The Word Cloud

EmmaD - it's possible, as my grandad was a civil servant too. His name was Padraic Fallon and he was a customs official, based in Wexford, but he went up to Dublin quite a bit. They may have moved in different circles, though. Yeats only went into a pub once in his life, out of curiosity - middle class protestants rarely frequented pubs and he was very unimpressed - whereas my grandfather was fond of his pint, and apparently (if provoked) fairly handy with his fists. Another factor was that Yeats felt a bit uncomfortable with the new wave of Irish poets (Kavanagh et al) as he felt they might supplant him.

Whisks. Sorry I can't fill you in on the underlying significance of this poem, but I'd never read it until I came across it on the net this morning. On the basis of what little I have read of my grandfather's work though, this is a pretty typical example.

I like the sound of your grandfather. I always think of Yeats as one of the proofs that great artists aren't necessarily nice or admirable people, except for their art.

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.

I think one part of learning to read poetry or indeed anything, is learning to go with the flow - to accept what you can't understand, and accord it equal value. Not easy, if you're an over-educated type like me whose spend the last twenty years trying to put her left brain in its place. I can unpick a poem like The Old Gods, but I can't actually tell you what the connection is between the sense I make of it, and the power of the poem. After all, if it was only the sense, it wouldn't need to be a poem, would it: it would be enough to have a few paragraphs of explication. Only it isn't enough. The art of the poet is to make everything come together - sound, sense, metaphor, myth, image, rhythm - and you could argue that the better the poem, the more, when you try to untwist the strands, they insist on snapping back again into a single rope.

Yeahbut, yeahbut,
I take your point an' all, but my Id can't write. It's part of my primitive brain and worries only about my beating heart. My Ego (as in the conscious bit) does the writing and needs to understand how to do it otherwise it can't do it - and it gets frustrated. It's all very well letting the Id soak it all up, but it doesn't let on what it's learned - it's a bottleneck.
Now and again, I've written what my Ego tells me is a fandabbydoobilous poem and I await a shower of glory from the creative writing teacher - who then says "Mmmm, interesting. What does anyone else think? Anyone?"
Not understanding how it works, means that I can't replicate it - and by "how it works", I don't mean technical masculine/feminine endings, iambic / sestina / villanelle / haiku with curry sauce, I mean that I don't seem to understand the process at root.
You mentioned a rope. I understand "rope". Things associated with rope. Let's see.

I can empathise with Whisks.
I do like Emma's analogy of the untwisted strands in a rope all springing back into place. That would work for me. But what I've seen here is the need to untwist the strands in order to make some sense of the piece / justify it having been written, only to be left with a bunch of slightly-more-easy-to-understand, untwisted strands. The excercise has destroyed the moment.
I think a poem, like any piece of art, should speak straightaway to the observer leavinghim a better person - happier, uplifted, more conscious of an important issue - something, anything that adds value, even if it is only admiration for the skill of the poet. At least some of this should be obvious from a first reading.
The fact that this is not the case for me with the type of poems we have been discussing probably says more about me than about the poetry, but I feel it is a justifiable reason for my not liking this syle. If you say it is excellent, I can take your word for that, just as I would that of a wine connoisseur who extolls the virtue of a particularly dry Chardonay, even though I know my pallate would find it much too dry. If I were given a taste I would have to say that I didn't like it - not that that would detract from its no doubt excellent qualities. In like manner I have to say that I don't like this style of poetry.

I see exactly what you mean, and there's no denying that some poems speak more readily than others. But the reason for acquiring a few untwisting skills is that after a while you don't have to use them consciously, any more than you have to break words into their letters and spell them out once you've learnt to read fluently. What had to be a left-brain process at first becomes a joint operation of left and right brain (Whisks, FWIW I find that a more useful distinction than ego and id, when it comes to creativity). It just happens, and the poem can work on you directly, simultaneously, figuratively (right brain) as well as logically, sequentially, verbally (left brain). And, to an extent, you don't even need to understand it in the untwisting sense, just to be willing experience it openly, like music which seemed uncomfortably spiky and incomprehensible a couple of decades ago, and now just seems like music: receiving what it offers, making of it what you will.

Think of a poet you like. Once upon a time you'd have taken a bit of thought to understand one of Elizabeth Barrett's Sonnets from the Portuguese, say "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." It's sophisticated grammatically, the vocabulary isn't what we use every day, and the sonnet form would seem downright peculiar if we hadn't had 600-odd years to get used to it. It only seems easy because we're in training.

I remember my mother saying that she'd gone to a big gallery of modern art in the 50s and, not having any art historical kind of education, being completely baffled by what to make of it all. It just seemed like stuff, rubbish, pointlessness. So she decided that all she would try to do was find something to say about each piece. If it was just that her toddler nephew would like all the bright colours, that was fine. If it was that it would be fun to float on a lake, that was fine too.

And she said that the effect was very odd, because although there were still lots of pieces she wouldn't have said she got, when she left and went into the street, suddenly she saw everything, from streetlamps to people's faces to the clouds in the sky, afresh, anew, as if she'd never seen them before in her life. I find that even poetry I don't 'understand' in the logical sense has that power.

I'm not saying that anyone has to put the work in if they don't want to, and anyone's at liberty to dislike a poem. I'm only trying to explain why some people find it's worth it...

Yes, we all start out prefering the sweeter wines, but even I have progressed to demi-sac. Maybe one day...
If I can be a little mischievous, when you told how your mother's experience caused her to see other things in a new light, the thought that flashed through my mind was "These poems do have a value - they make me appreciate other poetry more!"

I think I shall retire for the night on that note, before you hit me.

My girlfriend introduced me to Wendy Cope. I think my two favourites would have to be 'A Policeman's Lot' about patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes, and 'Nursery Rhyme' which is 'Baa Baa Blacksheep' - written in the style of Wordsworth. It would be really tempting to post the second poem up here as it's so short, but I read a very angry article penned by her about how everybody was doing this and gypping her out of her royalties. So buy the book, folks. It's called 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis'.

Yes, it's classic stuff.

I confess, I probably shouldn't have posted any of the poems I have - if I get sued, I'll have to take them down...