Copyright Urban Mole 2016
I was on the train recently, staring at the rails and the blur of sleepers between. If I very quickly moved my eyes against the direction of travel, I caught a glimpse of an individual sleeper and its neighbours; I was able to slow the flow of data just enough to pick out a little detail. Among the many boundaries of (human) perception, high speed, in the sense of a given volume of information over time, was hiding the little things. And making me boss-eyed.
So I’ll take a step out of the train and sit by the tracks and now, if I want, I can count the grains in the wood. And I’m thinking about ancient forests, Sweden, Scandinavia, low-eave architecture, flat packed furniture, Viking ships on rolling logs, rolling waves, and rolling heads in Lindisfarne. I should have stayed on the train — I would have got more work done.
The free association of information, a useful driver of creativity and mental agility, can soon become a burden when you need to concentrate. And you need to concentrate when you’re reading poetry. You need to concentrate without attending to your concentration: you need to enter a state of stillness. This is as effortless as wrestling trees.
But it is essential. Good poetry, like any good art, has a complexity that can only be engaged with if both poet and reader are present. Each line, and each unit of information within the line, needs to be compiled in the mind (I’ll elaborate on this computational metaphor in a subsequent post). Images, sounds, smells — synaestheticaly presented or otherwise — within metaphor, with or without sequence, are withheld by the poem in its inert — unspoken or unread — state (we’re switching to chemistry now). You are the one who has to exert pressure and heat to provoke a reaction. (Is language itself a catalyst here? The catalyst can’t be mind in the Cartesian sense, as the mind is affected by the poem whereas the language on the page remains the same. This would imply the poem itself is something beyond the text.)
Stillness: the inert atmosphere for poetic reaction. Let’s continue the tour of science metaphors with pink noise, where the sound of thoughts are subsumed in the background biological hum of heartbeat and synaptic firing, the wind in the trees and the birds in the wind and the trees. Stillness is never peace and quiet, never silence, but the non-attendance to detail. Stillness before reading a poem, and stillness after.
I made a mistake reading Ted Hughes’ Crow. I got so absorbed in the poems that I started to go from one to the next without pause until I came to Crow Tyrannosaurus. The cadence of the poem was off. It read like a first draft, full of raw emotion which the poet had no desire to work or even to look at again. He hadn’t managed to bring it across. This was a piece intended not for publication but catharsis; the editor’s eye wasn’t needed. That’s the size of the error I made.
The previous poem, Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door, was still reverberating, especially the capitalised prophecy:
I WILL MEASURE IT ALL AND OWN IT ALL
AND I WILL BE INSIDE IT
AS INSIDE MY OWN LAUGHTER
AND NOT STARING OUT AT IT THROUGH WALLS
OF MY EYE’S COLD QUARANTINE
FROM A BURIED CELL OF BLOODY BLACKNESS–
The Rule of Stillness applies as much to the end of a poem as to the beginning. There’s none of the novel’s forgiveness of greedy anticipation because a poetry book or pamphlet is a collection of individual works, not chapters. The poem doesn’t finish at the last line: the white space underneath is where it stops, where the afterimages form and the sounds slowly diminish.
What I’d missed in Crow Tyrannosaurus were the four line stanzas formed into the animals they describe, hollowed out with “insects and innocents” or bloated like the “bulging filterbag” it is the dog’s fate to become. Consonance and assonance, internal rhyme, struck punctuation and then, at the poem’s close, enjambment, falling syntax, and the bird lizard’s step-and-stab course off of the page.
Stillness before, and stillness after. Lesson one.
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