Robert Nye – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

On Robert Nye

Robert Nye died last week. He was a poet.

He was many other things too. His main income came from novels, not poetry, and at one time he was poetry critic for The Times, and regular reviewer poetry and fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian. Many a writer has been proud to have a quotation from Nye emblazoned on their jacket. He was a generous reader and a good friend to poets.

But now he is gone. His ‘calling’, as he put it himself, was poetry, and it is for his poetry that he would want to be remembered. He was sometimes described as ‘Gravesian’ although now the number of readers who know what that might mean is dwindling too.

I don’t know that Robert Nye’s poems do resemble Robert Graves’s in style. To some degree, perhaps. The two poets share a high regard for plainness combined with lyricism: they are lyric poets writing consciously in an ancient tradition. And of course, both found far more readers through their novels than their poems. Graves’ The White Goddess, which explores the long tradition of the poetic muse, was undoubtedly a powerful influence on Nye as a young man, and so were two other poets connected with the Graves tradition and what they referred to as ‘truth-telling’: Martin Seymour-Smith and James Reeves.

Robert only died a few days ago and yet already this catalogue of names sounds irretrievably like The Past. Who remembers Martin Seymour-Smith as a poet? Who reads James Reeves? Who openly admits Graves as an influence? Moreover, if you look at Nye’s last collection (An Almost Dancer, Greenwich Exchange 2012), you’ll see each of his lines begins with a capital letter. The poems follow a clear metrical pattern and often also a rhyming form. So Robert Nye was one of the Old Guys, then? Maybe.

Certainly he believed, in the oldest sense, in inspiration – in the idea that poetry has a mysterious source. The poem compels the poet, not the other way around. Writing poetry (unlike novels) is neither a matter of choice nor education. In ‘Runes’, an autobiographical ballad, he writes

It was the muse of poetry
Who held me in her spell
And made me measure all my steps
And dance for her as well.

Before I ever wrote a line
I was her small liege-man.
Playing the fool on the way to school
Is where my verse began.

He is quoted on the jacket of his 1989 Hamish Hamilton collection saying ‘As for poems, I hope never to write more of them than I have to.’ He was not being coy. The statement was factual. He wrote poems when a compulsion gripped him and at no other time. As a result, his entire opus was relatively small, though the range of his poetic reading was vast.

His friend James Reeves said that to be a poet was ‘to say nothing when there is nothing demanding to be said’ (Commitment to Poetry, Heinemann, 1969). Robert Nye did just that. And so what came to him, when it came, was sometimes curiously fragmentary, snatches of something retrieved from God knows where, like the three lines of ‘A Matador Past His Prime’ which comprise the entire poem:

Honour the fat and stumbling matador
Who having lost one shoe kicks off the other
And turns to face the bull in his stockinged feet.

Where did that come from? From wherever Robert’s poems found their source, which was as much a mystery to him as anybody else. His novels won prizes. His poetry collections did not. It didn’t matter in the least. What mattered to Robert was that some poems were written and some insightful, sympathetic readers were found. He was a dedicated and loyal letter-writer (alas – there will be no more letters) and communicated over the years with a large number of poetry friends. This circle of readers mattered to him intensely, and he was an important private responder to the work of others, just as they were for him. He did not pay much attention to fame or fuss. He was interested in the poems that he was interested in, which were of value according to his own intransigent standards, not the award criteria of the day.

Back to James Reeves:

Large profits and quick returns, philanthropic grants and radio attention, state subsidized prizes, book society recommendations and awards by festival committees – all these are irrelevant, even antipathetic, to the spirit of poetry as are interviews in Sunday supplements and publicized television appearances.

That was written in 1964. Lord knows what Reeves would say now! And while in private Robert Nye might have chuckled and agreed, he made no public comment about such things. It was irrelevant to him. He was a self-contained person and interested in poetry, and horse-racing, and his family and friends. For what it’s worth, I think his best poems – like all the best poems – are timeless. But that’s for the individual reader to put to the test. The poems are ready and waiting, though their author is gone.

Nye was the most serious of poets. Obituaries in the Telegraph and New York Times already confirm this. He was not, however, above wicked fun and although it is not (and should not be) the poem he will be best remembered for, I will end with a rare piece of satire, from his 1989 Hamish Hamilton collection and also included in the more recent Greenwich Exchange volume, The Rain and the Glass (2004). Though written some decades ago, it seems to me to have worn rather well.

Interview

What’s it like, though, being you?
The old dog growls and bristles. This is his favourite question.
Answers win prizes. Nothing interests him more.
Inspired by the pursuit of his own tail
He has written his poems to find out what he smells like,
And now here’s another dog, a dog-fancying thoroughbred,
Just down from Oxford, trained to the minute,
On heat and eager to do some of the sniffing
For him, and to declare the crap remarkable.
Woof woof, the old dog says, bow wow.
I’ll show you where I buried my gift!

NO NEWS IS SLOW NEWS

I have only just reached 29.

That’s to say number 29 out of the 77 December submissions, and this is too slow for comfort. So no blog writing today, only writing scribbly notes on people’s poems between pencil sharpenings. (I have sharpened two whole pencils to oblivion).

There will be feedback on the process in due course—another couple of weeks yet.

Meanwhile, Chapter Seven of the HappenStance Story is just about ready to go to print. If you’d like a copy (we sold out of Chapter Six) and you’re not a subscriber, here’s your link.

We have no snow in this wintry corner of Fife—at least only a powdery dusting. Rather disappointing, even for grown-ups. Also no word from the Bank of Scotland. Please forgive me if you’ve sent a cheque in the last fortnight. I can’t pay them in. I can only sit and look at them. If the situation persists for another week, a new account will be opened.

Meanwhile, the last word is with Robert Nye’s poem ‘Winter More’, included in the HappenStance pamphlet anthology, Winter Gifts, right back at the beginning, in 2005.

WINTER MORE

When it was Winter what I saw
Was not enough for my heart’s claw.

I wanted the North Wind to blow
Like God the Father shouting No.

My heart was greedy for pure cold:
I wanted icicles of gold.

I wanted Taj Mahals of ice
And no mere Arctic could suffice.

Winter extreme, Winter complete
Was what I longed for in my heat

To reach an absolute North Pole
And know in body and in soul

Some more-than-polar vertigo,
The truth of snow on snow on snow.

This was my secret lust and lore:
I always wanted Winter more.

I DREAMT A DREAM, WHAT CAN IT MEAN?

It’s a line of Anne Stevenson’s. I remember it but I can’t for the life of me find the poem.

And since I wrote that, I’ve remembered whose line it really is. Not Anne’s, despite the fact that she has a number of particularly good dream poems. Sometimes I think my entire life is a process of half-remembered lines.

But it’s fitting that I couldn’t remember the precise provenance of this one, because when I first read it, (in ‘Five Dreams’ in Robert Nye’s 1976 collection, Divisions on a Ground) I felt I’d heard it already. I thought perhaps it was a half-quotation, or maybe just doing what poetry often does, drawing on the deep well of common phrase and cadence, so what comes up feels hauntingly familiar.

But I wanted to find the line again because I was thinking about dream poems, for which I’ve always had a predilection. Indeed, I’ve written a number myself, though nowhere near as many dream poems as I’ve had dreams.

I’ve found it now but my finding was less decisive than I thought. It’s in Nye’s Divisions on a Ground, and then it’s also in the Hamish Hamilton Collected (1989) but substantially different – that is to say the key line is the same but the five dreams are slightly, or even completely in some cases, different. And in the more recent version (not included in The Rain and the Glass, 2004), the poet doesn’t say in the final stanza, “I dreamt a dream. I know what it means” as he did in the earlier version. Instead Nye concludes:

I dreamt a dream, what can it mean?
I dreamt I was a dry white bone
Which Love used as her flute.

Creepy. Why do some dreams demand to turn themselves into poems, when others fade? It’s probably that feeling – I dreamt a dream, what can it mean? – the sense of huge import, the feeling the dream is telling you something you need to understand.

That feeling was around long before 1899 when Freud tackled the business with such far-reaching consequences. Anne Stevenson prefaces Stone Milk, her 2007 collection, with a quotation from 14^th century Piers Plowman, “Then came a dream to me, marvellously I dreamed / [ . . . ] A fair field full of folk I found there between”. Significant dreams in the Old Testament of the Bible are even older, of course, which is how Joseph got his dreamcoat and is still singing about it in the twenty-first century.

But what about that experience where you dream you are writing the poem, and (in your sleep) you commit it to memory intending to put it on paper in the morning? You may even half-wake and scribble a few lines on the note pad at the side of the bed. The cold light of day almost invariably reveals these lines to be tripe. (‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’! Bill Callaghan has the last word on this.)

But sometimes a dream successfully crosses the divide – it gets out of sleep mode and into a poem, where it still pulls its weight in the waking world. There are several reasons why such a poem is potent, I think. One is that the poet isn’t consciously choosing the components, so less control is exercised. The poet isn’t interfering.

A second advantage is the absence of deliberate intent. The writer hasn’t got designs on the reader, or at least not in the ordinary way. The writer is merely trying to present the dream as a shared puzzle.

And there’s the delight of the surreal. Dreams, by their very nature, specialize in surreality, and this breaks the mould of ordinariness – poems are always trying to do that. So the dream scores points there too.

In the middle of the surreal, real symbols. Dreams – at least the kind you want to write down – haunt you with visual emblems (or so it seems). I have recurrent dreams about a house with cellars and attics, secret stairs and hidden passages, and, as John Lennon said, I’m not the only one. Poems favour symbols because they accumulate meanings like a rolling snowball. And multiplicity of meaning, as we all know, is poetry’s favourite stamping ground.

Then there’s the business of narrative. Memorable dreams have a sort of story line, and sometimes there’s even a resolution. I can think of some marvellous dream poems that take full advantage of that – and immediately Edwin Muir’s The Combat leaps to mind, a poem you understand instantly on more than one level.

So far I’ve carefully avoided mentioning visions. But we have an age-old tradition of those too and the difference between a dream and a vision is slight. When dream acquires vision status it is powerful indeed and even has God connotations. Scary.

In a more down to earth sense, there’s fairly wide-spread agreement – this may be rational or purely self-indulgent – that the writing of poetry involves an altered state of consciousness. That is to say, not the usual way of thinking or feeling. Various legal and illegal substances can assist in this, and some produce noteworthy creations. ‘Kubla Khan‘ (subtitled ‘A Vision in a Dream’) was, according to Coleridge, wholly realized in sleep and only written down when he woke up. It seems clear opium had something to do with the exotic strangeness. (I am not recommending this.)

Meditation can alter consciousness too, of course, though it tends to float you away from words rather than towards them. But dreams take the biscuit. If your consciousness isn’t altered when you’re asleep, I don’t know when it is. And sometimes something extraordinary emerges as a result. No need to worry about this. The dream will tell you in no uncertain terms if it requires to be written down. Unlike most dreams, you won’t be able to forget it and, once you’ve written it down, neither will I.

HOW LONG SHOULD A POET LEAVE BETWEEN COLLECTIONS?

How long should a poet leave between collections? Will fifteen years do?

Martin Edwards’ HappenStance pamphlet Rainstorm with Goldfish is his second collection. His first – also a pamphlet (he was a Redbeck Press pamphlet competition winner) – was Coconut Heart in 1997.

So Edwards has had no fewer than fifteen years to mull the poems between the pages of Rainstorm with Goldfish. And I think it shows. Without meaning to lapse into blurbonic plague (see Dennis O’Driscoll in Dark Horse, issue 25), the language here is distilled. There’s a purity in the understatement that strikes me as rare, and beautiful.

Poetry’s a fickle business. It was back in 1984 that Martin first encountered a little blaze of glory. He had poems in a Faber anthology, Hard Lines, and before he knew it he was being interviewed on Radio 1 as one of the latest gifted young poets.

It’s 2012, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out he’s no longer young and the blaze of glory was short-lived. But he’s been a faithful servant to the Muse all this time. He doesn’t write lightly.

Here, for example, is ‘Grief’. It looks so easy.

Your eyes and nose and mouth
were points

in a pattern of stars, gone
in a blink.

All the palaces of your voice were empty;
all the labyrinths of your fingerprints.

Or there’s ‘Hate’, which begins:

I’m sixteen and just beginning
to hate myself.

How could anyone not want to read the rest?

Rainstorm with Goldfish outfaces brevity with depth. And although there is something valiantly restrained about working against the current, about resisting the imperative of publish publish publish, I hope it won’t be fifteen years before Edwards does more. Anna Adams, in Island Chapters, says “True poems come into being at the top of an experience chain, as people and birds of prey are at the top of a food chain”, “something found, not something sought”. Sometimes the necessary experience chain takes fifteen years. Or more.

It has been suggested – by Robert Nye, among others – that patience, for a poet, is a mandatory requirement. Waiting until the poem is ready. Again, I can feel myself toppling into numinosity (stop, woman, stop before it’s too late!) but there is something in this.

There are innumerable ways of writing poetry. Some are young and full of life and playfulness and sheer delight. Exhilarating and fast and intoxicating. But a few writers take a lifetime to say a handful of small things plainly. Rainstorm with Goldfish belongs in that group.

INTIMIDATING POETRY

Poetry is out to get me.

Sometimes nice people say to me, by email, “I will send you some poems soon”. I know they mean well, but nevertheless I experience this promise as a warning. It is like the Godfather saying “I will send you a little present”.

But I have an antidote. It is a thin paperback volume with a green cover. It is 56 pages long and contains 33 poems written over seven years.

This is Robert Nye’s new book. I cannot link to it here, because the publisher, Greenwich Exchange, hasn’t yet made the publication available on their website.

The book is titled An Almost Dancer, Poems 2005-2011. Like the poet’s previous volume, The Rain and the Glass, it has a brief foreword about poetic practice. Here’s what the poet said back in 2004:

The craft, as has been noted, is long to learn. And the last lesson (like the first) may be that craft at best is only half the story, for poetry is not a product of the will. I have spent my life trying to write poems, but the poems gathered here came mostly when I was not.

“Poetry is not a product of the will.” Say that in a creative writing class and emerge unscathed.

In his new volume, Nye refers in his foreword to Norman Cameron, the twentieth century Scottish poet. In New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson asked Cameron “Do you intend your poetry to be useful to yourself or others?” Cameron’s reply (and it was typical of him) was: “Neither. I write a poem because I think it wants to be written.”

For Robert Nye, who shares Cameron’s view, “in each case certain lines came into my head unbidden which then required resolving before they’d let me rest.” Many of us could relate to that, though few would go on to say, “I must admit that . . . the process of poetic composition is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was, perhaps more so.”

But it is a mystery in more than one sense. It is a mystery that in the melée of tweeting and twittering, prizes and glorification, puffs and counter-puffs, rants and pomposities, a small poem can still arrive astonishing and complete. It doesn’t need to assert itself. It waits for you to notice it and pick it up, like a pebble amongst sea-washed pebbles.

Ruth Pitter, in her preface to Poems 1926-1966, says “I think a real poem, however simple its immediate content, begins and ends in mystery”.

I do not want to mystify – neither the process of writing, nor that of reading either—because essentially, despite the tracts and books about poetic theory and so on, certain poems do not need annotation or cleverness. Some of those are in Nye’s new book.

Sometimes Nye’s style is so plain that a modern reader could suspect the author of being disingenuous. But he is not. Here is one of my favourites, ‘The Lady With The Dog’. The title is not a subtle reference to Chekhov. The experience, I am sure, was real:

I saw a little old woman being led
Up a Cork alley by a mongrel dog.
The dog was wall-eyed and it had the mange
And slavered as it pulled her on a string,
Yet as they passed I heard the woman chant
In a low voice, as sweet as Juliet,
‘Who is my joy? Who is my darling boy?
Wolfie, my dear, aren’t you the dog of dogs!’
I hurried on, for I had things to do,
But when all’s done I hope I shan’t forget
That lady and her love for one fine dog.

In the crucible of the poem, “things to do” are life itself, the way its busyness preoccupies us and prevents us from seeing. And “when all’s done”—that is death, the moment of dissolution. And the lady herself, whose voice is as sweet as Juliet, is a vision.

In Nye’s poetry it is as if one line or phrase opens that vision, the glory that Wordsworth felt he had seen as a child and later lost. For a moment you peer through the poem and glimpse it too. Then you wonder whether you imagined it, and you have to go back, and read again.

Here is ‘Valentinus’, who was also Martin Seymour-Smith, the poet and literary critic, and a friend. What had he to say?

Yes, I knew Valentinus from my youth.
He taught me poets have to tell the truth
Or try to, though it make us seem uncouth.

You find this foolish? Lady, so did he,
Laughing at his own verses, teaching me
To laugh at mine or simply let them be.

Not that it’s ever simple to make sense
At least when living in the present tense,
Or to be more than your intelligence.

That is not the end of the poem, but those stanzas encapsulate a paradox—that the poet can somehow, sometimes, be more than his or her own intelligence, can be a vehicle for something that wants to be written. Nye is serious about this. He does not make the claim grandly.

Like many contemporary volumes, the book has endorsements on the back cover from Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Peter Porter and even Ian Crichton Smith. But the poems do not need endorsement.

All they require is a little private room for solitary reading. They are not in the least intimidating.