Tag: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER

The order makes a big difference.

I take my blog title from Coleridge, of course. Male poets are especially good at coming up with definitions of poetry, and it’s convenient that this should be so, because definitions are useful for brandishing.

The full quotation—recollected online—is this: “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order .”

I woke rehearsing Coleridge’s maxim in my head. Why? Because in my current price list—the one that went out to subscribers last week—I got one of the titles in preparation in the wrong order. Not for the first time, either, I might add. Sometimes these things get scrambled in my head: a sort of title dyslexia.

The pamphlet I got wrong was Hannah, Are You Listening?, by Mariscat publisher and Shore poet Hamish Whyte. I called it Are You Listening, Hannah? The order of the words makes a difference. The second (the wrong one) seems to me a weaker question, vaguer, more casual—even wistful and slightly distrait. The first (the right one) is crisper. It projects. It carries right out into what Julian Treasure calls ‘the listening’. Or so it seems to me, the person who got it wrong.

Hannah, Are You Listening? is a lovely little pamphlet. The poet’s voice is quiet but resonant, serious but playful—even impish, at times. There’s lots of white space. I sometimes talk about how poetic ‘technique’ can get in the way, like the specks and grains on the glass that stop you seeing through. These poems are transparent. Pure delight. 

Anyway, Hannah, Are You Listening? is nearly done. Two other new pamphlets are also in preparation. More of those later.

I’m also working on Tom Duddy’s second book (it will be called The Years). Tom died, as many of you will know, before he intended to. With the help of his wife Sheila and daughter Clare, I’ve been sorting through his unpublished work, in particular those poems he suggested for a second volume. He and I were able to correspond about some of them before all smiles stopped together.

The process of putting together Tom’s book is humbling. It is reading a life, not just a set of assorted texts. Again, he wrote with astonishing clarity. Sometimes his poems, at first glance, seem slight. Nothing much is happening here, you think. Then you realize everything is happening.

Already I am fumbling in words of inferior order to praise what Duddy did better. So I will close with a little example, appropriate because the title—the correct title—is ‘Window on the World, Sunday Morning’. You see right through the window. Not one speck on the glass.

 

Window on the World, Sunday Morning

 

A mother and a daughter (herself a mother)

walking very slowly, arm in arm, past

 

the closed gates, judging gardens as they go;

just behind them, catching up, soon to pass,

 

a man in a tight black coat, eyes downcast,

grey head bowed as if into a strong wind.

 

Two girls running sideways down the green mound

between the church and the soaking playing field.

 

Above them all, jackdaws cher-cherking

in the bright aftermath of gales and rain.

 

 

 

 

 

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. Cover of Freud's book on dreams

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 14th 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.