The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (48 page)

Well, I did warn you that the points would be obvious. Suppose you have learned all you have learned from my book, read all you have read, followed all the precepts and avoided all the vices? Suppose you now have a body of work, however small, that languishes unread and suppose you wish to do something about this. What to do?

G
ETTING
N
OTICED

Most people who paint and play musical instruments do so at home, not for profit or attention but for their own pleasure. This is how I write my poetry, entirely for myself. I am therefore not qualified to enlarge upon ways to get yours noticed, published and talked about. There are many competitions, poetry clubs and societies, not to mention thousands of websites, chat-rooms and online bulletin boards which offer net-based or face-to-face advice, workshops and courses. Poetry Slams and public reading events of a similar nature have migrated from the United States and appear to be growing in popularity here. There are outlets and venues for performance poetry not unlike, and often connected to, the standup comedy circuit. New poets can be heard, applauded or gonged off like comics if they have the courage. I must add the obvious caveat that such outlets tend to promote a rather crowd-pleasing line in off-the-peg wit and ready-made satire, but this may suit your ambitions.

The first opinion you should trust, I believe, is your own, so long as it is pitilessly honest. Ask yourself, through your journal or face to face with yourself in a mirror, whether you think what you have written truly deserves a readership or audience. If the answer is an absolutely honest yes–then you will already have the confidence to proceed. If you are sincerely unsure, find someone you trust and who is patient enough and kind enough to look at your poetry or have it read to them and offer a serious and unconditionally candid response. Choose such a person well.

P
OETRY
T
ODAY

Sounds like the title for a quarterly magazine, doesn’t it?
Poetry Today
. Well, in what kind of condition
is
poetry today? How is its circulation? Aside from the big guns–Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Alan Brownjohn, Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Peter Porter, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, Les Murray and others, there are hundreds and hundreds more published poets who continue to furrow their brows and plough their furrows in the service of the art. Are there ‘schools’ of verse; is there a distinctive voice that in fifty years’ time we will know speaks in unmistakable early twenty-first century tones? If there is, I have yet to hear it. I am not sure that any poem written now, social references and changes in language aside, could not have been written fifty years ago. Perhaps this is just my own deafness or ignorance.

I am aware that much in this book will enrage or stupefy some. The very idea of clinging to ancient Greek metrical words for the description of rhythm, the use of such phrases as ‘poetic taste’ and ‘diction’, the marshalling of so many lines from dead poets–all these will cause expostulations of contempt or slow shakings of the head from those with very certain ideas about where poetry should be going and how it should be written about. If we lived in a rich time of bountiful verse and a live contemporary poetics then I would agree with them. Allow me to become a little heated and unreasonable for a moment and see if you agree with anything I am saying.

I think that much poetry written today suffers from anaemia. There is no iron in its blood, no energy, no drive. It flows gently, sometimes persuasively, but often in a lifeless trickle of the inwardly personal and the rhetorically listless. This lack of anima does not strike me as anything like the achieved and fruitful lassitude of true decadence; it is much more as if the volume has been turned down, as if poets are frightened of boldness. Lots of delicate miniatures, but few gutsy explosions of life and colour. That, perhaps, is why the colour and life in the work of poets like Armitage stand out so brightly in a dull world. The poet and critic Ian Patterson, who was kind enough to correct some of the more egregious errors in the first draft of this book, points out that there are of course many contemporary poets writing ‘terrific poetry with amazingly live (and literary) engagement with contemporary language in the UK.’ He cites John James, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Jeremy Prynne, John Wilkinson and the tragically short-lived Veronica Forrest-Thomson, but is (wrongly) too modest to include himself. I concede that I may have exaggerated this epidemic of pernicious anaemia, but cling to my view that far too many practising poets default to a rather inward, placid and bloodless response to the world.

The Victorians, for all their faults, had energy to spare. We see it clearly in the novel with Thackeray and Dickens and in the verse of Browning, Tennyson and Whitman. The Augustans, too, for all their grandeur, had a real charge running through their couplets. Virtuosity, strength and assurance seem not to be qualities of our age. There are obvious reasons for this, doubt, relativism, social sensitivity, blah, blah, blah. The short bursts of twentieth-century experimentalism (Dadaist aleatory verse, Ginsberg and chums up at Big Sur with their acid-induced Automatic Writing and cut-up poetry) are now all older than the hat Tristan Tzara drew his random words from. There is some electricity in the verse that takes its language and attitude from the streets,
²
certainly, but is literary poetry, ghastly as the phrase may be, all played out? Is it a kind of jingoistic fascism to bemoan the failure of nerve of our distinctive cultural voice? Fuck me, I do hope not.

For my own taste, I would rather read the kinds of often extreme and technically flawed but always dynamic verse of a Blake, a Whitman or a Browning than the tastefully reined in works that seem to be emerging today. It may appear contradictory of me to write a book that concentrates on metrics and form in some detail, and then argue the case for wildness. Perhaps this is the most valuable and poetically fruitful paradox of formal writing–technical perfection may be the aim, but it is out of the living and noisy struggle to escape the manacles of form that the true human voice in all its tones of love, sorrow, joy and fury most clearly emerges. ‘So free we seem, so fettered fast we are,’ says Browning’s Andrea del Sarto, before adding the now well-worn
cri de coeur
I have already quoted.

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what’s a heaven for?

Or what’s a
poem
for?

G
OODBYE

We have come to the end of
The Ode Less Travelled
. I hope you have enjoyed the journey and that you will write and read poetry with a new energy and commitment, and with deep, deep pleasure. Please do not send me your poems. I am horribly poverty-stricken when it comes to time. Before it was ever announced in any public arena that I was writing this book, word somehow got out and I have already been flooded with more unsolicited verses than I can cope with. If you were to send samples of your work to me it is possible that I might skim through one or two lines, but it is desperately unlikely that I could ever give them the concentration they deserve or be able to write back to you. It is all I can do to find time to go to the lavatory these days.

As for my poetry. I have already said often enough that I do not write for publication or recital. This is partly cowardice and embarrassment, partly a problem connected to the fact that I am well-known enough to feel that my poems will be given more attention than they deserve, whether negative or positive makes no difference, they cannot be read without the reader being likely to hear my voice not as an individual poetic voice, but as the voice of that man who publicly disports himself in assorted noisome ways. My poems come from another me, a me who went down a road I did not take. He never entered the loud public world but became, I suspect, a teacher and eventually, in his own small way, a poet.

Incomplete Glossary of Poetic Terms

I hope I haven’t left out anything vital: not all terms for metric feet are here, since they are gathered in the table of metric feet at the end of Chapter One.

abecedarian
Pointless style of
acrostic
q.v. in ABC order.

acatalectic
Metrically complete: without
clipping
or
catalexis, acephalic
or
hypermetric
alteration q.q.v.

accent
The word used for the natural push given to words within a sentence. In poetry, accent is called
stress
. q.v.

accentual
Of verse, metre that is defined by stress count only, irrespective of the number of weak syllables. Comic and non-literary ballads and rhymes etc.
accentual-alliterative
Poetry derived from the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English traditions of four-stress alliterated lines divided into two, where the first three stressed syllables alliterate according to the
bang, bang, bang–crash
rule, q.v.

accentual-syllabic
Poetry ordered by metre
and
syllabic count. Iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter etc.

acephalous
Lit. ‘headless’. A line of poetry lacking its initial metrical unit. Same as
clipped
, q.v.

acrostics
Kind of verse whose first letters, when read downwards, spell out a name, word or phrase: What A Nonsensical Kind, you might think.

Adonic line
The final short line of a
Sapphic (Ode)
. Classically, the dactyl-trochee (named after Sappho’s line ‘O for Adonis’).

alba
Alt. name for an
aubade
q.v.

alcaics
Named after Alcaeus, another poet from Lesbos, greatly admired by Horace. Some English versions of his rather complex metre have been attempted, Tennyson’s ‘Milton’ being a well-known example.
Alcaics
now seem to be settled as a quatrain form. I will leave you to discover more.

aleatory
Lit. ‘of dice’–
a. verse
uses chance (drawing of words from a hat, sticking a pin in a random word from a dictionary etc.) to determine word choices.

alexandrine
A line of iambic hexameter, typically found in English as the last line of a
Spenserian Stanza
or similar pentametric verse arrangement.

allegory, allegorical
The device of using a character or narrative element symbolically to refer to something else, either abstract (the quest for the Holy Grail is an allegory of Man’s search for spiritual grace), or specific (Gloriana in the
Faerie Queen
is an allegory of Elizabeth I).

alliteration, alliterative
The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected.

amphibrach, -ic
A
ternary
metrical unit expressed as
, ro
man
tic de
lud
ed etc.

amphimacer
A
ternary
metrical unit expressed as
,
hand
to
mouth, pack
ing
case
etc.

anacoluthon
Change of syntax within a sentence.

anacreontics
Short-lined (often seven-syllable trochaics), celebrating erotic love, wine and pleasure.

anacrusis
Extra weak syllable(s) at the start of a line.

anadiplosis
Repetition of the last word of one clause or line as the first of the next, e.g. Keats’s use of ‘forlorn’ in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

anapaest, -ic
A
ternary
metrical unit expressed as
, uncon
vinced
, in a
spin
.

anaphora
Rhetorical or poetic repetition of the first word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or stanzas.

anceps
A metrical unit that can be either short or long, stressed or unstressed according to the poet’s whim. Only really found in classical verse, such as
quantitative
imitations of Sappho etc.

anthology
Collection of poems, literally of flowers–a posy of poesy, in fact.

antimetabole
Rhetorical repetition by inversion and
chiasmus
q.v.–e.g. ‘I pretty and my saying apt? or ‘I apt and my saying pretty?’ from
Love’s Labour’s Lost.

antiphon
Sung verse.
antistrophe
The ‘counter-turn’, used as the second part of a triad in
Pindaric Odes
.

aphaeresis, aphaeretic
The omission of a syllable at the beginning of a word: ’gainst, ’neath etc.

aphorism
Wise saying, often witty. Like an
epigram
but with a more universal truth. An epigram could be made about the appearance of a particular bride at a wedding, say, but this would not be an aphorism unless its wit and truth held for any occasion.

apocope, apocopation
An elision or omission of the final letter or syllable of a word, ‘i’the’ for ‘in the’, ‘seld’ for ‘seldom’ and the Chaucerian ‘bet’ for ‘better’ etc.

apostrophe
Aside from the obvious reference to a punctuation mark, a moment when a poet turns to address some person, object or principle, often preceded by a (pro)vocative ‘O’, as in ‘O attic shape!’ as Keats liked to say to his favourite Grecian urns.

apothegm
A short aphorism, q.v.

assonance, assonantal
A repetition of vowel sounds either used internally, or as a
partial rhyme
q.v. ‘Most holy Pope’, ‘slurred first words’, etc.

asyndeton, asyndetic
The omission of conjunctions, personal pronouns and other particles: ‘hoping see you tomorrow’, ‘not fond turkey, prefer goose,’ etc.

aubade
A poetic celebration of dawn or a lament at daybreak’s interference with lovers and their private bliss e.g.
Romeo and Juliet
: ‘But soft what light at yonder window breaks?’, Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ etc. Also called an
alba
.

ballad
Traditional verse form, often sung, usually in four-stress cross-rhyming quatrains, often alternating with three-stress lines. Not to be confused with
ballade
or
salad
q.v.

ballade
Verse form of three stanzas, three rhymes and envoi:
ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA.

bang, bang, bang–crash!
Michael Alexander’s phrase describing the alliterative principle behind Anglo-Saxon verse. Three alliterated stresses followed by a non-alliterated one.

bathos, bathetic
A (comic or pathetic) failure to achieve dignity, a banal anticlimax.

binary
A metrical foot of two units:
iambic
,
trochaic
,
spondaic
or
pyrrhic
.

blank verse
Non-rhyming verse: most often applied to iambic pentameter, such as that found in Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and Wordsworth’s
The Prelude
.

burden
A
refrain
, q.v.

cadence
Lit. ‘falling’, the natural rhythm derived from accentuation, i.e. the rise and fall of stress. The sound that precedes a pause.
caesura
Of metrical verse: a pause or breath in mid line.

canto
A series of long poems.

canzone
A lyric poem, usually with envoi.

catalexis, catalectic
Truncation: the docking of a final metrical unit, such as the last
feminine
syllable of a trochaic line.

cataplexis, cataplectic
Hardly relevant, but a fun word. It means a poetical or rhetorical threatening of punishment, horror or disaster. Like King Lear’s ‘I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth’.

cauda, caudate sonnet
Lit.
tail
. A three-line coda to a
sonnet
, consisting of a
trimeter
and two
pentameters
.

cento
A collage poem made up of lines of real verse from different poems.

chant royal
A sixty-line poem with envoi. I spared you it in Chapter Three out of care for your sanity.

chiasmus
From the Gr. letter
chi
, meaning a ‘crossing’ of sense. A common rhetorical figure, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men’, ‘one should eat to live, not live to eat’, ‘Real pain for sham friends, Champagne for real friends’ etc.

choliamb
A
scazon
q.v.–kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.

chronogram
A
gematric
q.v. poem or motto whose letters when added as Roman numerals make up a significant number, such as a date: e.g.
Lord have mercie vpon vs
= 1666 (or 1464 or permutations thereof ).

cinquain
A stanza of five lines. Esp. in reference to the verse of Adelaide Crapsey.

clerihew
From Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A non-metrical comical and biographical quatrain whose first line is the name of its subject.

clipped
As
acephalous
q.v., omission of the first metrical unit in a line of verse.

closed form
Any form of verse whose stanza length, rhyme scheme and other features are fixed.

closet drama
Not, as you might think, the hysterics attendant upon coming out, but a play written to be read, not performed. A genre invented by the Roman playwright Seneca.

Cockney School
Blackwood (of Magazine fame) and the
Quarterly Review
q.v. used this snobbish and wholly inappropriate appellation to describe the ‘bad’ poetic diction of Keats and Leigh Hunt and their circle. Byron, too, ‘disapproved of that School of Scribbling’ and believed Keats guilty of wasting his talents in ‘Cockneyfying and Suburbing’ (letter to John Murray, 1821).