I was uncertain whether to write about Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry in the form of a review or in
a feature article. Ultimately I went for the latter, and this for a number of
reasons. One is that our reviews section is dedicated to poetry, not to essay
writing, even when it is an essay on poetry. Another is that I wanted to
discuss matters that extend a little beyond Maxwell’s work, and a more general
article gives me the space to go a few yards (or a few miles) out on a limb.
The final reason is that I still haven’t made up my mind
what I think about Glyn Maxwell. When I first read Hide Now, one of his most recent collections, I thought I was faced
with a genius. I still think of that book as the best contemporary poetry in
English that I know of. But then I went on to read another of his works, The Sugar Mile, and I was left rather
cold. Of course, these are only opinions – the Guardian’s critic Adam Newey sees
things exactly the other way round. He also says about On Poetry that it
is "the best book on poetry I have ever read".
I’d love to meet this Newey guy, because his opinions are so
limpidly antithetical to my own. I imagine a dinner together would see us
discussing how he likes jazz and I like classical music, he likes sushi and I
like pizza, he loves cricket and I enjoy meaningful pursuits.
Chances are he’d even tell me that he prefers the new Star Wars trilogy to the old one – but I digress.
For those who haven’t read it, On Poetry collects a number of thematically related essays in which
Maxwell attempts to outline a theory of poetry. The titles of the various
essays are, in order, White, Black, Form, Pulse, Chime, Space, Time. These are
all, in his treatment, essentially aesthetic categories. The ‘White’ is the
whiteness of the page where nothing is inscribed, while the ‘Black’ is that of
the ink upon it. In his own words:
The nine sheets are
nine battlefields. The black will win some, the white will win some, it will be
silly as war and bloody as chess. If you get any poems out of it, any lines at
all, pin them to your breast. If you get any white sheets, bury them with
honours. Remember where you won, remember where you lost.
The paragraph pretty much encapsulates the style of the book
as a whole. Maxwell relies heavily on metaphor to get his points across. He
frequently brings up extracts from famous poems and proffers readings in a
metaphorical form; since Maxwell is a fine poet, the metaphors work well and
are colourful and enjoyable – indeed the whole book is very readable and
pleasant.
So what’s the problem? Well, I wonder how many of my readers
I’d alienate if I were to put it like this: none of what he says is true. I
suppose a more diplomatic way of putting it would be ‘these arguments make no
sense’ – I can settle on that, if you prefer. Maxwell says that ‘your meeting
with a poem is like your meeting with a person. The more like that it is, the
better the poem is’. That is – I really can’t find any other way of saying this
– not true. It’s not a matter of my opinion or his opinion or your opinion,
it’s just not true. Meeting a poem (which I assume means reading a poem for the first time) is nothing like meeting a
person – except, of course, in metaphorical terms, and very abstract ones at
that. It works as a poetic image, but it fails as a critical proposition.
It may be objected that I am being deliberately obtuse.
Right, perhaps I should be more accommodating. But then again maybe what
prompts me to be so obtuse is that I’ve seen this particular trick before, and
I am getting a little tired of it. TS Eliot’s essay What is a Classic?, which Maxwell cites here with palpable
admiration, is an example of the same train of thought at work. You make up your
own aesthetical category (Maxwell goes for ‘black and white’, Eliot goes for
‘classic’), then you are allowed to draw the connections that you like and
build a castle in the air that looks exactly how you want it to look. Since
these aesthetical categories are neither verifiable nor quantifiable, and since
they are not given any precise historical grounding but only one that is
convenient and selective, you can pretty much say anything you like about them,
and you will always be right. You can even contradict yourself, if you’re
clever enough to present it as a ‘symbolic paradox’ or a ‘dramatic tension’ or
what have you. I used to make use of this kind of sophistry myself back when I
was into writing football journalism, precisely because it is so irresistibly
seductive, and because you can look like an expert while saying almost nothing
at all. A touch of good prose, or a clever use of metaphor, and you can
describe the difference between Italian and English football in terms of the differences in these two countries’ drinking culture:
Like beer, English football is attractive because it
exhausts and justifies itself in its own isolated turn of the wheel. It
consumes itself as we consume it. Like wine, Italian football is at heart
referential, never fully understood or explained, always subsisting under a shadow
thrown by a shadow.
These articles were enormously successful – one of the sites
I wrote for still features a permanent link to them in the front page. But they
were never meant to be true. And neither is Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry.
Maxwell’s type of criticism has enjoyed a great deal of
popularity in the twentieth century. Personally, I think the finest example remains
Italo Calvino’s American Lessons, which
is essentially the same book as On Poetry,
but a bit more elegant and subtle in its presentation (instead of ‘black and
white’ Calvino has ‘heaviness and lightness’, and you can imagine how the rest
of the book goes). I use the word ‘criticism’ to describe this type of writing,
but with a little reluctance. Given that the readings, connections and
historical interpretations they draw are fictional and arbitrary, they have
less in common with the work of someone like Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin
or Northrop Frye than they do with the genre of occult literature represented
by the likes of Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky or Dion Fortune. Try reading
some of the texts by the latter authors, and notice the parallel in style – if
anything, the attempts by the magicians are much more schematic (if more poorly
written).
The problem with this line of thinking is not that it isn’t
pretty, it’s just that it’s circular. I am going to borrow a phrase from Cormac
McCarthy: "A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to
know it with." You cannot analyse your analytical abilities for the same reason
that you cannot bite your teeth. Likewise, you cannot hope to use ‘poetic’
means to analyse poetry, because all you do is produce more poetry. And indeed
Maxwell’s work, like those I quoted above, is frequently and peculiarly
beautiful. No-one could deny his ability with words. What’s lacking is the
willingness (perhaps even the courage) to look outside of his own ranch, at
animals different than his own stock. (Rats. I used a metaphor).
From Jacqui Saphra: "Thank you for this. I'm halfway through the book and have found certain sentences beautifully aphoristic and true. I want the larger arguments in the book to be true too - they are so seductive and poetic - but I'm afraid you've hit the nail on the head as usual (I use a metaphor)"
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