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Note on Night Walks

I’ve been mining into my past—who hasn’t? Most is lost. It’s what we can’t forget that we need to explore, not the Freudian ‘repressed’ stuff. This poem is about the many times as a boy I walked the length and breadth of Portsmouth at night. The ‘you’ reflected in shop windows is of course the Other, usually of the opposite sex, after whom we search, possibly to make us whole.

I call this sort of verse minimalist, though I may be using the term idiosyncratically. I don’t apply it to verse in the way it’s applied to modern painting and music. In painting, I understand, the term was employed in America in the 1950s and ’60s to the minimal presence of form and colour and to the incorporation of elements which would exclude emotional response, not arouse it. Along with Pop Art this type of minimalism repudiated expressive emotion and didn’t regard a work of art as unique or complex. An arrangement of manufactured objects, for instance, was intended merely to draw attention to their physical presence. The nearest experiments like this in poetry must have been what in the ’60s we called ‘found poems’: excerpts from newspapers, commercial catalogues, insurance policies and so on, out of context and broken into free-verse lines. There were also ‘shape poems’, inspired by games played by Apollinaire circa 1915. My minimalism isn’t like these.

Nor do I apply the term in its modern musical sense, where it labels the work of composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I see that minimalism in music was at war with complexity, one of its main techniques being the repetition of musical phrases with slowly shifting tonalities, often inspired by Asian and African music. The nearest to this in poetry must have been the ‘sound poems’ of the ’60s by such as Bob Cobbing and Edwin Morgan. Chanted phrases would repeat and modulate into other phrases, polyphonic effects sometimes achieved by mixing tape tracks.

I use ‘minimalism’ to describe brief poems in which statements are free of descriptive gumbo. Most modifying structures are scooped away, so that noun phrases and verbs make the utterances. The method is still in wide use, though I resort to it only rarely. It goes back at least to the Imagist movement. In 1912, Ezra Pound and others advocated the deployment of terse, pictorial expressions which had the aloofness of Chinese ideograms. Three of Pound’s rules said one must address oneself: 1. to the ‘direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective; 2. to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; 3. as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.’ An image is described as ‘that which represents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time.’

An imagist poem was praised for its concreteness, particularity and absence of direct message. It was only ever a starting point. Eliot favoured it, I suppose, because it stressed the ‘objective’ against a romantic, subjective egoism. In this he was sustained by the example of the French symbolist Jules Laforgue. For Eliot, poetry was not a place for florid emotionalism. He implied that exact emotions are conveyed by clinical equivalents.

Such writing tends to be austere, oblique, suggestive and often enigmatic—in the paring-away of decoration, but even more in the omission of explanatory connections. Pound thought that narrative joinery was best left to prose. So one vein of modern poetry has resulted in what one might call obscure concentrations of clarity. For the clarities, and the dumping of romantic seizures, we have much to thank the practices which grew up alongside imagism. As for obscurity, there have been many reactions and adherences. And inclinations towards the enigmatic, though not always austere, were in the air before Imagism.

In early 20^th century Italian poetry, there were three successive schools: the ‘twilight’ poets; the futurists; and the hermetics, who followed Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970). He began under the influence of the French Symbolists but developed an authoritative style of his own, stripping his language bare of ornament; distilling his experience in immaculate and evocative language. Hermeticism was so named for its obscurity and difficult symbolism by the critic Francesco Flora after ancient works of revelation ascribed to the Egyptian god Thoth (Greek Hermes Trismegistos).

The original ‘Hermetic literature’ (circa 50–300 AD) in Greek and Latin covered philosophy, theology, the occult, alchemy and astrology. The English ‘hermetic’ and the Italian ‘ermetico’ both came to refer to ancient lore, especially alchemy, and also to anything sealed, mysterious, cryptic. So the purified image was also a code to be deciphered. It is an odd quirk of fate that one of the greatest 20^th century poets, W.B.Yeats, not only had his style ‘hermeticised’ under Pound’s influence, but about two decades before had actually founded the Dublin Hermetic Society (in 1885) to study the ancient mysteries. Even symbolism, which continued alongside imagism, and whose most important originator around the 1850s had been Baudelaire, claimed to be working a kind of sorcery. Opposed to didacticism and sentimentality, the symbolists were still subjective, moody and sensuous.

The Imagists had no objection to being subjective, but in an objective way, which is not so mad as it sounds. And a complex of naked impressions was, whether called hermetic or imagist, bound by its nature to be symbolic. Although T.E.Hulme’s moon and stars, resembling ‘a red-faced farmer’ and ‘white-faces like town children’, might look like a snap of an autumn night as a thing-in-itself, how could it not reveal the mind of T.E.Hulme himself, an influential blend of reaction and revolution? To bring all this back to what I call minimalism, let me show what I mean by applying it to a 1978 poem by Bartolo Cattafi.

PASSERO

SPARROW

Tutti tagliati i tardivi tranturchi

All mown the late maize

bruciati i mucchi di tutte le sterpaglie

burnt the piles of all the brushwood

estinte e nel ricordo

extinct and in the memory

già stinte le battiglie

already faded the battles

la mente mistificante vede

the mind falsifying sees

la neve

the snow

e sulla neve il passero

and on the snow the sparrow

malmesso interizzito tracotante.

shabby freezing arrogant.

Now this is pared-down language, there is no intrusive eloquence, no metrical straitjacket. It names things (maize, brushwood, snow, sparrow; memory, mind, battle) without using or adorning them figuratively. The only metaphor is the last word; there are but few adjectival phrases and most of the one-word adjectives are verbal participles. None of the things described, such as the piles of burnt brushwood, arouses much emotion. Not in me anyway. I don’t pity the benumbed sparrow, which as yet is but imagined by a mind that also imagines the winter to come. These pictures seem the product of detached thought, as clinically written down as mathematical symbols. Yet here, in passing, is a paradox: a finished statement, whether a neat mathematical argument or a poem like this, must excite its writer. For the reader, the finished product provokes, initially, more thought than feeling in the body-mind. What I notice next is that although all the components are clear, indeed simple, there is nevertheless something that must be worked out.

Here comes the decoding stage. Allowing for ablative absolutes, this poem is a single sentence: ‘With autumn now just a memory, the mind pictures the coming winter and a numb sparrow.’ After that paraphrase I ask, ‘What expressible idea is symbolised by this narration about dead autumn and a falsifying mind’s picture of an arrogant sparrow in the coming winter?’ I might answer, ‘The past is dead, the future a fantasy. But life is brave and defiant in the face of death.—Or we like to think it is.’ But a poem is not just a paraphrasable idea; the sound effects in the original are considerable, and not just in the rhymes (sterpaglie / battaglie; mistificante / tracotante). There is also much control of musical rise and fall—say aloud the three lines centred on ‘la neve’. After this I’m stuck, I can babble no further. It’s not a case of the poem simply being an arrangement of sound and ideas which were not there before. It indubitably is. But it also sets up a fluttering of activities in my body-mind which it would be silly to try and translate back into language. Also, just how this magnet arranges the iron filings of thought and feeling depends on my digestion and what’s going on outside my window.

I’ve outlined what to me a ‘minimalist’ poem is like. It’s brief and lean. It need not be cryptic, though it often needs some decoding. It’s detached but it excites. There are cases when poets want to be mysterious and impenetrable, giving readers no more answers than life itself does. Indeed, although art partially explicates the mystery of reality, it also adds another layer of mystery. All art. As I’ve said, my own poems are not often so lean as this. There was always a fat man trying to get in. So this discussion of the gaunt style must be contrasted with a mode I’m more fond of, its opposite, at least as far as brevity and sparseness are concerned.

Alan Marshfield

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