Something awful happened on the day of the election we waved at our politician he looked in the other direction.
He'd promised he'd be faithful and fill our several cup we waited oh so patiently and the fucker stood us up.
He spoke the common language (he'd said it all before) he promised us a load of stuff (and then a wee bit more) enormous cash advantages (and two for one in store) he moved us like Demosthenes (he was still the same old bore)
So we say this. Massage our vote and devil take the rest Wouldbe MPs, do please take note: Please, guys. Feathér our nests.
copywrite S Llewellyn 2010
No 2 THE STORY POEM The Direction of the Story
Tuesday, 13 April 2010 at 09:45
No: 2 THE STORY POEM
THE DIRECTION OF THE STORY
How story poems are directed and the directions they take, poetically, are not always dictated by the poet. The elements that create a poem, as Keats was reported to have said by his friend Richard Woodhouse, are a common experience but one that carries its perplexity in the very act of composition; ‘ He (Keats) has said that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed and written it down – It has then struck him with astonishment-and seemed rather the production of another person than his own. He has wondered how he came to hit upon it-It seems scarcely his own….and he cannot conceive how it came to him…’
This also often applies to falling on a subject. To falling over a subject. As if tripped up by something in a story that is not the story but the unknowing of an idea that the story, like a vessel, holds in its scope.
Story poems are the earliest examples of the form. The Eddas, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales and before that, Homer, Virgil, The Ramayana, great sections of the Old Testament and the oral poems of the primitive tribe in its anguished mix of terror and exultation. And the Story Poem continues right up to the present, the great ones containing an idiom or figure that doesn’t really belong but somehow awards the story a truth.
In Robert Frost’s poem about a traveller on a winter’s night with ‘promises to keep’ there is an aside about how he knew the man that owned the plantation and in that simple intrusion a huge tension is created. The traveller’s journey is blocked to some extent by the snow-laden trees, he knows the owner, and suddenly, like a super-ego, he also knows that the owner is aware of him. Also blocking his path.
In the following poem by Geoffrey Hill much the same thing happens but it’s buried deeper.
The Guardians
The young, having risen early, had gone, Some with excursions beyond the bay-mouth, Some toward lakes, a fragile reflected sun. Thunder-heads drift, awkwardly, from the south;
The old watch them. They have watched the safe Packed harbours topple under sudden gales, Great tides irrupt, yachts burn at the wharf that on clean seas pitched their effective sails.
There are silences. These, too, they endure: Soft comings on; soft after-shocks of calm. Quietly they wade the disturbed shore; Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home.
Perhaps an incident from a story in a newspaper, perhaps a lodging in his memory from a story he had read. Perhaps the tale of some innocent southern seaside town invested with a tragedy that he visited. Who knows? But the story of young boys and girls setting out on what should have been an exhilarating day sailing at sea or canoeing on a lake turns into disaster.
Yet it does not really hold true. There may well have been an escapade of sorts but it hasn’t any links to this story. In fact it by-passes the story completely and heads off into a holocaust of erupting tides, irrupted in some ancient declension, where yachts inexplicably burst into flames and the safe havens of granite harbours have their sheltering kindergarten of little boats smashed by sudden, unbidden, gales. In fact this is Biblical.
Geoffrey Hill published his first volume of poems at the age of 26 in 1958 and now teaches Literature and Religion at Boston University. His poems have this great bloody weight of tribal terror in the possibilities of God’s twitching hand; where the smallest palsied flick is enough to divide continents in two let alone destroy the odd yacht.
We are asked to believe that the ‘old’ who watch the youth set forth on this terrible morning, have seen it all before. Full of wisdom and cliché the old look on wagging their gnarled heads; ‘told you so’ stooping with a resigned sigh to drag the limp bodies of their grandchildren up the shingle beach.
The poem pulses with consequences. He uses one phrase right at the end, in the penultimate line of the poem and brilliantly everything slams into focus. ‘….the disturbed shore;’
Suddenly, majestically, we are in Mathew Arnold territory with Dover Beach, ‘…down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world’. Geoffrey Hill bids us look again at the consequence of the war just finished thirteen years before. Old Europe, which has seen it all before, now has, yet again, to stoop down and bury the dead youth.
In the climactic last line he almost writes a cliché. ‘Just scraped home…’ Just scraped through…’ Again and again as clichés are repeated endlessly we too repeat the actions of weariness that result from the repetition of history. And he drives the point home with the repetition of the word ‘dead’. It is a story about us and how generational intent for a better world appears to be always defeated by our human concordance with our apparent, separated destiny.
Geoffrey Hill's anxiety about the Nazi Progroms and the Jewish Holocaust emerge in this poem The Guardians unbidden, plucked from some other poetic mind but channelled through his. Astonished, like Keats, at this benevolent gift he does what all great gift-givers do, passes the gift on to us.
A letter from Rod Farley
Thursday, 4 February 2010 at 07:18
Hi Bibby:
You're still rattling it out, aren't you? And either I'm getting better at reading, or (less likely) you're getting better at writing - cos I like your stuff more every new episode. Oh lor, that just means I'm getting used to you, like an old 45 that you had to play 45 times before you found it bearable. And which was the truer reaction, 1st or 45th?
I know a man who speaks in cliche. 'Let's get the show on the road' means let's have lunch 'Whaddya think of the show so far' - nothing to say, So let's fill the gap. And, of course, 'see what I mean?', 'get the point, follow the joint' (I've misremembered most of it, hear what I'm saying?)
I never know quite when he's joking, you see, Cos cliche is for him a disguise: An escape from desperate pain.
Apart from that, I like the horse poem a lot. Even on first reading. Your image of robes & curtains to describe the horrible warmth of the horse's interior; the lilac-shaped/sized brain...vivid. And the history of the abuse of the horse in the second verse is atmospheric, Bibby. Those mounts are being forced to travel roads that no one in their right mind or with a warm stable would think of taking. No wonder the bugger baulked at the idea of you in the third verse. You must have been wearing your emperor's hat.
One thing about a horse I'm fascinated by: give him an emperor & he'll panic; give him a disabled child & he'll calm down and take on the parental role. He knows when someone needs him for a good reason.
Keep scribbling.
Rod Farley
THE INFLATION OF CLICHE February 1st 2010
Wednesday, 2 December 2009 at 16:49
THE INFLATION OF CLICHÉ
It is self-evident that speaking and writing a language have common features but observable variations. I am thinking mostly of repetition and grammar. Speech (as opposed to ‘a speech’) consists of muddled endings; gaps in sense or meaning; pauses whilst the speaker searches; noises that mean nothing, to gain time; non-sequitors; verbal disintegration and finally,perhaps blessedly, silence, which sometimes turns out to be more eloquent than the mangled emotional/rational artifice that preceded it. One of the reasons for this is memory or the lack of it. One has to remember why one is speaking, about what one is speaking and about how to say it. Alack of this fundamental memory results in drift, repetition and ultimately embarrassment. To be alert and speak coherently is a gift, to be tired and speak coherently is heroic, to have run out of anything plausible to say and still continue speaking coherently is genius. (I realise these examples are demeaning to heroism and genius.)
Politicians and those in the legal profession are capable of the latter two examples in varying degrees and most people who are passionate about something are capable of the first.
All of us, however, suffer from some degree of memory loss, whether it be the public struggle to find an appropriate word or the lack of anything original to say to sum up a description of an emotion or event. And since we are only talking about people who talk to other people rather than themselves (those muttering on side streets) we must remember that all speaking has an audience. Audiences demand timely conclusions. You can’t go on prattling about the cat sick on your carpet indefinitely because if you did your audience would leave the theatre.
In this panicked rush to find a solution to the lost word or phrase we turn to cliché for rescue. It’s much easier and more pragmatic to say ‘Its turned out nice’ than to say ‘ When I woke this morning the bi-polar episode of last night, brought on by excessive alcohol abuse, was, once again going to bring me to my knees in a fit of darkly suicidal depression, when I noticed that King Sol had bathed the entire street in the most glorious light and, uplifted, I began to see that there might be something worthwhile in being alive after all.’ You say the former and write the latter.
Cliché in speech is forgivable infact cliché is extremely useful if only to stop ludicrous explanations full of egotistical pretension like the above from becoming cliché in their own right.
Cliché in speech is an undervalued champion of the rational. Long live cliché.
Cliché in writing is more elusive and thus more difficult to defend.
Many things are easier in writing clichés. We don’t have the machine gun repetition of phrases like ‘…I mean basically…’ or ‘ …you know what I mean…’ we can elaborate with cliché after cliché hardly noticing that we’ve done it while assiduously maintaining a look out for it.
The difference between ‘Mission Impossible’ and ‘Impossible Mission’ is like weights on a scale. The first carries a lightened version of the second by its default status as a cultural plaything, while the second has echoes of the first even when used in the most serious and weighty contexts. The attempt to secure peace, stabilise and introduce democracy into Afghanistan might be easily described as an impossible mission and I think most people would carry it in that context. Should it be referred to as ‘Mission Impossible’ then the subject is lightened and the context breathless and reduced.
Yet everything starts as original and it’s only by overuse that it becomes a clichéand the overuse is only because of its success. Poor cliché… it can’t win.
In poetry cliché has always played an important role.Partly in the chiaroscuro of highlighting originality, partly, more recently,in bringing to poesy a ‘common voice’ described also as a ‘modern voice’ or sometimes even ‘a real voice’. Cliché thus exhibits its full armoury and becomes something not to be excluded but to be welcomed for certain specific purposes. I am ambivalent about this and don’t really have any particularly strong views.
Others do. Christopher Ricks in an essay about Cliché used the lyrics of Bob Dylan to illustrate how, with the smallest twitch on the rein, Dylan could turn a well worn cliché into something different and fresh:
Well,ask me why I’m drunk alla time,
it levels my head and eases my mind.
I just walk along and stroll and sing,
I see better days and do better things.
(I shall Be Free)
The phrase ‘see better days’ has seen better days – that would do as the definition of a cliché. But Dylan brings it from its past into his and our present, by turning it into the present tense….he eases it from a dim past into the bright present. His own ‘I Shall Be Free’ is free from the clicheness of its clichés, without getting proudly trapped in the illusion that you can free yourself from clichés by having no truck with them.
A good point and I think true.
Yet there is something that is beginning to penetrate contemporary poetry in the English language (I am not able to comment on other language) that appears to me to be an inflation of cliché that is far more worrying.
The very content of poems are edging toward cliché. There are a lot of poems being written so one could build an argument, quite successfully, that what I am referring to is not so much cliché as repetition. But isn’t that the growing stem on which cliché blossoms…repetition?
The Forward Book of Poetry 2009 is a good weather-vane since it comprises a selection of published work during the year concerned selected by a team of judges. Best Collection, Best First Collection, Best Single Poem and Highly Commended Poems of which there are about 70. In all over 100 of the considered‘best’ poems of the year with prizes to match.
There are many wonderful poems in this anthology, especially the short listed prizewinners. But the Highly Commended Poems are full of cliché, contextual cliché.Oysters analogous to the labia; alone wondering what the light is across the street and who that person is and if they might be you; many metaphors about going backwards in trains, looking in rear driving mirrors, seeing everything recede; mothers; death; fathers, death; porn violence dressed up as reality in psychiatric wards and police stations; lotsof butchers; and the beginnings of an addiction to aphorisms.
The number of subjects an educated man (for his time) would have to think about in the middle ages in Europe, his lexicon of ideas, was a lot less than the burden of our possible A – Z of subjects. We have buried ourselves under a mountain of possible explorations and yet the mind shrugs this off with indifference. Our minds appear to be able to handle any number. All number of possible subjects.Perhaps that is the mind’s potential: the mastery of all there is. Only at that point will capacity be achieved.
In order to deal with this we elicit the aid of cliché so we can ascribe easily,and universally, known ideas. Cliché in other words ‘ticks the boxes’.
We need to break this habit before it turns poesy into a row of cabbages and when we’ve broken it we need to bring on the new.
The Critical Artifice
No 4 LITERARY POEMS
There is no parliament of literary critics; solitary and remote they internalise their view and then re-construct it and allow it to take an outing. They are essential because they are the closest approximation we have in the west to the perfect reader. Especially with poetry the reader is a rare creature.
There is a landscape to criticism that is immediately familiar: the absolution or condemnation of the history of the artist; the current position of the artist in the cultural firmament; an intimate knowledge of the artist, always used to throw a mordent light and cultivate readership, an infamous one was Al Alvarez on Sylvia Plath, A Savage God: A study of Suicide; secondary cultural concerns regarding existing mores and looking over the shoulder at what others have said.
Naturally not all readers are able to be critics and some critics are notoriously bad readers who deliver on achievement and gossip when feet of clay are spotted, especially sexual slitherings. The writer suffers much at the hands of these (not so much nowadays as all publicity is deemed profitable) but can then be elevated by another mature audience; who the king, who the one pleading for justice?
For the following poem by Seamus Heaney from District and Circle (Faber and Faber 2006) I shall attempt two quite contrary readings.
STERN
in memory of Ted Hughes
‘And what was it like,’ I asked him, ‘Meeting Elliot?’ ‘When he looked at you’, He said, ‘it was like standing on a Quay Watching the prow of the Queen Mary Come towards you, very slowly.’
Now it seems I’m standing on a pierhead watching him All the while watching me as he rows out And a wooden end-stopped stern Labours and shimmers and dips, Making no real headway.
Virtually every word in Stern points to another meaning. A codified literary assembly of phrases and syllables about literature, the poet who observes and the poet who is observed talking about a poet who’s influence both poets have had to find their own escape route from. Nothing, it seems to me, in this poem is as it appears and as an example of a literary device to discuss a literary critique I can’t think of a better example.
The first reading takes the usual form of a skim to feel for the door handle. Heaney tells the story in the first stanza of Ted Hughes meeting T.S. Elliot. This is recounted in the Letters of Ted Hughes ( Faber 2008 ) when TH met T.S. Elliot for the first time at a Faberparty after the publication of his first book of poetry A Hawk in the Rain. Ted Hughes described Elliot’s hands first in a letter to his sister Olwyn Hughes ‘He has huge thick hands - unexpected‘ and then on another occasion to William Scammell the description which Heaney recounts in the poem. Heaney seems to be eager to hear this story ‘And what was it like?’ as if the monumental moment was the most important thing, not the man himself, otherwise he would have surely asked what was he like? Elliot was of course not only the pre-eminent poet of the era and the most famous contemporary poet of the time (a fact that cannot be ignored since both Hughes and Heaney are the most famous contemporary poets of their time) but also poetry editor and one of the directors of Faber.
‘When he looked at you….’ recounts Hughes it was like the prow of the largest ship in the world coming toward you. When he looked at you. As if Ted Hughes was projecting his own future fame onto T.S. Elliot’s current fame. What other words could describe this look: poise, majesty, confidence and above all a superior curiosity about this new prince in the Elliot kingdom. The Hawk in the Rain had won The Galbraith Prize and been highly acclaimed. Not a fear of usurpation or an annoying rivalry but rather a benevolent wish to understand the new poet’s poetry, perhaps to give encouragement, perhaps to curry friendship. Elliot looked down from his massive height, stooped to bestow his blessings and Hughes caught the look, held the gesture and gave it a vaguely mocking analogy.
Heaney remembered being told. A decade or more after Hughes’ death Heaney recounts it again for us. For Heaney too, Elliot, the great English/American bard, cast a long shadow, The Waste Land and the Quartets defined modernism in English poesy. All poets struggled to emancipate themselves from Elliot’s grip just as many poets of today struggle against the influence of Hughes and Heaney. So in this respect Heaney is also making a memoriam for Ted, his friend, ( Heaney said the following of Ted Hughes’ death No death outside my own immediate family has left me feeling more bereft) and also himself. He is saying we are Elliot’s heirs.
In stanza two one poet watches the other. One no longer alive but struggling to leave the shore of his contemporaries and join his precursors, the Elliot’s and the Frost’s and the Shelly’s and Milton’s etc., a very full burial ground of illumination and extravagant brilliance, yet still homaged by contemporary poets, unable to leave, his influence settling but not yet settled, Hughes struggles to leave his legacy and be at peace.
Seamus Heaney is saying, ‘Hughes like me can never leave the shore, the mainland of poesy, for he is immortalised by his work, like Elliot before him. He watches me unable to put any distance between us, for inevitably I shall follow him in my Arthurian death boat, tethered to history.’
And the title ‘Stern’ is all about farewells. As a ship sets from the safety of the harbour its stern is the last thing seen; the part of the ship that carries the rudder, the means of direction. Also the Stern is the opposite of the Prow that Hughes saw coming toward him when he met Elliot. Undoubtedly, although Hughes and by association Heaney have been the Prow’s to many poets, their farewells will be the slowly disappearing reversal of ascendant fortune and excellence. In this poem Heaney is preparing for his own departure.
On the other hand Stern can be read as follows. His meeting with Elliot is overwhelming, the poetic ship of Elliots Waste land moves relentlessly towards him; overpowering him. Thomas Sterns Elliot is an unmovable object whose presence defies him.
Heaney watches Ted Hughes row out, his wooden stiffness, shimmering and labouring to make headway, his exhausting abundance of work, making no real impact.
It is indeed a stern critique about his friends inability to answer the poetic masterfullness of Elliots genius that naturally will also question his own.
Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel
Saturday, 31 October 2009 at 18:12
It seems that Frederick Seidel causes some confusion by his poetry with English Poetic sensibilities. He is much better received in the United States with reviews in the New York Review of Books and in the October issue, a poem published.
One reason for this is that he comes with a truly American voice tinged with European anguish and as a result is not fully comprehended, it seems, this side of the Atlantic.
Blake is the ghost in Frederick (Sui) Seidal’s work and his ‘cod’ rhymes are no worse than ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright/in the forests of the night…’ but his metaphors are not lit by the arcane struggle between good and evil, envisioned by Blake but have been modernised to address the struggle between luxury and starvation, sex and death, napalm manufacture and the hurtling functions of his Ducati Corse; possibly Hell.
Ooga-Booga seen in this light steps smartly away (dances with Fred Astaire) from the Blakesian image to the confessional voice of Robert Lowell who influenced him but later caught and spun by Gregory Corso and above all Allen Ginsberg who had his own Blakesian demons.
‘Howl’ broke loose and throughout Ooga-Booga we can hear Frederick Seidel trying to snap his tortured bonds and break out too.
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
(Opening lines ofAmerica, published in Howl, October 1956)
The United States of America preemptively eats the world.
The doctrine of eat lest you be eaten
Is famished, roars
And tears their heads off before its own is sawed off.
The human being sawing screams ’God is Great!’
(Opening lines of stanza 4 of Bush Administration in Ooga-Booga published 2006)
It is the modernist mannerism of Tropic of Cancer and Under the Volcano; angry,ribald, insulting and deft.
Its ‘popper’ poetry, both The Open Society and amyl-nitrate, throwing Seidel into epileptic poetic seizures, as this stanza from Dante’s Beatrice demonstrates:
I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and I its.
All it lacked was tits.
All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.
The Beatles could sing this or the Ramones. Or Ginsberg:
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!…
This is America not England, full of blank threats like going down a US penitentiary corridor.
For some reason Faber publish Frederick Seidal two years or more later than his American publishers. Are they waiting for permission? Is Fred going to Bologna first to have his racing Ducati built in order to self immolate his bitch and himself? Will sales increase after his spectacular wipe out:
The racer being made for me
Is not ready,but is getting deadly.
Seidal understands only too well the slow turning of the material screw
as`we herd our junked up planet into smaller and smaller corners, now populated by billions of others and this to Seidel is perverse and his perversity liberates itself in verse:
My own poetry I find incomprehensible.
Actually, I have no one.
Everything in art is couplets.
Mine don’t rhyme.
Or
Judith slew Holofernes.
Cut his head off.
Slew slime.
Cunt with a dick
Cut the monster’s head off.
Holofernes startled head farts blood
And falls off.
And he also deals in the anguish
Islam is submission
Behead the man
Who will not listen!
My head and hand are coming to an end.
There’s no co-ordination; as Ginsberg dealt with it in 1956 only a decade before Seidal started writing poetry.
Oh yes, he’s been around for a while.
FROM ROD FARLEY 27TH. OCTOBER 2009
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 at 11:25
Ah...I see...I think I see.
I'm wondering about this pinning down as you call it of Death, Love etc. I was reasonably impressed by your paragraph, until I thought 'Hey, What is this crap? Surely we want to try & understand people's experiences of love etc. - not death cos that's freaky & hard-going - in order to compare our life-stories with others' & so connect with the rest of the race?. If I had exactly the same numbness when I saw a beauty as you did, I'd say Crikey, I've been there! (Probably had the same shit from the same dealer, actually.) If not, I'd say Crikey, missed out again. (& change my dealer.)
Keep scribbling. I like this interchange. You're sort of unpredictable.
Do you carry a gun? Sorry, just a thought.
Rod Farley
Dear Rod....the time is fast approaching when the purchase of a fire-arm seems inevitable. I have little experience with them but I believe you can hit your target from many hundreds of feet...well this could be a bit of a metaphore. I never have to say I have missed out again because I have never tried....wouldn't succeed to describe either love or death. When you're dead there isn't much communication...when your in love you don't need words...nevertheless they are the two things which demand our attention and about which most things written are written. Arjuna understands only too well Krishna's mocking response to his question...abandon hope and experience what is there....throw yourself in...or as Ted Hughes used to say 'stick your head in the bucket'.
What is the telephone number of your dealer?
THE NINE TYPES OF POEM
Thursday, 15 October 2009 at 11:03
Nothing looks good unless it’s numbered, No 7, 34B, K101, 1914-18, 9.11.2001 which turned out to have a greater effect down here than a discovery located in the orbit of Jupiter, 9mm and so on.
So it’s good to number poetry; give it the fragile bridge it needs to span the turbulence of the words. In my view there are nine types of poem.
1. Descriptive Poems: Countryside, haircuts, kitchens etc.
2. Story Poems. Someone went somewhere and did something.
3. Joke Poems. Puns, one liners, allegorical fixes on the now.
4. Literary Poems. Full of dazzling technique, classical form and eclectic reference.
5. Metaphorical Poems. The most common. Endless varieties of how one thing means another.
6. Moment Poems. That spring open like a trap door into a new world to explain something that cannot be explained.
7. Influenced Poems. Where the ideas, line structure, mirror (mostly unconsciously) the greater original.
8. Autobiographical poems.
9. Political/Polemic Poems.
All the above naturally include elements of some of the others but the main thrust is, usually, fairly apparent.
I would like to take each one and provide an example and discuss it.
No.6 Moment Poems.
This poem by Lesley Saunders is called The Experiment.
Of the boy or boys who took part nearly everything must be invented: whether their parents had given consent, whether friends were envious or scared, how unexpectedly their dreams of flying would end – though
you’d know the moment you’d met one by the excitable wings of his collar, by the folded ailerons of the shoulder-blades, the way his uncertain hair has coiled itself into wires, and the eyes like skies after lightening; even so
hearing a series of small storms in a room upstairs,you’d hardly infer what was there: something suspended, clairvoyant, a body of evidence plying between laws of desire and repulsion, results and their cause,
the child all the while sparkling, a lark mirror, a dark chandelier, levitating feathers, confetti, little leaves of gold that fill his nose and mouth like a shout, till he’s an ariel in the bird-catcher’s hand, thrilled almost to bits.
What makes it work is the silk, and the virtue repeatedly applied to his heels: hinting, if only the rain holds off, at brave new systems for travelling through time over wild-eyed distances, hire wire acts over oceans and prairies, a rodeo of lights.
For some looking back it must have seemed just a dream, a phrase they’d been going through, unconditional, perfect; for others, a warning of danger to come, charged, resistant, different, a world hung by a thread; the future before it’s begun
It is not in our nature not to want to know although others have disagreed with this.
William Empson for instance in Seven Types of Ambiguity ‘The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live aswell as one can;….’. Given the depletion of nerve and intelligence as aesthetics are conceived and then suppressed by our reverence for material effect, it is a miracle that we can still remain calm in the face of absolute paradox.
In ‘wanting to know’ we seem to be always presented with the barrel of the gun pointing at our heads rather than holding the trigger. Think of the discovery and implementation of atomic power or the different but more insidious power of the dark side of the Internet. And of course the internal combustion engine that has, in large part, enabled our global civilisation to achieve greater wealth than ever before but has also been central to the slaughter of millions and now the contamination of our planet. The thing we wanted to know and subsequently created turns on us like a jealous deity.
It may be that ‘not wanting to know’ holds a very important aspect of ourselves because in the act of ‘not wanting to know’ we do, it seems to me, two things.
First we stop making demands on the pragmatic resolution of a question and secondly acknowledge that an absolute answer is a dead end and that more creative and imaginative answers will not only be relative but open ended, leading to other questions.
For someone to assert that ‘God exists’ is not nearly so rewarding as saying that to believe in the existence of God incorporation of God being ‘nothing’ and ‘non-existence’ might also be involved, which in turn would lead to a greater insight than that so absolutely inferred in the first statement.
This contemporary poem leads to insights not apparent in its attempt to discriminate between a wiser/older set of eyes observing something that is not fully understood except by the protagonists of the story even when they had acquired the wisdom to do so in the final stanza.
So the story of the poem is a simple set piece between a misunderstanding (consummated in the final lines) as the principal characters look at themselves and the observing poet coolly describes one universal truth as something discreet and uniquely ingenious. In this case The Experiment.
‘Not knowing’ then becomes more than just unconscious growing up. It also becomes the very light the poet uses to illuminate what it was like ‘not to know’.Leslie Saunders delivers this for the reader so that we may also use ‘not knowing’ to understand how childhood might well be seen as an experiment the outcome of which is unpredictable.
So lets look at this and see what a moment Leslie Saunders has managed to invoke.
Her munitions are ‘aileron’, ‘something suspended’, levitating feathers’ and‘heels’ in stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively.
An aileron is a hinged flap on an aircraft for maintaining lateral control, in other words giving the ability to move from side to side, or to balance sideways movement. It suggests also a restriction in movement.
Childhood is necessarily restricted by the provision of life within the environment surrounding the child. No one can grow up in an expanded childhood that negotiates everything there is. And yet the imagination of childhood allows for the creation of possibilities even though there is the impossibility of being able to fly by oneself.
The imagination of a child can create flight but it is something that one has to suspend before physical reality reduces the notion to rubble. A suspended belief is itself dangling in air.
So another tack is required and the myth of Icarus and his waxed and feathered wings offers a solution to the imagination for the soaring energy of the initial enterprise. What happens next can be safely kept for the melancholy of adolescence and the grim physical laws that circumscribed his boundless enthusiasm.
Myth comes to the rescue a second time with the heels winged liked doves and Perseus covering unimaginable distances for his rescue missions.
So we are delivered flight as the perfect imaginative escape, its Olympian ideal crushed by the inevitable flight from childhood only in the final lines.This is a moment where two things become one thing and the poem flowers with truth and grief.
