{"id":918,"date":"2021-07-16T15:20:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T15:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/?p=918"},"modified":"2021-07-16T15:18:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T15:18:02","slug":"a-note-on-poetry-a-contention-an-ideal-a-credo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/2021\/07\/16\/a-note-on-poetry-a-contention-an-ideal-a-credo\/","title":{"rendered":"A Note on Poetry: A Contention, an Ideal, a Credo"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Gregory Leadbetter<\/p>\n\n

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I suspect that the \u201cdefence\u201d of poetry is as old as poetry itself. After all, poetry \u2013 if it has any distinct identity as a form \u2013 somehow distinguishes itself from other norms of speech and language. In poetry, language behaves and presents differently \u2013 and, as another order of language, it implicitly calls upon other orders of attention. This warp or swerve from the familiar might provoke conversation about what happens when language enters these altered states and becomes poetry \u2013 and there might emerge the prototypical \u201cdefence\u201d or \u201capology\u201d. In less defensive terms, this produces what Ted Hughes calls the \u2018prose precincts\u2019 that poems need if they are to be more widely received into the culture at large (219). Seen this way, a \u201cdefence\u201d of poetry is really a vision of poetry: a contention, an ideal, a credo \u2013 even a manifesto, of sorts.<\/p>\n\n

Poetry defies comprehensive definition, but to present a defence or a vision of poetry is in some way to define it, provisionally (only ever provisionally), for the purposes of the present argument. I have already begun to do so here. The poetic imagination responds to and directs the self-altering qualities inherent to language \u2013 figurative, aural, affective, fictive \u2013 to excite the attention by the action of its form. It is characterised by the simultaneity and paradox of its effects: activity and passivity, the voluntary and the involuntary, presence and absence, concinnity and spontaneity, knowing and unknowing, disturbing and soothing, infecting and curing, intensifying and relaxing, summoning and exorcising, wilding and ordering, saying and not saying. Poetry operates at once sensuously and subtly \u2013 that is, upon both the physical and the subtle body of our being. It does not just describe or refer to experience: it constitutes experience, and in this sense, as R.P. Blackmur puts it, poetry \u2018adds to the stock of available reality\u2019 (349). In poetry, language changes its own nature, and (however imperceptibly) changes the nature that it meets. It speaks to the world-making life of ideas and feelings, moving mind and body at once. In this somatic and psychoactive power, poetry possesses transnatural force.<\/p>\n\n

This metaphysic \u2013 which may at first glance sound arcane \u2013 is also the secret of poetry\u2019s social and political agency. Poetry speaks not only to what we are, but also to what we have been and might be. It addresses the grounds and powers of our apprehension, and hence the very basis of our participation in the world. True and lasting change depends upon the cultivation of our inner lives \u2013 our values, sympathies, and knowledge \u2013 even more than our outward: a fool in a presidential palace is still a fool. Poetry is educative \u2013 it is earth, rain, air and light for our growth, as a person \u2013 and in this sense always possesses a social and political dimension, even if only implicitly and obliquely so. The loudest, or angriest, or most obvious response \u2013 however just the cause \u2013 is not necessarily the most compelling, lasting, and needful, for the collective good. Sometimes, as Nietzsche writes, \u2018It is the stillest words which bring the storm\u2019 (168). Like all genuinely educative arts, poetry possesses an initiatory<\/em> character: a point of origination that is also a point of relation, renewal, and transformation.<\/p>\n\n

Like poetry itself, a defence or vision of poetry has its context. Something stirs it into voice. It cannot necessarily speak to or for the infinite variety of practice that goes under the name of poetry. Each poet, each critic, can only contribute their distinct contentions, with their distinct psychological, experiential, and intellectual genealogy. This is one of the reasons why genuine diversity and receptivity is so important to cultural life, because no one person can or should bear the impossible burden of pretending otherwise. To be a student of poetry is to participate in a shared endeavour of many hands. A particular defence or vision of poetry may embody a particular taste, appetite, or intuition \u2013 but that is also one basis of its potential value.<\/p>\n\n

I follow this principle in what remains of this note, not only to dilate upon what I have already said, but also to highlight nine inter-related aspects of poetry and its possibilities that I feel are especially important, which at the same time, in the present context, might benefit from a few words in their name.<\/p>\n\n

1. Poetry is a fictive, fabulist art. That principle can be obscured when a poem is praised (for example) for its \u201chonesty\u201d or \u201csincerity\u201d \u2013 neither of which, despite their virtue, is enough to make a poem. Poetry does not excuse factual error, nor malicious falsehood, but \u201cfacts\u201d alone do not make a poem either. A poem is a storying, a naming, a making. The \u2018truth of art\u2019, Marcuse writes, \u2018lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality\u2019 (9). When we use the verb \u2018to be\u2019, we become \u2018Wizards of Is<\/em>\u2019 (Allott 339) \u2013 and poetry thrives on that wizardry. The \u201creal\u201d is itself imaginal \u2013 that is, an imagined state or quality \u2013 and the imaginal is real: that which we imagine, even if it does not exist in nature, is a truth of our lives. The fictions of poetry are essential to its psychoactive power. Let\u2019s keep sight of this implicate creatrix.<\/p>\n\n

2. I have said that poetry is transnatural: a self-altering changer and maker of nature, a source of new elements, patterns, and realities in the human universe. At its most basic level, this involves a differentiation of some kind, some Promethean spark of an altering, ordering, animating presence. Think of the difference, for example, in archaeology, between finding a stone or a shell worked into a bead \u2013 or stones or shells arranged in a circle \u2013 and simply finding a stone or a shell. This altering, ordering, animating differentiation is the origin of art \u2013 of the aesthetic \u2013 which is coeval with ritual, and symbolic action: action, that is, which stands for more than itself, whose form has a multi-planar life. Impatience with these qualities tends towards an anti-aesthetic impatience with art itself \u2013 an exclusion of and desensitisation to its reality. This is to shun the very poetry of poetry.<\/p>\n\n

3. Poetry depends upon curiosity, both in the poet and the reader or listener. As a performative art, poetry should attempt to summon and reward that curiosity, but even the best can only do so much. A poem is an invitation, of a kind, to the exercise<\/em> of curiosity on the part of the reader. The reader cannot \u2013 or should not \u2013 expect the poem to yield everything it possesses without some active participation on the part of their reading. That participation should be a form of pleasure, and should be rewarded by the poem itself. Wilful obscurantism and jargon are enemies of poetry, but so is the idea that some unfamiliar quality in a poem \u2013 in its diction, for example \u2013 necessarily \u201cexcludes\u201d the reader. A healthy culture encourages curiosity \u2013 and curiosity entails an interest in what we don\u2019t already know, or have not already encountered. If a poem merely rehearses settled preconceptions in paraphrasable terms, it may as well not be a poem. Poetry allows for exploration, questioning, essaying, with room for complexity, irresolution, and productive ambiguity rather than reductive certainty. Poetry acts also as a guardian of language, in all its quirks, peculiarities, and possibilities: let\u2019s not purge it of that life, but rather foster the diversity of its ecosystem. As for the poet: to be a poet is to be a perpetual student, responsible for the training (not just the exercise) of their instinct. As Ben Jonson puts it: \u2018our Poet must beware, that his Studie bee not only to learne of himself; for, hee that shall affect to doe that, confesseth his ever having a Foole to his master\u2019 (VIII.639). The risk, if we give up on these things \u2013 which are in fact their own reward \u2013 is that poetry is reduced to a neutral mush, made safe for consumerist attitudes. Curiosity is an intellectual state, but it requires no qualifications: it\u2019s a common property, free as the air \u2013 though all too readily neglected or left to atrophy, which only aids the forces of cultural inertia. Poetry is a stimulus to curiosity \u2013 and it is a gross disservice to everyone to treat the intellectual or the aesthetic as \u201celitist\u201d, in poetry or any other sphere. These are our common human inheritance, and a true inclusivity invites, evokes, and rewards curiosity.<\/p>\n\n

4. The operation of language itself is mysterious, and poetry rides that mystery. By \u201cmystery\u201d, I do not mean vagueness: on the contrary, its psychic efficacy depends upon the utmost precision in poetic composition. It is not an excuse to sidestep the demands of clear thinking. Rather, mystery is an achieved condition, which realises a state that cannot otherwise be realised: an activated unknowing that irradiates our knowing, stimulating our epistemic, empathetic, and creative powers \u2013 the primal organs of our presence and participation in reality. \u2018The wisest of the Ancients\u2019, Blake wrote, \u2018considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act\u2019 (702). The operation of mystery is supra-rational, not anti-rational. It does not demand unquestioning affirmation or belief: mystery incorporates doubt and scepticism. At the same time, in the realisation of its mystery, the poem creates a state that exposes the reader to its transformative agency: what Coleridge called \u2018Poetic Faith before which our common notions of philosophy give way\u2019 (Lectures<\/em> I 362). Poetry achieves this mystery partly by bringing language into dynamic relationship with the life beyond language: conjuring and quickening the preverbal rhythms and energies of our being, in verbal forms with supra-verbal effects. A woken mystery is a mark of poetry.<\/p>\n\n

5. As a medium of perceptual, epistemic, and affective wakefulness, poetry is not quite the opposite of hypnosis: it may indeed lull certain elements of consciousness to sleep, though it does so in order to awaken others. (What could we call this counter-hypnosis? Egregnosis, perhaps \u2013 likewise from the ancient Greek: egregoros<\/em>, wakeful.) A poem produces an irruptive pattern: modulating breath, activating the silence as it breaks it \u2013 and in this, like music, manipulates time, and creates its moment: at once its duration and its turning force. The orality and auricular form of poetry \u2013 sourced in the body \u2013 is one of its distinguishing virtues, and cultivates a relationship between sound and sense, the psychic and the somatic, the numinous and the sensuous. In vital ways, its seeing is the work of sound: vibrations that propagate acoustic waves. This is not to diminish the graphic dimension of poetry, since the coming of writing and printing \u2013 only to acknowledge the intimate connection between rhythm, vibration, and psychophysiological effect. The Latin word carmen<\/em> connotes \u201cpoem\u201d, \u201csong\u201d, and \u201cspell\u201d: an alignment suggestive of the ecstatic space-time of the poem, the process of poetic fascination that holds you and alters you in its moment, in ways both intellectual and more than intellectual. We are opened, inside its auricular form, to what we might not otherwise be open \u2013 and this is one secret of the poem\u2019s power of origination and renewal. \u201cLyric\u201d poetry is still far too often defined as an effusion of personal emotion \u2013 but it is far better conceived by reference to these aural qualities.<\/p>\n\n

6. Considered this way, the lyric converges with the mythic \u2013 a category with which, conventionally, it is contrasted. A poem is its own psychic event, and, like a myth, its figure embodies its own irreducible, seminative life: its daemon, the presence of its mystery. Robert Bringhurst writes that \u2018myth itself is neither fact nor fiction. Myth is a species of truth that precedes that distinction\u2019 (115), and in this sense, myth fulfils Coleridge\u2019s desire for a \u2018medium between Literal<\/em> and Metaphorical<\/em>\u2019 (Lay Sermons<\/em> 30). The imagination is mythopoeic in character, and this both precedes and outlasts religion. The primal form of a poem, perhaps, is a lyric myth.<\/p>\n\n

7. Even the most \u201cpersonal\u201d poem has a persona. It isn\u2019t often noticed that, as the derivation of the word suggests \u2013 from the Latin for a theatrical mask \u2013 \u201cpersona\u201d also implies an im<\/em>personal quality. It is performative, and its performance \u2013 however rooted in the self \u2013 carries it beyond the self. The impersonal quality of art is what enables it to be personal for others \u2013 that is, for it to be taken up into their own psychic life, independently of the biographical conditions of the poet. The impersonal eludes the merely socialised persona, and its superficial habits, to realise something of our pre-social, pre-conceptual life \u2013 something wild \u2013 that is nevertheless critical to the well-being of human society: the impersonality of the mask brings news from ourselves that otherwise would not have a voice. The impersonal, in this sense, becomes the very condition of that most personal utterance. A poem is a voice, and its voice \u2013 like its mystery \u2013 is an achieved quality. This is the substance of its art. Poets can disappear into the voice of the poem, no less than novelists into the voice of the novel, and the truth of the poem is not compromised for that: on the contrary, it counters the reductive literalism that might turn a poem into an exercise in narcissism or dogmatism. A poem is also a gift \u2013 and the gift of the poem (however personal in effect, intent, or address) assumes this impersonal quality, wherever the poet is serious about making something for someone else, and not just for themselves.<\/p>\n\n

8. Writing in 1880, Matthew Arnold prophesied that \u2018most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry\u2019 (300). He does not say why or how it will be so, but in this pregnant remark Arnold discerns an important tectonic shift in cultural history, in which I think he is right to give poetry a prominent \u2013 indeed, pioneering \u2013 place. Rooted in the body and our participatory powers of apprehension, poetry predates the schism between the \u201creligious\u201d and the \u201csecular\u201d, the sacred and the mundane. The medium of poetry transcends this dichotomy, and hence can assume a role in our spiritual lives for which \u2013 in the English language, at least \u2013 we have not yet developed an adequate vocabulary. Poetry is imbued with qualities of attention and intent that are the very roots of our arts, sciences, and beliefs. In its psychoactive, transnatural power, poetry is a form of metaphysical inception \u2013 at once pre- and post-religious, pre- and post-secular. Poetry is an origin that remains<\/em> an origin: a point of perpetual genesis.<\/p>\n\n

9. Poetry unsettles through the stealth of pleasure. In the poem\u2019s synthesis of focus and diffusion, things happen.<\/p>\n\n

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Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Allott, Philip. \u2018Kant or Won\u2019t: Theory and Moral Responsibility\u2019. The BISA Lecture, December 1995. Review of International Studies<\/em>, 23:3 (July, 1997) 339-357.<\/p>\n\n

Arnold, Matthew. \u2018The Study of Poetry\u2019 (1880), in The Portable Matthew Arnold<\/em>. Ed. by L. Trilling. Viking, 1949.<\/p>\n\n

Blackmur, R.P. Form and Value in Modern Poetry <\/em>. Doubleday, 1952.<\/p>\n\n

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake<\/em>. Ed. by David V. Erdman, rev. edn. 1982; University of California Press, 2008.<\/p>\n\n

Bringhurst, Robert. A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World<\/em>, 2nd<\/sup> edn. Douglas & McIntyre, 2011.<\/p>\n\n

Coleridge, S.T. Lay Sermons<\/em>. Ed. by R.J. White. Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1972.<\/p>\n\n

Coleridge, S.T. Lectures <\/em>1808-1819: On Literature<\/em>, 2 vols. Ed. by R.A. Foakes. Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987.<\/p>\n\n

Hughes, Ted, and Sagar, Keith. Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes & Keith Sagar<\/em>. Ed. by Keith Sagar. The British Library, 2012.<\/p>\n\n

Jonson, Ben. \u2018Timber; or, Discoveries\u2019, in Ben Jonson<\/em>. 11 vols. Ed. by C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Oxford University Press, 1925-52.<\/p>\n\n

Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension<\/em>. Beacon Press, 1978.<\/p>\n\n

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra<\/em> (1883-91). Translated by. R. Hollingdale. Penguin, 1961.<\/p>\n\n

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Gregory Leadbetter<\/strong> is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. His books include Maskwork<\/em> (2020) and The Fetch<\/em> (2016), both with Nine Arches Press, the pamphlet The Body in the Well<\/em> (HappenStance Press, 2007), Balanuve<\/em> (with photographs by Phil Thomson) (Broken Sleep, 2021), and the monograph Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination<\/em> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).<\/p>\n\n

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Gregory Leadbetter<\/p>\n

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