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READING VERSE

Rollmops are herring constructs; phone satellites are made of tinfoil; poems are re-fabricated language. But when you chew a rollmop, what do you taste? Vinegar. And if you’re a photon in the radio part of the spectrum and you ping against a mobile phone dish, it’s not the tinniness you sense first but (take my word) the reflective index; indeed if you’re an alert photon, you savour the equations which went into the index. And when you read a poem, or perhaps I should come clean and not be too presumptuous: when I read a poem, I do not sense a stream or cloud or flak of words apart from those in the writing. I don’t hear them speaking other words.

Example. If I read or recite:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows . . .

(that thing by Housman), I pause a second at ‘air’ and only when I reach ‘blows’ am I more or less confident that primarily a breeze is implied and not a grand aria. I am virtually certain that never in a long life of reciting these lines whilst shaving (I must inform you that like Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin over our bed-head, and lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate over the foyer to our dining room, the Housman poem is enmuralled on our bathroom tiles), never until I indited this page have the words ‘breeze, wind, current’ or ‘aria, song, lyric’ (or any word at all other than ‘air’ itself) slipped into mind.

As to ‘kills’—‘an air that kills’—well, the abstract idea of slaughter did attend (or constitute, I’m not sure which) my reading, but never before now has the homunculus in the theatre of my mind cried, ‘Aha, slaughter!’, associating it with Goyaesque, Guernican, Kosovan images of mayhem and cruelty.

I must point out that until recently I believed that to me an idea was a proposition, not often an image and still less frequently a Platonic abstraction. But I may have been wrong all these years, since in the last paragraph I notice ‘the abstract idea of slaughter’. Now I deeply distrust Platonism. So much so that I have a copy of the Symposium hung in the lavatory where my grandmother used to spike quartered pages of the Daily Mirror. It was a big spike which made big holes, so we had a good reason to exercise caution. But if in fact I am a closet Platonist, due to pernicious upbringing, I must insist that my abstractions are not Ethereal Ideals; they are constructions soused in sour brain chemicals and tied together with string. Mental rollmops, if you will. I stray thus to convince you that I am serious and never leave the house without consulting Kierkegaard or Strawson.

As I compose this, I am nervously glancing at, and at times even contemplating, a coffee mug. I am alarmed to find that as I perform this act of seeing I do not internally verbalise. I see the mug but it gives rise to no ideas of the predicative-propositional kind. I am aware of it spatially. I see colours. If forced, I can name a few of them: blue, green, white. I also note its shape, of course. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that I might define it, that I could internally outline the haecceity of this domestic, reified instantiation of the Real. I do not compare it to others of its kind, either, or remember who bought it. I could, if caught by the whim, indulge in the game of ‘How many uses can one invent for this thing?’ or ‘How many associations come to mind?’ No doubt, with sufficient focus, I could come up with ten answers to each question in just two minutes. But I do not normally (correction, I never) relate to the world in this way.

When I read ‘kills’ (in the Housman lines), I experience internally a clean sound and assign an utterly vague, undoctored and unindoctrinated meaning to ‘kill’, which comes to me from a barrel of clichés like ‘That job (or joke) kills me!’ and ‘One or two rollmops won’t kill your appetite!’

Knowledge and belief might seems to be outcomes of reading poetry, but something utterly different from these occurs when I finally, after many readings, grasp a poem. You will notice that I studiously avoid the term ‘understand’. It is true that ‘to grasp’ might entail ‘sufficient understanding’. But to me, understanding something means a visitation, a total enlightenment, and this I seldom have, if ever. Such a revelation would result in a state of mind that is fully able to explain the compacted layers of sense; the cross-currents of music; the collision and inter-staining of images; the wild but apt associations; the deep resonance of Something Other; the budding of etymologies; the douceur, fracas and ironies of social tone; the atmospherics of mood; the marvels of structure. Such total brilliance I believe impossible, even in the most immodest critic.

So I stick with ‘grasp’ and am glad when it’s good enough. With every reading it’s different anyway.

I don’t read poems (does anyone?) in order to obtain new knowledge about the world or to have my belief system realigned. I read to have an in-body/mind experience, maybe a slightly altered state. It’s like brandy or sex or a walk in the country. And if you want me to admit that I am not, as I seem to pretend, a happy buffoon, I’ll confess to being intellectually stimulated sometimes. Though don’t you think that consciousness, whatever it turns out to be, must be a mind-body business? There’s no ghost in the machine (the homunculus I mentioned was a soused red herring). I don’t like the word ‘intellect’ and use it here only to bring this trip down to earth and leave us on familiar ground. If you have agreed so far, you might also acknowledge that when one engages with a poem, all notions (and connotations) of ‘intellect’ are misleading. ‘Imagination’? Closer, but that’s a different kettle of rollmops, pace The Blood Rules, and needs to be deconstructed by a munitions expert.

The great tag-wrestling match, Invention-&-Imag-ination versus Reason-&-Judgment, has been corpsing and clowning in the Epistemology gym downtown for a long time, ever since the students of Plato and Aristotle tired of throwing one another from the sharp side of Areopagus. Name the Goliaths of thought. Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Blake, Coleridge, Blake, Baudelaire, Freud, Wittgenstein, Foucault . . . . There’s no easier ways of impressing friends to the gagging point than by chasing this stuff in look-up books. Name any giant and you name someone who has added ten cubits, or qubits if you wish to denigrate, to what we know about representing Reality, whether on the page or from it.

Until brain scans of cerebral injuries, it was impossible to know where in the parietal lobes, amygdala, posterior cortex etc we ‘got’ a joke; or where we ‘saw’ a beautiful woman and could differentiate her from a Picasso; or where we ‘felt’ like a beer or an idiot (if we happened to like idiots); or where we memorised (no quotes) the reg. no. of the off-roader which cut us up on the M25 and escaped by a slip-lane. Before science was able to touch the subject of subjectivity, you nailed your pennon to your lance of faith and opted for one camp or the other, Neoplatonism¹ or Empiricism. Either you believed (or believed you believed) that the Association of Ideas, in the modern sense of symbolic adumbration, flung a flex across the Gulf and plugged us into the Divine, or you believed it just gave us new toys. Remember I’m talking about reading, and with rather loose methodology. I’ve long been content with the toys. And I believe I know how we read. This comes of submitting myself, menstrually in ‘100+or–’, to the severities of dissertation.

I have denied myself one particular rigour, namely the pleasure of primary sources; these you’ll find only in quotes from quotations. Now if one knows nothing of the giants of thought and the mental edifices which ended in Wittgenstein advising us to throw away his ladder and Niels Bohr saying if we were not shocked by quantum theory we hadn’t understood it, one thing surely stands out from Thought for Beginners like a pikestaff with an apron on it. I allude to the fact that Plato thought that poets were liars, bad republicans, and didn’t write home to their mothers.

He said that rune-smiths not only copied Nature scurrilously, they were copying copies (since Nature itself was a copy of the Divine), and so were a few leagues out of whack. A ship in a storm in ordinary life was a copy of the ideal ‘Ship in Storm’. When a poet described a trireme in bad weather, he described what in his mind’s eye came from previous perceptions, or even from drunken accounts on the waterfront, and these were but distortions of the World-in-Itself. Or, as Saul of Tarsus put it after he changed his name on his visa, we see the world in a tarnished bronze fruit-bowl, or ‘in a glass darkly’ as someone rendered it.

Platonism was the rage in the Renaissance, but Shakespeare, never one to offend, seemed to agree with the fashion whilst leaving a gap open (‘not so wide as a church door’) for nihilism. ‘The truest poetry is the most feigning’—the most untrue to reality (Touchstone, AYLI). The poet ‘gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (Theseus, MND). These airy nothings were equated to ‘the forms of things unknown’, a thought which was either merely fashionable or a stab at alternative irony. Hamlet tells the players: ‘ . . . suit . . . the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: . . . for the purpose of playing . . . is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show . . . the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (Hamlet, Hamlet). Note that Platonic ‘form’ again. But did the observed of all observers really think what Plato himself would have deemed impossible, that Art puts us in touch with the Real? I don’t think so. I believe he would have agreed with Plato and not with his sanguine contemporaries and their muddled successors. Shagspeer wasn’t kidding when he got Prospero to call a play ‘a baseless fabric’—and the whole world one, too: ‘These our actors / . . . were all spirits / and are melted into air . . . / And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / . . . the great globe itself / . . . shall dissolve / And . . . / Leave not a wrack behind’ (Prospero, Tempest).

One can be a nihilist and still agree with Bacon that the mind has a desire for more reality, a desire which illusory perception and the feints of poetry partially satisfy. To Bacon, poetry had ‘some participation of divinesse . . . by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind’ (The Advancement of Learning). Blake and the symbolists and the surrealists and absurdists who followed were bolder, though less convincing. To Blake the human soul existed before birth and had intuitive knowledge of the spirit world whence it came. Nature was a manifestation of the transcendental (a notion that got the 19^th century in a twist: I’d replace it with ‘immanence’). To Blake and the schools that followed him and are still around, life was full of symbols. Perhaps nothing summed it up quite so well as Baudelaire’s famous line, where the ‘y’ (‘there’) refers to Nature:

L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles.

Coleridge held that imagination ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create . . .; it struggles to idealize and unify’ (Biographia Literaria). And do not these thoughts apply as much to imagination used in the act of reading? Nor is this all.

There is an opposite approach, the Classical or Enlightenment one, supposedly descended from Aristotle. He claimed that poets, in using rhetorical figures of speech such as metaphor, brought things into relationship which were disparate and unconnected in Nature. Not only this, but poets imitated life (and other writers). Doubtless Plato’s Greek for ‘copy’ and Aristotle’s Greek for ‘imitation’ are easy to distinguish. We tend to copy scenery (in painting) and imitate actions (in plays). Anyway, the theory seems to go like this: when I imitate Nature by evoking it in writing, I am creating not only an additional object but also one which ‘tells’ some kind of truth. Hobbes thought that imagination—in his day the word for it, fancy (from ‘fantasy’), hadn’t yet been tossed into the nursery attic—was ‘that which finds likeness’ (Leviathan). Locke developed the theory of association of ideas, which played in tune with Classical restraint (‘baroque’ is contemporaneous with ‘neoclassicism’) and with Romantic exuberance, depending on how widely one associated.

Aristotle recognized four methods by which the mind associated one idea with another: similarity, difference, closeness in time and closeness in space. Of course, the British empiricist philosophers John Locke and David Hume stressed the importance of sensory perceptions in associationism. (Later on, psychology went beyond the senses and beyond sense.) Anyway, association was like connotation, it added pleasure to the merely denoted. Classicism was happy so long as the more admirable powers of judgment, restraint and order checked the lunatic fringes of imagination.

When reading, I make relevant as well as reckless associations, judging well and badly. In any case, what we build in our brains are things (experiences and states) that have never existed before, new creations in the mind (and so in the world), however fleeting, like whiffs of peat or heather in a single malt.

Psychoanalysis came along. You don’t have to agree with what Freud says about dreams or Jung about archetypes to acknowledge that something akin to their descriptions of the mind must be the case. Whether I am of the Neoplatonist Persuasion that sensory perception and the arts deliver something symbolical of the Real, or whether I am of the Empiricist View that it’s better to restrain my tastes within the limits of the quotidian, seems to me irrelevant. Given that my retrospective introspection is hazy at best, it nevertheless seems that, when I engage with a poem, a sort of semi-detached thoughtfulness and sniffing-dog fantasising happen together, perhaps in proportion to what is in the text, but more than likely determined by brain chemistry and what I ate for lunch. I should give another example. Let me cite Blake’s little piece about the sick rose, without analysis, other than to say I have to work harder at this one than at the Housman. But, hand on my heart, I find them equally moving.

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm

Has Found out thy Bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark, secret Love

Doth thy life destroy.

Grasping a poem is a bit like ‘getting’ a joke, or like getting a series of small jokes and a big one at the end. Expectation is constantly undermined. The brain is working happily at what it was designed for: ‘to make some kind of emotional or metabolic adjustment to the central events of every conscious moment’². Reading a poem uses a mixture of faculties for which I don’t have a name, though I’ll suggest pro tem ‘informed intuition’. This includes all sorts of proclivities: an openness to texture, an ear for music, a capacity for logic, an ability to make relational and associative leapfrogs of imagination, a willingness to adjust. And as many have said before: as we read, we create new (private) structures. There’s no single correct reading of anything, and some good ones which might be at war with one another.

But be careful. Too much poetry can burn a person out. Beware of the need for a daily fix.

I’ve mentioned workshops before and will again. I’ve not yet reached back in time to the poems first aired in small but regular gatherings in the house of Fleur Adcock³. Others attending were Jack Carey⁴ and Hubert Withefold⁵. The meetings were good-humoured, unaggressive, mutually beneficial.

I should also renew my thanks to Jim, who made a single bound copy of my complete poems from 1956 to 1972. That volume has been one of my sources. Although revisions made for these sets reflect my present preferences, the older versions must have some authority. I’d been writing since 1952 but didn’t want the earliest work included in the Collected Poems, 1972. Indeed, I no longer stand by some of the 1956–72 pieces and have excluded them from these sets. Also be it noted that the translations come from many dates. Most before this set have been done in the last two or three years.

Alan Marshfield

¹ Neoplatonism. A philosophy, started by Plotinus in the 3rd century AD based on Plato’s ideas and stressing the difference between an eternal world and our changing physical condition. The doctrine held that a mystic union with ultimate reality from which our world of appearance is derived is attainable. (back)

²Comic Relief, a New Scientist article (27/05/2000) by John McCrone, author of Going Inside (Faber). (back)

³ Collected Poems (OUP, 2000). (back)

⁴ The Cathedral (Workshop Press Ltd, 1973); Woods and Mirrors, (The Salamander Imprint, 1976). (back)

⁵ A Blue Monkey for the Tomb (Faber). (back)

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