The artist, undecided over the position of..... Rebecca Parfitt
Notes on Poetry: Modernism and Modern Poetry
Dublin Spring
Green as the Liffeyruns
on St. Paddy’s Day,
chock full of artificial green,
purple is the grass under my feet
across the park to the bus.
The world spins with each breath,
there is the smell of fear in my hair,
not knowing which way is next,
watching the pale sun,
rubbing my eyes to purple and green.
As the Liffey runs
past my bus window,
my arm on the narrow ledge
knife-edge, resting,
I catch my breath,
with time to wonder,
staring out instead of drawing in,
All the facades of my brain
are shiny and unabsorbing,
like plate glass in the sun,
where only clouds leave their mark,
turning the river dun and fast flowing.
I rub my eyes till the colours come,
purple and green
- Cat Dickinson
Malham Tarn
The rain wisps and buffets
craggy moorland, like ghost giants
striding across the prehistoric grass,
emerald and topaz stubble,
matt, flat, sparkle of white limestone.
The wind gurgles and pops, singing
through the metal cattle grid,
sound caught like an aboriginal tone.
There are no people here, there never were-
not even sheep. Sparse branches,
trees half buried, clinging to
the underside of rock, arthritic, rheumatic,
clawing the low sky.The ruined wall
built by no human hands, long gone,
metamorphosed winding creature,
leviathan of the moor.
Man-forsaken, immortal earth,
suicidal fog, booby-trap paths.
Man is thwarted, knocked off
his bike of progress, prone in the mire,
tyres whizzing, impotent, surprised.
God has left his last message to the world
here-
it will endure.
- Cat Dickinson
Caught
(Emil Nolde, Red and Violet clouds, date unknown)
There's blodd in the sky
red ink falls into my eye.
Drops of colour fill and burst
explode and converse
with one another.
The world is flat in this mind,
In this mind the clouds wander and fly,
they throw rain to the ground.
Floods of anger wash across.
A lonely man fights with the real picture
spews in flashes and bolts,
as though he is lightening.
Running from his madness
the clouds fly after him.
He saw three faces today and
a dragon,
a sunflower and a dog’s paw.
Like a puff of smoke they were gone again.
He sighs and begins all over.
- Rebecca Parfitt
The artist, undecided over the position of the right arm
(Pierre Ingres, Study for the ‘Turkish bath’, 1862)
Honesty feels its way around the fleshly lumps.
Creaming the pallet.
Lady of some significance,
Unknown and sketched with a third arm.
She is a bored nude.
Dropped cheeks,
eyes,
lips.
Lie back against the plinth.
Despondent
lost all
energy.
Spinning coin gradually
Falls
to a halt
like,
her
and
him.
Still paint pot, like it never felt a brush before.
Nude, take your skin away with you and drip
it
into
something
warm
and
willing.
- Rebecca Parfitt
Modernism and Modern Poetry
‘What happened to the ambitions of poets here in Britain? Have they not digested the news that Edward Thomas and his world are gone for ever?’
from J. M. Coetzee, Youth.
When discussing experiment in poetry it is common to find a precedent for some aspect of innovation. George Herbert’s shaped verse, for instance, is often cited as an early example of concrete poetry. Nonetheless the radical shift in our expectations of what poetry can achieve and what poetry can absorb that happened sometime between 1910 and 1920 is tantamount to a revolution in the practice of writing verse. Indeed the word verse these days seems reductive, a throwback to the times when it seemed that poetry had to be written with a regular rhythm and a regular rhyme scheme, when certain words were thought fitting and others simply were not, when words such as decorum might have played an important role in the study and teaching of poetry.
This period in the history of art and literature is sometimes referred to as the modernist era. The name suggests an effort to drag poetry into the twentieth century and, with it, an opening up of possibilities, of being open to the cross currents between the arts, between countries and between centuries. The roots of this paradigm shift are for another longer study. This essay will focus on the modernists, and especially Ezra Pound, as the beginning of an experimental phase in twentieth century poetry. The experiments open pathways for later poets but they are also seen as dead ends by many others. So much so that a history of English poetry in the twentieth century might be seen as a tracing of two lines. The Modernist line started by Pound and Eliot, although inspiring to some extent, poets such as Auden, and opening up possibilities in terms of subject matter and diction, peters out in England and instead instigates a particularly American lineage. The English line seems to take a diversion around the year 1910, all the way around Pound, Eliot, Jones, and emerges again to an extent with the poets of the thirties, but comes into prominence as the mainspring of English poetry in the fifties with the movement and since then has all but dominated.
Most English poets since the fifties ignore the modernist line. They appear to sidestep that modernist decade in their reading of the poets of the past. Indeed it may appear that they to go back to the nineteenth century for their inspiration. For them there is no point in following a set of experiments that lead nowhere, that provide no helpful model, that clear no useful creative space. They see the modernist experiments and the subject matter of modernist poems as simply not reflective of their own experiences, nearly fifty years on, a world war later and in a different era. The answer, then, is to give pre-eminence to poets such as Thomas Hardy, and before him, to Tennyson, even to Wordsworth. Pound provides no working model. Gerard Manley Hopkins is an aberration. Nor do the internationalist tastes of the modernist poets find favour with the poets of this English line. The organic form of Eliot’s Wasteland or of Pound’s Cantos, cummings’s use of typography, these are all shunned in favour of what is sometimes called the well-made poem. We see it in Larkin’s work, in Heaney, and in many more poets of the second half of the 20th century. Compared to the ways that art has moved beyond the canvas and into avenues that challenge and unsettle, the mainstream of English poetry has remained resolutely conservative. Of course, all of this is, in itself, reductive. Contemporary poets, whether they realise it or not, incorporate, directly or indirectly, the impact of the modernist revolution in poetry. Even if Hardy, Tennyson and Wordworth are the avowed models, poets in the second half of the twentieth century write in the shadow of Pound and Eliot.
Pound’s first ambition was to wean poetry away from the reliance on the pentameter, which he saw as a symbol of all that was old-fashioned in verse. One of his first pieces of advice to aspiring poets was to check the calendar. Poets, he felt, needed to understand that they lived in the twentieth century. His mantra that form should be co-terminous with content runs through many of his own experiments and underpins much of what others achieved later. Take the first half of the poem, ‘The Return’, written in 1913, as an example.
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, .......................and half turn back; These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe," .......................Inviolable,
In the absence of a strict rhythm and regular line length the poet turns to other devices to make and re-enforce meaning. The lines end in places where the meaning determines. The ‘tentative / Movements’ make the reader turn back for the start of the next line, a kind of visual and rhythmic re-enforcement of the hesitancy that is at the heart of the poem. Again, with ‘the uncertain / Wavering’ we get a sense of vacillation implicit in the poem’s movement. All this is made even clearer in the pun on ‘the slow feet’. And later when the snow hesitates in the wind, the line half turns back on the line ‘and half turn back’. All this is seen on a grand scale in Pound’s epic poem, The Cantos, when he allows the events if his life to determine the direction of the 800-page poem, written over the course of fifty years.
Williams Carlos Williams has no qualms with discarding the pentameter. The line that Pound arguably began with poems such as the one above and ‘In a Station of the Metro’ leads to poems such as Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. This poem aspires, to some extent, to the kind of reaction normally reserved for the neatly stacked pile of bricks in the art gallery.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
The poem, from 1923, thrives on paradox. So much depends upon the most ordinary of objects. So much depends upon the word ‘upon’ so that it takes a line all to itself. The red wheel barrow takes two lines. The words are given so much prominence that we feel there must be more to them. This is the poetic equivalent of Duchamp hanging a spade on the wall and calling it art, or his famous urinal, or the hat stand in the hallway of the gallery which the gallery-goers miss on the way in or hang their coats on and then search for the first exhibit. Williams disrupts expectations as much as Duchamp. And in doing so he makes us question what a poem is. He makes us turn back and look at how poems have been written in the past and ask why those conventions exist and whether they need to be perpetuated. That something has been done for centuries is no valid reason for its continuation, or may indeed be a valid reason for throwing it out. But the poem stands as a comment on the past. It thrives on what it lacks. We look for and don’t find rhyme, rhythm, or for some, reason. We look elsewhere for meaning. ‘Water’ stands on its own on a line disconnected from its modifier. The poem stands disconnected from poetic history and yet intimately bound up with it, depending on it. Put a spade on a wall in a gallery and its functional quality - the use we make of it in the field or garden - pales into secondary significance. It’s not there to be used. It takes on a new significance through the contrast with how we normally see it and its status as a potential work of art. On a wall in a gallery it fluctuates between the thing we know and take for granted and an abstract form, an aestheticised object.
Like Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the brevity of Williams’s poem seems to tantalise readers with possibilities of interpretation. See the poem’s Wikipedia page for a starting point. We seem to need a context, either literary or in Williams’s life (he was a doctor and on a call to a sick girl when he conceived of the poem) in order to come to terms with the poem. Each word becomes a field of dispute.
An even more obvious example of all this is Williams’s poem ‘This is Just to Say’ which begins (or has it already begun with the title?)
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
As with Duchamp’s objects, Williams’s words would normally have a function - to do a job, to get a message across. It would be glanced at on a fridge door. Placed in a book and called a poem it takes on a new significance.
It would seem that the logical conclusion to this process is to create poems that rely mainly on the visual quality of the words on the page, what might be called the materiality of words. To some extent, all this leads concrete poetry. The manifesto of concrete poetry says that it ‘refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles…’ Take, for example, the famous poem by Eugen Gomringer from 1954.
In this poem it is the white of the page, the absent word, that becomes the focus, representing a meditative space for the reader. The text around the space creates the paradox in that it is the absence of the word ‘silence’ that creates creates silence, especially when the reader attempts to read the poem aloud. More importantly, the text becomes a kind of image. The movement to which Gomringer belonged owed much to Mallarme’s spatial poems, which he himself referred to as a kind of shipwreck. For many poets of the second half of the 20th century, this kind of poem, wherein any narrative dimension is overshadowed, subordinated even, by the materiality of the words, was the point at which the experimental poetry runs aground.
Open most anthologies of recent poetry and you will find very little that reflects or builds on these experiments. Amongst the modern British and Irish poets perhaps it is only in the work of Paul Muldoon that we find any real attempt to inhabit the creative space prepared by the modernists. In Britain it is the English line that has predominated. The line that runs through Larkin, Hughes, Heaney has circumvented Pound, Eliot, Williams, cummings.
Of course there have been British poets who have endeavoured to keep alive the experimental spirit of the modernists. See, for example, the Wikipedia page on the British Poetry Revival of the sixties and seventies. It is important to note work by the likes of Ian Hamilton Finlay, or the ‘lyrical experiments’ of J. H. Prynne. The influence has been marginal and short-lived. The poetry that has been taught and bought in Britain for decades has been that of the English line.
But this is only half of the story. From the fifties the mainstream poets in English have used methods employed earlier by modernists and have taken advantage, whether they would admit it or not, of that creative space that modernist poets have opened up by nudging aside the limitations of metre, diction and structure imposed by convention.
You only have to look at the opening of Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’. As Robert Crawford says, ‘these lines could not have been written without Modernism’. Crawford may have been thinking of Eliot’s demotic passages in ‘A Game of Chess’, but more relevant is the Pound of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ who deems western civilization ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’. Even more relevant is the Pound of Canto XV who wrote of ‘the great scabrous arse-hole, sh-tting flies, / rumbling with imperialism’. The Modernists challenged what was thought suitable for a poem, both in terms of subject matter and diction. This all paved the way, allowing Larkin to give poetic legitimacy to the word ‘fuck’. It is this merging of the demotic with conventional poetic form that explains much of Larkin’s popularity and is continued in, for example, Tony Harrison’s ‘V’.
Look also at Heaney’s use of lineation in ‘Follower’ where he reminds us of Pound’s ‘Return’ and also of the etymology of the word ‘verse’ as both a line of poetry and the line of ploughed land:
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land.
We can find the international outlook of the modernists also in the Heaney’s use of Dante in ‘StationIsland’ or in his translations and homages to poets across the globe. And even more so in the work of Paul Muldoon. See, for example, his use of concrete poetry - in fact, his version of Gomringer’s ‘silencio’ - in the collection Hay. For Muldoon, the experiments of the past are all there for the taking.
Muldoon’s playfulness and his openness to new forms, his willingness to stretch the bounds of, for example, rhyme, is often seen as a type of post-modernism and certainly his work, at times calls into question the whole idea of conventions such as rhyme. His elaborate rhymes (Michael Longley once quipped that Muldoon was the man who could rhyme cat with dog) at times seem to expose what I referred to earlier as the materiality of the poem, by bringing to the fore the act of writing as a contrivance, shocking the reader into the realization that what one is staring at is a ‘verbal device’. That last term, incidentally is Larkin’s. Muldoon’s verbal devices are suspect - the wires stick out of them.
‘Errata’, for example, recalls Williams’s canonizing of a fridge note. What would normally sit like an unwelcome addition in the end papers, correcting printing errors, becomes incorporated into the collection, like Duchamp’s hat stand being incorporated into the exhibition:
For ‘spike’ read ‘spoke’.
For ‘lost’ read ‘last’.
For ‘Steinbeck’ read ‘Steenbeck’.
For ‘ludic’ read ‘lucid’.
That last line hints at the quality in Muldoon’s work that has led critics to consider him a ‘post-modern’ poet. The playfulness of his approach, in both his poetry and prose, is seen as a sign of his awareness of the slipperiness of language and the arbitrariness of poetic convention. In his most recent collection, Horse Latitudes, a sequence called ‘90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore’ ends with the haiku:
Completely at odds.
We’re now completely at odds.
Completely at odds.
For much of his career Muldoon has been at odds with the mainstream of British poetry. This poem is at odds with the expectation that a haiku should contain a degree of variation within such a short space. The repeated phrase here has the lure of a Duchamp ready-made, frustratingly simple and simultaneously complex.
It remains to be seen whether the centenary of the Modernist decade manages to stir up a renewed interest in their attempts to change the direction of English poetry, whether it can bring into focus the sometimes disavowed influence of the modernist achievements, and whether the British poets of the twentieth-first century will see experiment as a way to reinvigorate the genre.
