I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".


That's an honest account of how I feel about poetry.  I do sincerely believe that I'm missing something: but what it is, I've no clue.  At school, we had an annual poetry competition, the Lyme Poetry Prize, and everyone studying English was expected to enter.  Since I did English to A-Level, that meant having to enter every year.  My efforts were always crap.  I knew they were crap.  When the winners were announced, I was never in any doubt that the winning poems were far better than mine would ever be.  One year my friend Luke won, with a poem based around something that had happened at a bonfire party in my parents' garden.  (We used to have fantastic bonfires.)  It was obviously better than anything I could produce, but I had no idea why.  A few years ago, I spent an evening with a friend who, very patiently, tried to guide me through one of Shakespeare's sonnets.  And fascinating and enjoyable though that was, did it persuade me that poetry qua poetry has something special to offer?  Sorry, Heather: nope.

For what it's worth, I don't think I'm the only one who feels like this.  My Penguin versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey are rendered in prose, and the introduction makes it clear that that was a deliberate choice, because we live in an age of prose.  (Penguin's translations of The Aeneid and The Metamorphoses, however, are in verse.)

Anyway: McMillan replied.  What a star!

Maybe start with Norman Nicholson; for me a lot of it is about the white space at the edge of the page.
Don't think of it as missing something; enjoy the language.

That first tweet, I have to admit, comes a bit close to leaving me cold.  There's a couple of resonances it has; one is to an essay by Heidegger's essay "The Thing", in which he talks about the essence of the jug being the space it contains, rather than the earthenware itself.  Without shaping the nothing, there is no jug.

Sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holdng.  But if the holding is done by the jug's void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug.  He only shapes the clay.  No - he shapes the void.  For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form.  From start to finish the porter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel.  The jug's void determines the handling in the process of making the vessel.  The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.

But that doesn't quite fit when we're talking about poetry after all, because the white spaces at the edge aren't the essence of the poem: we could by the same token be satisfied with a Tristram Shandy-like black block, just so long as the margins are preserved.  The other resonance is with Cage's 4'33 and - more generally - the idea that the integrity of a piece of music depends on each note and phrase being differentiated from what is on either "side" of it, whether it be another note or the absence of a note.*  (We're getting perilously close to Derrida here; a paragraph with Heidegger, Cage, Sterne, and Derrida is probably a paragraph that should be stopped before it's too late.)  Maybe McMillan's white space is like Cage's silent music.  But, again, that doesn't quite work - again, the analogy with the black page in Tristram Shandy shows why.

There is a few exceptions to my general poetic tin ear.  I had a fantastic English teacher when I was 11 called Peter Cash; he made his class learn Edward Thomas' "Adlestrop", Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow"; I've a soft spot for all three.  But "Adlestrop" and "Stopping by Woods" are straightforward, which is why they've never left me after almost 30 years; and "The Red Wheelbarrow" lingers because it's odd.  Odd and short.  Oh, and - on reflection - it also speaks to one other thing that puts me off poetry, which is that a lot of it, it seems to me, revolves around the idea that everything is like something else, or represents something else, or is in some way meaningful.  "The Red Wheelbarrow" says, "Nah, mate.  Here's a thing, complete unto itself; and it's still a source of wonder and beauty".  That's brave, I guess.

Whether I've got the right end of the stick is another matter - I probably haven't - and I'm suspicious of wonder and beauty, anyway.  Start finding them in the world, and before you know it, you'll've started to write poems in which - ooops! - everything is like something else, or represents something else, or is in some way meaningful.

But I digress.  "Ozymandias" is also something that has stayed with me; I used to be in a choir, and we once sang a setting of it, so I learned it that way.  Again, though, I find myself asking, "Wouldn't it work as prose?".  More or less, it would.  Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate is marvellous; but had he written it as a conventional novel, it's not clear to me that anything would have been lost.  Or, rather, though it would have been very different, it... hmmm.  I don't know where I'm going with that thought.

But then that other tweet from McMillan is worth considering:

Don't think of it as missing something; enjoy the language.

Maybe that's a good way in - at least to some poems.  There's the fabulous Dada-avant-la-lettre of "Jabberwocky"; that'd be simply doggerel were it not for the fact that it's baffling, and it sounds great.  One might spend time unpicking the lyrics from a Public Enemy or Eminem record, but part of their genius is the way the words roll.  Yet, again, prose can do that, so why that's a virtue of poetry in particular, I'm still not sure.  Go back and read the proseified version of the poem at the top of this post; it works aesthetically.

Still, I'll begin to end this rather pointless post with the one poem that, I think, exemplifies how just enjoying the language might give a way in.  It's Tom Raworth's "You've Ruined my Evening/ You've Ruined my Life":

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish
only as one i contain the complications
in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant
i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels
and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts
the actors bow gently to me and i envy them
their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world

i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams
walking through corridors of glass framed pages
telling each other the final lines of letters
picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another
only as one i contain the complications
and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world
the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings 

i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant
picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing
re-running the reels of my presence in this world
the difficulties vanish and the images are the same
eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated
inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications
only as one walking gently storing my dream

I have no idea what the hell's going on there, but I want to.

Even so: liking a few poems isn't the same as liking, or getting, poetry.  I still don't think I know where to start, or what it is I'm supposedly missing.

And I'm immensely chuffed that Ian McMillan took the time to answer me.  As I said at the start, this may not come across as an encomium; but he's got me thinking, and, frankly, one can't ask for much more.

*That's why people who clap too soon at the end of a performance need to be taken out and shot.  The moment of quiet after the final note is a part of the music.  Does the score have a line for applause, most of which is rests until the moment everything else is done?  No.  No it doesn't.