– O how could I order that tuna and chips, – And sip my beer and gaze at yachts and cruise ships
Beyond the tops of changing booths and beach umbrella tips;
– And glimpse and catch the sea’s soughing of old truths – Through exhaled smoke of bronze Italian youths
And cries of a fat child a made-up plastic granny soothes;
– And not think of a Romantic poet’s pyre, – Or Claude’s Seaport, which Turner set on fire, Or brine-drenched heroes Neptune saved from Aeolus and Juno’s ire.
– But I confess it took an old tourist’s poem, – And my desire to make his tercets my own,
For me to see this sea transcending our own and Aeneas’ Rome.
– When we were on our way down here through Nice – We saw b-boys do flares, headspins, then freeze.
On Friday nights the promenade is checked by Finance Police.
– But all the while, at the sandy edge of sight, – On feathery legs of old, gods roll from the night,
And we would sense them could we still perform the proper rite.
One morning during the first week of Advent,
_ When I was possessed,
After a birthday’s dark exhilarations,
_ By a terrible kind of nervousness,
We saw, on stage, the judgement of our son,
Before his class, the Egyptian pantheon.
I was chosen, he said, to be mummified today:
_ My life was cut short
While I was out in my papyrus boat,
_ Hunting hippos (a dangerous sport).
Then they took the brains out of this son of ours,
And placed his viscera, like pasta, in cardboard jars.
As in the womb of Advent, I’d put myself
_ In that small space
In which they shut him, cured and bandaged up,
_ And pray to God I feel the grace
Of Christmas, afloat inside its heavily
Expectant bustle, remote as a vessel at sea.
And what strange afterlife shall I find there,
_ On stage, when they lead
Me out, to weigh my heart against its feather?
_ Wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid
In this book’s manger, roughly I perceive
Angels, livestock, and men, the gifts you’ll leave.
In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.
In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.
The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.
And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.
As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’
New Year
At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.
Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.
A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’
One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’(1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.
What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’
I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’
That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.
It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.
But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.
To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?
I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.
All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.
Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com
_ I thought that I would read the beginning
_ Of the last gospel, but
_ The book fell open at
The beginning of the first, my thoughts misdeeming
_ What I needed to write this poem,
_ But the book satisfying them.
_ My intention was to write about
_ A father and a son
_ Hand in hand upon
A curving shore, a memory I doubt,
_ But fitting image for
_ All such memories I here recall.
_ Those early summer evenings spent
_ With my dad on that outcrop
_ Watching peregrines drop,
Or in the woods, off way-marked paths, intent
_ To find the fabled stand
_ Of Weymouth Pines, which we, at last, found.
_ Our lingering at Mickla Bridge,
_ Discoursing about Yeats,
_ As the sun politely waits
To set behind the bluing fields’ high ridge.
_ My making for my first son
_ My arm a pillow to rest upon.
_ But while I thought on these things, behold,
_ An angel of the Lord
_ Appealed to my words and implored,
All things are created through the Son, that child,
_ Conceived of the holy ghost,
_ Praised suddenly by a heavenly host.
_ What have I written? And what have I
_ Imagined and not written?
_ And what remains unwritten
And unimagined in this poem? Before I
_ Knew it, my thoughts were lost,
_ Or found with child of the holy ghost.
Edward Clarke’s Eighteen Psalms was published by Periplum Poetry in 2018. He is also the author of two books of criticism, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books 2014) and The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and poetry editor Cassandra Voices.
While someone exhorts us
In song to sing to God,
I've looked askance and asked, is he
Among us here or not?
And found that question, off its no-man's land
Uptaken then in hand,
Lies with sheep in shade,
And takes its rest in space,
Beneath a large-leafed chestnut, bright
With burning candles, placed
At intervals upon it, by that same hand,
Which forms from sea dry land.
Can it be we have
A second chance of rest?
I labour to hear a voice whose sworn
Obscurity you blessed,
Like a bright cloud above unharvested grain,
A clear heat after rain.
Edward Clarke’s latest book is called The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry.
If you are complaining about Climate Change, Brexit, Donald Trump, and all the cozening of late capitalism, I will not take you seriously if you have accepted, without very much thought, that there is only ever an arbitrary relationship between a signifier and what it signifies.
I will say to you that you are closer than you realize to being an embodiment of the world’s problems, and I will ask: have you considered how our future shall have been changed if the divine is awakened in man through poetry?
A widespread feeling of intellectual decrepitude among my generation is bound up with acceptance of the pseudo-philosophies that spread from France in the late 1960s. A dumbed-down account emerged in Terry Eagleton’s best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction, now in its second edition.
Each January I lecture on critical theory at Sarum College in Salisbury, and have grown increasingly frustrated outlining Jacques Derrida’s assumption of Ferdinand da Saussure’s argument that meaning in language is a simple matter of difference. In that lecture I explain – mostly to retired vicars or shamans, or both – that a sign is made up of a ‘signifier’ (like a written word) and a ‘signified’ (its meaning).
Then I quote from Eagleton: ‘The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one’: there is no reason why the three marks c – a – t should signify cat. He continues: ‘Each sign in the system has meaning only by virtue of its difference from the others … meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is functional, the result of its difference from other signs.’
Such a theory may be correct from a strict scientific or linguistic perspective, but from a poetic perspective it is a negation. For W.B. Yeats, as for any other great poet, meaning is immanent in a sign. To disagree places functional rationality above a divinely creative imagination: perpetuating the potentially lethal metaphysical imbalance at the heart of our society.
In fact, Derrida can be a relatively exciting author, but I get the impression he is rarely read in the original, outside of France, and a simplified account of his work has become a dangerous dogma. It is now a political tool used in the academy to excuse people from teaching or studying the literary cannon: why would you bother with Shakespeare or Milton any longer? This is a New Age delinquency in desperate need of Reformation.
Eagleton further claims: ‘Poetry is a sort of trick, whereby an awareness of the textures of signs puts us in mind of the textures of actual things. But the relation between the two remains quite as arbitrary as in any other use of language; it is just that some poetry tries to ‘iconicise’ that relation, to make it appear somehow inevitable.’
I will counter Eagleton by quoting a more circumspect Romantic perspective than my own: that of the American poet Wallace Stevens who described the real as being constantly ‘engulfed in the unreal’. Poetry, he stated, ‘is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.’ Elaborating this belief, he knew:
A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has only to be presented as best one is able to present it.
Great poetry makes you apprehend, more than cool reason ever comprehends, that there is a sacred bond between word and thing or word and idea, expressed in the very making of poetry, work which is, as Stevens imagined, ‘on the threshold of heaven’. A great poet should be capable of teaching a linguist to have faith in a ‘story’ that his discipline cannot fathom, so that it ‘grows’ in Shakespeare’s wise Hippolyta’s words ‘to something of great constancy; | But, howsoever, strange and admirable.’
George Santayana had asked: ‘How, then, should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic is a term of reproach?’ Stevens knew: ‘It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most. | It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.’ Meditating on Santayana dying in Rome, the poet apprehended the philosopher almost literally at the end of his poem: ‘He stops upon this threshold, | As if the design of all his words takes form | And frame from thinking and is realized.’
These works I have listed could be a kind of mirror. If you believe that the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one, you will see that you have a quasi-hipster beard and haircut, and that you are engaged to be married to an intellectual hippopotamus. The shepherd-king’s curse might stick:
For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause. For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love. Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand.
As René Guenon has warned: ‘The word ‘satanic’ can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of traditional truth?’ I am convinced that post-modern literary theory has Satan as its right hand man.
Edward Clarke’s last book was the Vagabond Spirit of Poetry. He is the Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. His poem Psalm 41 appeared in the previous edition.
70
I’d like to set you to
The tune
Of ‘Wolves A-Howling’,
So you can make no tarrying,
And hurry
Out across
The peaks of wild Arkansas,
The heights of south Missouri:
Make haste, O Lord, to help me,
Make haste, O God, to seize me,
Can’t you see the wolves a-howling
All round my pretty little darling?
The tail end of
Another text
The prelude to
The song that’s next,
This song is but an interlude
Of perfect prayer
With hardly any words
That fiddlers howl with care.
And I would put it in
Some wild quatrains
To try and heed
The word that frames
Its words:
Make haste,
Let them be confused
That chase
My living soul,
That howl
And are a-howling
All round my darling.
Let all that seek you
Exult and howl,
Let God be magnified
Inside my soul.
As I am poor and needy
Make haste to seize me:
O how the wolves are howling
All around my poor little darling.
Edward Clarke’s latest book is called The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry.
