Still trying to write, always trying to write
I was thinking about ‘duality’ and the trouble it causes, in the sense of the division between our interior world as writers and the exterior world of so-called facts and things, and I remembered a poem-series I wrote when I was at University. I lived in a lovely attic room near Kenilworth Castle with a view of fields and a rookery uphill in a beech grove to the right. I felt I unable to say anything through my poems that wasn’t hideously personal and removed from the world, so I set myself the task of writing only about what I could see from the window. I don’t remember now if I wrote everyday. I wrote short poems, I think the longest was about 12 lines, and I tried to find good similes and metaphors, but I stayed disciplined about the idea of only looking and recording. Around poem 21 a transformation took place, and it was as if everything I wrote about the things I could see was chock full of emotion, had become a kind of abstraction despite my trying to stay close to perceptions. What had happened I think was that I had discovered (or rediscovered) that writing simply through perception is often the purest way to express our great thorts, that the kind of self-restraint involved means we are allowing through only the purest ideas. Also we are placing our ideas into the world of things, or at least trying to. I’m not sure if I could come up with a complete explanation (though I think TS Eliot already did), but I just thought the idea might be useful.
(By the way, I think it’s important to emphasise that all my opinions are only my opinions, not rules, and they have arisen from my own particular experiences, though I can credit The Word Hoard with creating the context for many of these experiences. But they are not intended as hard and fast limitations, they are just observations I have arrived at on considering the path things have taken. I do think what we have learnt from The Word Hoard is important, but I don’t think that finishes the subject.
Anyway, thinking of oneself as a poet doesn’t necessarily need qualification or preparation, and our writing can be strangled by too much theorising. This links me to the process of free jazz and composition (not a contradiction in terms for me) where you can act almost entirely on impulse. One of the huge differences in my writing now as compared to how I wrote say 20 years ago is there is less impulsiveness there these days, and I think that is a loss. When I was younger, I never thought twice about what I should write, only what I wanted to write, and over the years I learnt to edit the results. But as often as not I did not edit, because the impulse had carried the line through unbroken. This is like improvising in music, sometimes you find something pristine, sometimes you have to search around for it. This is where your technique supports you, when the dreaming is less clear, but a poem or improvisation that is all technique is dead.
Another way of putting that would be that this impulsive process is also a technique that can be learned through repetition, and I’d say it’s a preferable approach to trying to put someone else’s theories (or dogmas) into practice. All I’m describing is that inarticulate desire to write something that the poem tries to articulate, and of course this is not subjectless or without personality, but this state of desire and power is the beginning point of improvisation, what I prefer to call listening or dreaming. It’s vital to return to that state over and over, to renew the impulse, to commit to the impulse, or writing becomes too mannered and stiff. Easy for me to say, but I believe it even though I find it almost impossible to follow my own advice at the moment.
On another, I hope connected, subject, in thinking of all the great American writers from the forties, fifities and sixties who have influenced writers involved with The Word Hoard, we have to remember the context in which they wrote, of Communism and McArthyism and so forth. These were writers for whom looking at the ‘ordinary’ world was a kind of political act: Williams’ choice to write from the commonplace in commonplace language was at that time ‘anti-poetic’. The fascination with Japanese & Chinese writing was also, I think, part of a radical movement rather than a taste for the pretty and soothing, part in fact of a counter-cultural movement that was opposed to the Cold War conformism that predominated in America. For all their very specific historical context, I still think we can imagine our way into the work of these poets in a way that strengthens and refreshes our own work, and their lessons can be applied here in England, or anywhere else. The kind of writing that just plonks itself down on things is very English isn’t it? It’s the result of mediocre writers over-reaching their intellects I think, and to be ignored. Yet the very English Ted Hughes looked at a few things too and they didn’t seem too boring. As Pound the old fascist said: without character you will never play upon that instrument, nor execute music fit for the odes. Hughes’ character animated the things he looked at in much the same way that Williams animates things in his poetry, a very different character of course, but the power of the fascination is similar I think, and the perception that the senses are, or at least can be, the short circuits to understanding. Does that make sense? I like my friend Ellie’s idea of metaphor as the intermediary process between the world and ourselves as writers (though we are of course part of the world too).
