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                   OBLIQUITY AND  MINIMALISM

I have always favoured what E.M.W.Tillyard called, about the time I was born in 1933, ‘obliquity’.  I make no apology for using so ancient a text as his Poetry Direct and Oblique instead of one that more radically challenges cultural structures, as the works of Derrida and Foucault are said to do. The effect will be the same, since I propose the not uncommon argument that texts are seldom as plain as they may seem.  Density of allusion has existed in European poetry at least since the 1850s.  De Nerval’s El Desdichado is a reminder of how compressed and allusive poetry can be.  It was published in Les filles du feu (1854), only three years before Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal.   Here’s my translation.

EL DESDICHADO¹ 

I am the Shadow—Widowed—Unconsoled,

The Prince of Aquitaine² of Castle Wrack:

My only Star³ is dead,—my lute of stars untold

Emblazons Melancholy’s Sun of Black.

In the Tomb’s night, You who once consoled,

Oh give Tyrrhenian⁴ Posilippo back,

The flowers that pleased my heart, now waste and cold,

The Vine and Rose twined round the trellis⁵ rack.

I—Love⁶ or Phoebus?⁷  Lusignan?⁸ Biron?⁹

The Queen¹⁰ has branded my brow with her lips;

I’ve dreamed in Grottos where the Siren dips…

And victor twice I’ve crossed the Acheron:¹¹

I’ve used the Orphic¹² lyre in turn to play

Sighs of the Saint, the weeping of the Fay.¹³

       A friend asked, ‘Why so many endnotes?  Who are you translating for?’  I translate for myself, and the endnotes are for me and those like me.  I’ll not remember who Biron was, what he represents here, and the rest.  This is also the poem from which T.S.Eliot in The Waste Land took the phrase ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’, so it has an added interest.  I’ve never thought of poetry as simple or straightforward.  Naturally, there should be an immediacy somewhere, in arresting rhythms and language perhaps, but even ‘easy’ poets like Housman are inexplicable as to frisson.  Yes, I believe in aesthetic shudders.

       If mathematicians like to compare their theorems to poetry, poets might try to reciprocate by reminding anyone who cares to listen, especially those new to the art, that poetry is a discipline that requires as much rigour, dedication and learning, if only about life, as algebra.  A poem of mine like the following, which some have liked, may seem simpler than it is.

       I Fed

I fed the monotonous shore

under my eyelids.

Waders in mud.

Red horizon.

I sought you under old tiles

past the resin of chairs,

mud in my mouth.

No taste there, only

abandoned boats.

       I don’t get much shorter than that.  Over the long stretch, I’m no Circe Maia or Bartolo Cattafi for brevity.  What I’d like to stress is that poetry is condensed and contrived.  It is therefore usually harder than prose to understand and must be read more slowly.  This is one reason why it’s not widely read at all.  It should already be clear that it is not my intention to condemn the difficulty of poetry, but nor shall I moan about the size of its readership or propose another movement towards simplification.

       Many types of prose, notably technical prose, are also difficult for the casual reader.  There are special vocabularies and uncommon concepts.  Terms like ‘cash flow’, ‘top-down’, ‘quantum states’, may superficially sound understandable, but to know their full meaning one needs to have had the benefit of long study.  In the same texts it is possible to encounter terms that are not so guessable, such as ‘bull market’, ‘protected scratch space’, ‘hadron’.  Books that contain jargon like this are for specialists.  Is poetry too, then, only for specialists?  In a way, yes.  Poetry itself, as distinct from poetics, doesn’t have a unique jargon or set of concepts; its difficulty comes another way.  A mixture of strange rhetorical effects makes it readable only by a minority who have chosen to study the art in some depth.

       Prose comes in a range of forms: opinion columns in newspapers, books on academic subjects, novels, the list is endless.  What is difficult prose to one reader is not so to another.  Some is not easy at all.  But nor, as I say, is most poetry.  I’ll show how it is that certain habits of obliquity have become common among poets, so common that poets hardly know quite how indirect they are actually are.  I’ll use my own piece quoted above as an example.

       An untrained reader would, I believe, need to look at it more than once.  When I speak of untrained readers I mean those not used to poetry.  I would myself need to be very alert, if this had been by someone else, to get it first time.  This applies even to the first two lines:

                   I fed the monotonous shore

                   under my eyelids.

       The more I go over this the more I see what could be missed by a quick reading which understood just the bare sense: ‘I looked at the shore.’  What does ‘feeding’ the shore ‘under my eyelids’ mean?  I pause.  Perhaps the words suggest droopy eyelids and an inattentive gaze.  It could also suggest eyes that are shut, or shut after gazing.  ‘Under my eyelids’ feels as if the vision is stuck on the eyeballs.  Anyway, although ‘feeding (or feasting) one’s eyes’ on a sight is not an uncommon figure of speech, twisting it round so that the sight is fed into the eyes is unusual.  It is no wonder I read this more slowly than prose, and have to re-read it to get closer. 

                        Waders in mud.

                        Red horizon.

       Two abrupt, descriptive utterances.  Two sentences without unnecessary verbs.  The feeling supplements the previous ‘monotonous shore’.  I have also to pause to take in the fact that this is a shore which leaves mud behind, not sand.  Such shores are found in land-locked, silted harbours.  I have an idea that people who wade in mud for a living do so to collect cockles or attend to crab baskets.  But ‘waders’ don’t have to be people, they could be birds.  Birds might be the first and preferred image for some readers.  Even as the writer I can’t possibly know how my mind was working or tell exactly what I had in mind, so I see no reason to limit the options.  Poetry does not impose boundaries.

       A red horizon could suggest morning or evening.  I have my own preference.  The quiet brevity of the facts has created an atmosphere of melancholy, or perhaps peace: at this point there’s still a choice.  I keep this in mind.

                        I sought you under old tiles

                        past the resin of chairs,

                        mud in my mouth.

       Suddenly there’s a new puzzle.  Who is this ‘you’?  To poets a ‘you’ is often a lover or close friend.  One has to read quite a lot of verse to know that.  It’s possible that here the ‘you’ refers to some other type, a parent or child, or some supernatural or mythical being, or God, or the poet himself.  Only a knowledge of how the writer usually employs this pronoun could lead me to suspect one of these more abnormal usages.  Usually I would assume a friend or lover.

       The scene has shifted to an interior, into an old house (on that shore, one assumes).  Why past the resin of chairs?  Resin is secreted from beneath the bark of fir and pine trees and is not the same as sap.  In furniture, visual traces of natural resin is long gone.  Would the poet have known that an important hard resin is rosin, used in varnishes?  Would many readers know that?  Does the poet seek his lover in an old house beyond the past of the chairs, back past to when they were trees even?  Or does he just push aside the varnished furniture?  Or are we to imagine the chairs still exuding the smell of pinewood, with ‘resin’ used loosely?  Or does he remember the smell they once had?

       There’s something rich about ‘resin’, however it’s taken.  There was something rich in the past of the lovers or friends, in contrast to the feeling of ‘mud in the mouth’ in the lonely moments when he seeks her (or him) again in their old meeting place by the shore.  There are suggestions but no direct answers.  This is stark poetry, proceeding by indirection.  It ends:

                        No taste there, only

                        abandoned boats.

       There was no taste for life in that vicinity without the other, just as there is no taste but mud in the speaker’s mouth on this revisit.  The whole shore is inside the viewer, behind love’s lips: even the abandoned boats are.  The house and the boats are bereft.  He goes to a place where they used to meet and finds nothing to remind him.

       Something like the above, even its ambiguities, would occur fairly rapidly, I suggest, to the practised reader of poetry, but I think even an intelligent reader who never reads poetry at all could not absorb it in the same way.  The reader of poetry would linger over the piece, go back to those two occurrences of ‘mud’, even wonder perhaps if an abandoned, upturned boat on a mudflat might not resemble the upper palate inside the mouth of the observer.  There is no clear story, only a hint of one.  There is an atmosphere of regret, nostalgia, for anyone who cares to stay with the piece.

       Absence of clear story keeps readers away.  Obliquity, I’m afraid, also keeps readers away.  Readers of any anthology of modern verse will find this poem by no means the hardest of exercises.  If anything, it’s on the easy side.  Elsewhere in poetry books abound allusions and lacunae and unusual syntax all much harder than any here.  Practised poetry readers take anthologies in their stride, even accepting some types of total obscurity, if exciting enough, as one kind of experience to expect.  If poems could be once-off products, hung on walls and examined the way paintings are, the best would go for high prices.  But poems are infinitely printable, so have little value as objects, and cannot be taken in with one slick glance.

       However, I see no cause for complaint.  Poetry has often been difficult, read by élites, not a caviar to be wasted on general readers.  Poetry élites these days are self-selecting, being mostly writers of verse themselves.  Not all small magazine subscribers and poets (the two often the same) know as much about poetry as say academics and serious reviewers.  There are many standards and tendencies.  But one does not have to know a lot to pick up a few current habits.  I say that not disparagingly.  It’s possible in the arts to absorb unconsciously fragments of methods and tradition and to put these to good use, despite a practitioner’s inexperience.

       When Tillyard wrote of obliquity he quoted much Yeats and Eliot, sound scholarly types, and with a fastidiousness which believed that one day ‘culture’ would ‘once again become more standardised’.  His terms for kinds of obliquity are ones I might apply too, though more roughly.  His use of ‘allusion’, for instance, refers only to literary echoes such as he finds in Eliot’s Whispers of Immortality, where he points out that ‘Grishkin is nice’ and what follows is a reworking of some verses in Gautier’s Carmen.  It seems to me that allusion covers much more than nods to other literature.  It includes indirect references to anything at all.  Thus, silted harbours are alluded to in the poem above.  Metaphors, like ‘I fed’—no literal feeding went on, allude (1) to the actual referent (the resting of eyes on a scene), and (2) to the comparison’s core itself (the ingesting done by a mouth).  Difficulty occurs when it’s not clear what part of a story, or of the world’s anatomy, the core of a metaphor might refer to in any way at all.  Symbols have the same problem, and symbolism is almost second nature to some of us: are my ‘abandoned boats’ symbols?  They must be.  In sound boats you travel; wrecks get you nowhere.

       If allusion is high on the list of what makes for difficulty, structure must be up there on the same level.  Structure is in everything, from the morphology of words (are some of them coined, like Hopkins’ ‘leafmeal’?), to syntax, to verse-form, to the total arrangement of parts, the plot, if you like.  It is often not a poet’s aim to present a story, scene or argument in simple terms.  But when masterful simplicity is present, with flair and control, it achieves an effect.  Prosaic and uneven simplicity works less well and is usually lifeless. 

       A common feature of difficult structures is omission; but the absence of words can be telling, even if the reader has to work things out, read between lines.  Of course structures can go the other way and be superbly proud of their own heaping-up of neo-gothic effects.  If there are difficulties of structure in I Fed, it is due to the large holes in the slim content, in what is not said.

       These, as I see it, are the two constituents of tension, and perhaps of difficulty, in verse: allusion and structure, or more generally, meaning and form.  Obliquity, in the senses intended by Tillyard, is not always difficult.  What he calls obliquity of rhythm, for instance, is no more than subtle effects, to be noticed and appreciated or not, though none of his examples is obscure.  One may be puzzled as to why a poem is laced up in a rhythmic form which itself, and not the syntax or meaning, makes it hard to read smoothly, but a reader will hardly be put off a work by prosody alone.  In free verse in its more minimalist forms one might be puzzled too by the line breaks, why ‘the’ occurs at the end of a three-word line, for example.  Again, a puzzle but not an impediment.

       I suppose I should add, as a last example of difficulty, ‘voice’: who exactly is speaking?  What’s the tone here, and what human disposition stands behind the tone?  Are the details from first-hand experience?  Is this autobiography or total fiction?  It might surprise the reader to know that I Fed is not a private confession.  When I wrote it, I felt that I was indeed dredging up and using some personal memories, scenes from my past, utilising feelings I might well have entertained about someone, or about a composite of friends and lovers.  I have certainly stood in a place like the one described.  So I was calling upon the personal, as writers must.  But I was creating a fiction, specifically in response to reading Cattafi.  So there you have allusion again, not only ‘What sort of voice is this?’ but also, ‘Is this voice related to other literature?  Is it saying anything about that corpus?’  I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t want to spoil the argument.  But now you know the truth.  I was, in a sense, faking it.  Poets do.

       This volume contains the best of my poems written over fifty years, accompanied by notes.  When I read other people’s poems, I also enjoy reading whatever comments about them I can lay my hands on, even if some opinions are dumb and condescending.  Some of the most helpful comments come in the footnotes of scholarly editions.  The more boisterous, good-humoured remarks can act like an audience warm-up, even nicely complementing the poems if they set the scene or throw light on the dark zones.  I know there’s always the chance that an interpretation exceeds the evidence.  But there could be reasons.  The poem might be so elusive that it sends one chasing phantoms.  Perhaps a psychological or critical fashion waves a light from a new angle.  If poets themselves go beyond those poems of their own which they seek to explain, purist may frown.  I take the view that prose additions by authors themselves, however wrong-headed, are valuable.  I do not agree with Basil Bunting’s ‘Never explain.  The reader is as smart as you are.’  This is after he has counselled poets to pare down, put away, then pare down again.

       Poets like David Jones in Anathemata and Randall Jarrell in Selected Poems, even when providing notes, still assume the reader’s readiness to find help in other material.  My own jottings also, occasionally, point to other sources.  However, I’ve done my best to limit the need for further foraging.  I’ve not particularly aimed to deconstruct, exposing assumptions and inconsistencies, though I may here and there have given off a whiff of that activity.  Not usually, however.  When summarising I’ve leaned towards simplicity, even when approaching plots not easy to outline.  Or I think I have.

       So by notes, on poems in general, I mean comments of any kind, from academic critiques to brief footnotes, and including of course personal gossip.  A warning.  Whatever our condition as poets, narrators like me occupy an amateur status as thinkers; you can’t rely on us.  Storytellers not only create untrustworthy mouthpieces, they are intrinsically unreliable when they explain themselves.  My private myths are controlled by other myths I’m not aware of.  I make assumptions informed by my historical and social context.  And what about the internal inconsistencies in all discourse, which I hear are unavoidable?

       Whilst writing a note on a poem, I’m usually studying that poem again.  My previous readings, and the comments of others, are present as influences when I read again.  Also, the note I write may force me to modify my previous judgment.  Reassessment involves keen attention to the poetry and a fresh understanding of it.  There is always a fluid, two-way action between the readings of the poem and the various writings about it.  The past is always present, and the present alters the past.

       Writing a note is like writing anything else.  However, it relies on the work examined, so it is in a sense derivative, like a secondary text in history.  Yet just as a history can be more interesting than the period described, some criticisms have more meat on them than is in their poetic sources.

       Once a note exists, it is there to accumulate the same kind of aggregate reading as does the poem it is based on.  Over the years, with much-read poems, many critiques are recorded, and, if one considers translations and adaptations within the same language, such as the later renderings of Chaucer, many versions of a poem may also get written.  As times change, a poem’s essence changes, so there is nothing definitive or sacrosanct about a text.  Look at the Bible.

Alan Marshfield

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  ¹ Spanish: ‘The Unfortunate One’.  I am indebted here and in the following footnotes to the discussion of this poem in The Poem Itself (Ed. Stanley Burnshaw, Pelican 1960.)  [BACK]

  ² A vague figure, stripped of possessions.  [BACK]

  ³ His Beloved.  [BACK]

  ⁴ The Tyrrhenian Sea is the ‘Italian Sea’ (la mer d’Italie) contained by the Roman coast and the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily.  Posilippo is a resort on the Amalfi coast just south of Naples.  [BACK]

  ⁵ Treille: strictly ‘vine-arbour’.  [BACK]

  ⁶ Eros, god of Love, who lost his love Psyche.  [BACK]

  ⁷ Phoebus Apollo, god of Light and Poetry.  [BACK]

  ⁸ The mortal Lusignan lost his water-sprite wife, Melusine.  The Siren, two lines later, alludes to this.  [BACK]

  ⁹ Biron: Charles, Duc de (1562–1602) lover of daughter of Duke de Savoy, King Henry IV’s enemy, or poet hero of the Perigord district?  [BACK]

¹⁰ Venus, Queen of Love, and also his Beloved.  [BACK]

¹¹ A river of Death in the classical Underworld.  De Nerval has been like both sorts of poet, one who lost love and one who won it.  His two encounters with death could refer to the death of his Beloved and to some other destructive event in his life.  [BACK]

¹² The poet Orpheus with his lyre tried to rescue his love, Eurydice, from Hades, the realm of the dead.  [BACK]

¹³ Saint ... Fay: perhaps the Holy (saint) and the Magical (fairy) are two other forms (along with the Queen of Love and Lusignan’s mermaid) which have embodied his Beloved in his verse celebrations.  The original reads:

          EL DESDICHADO

          Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé,

          Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie:

          Ma seule Étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé

          Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

          Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,

          Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,

          La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,

          Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

          Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? … Lusignan ou Biron?

          Mon front est rouge encore du baiser de la Reine;

          J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Sirène…

          Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:

          Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée

          Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

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