So you want to be a poet?

Well, if you’ve made it this far you probably already are a poet, though you may not know it. But wait, let’s check! Do you know what iambic pentameter is? How about an Italian quatrain? A Shakespearean sonnet? Yes, okay, they’re definitions of poetic structures; beats per line, order of rhyme, number of lines, that sort of thing. How about a foot? That’s the basic unit of measurement of accentual syllabic meter. Of course it is! There are different types of feet too: iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic, all to do with the stress on the syllables.

Still want to be a poet? A poet would be well up on all that stuff wouldn’t they? Except, I write poetry, which makes me a sort-of poet, but to be honest I had to look all that terminology up on Wikipedia. If I’d been a Lit student having to field questions on it, I’d surely have failed. Well, I did fail actually – not that I was ever asked those questions, specifically. Log tables made more sense to me, but I still liked writing poetry. Log tables are obsolete now, while poetry remains pretty much a constant throughout time. And do you really need to know about all that structural theory stuff anyway? Well, the poet Robert Frost thought so. He said: there can be no fair tennis without a net, that without proper structure, poetry seldom yields works of beauty.

And he may have a point:

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Reopened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey;

That’s W H Auden writing in 1940. Plenty structure and rhyme there, and a silken beauty in the flow of it.

But then how about:

A shattered army, Thames’ filthy tonnage, tumbrils of carrion,
Not a beautiful spectacle
For the drinkers of history, or for me
Or my friends, this island’s parallel issues.

That’s Ted Hughes, writing in 1963. No structure, no rhyme, like being hit in the face with a plank of wood, leaving you with multiple splinters to pick at, which I presume is what he intended. So, maybe Frost was just an old fuddy duddy traditionalist and you can play tennis without a net after all, that indeed certain poetic themes demand a freer form if they’re to achieve their desired impact.

I used to strive for structure in my own poetry, but sometimes the struggle took over from what I was trying to say. Rhyme and structure are satisfying to achieve, like completing a literary puzzle, but they can also cheapen a poem, so why push for rhyme if you don’t have to?

How about this:

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine

That’s Phoebe Hesketh. No structure, no rhyme except for that last poignant hook between “shoe” and “you”. A friend of Herbert Edward Palmer, an English poet and critic, his advice to her was never to let the conscious mind force a poem into shape. That’s important, I think. It can be pleasurable exploring traditional patterns in poetry, and good practice trying them out, and if a poem falls into such a pattern, then let it be, but if doesn’t want to, don’t make it.

According to certain psychological theories, we exist upon a seething mass of unconscious energies that seek to become conscious through us. They are our life’s work, whether we know it or not. And poetry, indeed any form of creative expression, is a good way of achieving that, and it’s not like we have any choice in the matter. For a creative person to ignore the pressure from within is a very bad thing, and will backfire with more neuroses than we know how to handle. But to sit a while with pencil and paper, jotting the lines that are offered up, seemingly from nowhere, is worth years of therapy, whether you know an iamb from a trochee or not.

Poetry has always been an important aspect of any civilised culture, and not just for the professional – if indeed there’s such a thing as a professional poet any more. But can anyone really write poetry? Well, okay, not everyone wants to, not everyone gets it, but I suspect if you’ve a hankering for it, you can write it well enough. As a way of expressing the seasons of your life, there’s no finer way of honouring your self. How to start? Start with your life. Imagine you are a bit of the universe seeking to discover the meaning of itself through your eyes. So you capture a moment in time as if to bookmark it, and you say to the universe, okay mate, this bit’s important. Let’s remember this. Then you look back over the stuff you wrote twenty, thirty years ago, and you can see the change in yourself, the smoothing out, the growing up.

However we should beware the trap of thinking poetry is a road to fame and fortune because of course it’s not. Even the Poet Laureate only makes £6000 a year, which doesn’t get you much of a mortgage, does it? Fame and fortune are their own path, with their own rules, and only about one in ten who seek it, by whatever means, succeed at it. But in the business of writing poetry what we’re really looking for are glimpses of meaning, which boil down to those occasional and all too often elusive personal gifts of insight from the unconscious. Sometimes those insights are beautiful, sometimes they’re ugly, and mostly they’re of no interest to anyone else. But as always, in the writing of anything, the person most served by the effort is you, the writer. Poetry, however you define it, helps us grow a little. It’s just occasionally we’ll hit upon something that’s of a more universal appeal, so it’s not always true we should give up on the idea of publishing altogether. But as ever my advice these days is just to blog your stuff, thus calling it “sort of published”, and be done with it. Poetry can heal all wounds, but pursuing, through poetry, the eternally precious bane of fame and fortune is pretty futile, and worse, it will tear your heart wide open again.

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Last Spark

A languid sun sinks low and seeps
Into the wide horizon’s reach,
Bleeds then into a watery stain,
Now smoothing out the wounded sky,
And soothing all our heads for sleep.

Through blunt anaesthetising rays
I squint, forgetting now the day
And its long, weary labours drawn,
Daring instead to harbour hopes
That from this heavy-limbed fatigue
Tonight, I’ll find respite in dreams.

Meanwhile, I sit entranced and still,
Allow the sun to finger through
The clutter of my memories,
Brush back the sleeves of ancient tunes,
Whose sweetness I had long thought gone,
Though each now shudders back to life,
Beneath the needle’s crackling pass.

Then, slow, into a coppered sea,
The suns departs this fractious day,
And with one final spark, is gone.
The day is done, its length is run
And as I start my little car,
And turn at last my wheels for home
I know, for all the life on earth,
We feel each setting sun alone.

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On the nature of evil

A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2006 was a Russian writer, intellectual, and Nobel Laureate, also a decorated officer with the Soviet Army during the Second World War. He was arrested in 1945 for comments he made in a letter to a friend in which he criticised the prosecution of the war, and Stalin’s part in it. Although he counted himself a patriot and was loyal to the revolution, he was betrayed as a subversive and spent the next eight years in a prison system that amounted to slave labour, one in which millions perished. Solzhenitsyn survived and wrote about it, an act for which he was eventually exiled.

His magnum opus, a three volume work called the Gulag Archipelago, appeared in 1973. It was not intended as a political work, though it certainly earned him the rank of political dissident, and made him a fresh target for the Soviet authorities who even tried to poison him. It was more an historical expose and a careful analysis of the Gulag system, also a study of mankind, and of himself.

The work is important because Solzhenitsyn teaches us the Gulag and the system that gave rise to it is not a peculiarly Soviet thing, rather it’s something at the heart of us all. Call it a weakness or an inherent tendency, given the right circumstances, the Gulag can occur anywhere. Also, not only can we all fall victim to it, but – important point this – we can all fall in as perpetrators and accomplices.

Solzhenitsyn observed that evil could not simply be identified in a small percentage of the population, because then the bad people might easily be isolated from the rest of us, then destroyed and evil along with it. But it doesn’t work like that; evil persists throughout time; the camp-guards, the interrogators, the torturers, they could be any one of us, and the trick of evil is to prevent us from imagining a scenario whereby we might indeed be drawn into committing those extremes of harm to our fellow beings.

The Gulag system was a vast network of camps spread across the entire Soviet Union, and from which no one was safe. If labour was needed, quotas would be sent out, the state security apparatus would then pursue the necessary arrests, and victims would be found, guilt concocted as needs be and verified by confession signed under torture. Incarceration would then last eight, ten or twenty five years. Terms were nominal though and in reality many were worked to death in unimaginably harsh conditions.

We learned of the camps in 1966 on the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first book, “A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch.” This is a short book, but sharp, like a lance through the brain, and tells, as the title suggests, of just one day in the camp-life of prisoner Ivan Denisovitch. The men wake, they march out to work on building a power station, then they march back. Falsely accused of being a German spy, Denisovitch has lost everything, or has he? What is it that defines a human being and grants him purpose, and meaning? What is it that redeems him?

The story could merely have been a raging indictment of the system, which in part it is, but in the main it’s an observation of humanity, of its adaptation to extraordinarily harsh circumstances and how small things can take on a massive significance in a man’s life. On his return march, Denisovitch comes across a scrap of broken band-saw blade and smuggles it into camp. It’s a triumph, one that lights up his day, and he will spend the coming weeks painstakingly grinding it on a stone to fashion a knife – not to harm others, or to facilitate his escape, but merely because a knife is a useful tool to have in camp life, and under such reduced circumstances, it bestows more dignity on a man than a fancy car or a beautiful house.

Remarkably , “A day in the life” was published in Russia, with permission of the State. But by then Stalin was dead, and there was a change of mood, a certain rapprochement between the State and its people. But Solzhenitsyn was already working secretly on his next book, the altogether more explosive Gulag Archipelago.

The three volume, unabridged version is perhaps a little too much for the average reader, though an important source for scholars, in that it goes into great detail. It names names, places, dates. But there is also an “approved” abridged version, and this is more suited to the general reader. The book documents Solzhenitsyn’s own confinement, the horrors and the humiliations he both suffered and witnessed, also what he learned by a process of self reflection and from the observation of his fellow prisoners, how they coped, how they held body and soul together, how they protected their dignity. His conclusion was as profound as it was unexpected, that he could not view the Gulag as an alien system, one that had been unjustly imposed upon him by some external agency, that indeed he was in some way responsible, not only for his confinement within the system, but for the very existence of that system in the first place.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, warned us that man himself was the danger, not just some men but all men – that we carry within us the seed of our own destruction, that evil follows us around because we are unable to see it in our own hearts, and that without at least a rudimentary process of self reflection that dark seed will grow to do untold damage either to us, personally, or to those around us.

In the absence of religion, we think we can entrust the development of the psyche and the control of our excesses by a secular ideology, be that Marxism or Free Market Capitalism, but there’s something in us that seeks what, for want of a better term, we must call spiritual growth. There is a religious function within us that seeks knowledge of ourselves and our place in the universe. If ignored, we fall prey to the shadow forces within us; we are easily seduced, easily manipulated by the darker archetypal patterns of behaviour; a newspaper headline screams “death to the traitors”, and we see red, and wish death upon all traitors, however loosely they be defined. Only reflection bids us pause, bids us think, and grants sufficient space for the better side of our nature to win through.

Religion once fulfilled that role, but given the mess of the last few centuries it’s clear it didn’t do a very good job in sparing us from ourselves. In the absence of religion, psychoanalysis and various self help movements offer an alternative, but we’ve had a century of those and things only seem to be getting worse. Perhaps then evil is like any other pestilence that circles the world. It’s simply a fact of nature and, like Solzhenitsyn achieved, by a process of strenuous and unrelenting self analysis, all any of us can do is recognise the potential for evil in our own hearts and find the best way of subverting it, even if it takes us to the end of our days.

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The Test of Time

I was after the GSTP pocket-watch, actually, the one with the Ministry broad-arrow on the back. My dad had one, army surplus, from the ’40’s. He was a Colliery Deputy and preferred a pocket watch down the pit. I don’t know what happened to it, but I guess the pit ruined it in the end. GSTP is short for General Services Trade Pattern, various makers working to a specification laid down by the government, all good quality Swiss makes. Even broken ones fetch good money now, which is why I had to let it go but I was in the mood for a punt, and then I saw this one:

This one’s an English Lever, about a hundred years old. I have a few in my collection already and none of them are any good. They were a century out of date even when new. You’ve only to strip one to see the decline in English watch-making: lack of investment in design and technology, a staid conservatism and a misguided belief in our own superiority, even as the Swiss and the Americans were racing ahead of us. It’s a far cry from a GSTP, and I suppose it was the watch-case that drew me, three blurry impressions I took for hallmarks. The seller said the case was nickel, but you don’t hallmark nickel, so it was more likely a silver piece, I thought, and worth twenty five quid at least, even as scrap, so that’s what I bid, and I won. The seller clearly didn’t know much about watches. Ha! But then the watch turned up and the seller was right – the case is indeed nickel, and those marks are just there to fancy it up a bit. Hard luck, Michael. Serves you right.

You wind an English Lever from the back with a key, like a clock, and you set the time with a key from the front, or more often you can’t be bothered because it’s fiddly so you just twiddle the minute hand with your finger, which is why you see so many English Levers with the minute hand snapped off. The best you can say is they’re simple. And this one was both cheap and simple. It was also dead. Not much going for it then.

But then I opened the back and saw a list of dates, microscopically inscribed by hand. The earliest one is April 1918, the latest September 1923. These could be service dates, they could be dates when the watch was pawned, but either way it was suddenly starting to tingle with its own history, and my imagination was filling in the blanks. So I took another look: the ceramic dial was in good condition and that nickel case would polish up well. The mechanism was awash with what looked and felt like engine-oil, but otherwise looked okay. It had a somewhat sturdy jewelled balance and lever, and the hair-spring was still a pristine spiral, just aching with potential. Usually that spring’s a rat’s nest and the watch is gonner. Given its history, and the times it had known, could I not do something with it? (I know, I say that with all the old watches I rescue from Ebay)

So I stripped it, cleaned the bits, swirled them gently in a jam-jar of white spirit, left them to dry overnight, cleaned out the pivot holes with a toothpick, passed them over the demagnetiser, then rebuilt it. There’s something meditative about assembling a watch, at times a bit fiddly, but that’s all part of the pleasure. Then I oiled it with a needle dropper and some proper watch oil, lowered the balance into place, gave the key a few speculative winds, and,..

Away it went!

By now I’ve had it ticking in my pocket all day and it’s not lost a minute, so I’m thinking to myself I’ve misjudged it; it just needed a bit of care and it’s back working valiantly again just as it was about to be written off as scrap. And I’m thinking too it’s a very English thing, actually, that maybe English Levers like this one are indicative of the spirit of Albion: far from perfect but generally reliable; they’re like an MG sports car, a little basic, certainly obsolete, and outclassed by just about everybody else, but there are still plenty of them around, still attractive to a discerning audience. So I take it up again, thinking maybe, like my dad’s old Swiss-made GSTP, this is a watch I could actually use.

But the damned thing had stopped!

So then I’m back to cursing it for a worthless piece of junk, and asking myself: how did Englishness, with all its shortcomings, its clunky lack of sophistication, its bad taste and its frigid conservatism manage to come through two world wars and survive a century of upheaval that laid waste to the rest of Europe? The answer, I suppose, is we did it with stubbornness, and luck, and it’s not like we had much choice. But we also had not a little help from our friends, when we needed it, friends who, for one thing, made all those GSTP pocket watches for us. As for our unshakeable sense of superiority in spite of all evidence to the contrary, well, that’s just the English way too, and perhaps not a bad thing if it keep our faces turned to the wind when the odds are against us and others are losing their wits. And is that not the truest test of time anyway?

I give the watch a little shake and it stutters to life once more, settles to a steady beat. Maybe it just needs another look, but for now, clearly you wouldn’t want to bet your life on it. Still, it has a certain something, don’t you think? Or should I have held out for that GSTP?

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Childhood

He lost the Faery tongue aged five,
Lost it to chalk boards
And vague threats of God.
It was the Gulag then for him,
His life now frozen for want of sun
And green. And where, when
He was not afraid,
Boredom was the name
Of his routine.

Bare-toothed and baying,
Grey wolves circled and chastised
All vestige of the Faery from his eyes,
Their faces hard, but for those times,
And times again, of false grace,
When he observed they bowed
At every mention of His name.
This God, beneficent of the angry
And the cruel, but no friend to the reticent
Or the cowed.

So, he sought solace
In the prettiness of girls a-while,
And pined.
And thinking what he felt divine,
Put all his hopes in Love,
And thereby came to see,
Amongst all flesh, at least,
The fact of his invisibility,
This Faery child,
Alone among the chained
And shuddering freaks,
Trapped in the darkness
Of an all too swiftly run mortality.

Thus one by one they fell.
The reticent, the cowed,
The lovers, and the wolves, and all.
All into the abyss were swept.
While he, invisible to the last,
Unknown and untouched still,
Watched each one fall in turn,
And wept.

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