me more than a few problems. Trying to encourage people to read difficult poetry has led me to describe certain poets and certain poems as ‘important’. This has now become a cliché in my head as well as on the page so I’ve decided to work out what we mean when we say that ‘The Triumph of Love’ is important or that Paul Celan is important.
I’ll start with the importance of poetry as a means of expression. Ever since I read and understood my first ‘adult’ poem I’ve known instinctively that poetry was somehow important but decided not to work out why. This intuitive knowledge is problematic because it is really hard to explain but I can give something of a definition by separating out my notion of importance from that expressed by others. There is a view that poetry is in a privileged position because it can provide a closer indication of the truth than any other form of expression. I reject this view because I have yet to see any empirical evidence to support it and because this claim is the kind of thing that gives poetry a bad name.
My notion of the importance of poetry would rest on the fact that it isn’t prose and that it is incredibly versatile. Not being prose removes the poem from ordinary speech and enables all kinds of devices to give expression to deep emotion and profound ideas. Poetry, at its best, can be both incredibly beautiful and packed with meaning at the same time in a way that other forms of art can only aspire to.
This notion of versatility combined with a kind of strength has stayed with me since I was thirteen when a single line from a poem suddenly made sense. Nothing that I have read or tried to write since has caused me to change my view that poetry is really important but not that important.

So, why is it that I feel that some poets are ‘important’ and others not? I must stress that this isn’t an argument about the canon which (I would argue) has little to do with importance but an investigation as to why I feel that I can make an instinctive judgement  about a poem’s importance before I fully understand it.

First of all, poetry has to hold my attention and it has to be honest. This will always weed out about 95% of what’s been written. Heaney isn’t important because he doesn’t hold my attention, Larkin isn’t important because he’s dishonest and manipulative (I could go on).  Muldoon holds my attention but there’s this lurking suspicion that he’s dishonest. Of the Movement poets, I can make the strongest case for Thom Gunn in terms of interest and integrity. Elizabeth Bishop’s work is always interesting and honest and the degree of technical skill marks her out as ‘important’.

Modernist poetry gave poets a whole new set of crayons and the ‘late’ modernists continue to exploit this potential. For all its many faults, modernism did open up the possibilities of poetry and this trend should be seen as important because it represents a major break from what has gone before. Hill, Prynne, Celan, Olson and Matthias have all pushed this potential and produced work that is interesting, honest and complex. Sometimes the crayons don’t quite work as intended but that’s inevitable when something new is attempted and when you’re pushing the versatility of poetry to its limit.

Poetry that is important is poetry that is innovative, complex, honest, technically accomplished and interesting because it stands out from the rest of what is being produced and because it is clear that the poet is deadly serious about making poems.

‘The Triumph of Love’, for example, meets this criteria even if some of the devices used don’t actually work (the faux editorial gloss and the angry response to critics) because other factors more than compensate. Very few people on this planet are more serious about poetry than Geoffrey Hill.

Having written the above, I now have a lurking suspicion that Paul Muldoon might be more important than I thought……