The Word Cloud

Over on the thread about Creative Writing, I posted a poem to exemplify the poet William Carlos Williams's dictum "No ideas but in things" and it sparked off a discussion which I'm copy and pasting here, in the hope that it'll go on....

Emma:

Nashelle, the William Carlos Williams quote is about how poetry must be grounded in physical reality, if it's going to say anything worth saying: generalisations and abstractions on their own won't do.

I must say I agree, on the whole. This is one of his most famous poems:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Nashelle:
I know that poem. And I agree with what he says. A poem can't be just nice words! Some people say that my poetry shows the 'real' me. That I
tell a truth in my poetry that I don't in my prose. That's quite an interestign topic - telling the truth in fiction writing. I write more
prose than oetry so this is something I'm working on.

I think you have to 'lie' in autobiography (or at least bend the truth) and tell the truth in fiction. of course there are no rules...!

Tony:

Can anyone tell me why the brief statement,

"I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast.
Forgive me. They were delicious; so sweet and so cold."

when split up into little bits, become poetry that people apparantly think is marvelous. I'm not getting
at you, Emma, and perhaps you're the one to explain it to me. I don't consider myself a Philistine, but
I can see no merit whatsoever in in this, nor does it hold a shred of interest for me.
Maybe Mrs William's reaction might have been worth recording for posterity. Am I alone in my
inability to appreciate such mediocrity (my judgement)?

I enjoyed
minced beef
for dinner,
followed by
strawberries, meringue and
icecream.
Delicious.

Cool

Emma:
It's about sex, and forgiveness, and marriage, and a few dozen other things. Technically brilliant - the s-sounds in the last stanza, for
instance, and the rhythm of the first...

I've just read it again. Try really making the most of those line endings. Masterly.

Tony:

What does anyone else think? Am I the only Philistine on the Cloud?
Well, thanks indeed for trying Emma. That explanation/critique hasn't changed my opinion at all, I'm afraid. The writer's exposition sound a bit pretentious to me. I wonder how much of what he reads into William's words were actually in the poet's mind when he wrote the piece. Maybe he had a completely different hidden meaning. Maybe he just liked plums, but not for breakfast (can't say I'd blame him for that). Maybe I am a Philistine, after all - I am just 'so not turned on' by any of this sort of stuff (even less so, by erudite writing that manages to extrapolate pages of explanation from the original couple of sentences!), but I am grateful to you for pointing me to it. I'm sure you won't take offence at my voicing my opinion, Emma. Please don't. I shoudl be very distressed if you did. Thanks again.
What does anyone else think? Am I the only Philistine on the Cloud?

Cool



Edwina:

You're not alone Tony. I don't get it either, but then I have never been into poetry that much. Unless it is a straight forward theme, I'm lost. I think I'm probably the Philistine Tony.

Emma:

"I wonder how much of what he reads into William's words were actually in the poet's mind when he wrote the piece."

In mainstream literary criticism, that's not the issue (though of course it is for us, as writers, thinking about how and what to write): the
basic principle is that the text stands alone. Of course there's space for each of us to have our own personal reactions, but even if the
critic reads it differently from how Williams intends it to be read - which is every reader's right - there's no escaping that Williams was working with that kind of minute attention and complexity, because that's what poets do, and what he said he was doing.

Not offended at all, BTW, though it's always a shame when someone doesn't get a poem you love. Anyone who is interested in understanding why and how contemporary poets do what they do, and why it matters, should check out Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, which is to poetry what David Lodge's The Art of Fiction
is to novels: Padel is the most miraculous explicator. And because it, like the Lodge, started as a newspaper column, exploring one poem each
time, it's great for dipping. Besides, it's hugely valuable, as a prose writer, to be reminded of just the kind of close-up attention
to words that writing poetry entails, because writing prose should

Tony:
Now that all makes sound sense and not at all pretentious. I'll have to
try and get a look at "52 Ways". I do, indeed, agree that great prose
should be like poetry to the soul and it would be good to get some tips
to help with that.

Edwina, thanks so much for joining me 'above the parapet'. It was getting lonely up here.
entail it too, even if our tools and purposes are different.


Emma:
The link I posted was probably not the best explication, because it was part of a larger argument about the whole Imagist movement, but it was what I could find...

The thing is, I think, that we've all forgotten that we once had to learn how to read fiction: how metaphors work (metaphors being the basics of thingy-ideas and ideay-things), what's going on with a jump-cut, flashbacks, prolepsis, deductions about what people feel from their gestures when the writer doesn't tell you, ambiguities, reversals, surprises which are only surprising because you had expectations based on other books, and so on. Some people learn how to read to the point of making sense of Finegans Wake, (not me, though) others have trouble assembling the stories in, say, Peter Ackroyd, some can't or don't want to deal with more complexity than you get in a Mills & Boon, or category sf/f fiction.

And reading poetry is to some extent also about learning how to read it, but while some of the tools are the same (metaphor, say), others aren't - line-endings, the hundred and one different kinds of rhyme beyond consonantal end rhymes, playing with metre, and so on. That's what Ruth P. is so brilliant at: showing you some of those things, and getting you to hear/see/feel how and why they work.

Just a very small example: the L sounds in the Williams which link 'plums', to 'cold', beginning and end, with round, sounds and lots of consonants which lie forward in the mouth: p, m, d, and lie heavily at the line-ends, so that 'plums' holds on and gains weight, and 'cold' rounds out the end. And a faint echo of o and bs and p, in the middle with 'probably', also round and forward but with a feminine (i.e. unstressed syllable) ending, because it's the middle, and still moving on, and probably is an uncertain, un-final sort of word. In prose you might play a bit with the sound of the words and sentence, but only the most poetically-minded writers would actually plait it all together as carefully as that. But the poem-reader can just hear it, or feel it, or actually to and fro and find it all consciously. A reader will 'unpack' a poem, in the way you can't really a novel, but it helps to know what kinds of unpacking might yield treasure.

Tony:
more excellent sense, thank you. I'm beginning to see what you're getting at - there's so much pleasure to be gained from good poetry if only you work hard enough to find it and think hard enough to appreciate all its finer nuances.
Now I meant that sincerely, but even as I wrote it, it sounded as though I were being sarcastic, because, of course, you could equally argue, how much better (certainly easier) to sit down to read a good ripping yarn that entertains straight off the page with no analysis required. Or, in the case of more litterary fiction, enjoy a good read and appreciate the rhythm of the phrasing and subtility of the metaphors and word pictures as well - still without having to take it apart line by line to achieve satisfaction.
And the same could be said about 'old-fashioned' poetry. It can be appreciated at face-value, though no doubt yielding all sorts of hidden treasures, too, to the expert eye who takes the time to delve.
I think that's my objection. This modern stuff, certainly to the inexpert eye, has no face-value. Its value - beauty - pleasure, has to be prized out - and that probably takes an expert. So it is of little use to people like me. Am I being too crass? If something doesn't immediately appeal to some extent, what would make me want to put time and effort into finding out if, maybe at another level, there was something of great value? (A bit like the opening paragraphs of a novel: if they don't grab the agent / publisher / reader, why should they want to read on?)
I take great pleasure in studying the workings of the latest gadget to see how the mechanics of its manufacture enable it to carry out its function. Others may understand nothing of its workings but appreciate it, none-the-less, as a very useful gadget. I might think they are missing out on the wonders of it ingenuity, but they are happy having a gadget that perfectly fulfills its function for them.
To me, William's poem and those of that ilk, are like a gadget that has no actual function but is still, as you have explained about the poems, intricately and ingeniously made. The mechanism can be appreciated if you take the trouble to delve, but others will justifyably say, What does it do? Nothing. What's the point?
The point, I might say, is to demonstrate this marvelously subtle new mechanism. But I don't understand mechanics, they reply. It does nothing for me. Should I encourage them to become expert mechanical engineers in order to appreciate its subtilty? Would they not reply, but I can already appreciate this other gadget that works for me, even though I may not understand how. Why bother with the one that does nothing for me?
I guess I'm still not converted, but my analogy, has reminded me that just as some are mechanically minded, some our poetically minded. As I can appreciate the workings of technology, others can appreciate the artistry of modern poetry, even though it may remain an enigma to me. To each his own, I guess.

Cool

Emma:
I picked the example of the L sounds because you don't need to unpick it to apprehend it: in reading you hear those sounds, whether or not you can or want to understand how they're working. Working it out comes later, or never. Williams is only doing in a subtler way what traditional consonantal end-rhymes have always done: making links and patterns with sounds.

I see the analogy you're making (and I'm someone who very much appreciates the aesthetics of machines without being in any way an engineer). The reason 'traditional' poetry appeals is because we're used to the idiom: we know 'how' to read it, as an engineer knows what a camshaft will be doing, whatever the ultimate job of the machine as a whole. Beethoven's late quartets sounded to his contemporaries as the weirdest products of IRCAM do to us, because they were like showing a steam-driven age what's going on with quantum mechanics...

I think the first thing to do when reading modern poetry is to be open to it: to listen and feel for whatever it offers, letting the images and sounds set off in your brain whatever they do set off: a poem is created between writer and reader. What it says in a verbally explainable sense may not be immediately obvious (but then what Joyce's Ulysses or To the Lighthouse say is also not obvious at first reading), just as, say, a dance isn't immediately explicable and yet is completely compelling, with shape and meaning for us. As Eliot said when someone asked him what The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock meant, 'If I knew that, I wouldn't have to write the poem.'

Tony:
I chuckled at that Eliot quote; it's strangely reassuring. Each time you respond I see a little more - you make a good appologist for the genre.
I feel that any work of art, be it poetry, painting, music, dare I say - novel? needs to grab its audience up front. Something about it must make the observer want to stop and dwell a while, appreciate further whatever the work has to offer. There are many examples of all four of thse art forms that (for me) completely fail to hold my attention. Perhaps I am the looser for never having experienced whatever I might have uneartherd, had I lingered, but I don't feel I'm entirely to blame; the poet, artist, musician, writer, must bear some of the responsibility. But then, justifiably, they may say they are not producing their art for such as me, but for those who can appreciate it, which maybe is a pity.

Cool

Good idea, Emma, to put all this on to its own site and open it up for a wider input. It's a shame WordCloud is messing up the alignment (and put one or two glitches into the transferred text). Because it's so hard to read the text against the ochre background, try this: LEFT-CLICK AND DRAG YOUR MOUSE OVER THE TEXT. HIGHLIGHTED, IT BECOMES EASILY READABLE; you still have to scroll right and left.

Tony, crossed with you. I've tried editing the HTML and it still doesn't work. I think it was the original long link, but it doesn't seem to be able to re-think things...

Dunnit! Copy and pasted into WordPad, to strip out the coding. A bit crude, but at least it's not messing things up!

Hey - well done, Emma. Not only artistically articulate, but technically terrific, too.

(Does the aliteration qualify that as poetry?)

(Does the aliteration qualify that as poetry?)

No - it qualifies it at alliteration...

Oh well,
That's swell.
I'll bow
out now,
Not quite
contrite.

Tony, I'll admit to philistinity too - there's a lot of modern poetry that I simply don't "get" - although I'm aware that there is something I'm not getting. I used to write poetry copiously up until the age of nine (!), when a fire in the classroom consumed my entire life's work (!!) - I'd taken in my whole notebook (!!!) for a school project and didn't have a copy. Next time I went to school, there wasn't even a classroom; I don't think I ever got over it. Now and again, one squeezes out of me but the style is still stuck in that of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc that I loved at that tender age although occasionally a purple one erupts from me. I know they're not very good (well, I did win a school prize with one, aged 17, but that just shows the standard of the competition).
I like Wendy Cope (Lear and Belloc for grown-ups) - and your little ditties - but other than that, they sail right over my head.
Emma, I am open to understanding, I just don't yet. I liken it to Modern Art, which left me stony until I visited MOMA in New York (the Frank Lloyd Wright beehive) and had an epiphany. The dominoes in my mind toppled over and I finally got it - and love it now. I trust that one day, the same thing will happen with poetry, when the time is right.
Whisks

Whisks, that's so sad about the loss of your life's work just be thankful it happened so early on . And thanks for joining Edwina and I as the only ones on the Cloud admitting to struggling with modern poetry. Emma's making a sterling effort to awaken within us whatever it is that as yet lies dormant, but so far I still await my epiphany. In the mean time I will, no doubt, continue to pen the odd 'ditty' for my own and others' entertainment.

I have a fondness for 'bad' poetry - doggerel, I guess. I know 'The Highwayman' off by heart. And 'The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.' My grandfather (who was a minor Irish poet of the modern variety) would turn in his grave.

There's lots of modern poetry (lots of modern fiction, come to that) which I don't get either. Some I just think, 'So? Was that it?' and others I have a stronger sense that there's something I'm not getting, but, as Whisks says, I'm just not. (I can't tell you how frustrating it is when the boot's on the other foot, and a reviewer doesn't like your book because they've completely not got it...)

How about this one, by John Burnside, which is one of my current favourites since I found it in Padel's follow-up to 52 Ways, The Poem and the Journey. It seems to me a more subtle example of No Ideas But In Things, in a journey from concrete to abstract:

The Old Gods

Now they are condemned
to live in cracks
in bubbles of plaster and rust
and spiders' webs
behind the furniture:

speaking a derelict language
to empty space,
sealed with the vapour
in bottles, closed in the blown
robins' eggs
in some abandoned loft.

Each has its given power.
Each has its heart, its secret,
its local name,
and each has its way of learning
the skill of return,
the science of bleeding through, when anger or fear
is fuzzing the surface,
making us dizzy and whole.




If you want some ways to track the journey, you could try the end-words of the lines, or the ideas of the Old Gods, or the concrete, physical verbs and nouns, or the vowel-sounds, or the consonants, or the beat of the lines - notice the only long line...

Crossed with Aonghus. I love things like bits of Tennyson and Blake, Masefield's Cargoes and Kipling, and yes, the Little Yellow Idol - wonderful to read aloud. I don't think that's horrifying at all, any more than liking Austen or Dickens is horrifying. And similarly, it's just not something which you could write now...

Googled my grandad and found one of his poems.

An Island

A man must go naked to an island,
Let the weather lend
A skin till he grows one, the rock fit
The beat of the surftop to
His feet; let him go like spindrift
Till he find wings, or the wave
Streamline him like the great
Matter of a seal.

Let him find toes too,
Prehensile or web, for the cliff fall;
Let him put two notes in his pipe
And be the first music.
Let the island be the eye
And the boundary of his being, then
Let him be an island
And bound on his own beat,

Back before the Gods,
Before the beginning, before the betrayal,
Before the woman slopped over on his bed,
Before the sun stood on a stone circle;
Let him go back to be
Just one simple thing, matter, an island
At its first meeting with the sea.

Hopefully nobody in the extensive Fallon clan will sue me for breach of copyright...

I rather like that - a nice invocatory air to it. And I love 'the great/matter of a seal'. Not sure about the gender politics of the last stanza, though...

Emma

His wife was a tough old matriarch and all his poems were published posthumously - probably to avoid any rows. I'm afraid a bad attitude towards gender politics is a bit of a Fallon trait. Not me, though. No sir....

I liked the Burnside poem as I like the idea of forgotten but important things (gods, the idea of gods, or whatever you're having yourself) hidden away in the cracks of the world and this is what the poem conveyed to me.

And I adore Wendy Cope. The poetry world is only beastly about her because she sells and makes money. You thought novelists could be spiteful and competitive about each other, until you hear a bunch of poets at the bar - ye gods!

Glad you like the Burnside too.

It occurs to me that your grandpapa might have known my grandmama, born 1901. Her father was a civil servant in Dublin on the edges of the the Yeats/Lady Gregory/Abbey Theatre circle - apparently Yeats would never talk to him if there was anyone more important in the room.

I've tried to understand 'The Old Gods', I really have. But all it says to me is Neglect - not a very uplifting sentiment. And to pick on two negative feelings - anger and fear to be the apparantly missing elements that will make us whole, is again a bit of a downer. There are some pleasing phrases and pictures that I liked (speaking a derelict language to empty space; some abandoned loft) But I don't at all feel a better person to have read it, I'm afraid.
Sorry Aonghus, the Fallon touch is a bit lost on me, too. I'm just checking the cost of flights back to Philistia as we speak.

and each has its way of learning
the skill of return,
the science of bleeding through, when anger or fear
is fuzzing the surface,
making us dizzy and whole.

I think what it's saying that even though the old gods (the celtic gods, if you like, or the old powers that we've lost our capacity to sense) are trapped in the ignored, neglected fabric of the world, each has learnt to come back when we need it to, so that when anger or fear is fuzzing the surface of life, which is all we usually see, it can bleed through that surface, to make us dizzy and whole with some sense of the transcendent and immanence of their divinity.

Blimey! I was a morbid teenager. This is what I wrote at 17.

A Tree called death

Shadow of a charcoaled bark

And all is lost amid the dark

Inseparable in discontent

Damp and cold when summer’s spent

Now call to me for I need you

Though I hate the sun – in sun we grew

Now autumn leaves are falling fast

Carpeting the valued past

It’s hard to tell when one’s not there

Can’t take a chance – not sure they care

When all that’s left for you to see

Stands tall and straight – Death’s dark tree

And all you saw were old brick walls

Broken windows and abandoned stalls

Put on your coat and catch your breath

As your eyes look up on a tree called Death.

Anyway, for my two penneth. I think the William Carlos Williams poem about the plums (well I know it's not really about plums) is, what can I say - very sweet. It would have made me smile fondly had my husband written it for me, but, as a poem? I am not sure. It is more of a little love letter. Chinch

Chinch, someone (who knows) ought to comment on your poem it sounds very good, although I haven't figure out what you're on about, or what the tree of death is. (But, if you've read any of my contribuions above you'll know not to let that put you off!). Write on.

Emma: thanks for the explanation; at least that sounds as though it's making sense to me, unlike the poem.

Tony, you're welcome.

Chinch, I think that's rather impressive for 17, both technically and creatively - and aren't all 17 year olds morbid? I know I was. Something to do with not really believing it can touch them...

Anyone who likes traditional forms - rhyme and metre - might enjoy this one, by Tony Harrison:

Timer

Gold survives the fire that's hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of coarse official buff
contains your wedding ring which wouldn't burn.

Dad told me I'd to tell them at St James's
that the ring should go in the incinerator.
That 'eternity' inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they'd be together, 'later'.

I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress -

the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!

It's on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!

I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me watch to time the eggs.

Powerful imagery there Emma, and everso ...uncomfortable. I like it though, as it's cleverly written, and very different. Creepy!

Dearie me, this is a lot to take in on a Sunday but I'm hanging on in there *gulp*.

First, The Old Gods - yeah, I kinda "got" it after reading it once or twice (and even before your explanation, Emma - hooray for me - it was nice to know I was on the right track when you unpicked, so thanks), but I still found it hard work; like glimpsing a match flickering at the end of the tunnel, rather than a dazzling sun.
Aonghus' ancestor - I rather liked this, even though I don't "get" most of it - I really did enjoy the language and emotion and left it at that. I think that might be my problem - I can appreciate metaphor and elegant words, phrases, even sentences - but put them all together, and you've lost me. There's a struggle between my id and my conscious brain - the id "gets" it on an emotional level, but can't explain it to the rest of the grey matter which then gets frustrated and cross.
One or t'other of them brings to mind school days when we had to learn poems off by heart. I remember being quite taken with Grey's Elegy in a Churchyard (or somesuch) but instead, plumped for "Tony the Turtle" to learn out of shear bloody-mindedness (everyone else chose Tennyson, Keats et al - show-offs, the lot of 'em, I thought).
Chinch's poem - I'm no poetry critic but I empathised with the 17-year-old who wrote it - and yes, I understood it.
Timers - yup, I did like it - fun, a vignette, and a bit clever. It wasn't supposed to be fun, was it? Oh dear, you've stuffed up again, Whisks.
The plum poem, I also thought more like a love letter, chinch - good analogy - meaningful for the recipient but not necessarily for me, although I quite liked its simplicity. Reminds me of Wendy Cope's "The Orange" (or something like that) which brought the same private smile to my face. I've also lived the last ten years of my life according to Wendy's poem about the Purple Hat.
I'm a simple soul, really.
Whisks

P.S. Forgot to than you, Emma, for dragging us rough philistines out of the darkness of ignorance by our scruffs. I'm enjoying this thread, really, even if I kick and scream. A glimmer of understanding is worse than none, methinks, but I'm trying (you can agree with me, it's OK).