And So, I Abide By This.

Alan Gillis: I’m good, cheers! As I grow older, I find I enjoy springtime more and more. I used to like winter, but now spring really feels like some kind of primal threshold. Not dead yet! Meantime, university work is kind of seasonal, and while there’s still lots to do, spring opens the possibility of doing one’s own reading and writing for a while. So it’s a double-whopper.

AG: I’ve long been drawn to the way poets such as Mandelstam and the early Auden often eschewed poem titles.  Even now, part of me is drawn to the idea of not giving titles. I guess there’s a move from a nameless poem-in-gestation being all potential, to a named poem being something definite, about which I hesitate. It’s a limitation, isn’t it? ‘Oh, it’s this’. Also, there’s an argument that being without title plunges you into the poem more fully, with no guide, so you enter straight into the words-in-movement of the verse and figure things while you’re under way, without a big signpost. 

But when you think about it, those nameless poems by Mandelstam and early Auden end up being designated by their first lines, in practical terms, which become surrogate titles, which are often quite poor. Arguably, something like Auden’s ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’ is better off being called ‘The Secret Agent’. So you might as well embrace titles.

Going back to that thing about potential: if names are containers, then I like to think there is some kind of energy, a load of multiform possibility, bouncing about within. There’s hopefully a lot more to ‘Alan’ or ‘Andrew’ than those names initially suggest, right? But ultimately, the names harness possibility rather than stifle it, because without the names there would be no ‘Alan’ or ‘Andrew’ to be known in the first place. One of poetry’s jobs, it seems to me, is to ensure that words, the names for things, remain ‘alive’. And in terms of how we approach and read poems, that can start with titles.

From plain titles to baroque and oblique titles, from the ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ titles to the strange ones that misdirect or sit sideways to their poems in varying degrees, one might as well explore the whole gamut and enjoy it. I learned late in the day how useful titles can be in terms of suggesting theme or context, which can really benefit the rest of the poem in a huge number of ways. That should have been obvious, but some of the most straightforward things are often forgotten in poetry. There’s also a range of things that happen relative to when a title appears. You can come up with a title first, then try to write a poem approaching that. Or you can write the poem and come up with a title retrospectively. But more often, poem and title emerge in relation to one another at unpredictable stages of composition. From poem to poem, title to title, you’re just steering the ship relative to the currents of the water.

AG: As with titles, some part of me resents the opening line. I mean, openings need to be good, right? Preferably, really good. They need to do so much. They are the attention-seekers, the prima-donnas, of verse. The way the opening and closing of short lyric poems lord it over their middle is galling, really. When you sit down to write a poem and it doesn’t go well — which, in my experience, is most of the time — the opening is overwhelmingly the problem. The impossibility of an opening. But then again, when you get a line that works, when you feel things ‘click’ and something starts opening out, there’s nothing better, really.

As with titles, I guess there’s no single thing to look for. It makes sense there might be as many kinds of openings as there might be differing kinds of poem. A zinger is lovely, but to always seek a zinger would be tiresome. There’s a strong argument that the opening line should seed the entire poem: especially in terms of measure and tone, voice and key. But really, there are levels and gears to how these things can be developed, ways to let the poem emerge more gradually, while swerves and surprises and false-starts can be super effective. Whatever opening line will work will always be relative to the poem as a whole, even while the poem as a whole will be dependent on the opening line. Like I say, these things are buggers until, on a lucky day, they are not.

AG: Yes, Mahon’s definition works for me. But that’s not to say these terms are settled. I mean, I’m happy with the idea of soul, until I think about it, and then … What about poems that are striving to be affectless? The post-industrial-commodified-your-inner-self-is-an-algorithically-controlled-illusion-to-generate-profit-for-the-machine vibe? Does satire need soul? It possibly does, but then we’re talking about something so elastic that it is entirely elusive.

Most poets, I imagine, hope their poetry has soul. Yet we don’t really know what soul is. If we try to define it, it evaporates. But almost certainly, if there isn’t some skill and measure involved, then soul will likely be absent. There needs to be a shape, a body. So there’s a kind of paradox that becomes central to the art: trying to conjure the unconfined qualities of ‘soul’ through something as dour-sounding as ‘formal necessity’. I guess that’s where ‘song’ comes into it?

One can see, more and more over the past years, a move away from song, towards a sense of poetry as a generalised kind of art-language, or as a more formless medium of direct self-expression. The former can create all kinds of cool possibilities. But personally, I maintain a massive personal bias towards poetry that gravitates towards song. For me, this means verse based on the line, where rhythm and cadence and structure are paramount.

Like I say, it’s entirely possible that other kinds of patterned or conceptual language games can create compelling effects, whether those be emotive or sensuous or dramatic or rhetorically performative or purely cerebral. That’s fine. But one repeatedly witnesses, from within the poetry world, a refutation of conventional lyric techniques and standards, which I think is barking up the wrong tree. Of course, not all poems based on the line, and on the conventions of verse form, are good. These can more easily give you triteness than gold. Nobody said it was easy. The error is to blame the formal techniques, when one’s attempt at writing poetry turns to mud. Many people blame the tools, rather than themselves, when it doesn’t work out.

To suggest that prosodic techniques in themselves are good or bad, or conservative or radical, is quite inane. It all depends what you do with them. You need to bring something new or individualised, or whatever, or you won’t have a poem. You have one unique thing to bring, and that is yourself. But you are not a poem. You need to push against the strictures of form, while the form will also be shaping and pushing back at whatever it is you are trying to express. And this attempt to fuse the particulars of your own sensibility, experience and imaginative flight (whatever emerges in the moment of writing), into potent patterned expression is what I understand by Mahon’s ‘formal necessity’, and this must be renegotiated and renewed with each poem.

One can be happy with a ‘different strokes for different folks’ approach. There are differing conceptions of what is good in art. Yet at the same time, some things are worth insisting upon. The trick is to keep some kind of balance between upholding standards and being open. But what is dispiriting is the shuddering frequency with which basic conventions of technique and form, and basic standards of quality, are targeted as conservative or elitist or whatever. This seems so hackneyed and wrongheaded that it is nuts. In any case, I believe that, once the passage of time has done its thing, then it will be poems that approach Mahon’s definition that will stand true. These qualities are an inherent good. And so, one keeps honing technique, alert to the line, hoping for song and some soul.

AG: Like yourself, my formative experiences were my upbringing in good old Northern Ireland, back in the day. Whether you call it the Troubles, or a Civil War, poets like Heaney, Longley and Mahon got a lot of heat for not representing one side or the other more fully. But the way they insisted that a poem might create a space to do more than feed the impasse — not to be ‘free’ or aloof, but to allow for a reflective and creative engagement with the full complexity and otherness and harm and potential of their world in all its structural inequality and grainy particularity — that seems incontestably valuable. And so, I abide by this. If a poem simply states a point of view or opinion then, for me, it’s not really a poem. I realise this can raise heckles, but I believe in it as the moral centre and value of the artform.

It’s not that your worldview isn’t important, or that you need to entirely disown it. It’s more that, in a poem, any worldview is put into an art space — just kind of framing it, by saying it is a poem, transmutes it in a way —where it is left to ramify against all that it is not, the void of the rest of the page and so forth. The point of literature is that it is part of life, and so it needs to engage with the harm and otherness and uncontrollable mess of the world, and so each poet needs to recognise their unavoidable complicity with it all, and needs to represent and explore and contest and imagine and embody something they don’t fully understand in all its inexorably open-ended unfairness and sadness and contradictoriness and horror and pleasure and glory. Like, a poem can also be quite lovely or a bit of fun. But here endeth the lesson.