Clive James on the art of poetry

Poetry ‘cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood’, wrote Zbigniew Herbert in 1948: ‘It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.’ Nothing could be more truly said of Clive James’s approach to poetry. His latest assemblage of essays, reviews, and miscellanea, collected over the years that straddle his diagnosis of leukemia, feel necessary as oxygen. There is a quiet restlessness too: a sense of sorting papers into some final order. James has taken fifteen ‘miniature essays’ commissioned by Poetry magazine and welded them together with interstitial passages, much like the retrospective auto-critiques he included in the reissue of his first volume of criticism The Metropolitan Critic. Published alongside a number of more formal pieces (including appreciations of the usual Australian suspects: Les Murray, Peter Porter, and Stephen Edgar), they reflect the man’s lifelong fascination with the substance and practice of poetry. Questions of technique, historical developments, shifting fashions – everything from canteen gossip to the isolate ecstasies of the craft is thought upon: everything, that is, except ‘theory’, an omission James explains by recourse to a couple of old masters: In my active years as a critic I made it a rule, when talking about poetry, to confine myself to practical points that I felt professionally qualified to discuss, having long been engaged in writing poems of my own. With due allowance to scale, I wanted to stay in the territory that Dr Johnson, himself a great critic, retroactively marked out for Dryden, our first great critic, the poetry criticism of a poet. ‘If there was any theory behind my approach,’ James concludes, it was ‘the theory that concentrated meaning should be what any poet should be after’. And so, rather than teasing out some larger aesthetic, it is the critic’s efforts to register emotional and intellectual responses to ‘a stretch of language that transmits the thrill of human creativity by all its means’ that gives the Notebook its particular charge. There are few critics at work today (let alone poets) who could wring such imaginative freedom from such tight corsetry. But James has, ever since his first, rip-roaring reviews for the TLS, possessed genius for unpacking poetic process – for admiring the poem on its own technical terms. Frank Kermode may have had the broader intellectual antennae, Helen Vendler the more philologically and contextually rigorous background, but James (like his critical forefather, Randall Jarrell) is the great phenomenologist of the poetry-reading experience. He notates, even replicates, the mounting raptures of the perceiving consciousness. Enthusiasm is the chronic condition of his prose. Philip Larkin remains a touchstone figure for this kind of treatment. Here is James on the celebrated final lines of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelledA sense of falling, like an arrow showerSent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. ‘Of those three linked hits at the very end,’ James writes: the second one, ‘sent out of sight’, strikes me as the miracle among the miracles, because it somehow gets the sense of the longbows being lifted and the strings let loose. At the start of line, the phrase is perfectly placed. It’s a fine example of a phrase finding its poem: the hammered phrase helping to generate a singable scheme. Given that James has been given free rein in these essays, it should not surprise that he revisits his personal canon. What is fascinating, forty years on, is to see how the rankings have shifted. Larkin and Auden are still very much in evidence, Shakespeare remains at the centre of the web, but in the intervening decades Lowell (once a major figure in the pantheon) has been subtly demoted, while fellow American Richard Wilbur has been raised. It is Robert Frost, however, who takes first gong among the moderns, at least in these pages. In a longer essay designed to defend the poet against the destructive ministrations of past biographers and exegetes, James disputes the notion of Frost as a crackerjack moralist who had no deeper poetic program beyond personal ambition: But before he crossed the Atlantic in 1912, he was already regaling his American editors and poetic acquaintances with his considered ideas about poetry: ideas that add up to a conception of modernism still pertinent today. He talked of ‘skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’. ‘It was a true idea, not an easy motto,’ James continues: Implicit in the idea was that the spoken language supplies the poet with a store of rhythms which he can, and indeed must, fit in counterpoint to the set frame of the metre. A hundred years later, very few poets want to face the labour involved in doing this. So it is that the Notebook’s accounts are drawn up according to the degree of affinity shown to the spirit and the letter of Frost’s challenging poetics. Postwar American poets such as Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur are praised for the ways in which a concentration on technique led them away from the trap of vers libre solipsism, in which slack lines endlessly circle the plughole of the self. The critic also argues that the serious fashioning of larger events (in the case of Hecht and Wilbur, World War II) means they aim for clarity of thought and expression, even when they are being oblique. John Ashbery and J.H. Prynne are seen as talented poets who have nonetheless led hundreds of acolytes into an airless hermeticism. Clive James James is keen that this avid formalism not be seen as technique for technique’s sake. He is willing to grant that there are those (T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore among them) who have achieved the second simplicity accorded to Picasso or Mozart. They are allowed to play tennis without the net because they first won grand slams with it in place. Yet the weighting of appreciation here tends to favour those from whom correctness is more important than content. Vladimir Nabokov’s thousand-line poem in couplets, to which his novel Pale Fire is written as a series of savage and hilarious footnotes, is described as a marvel because of its recherché adherence to Pushkin’s strict technical standards. Likewise, while John Updike’s verse draws mildly damning criticism (‘he was led towards frivolity by a fatal propensity for reveling in skill’), the American writer is accorded poetic respect where other, more serious voices are dispatched merely in passing. When James writes of Lowell’s black-sheep poetic heir, Frederick Seidel, that he has an ‘unfortunate propensity for kiddie rhymes’, we see how an excessive formalism can become a form of aesthetic snobbery. Seidel does indeed use simple rhymes on idiotic repeat. Their purpose is to inject a note of hilarity into the horror of the contemporary which the poet wishes to describe while remaining aloof – to ratchet up through repetition a sense of the decadence and disaster of the present. Such singsong blatancy binds together stanzas in which multiple ideas are thrown together as in some semantic particle accelerator. And, while the failed examples may sound faintly ludicrous, the successes show us how a conscious weakening of form can have its own kind of negative energy, as in Seidel’s terrible poem about 9/11, ‘December’: I am flying to area code 212To stab a Concorde into you,To plunge a sword into the gangrene.This is a poem about a sword of kerosene.This is my 21st century in hell.I stab the sword into the smell.I am the sword of sunrise flying into area code 212To flense the people in the buildings,and the buildings, into dew. For a critic and practitioner who has spent a lifetime justifying his own poetic predilections in often scintillating terms, the point is not to cavil, but to admire. If this turns out to be the last book published during Clive James’s lifetime, it is a fitting vessel for farewell. And if the opinions and insights ventured in these pages have already been relayed in more polished if less adamant form elsewhere, they have never seemed more personal, an investment of self in art. The Notebook convinces the reader once again that a great critic can reawaken a dormant sense of wonder for what poetry can do. It proves Herbert’s statement of poetic faith in that mid-century essay: ‘Poetry is not some kind of trigonometric function. It’s a human, an arch-human function. After many errings it will reach its destination and then it will be the conversation of one feeling being with another.’

Geordie Williamson

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