You probably remember Mallarme’s response when Degas told him he had a great idea for a poem: ‘Alas, my dear, poems are made of words, not ideas.’ Of course there are ideas in poems, but I much prefer it when ideas come after poems. That is, I don’t want my first encounter with a poem to stimulate my intellect. I want that first encounter to be musical and physical and always verbal. R. S. Thomas writes that ‘Poetry / is a spell woven / by consonants and vowels // in the absence of logic’ … ‘Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.’ With all due respect to R. S., I might modify this a little, at least for myself. For me, poetry arrives at the intellect by way of words, as the product of their chemical reaction. For me, a poem’s meaning is its aftermath.
The poets I most admire are more than in command of language. They are also in awe of it, treating words like strange and wondrous pebbles just turned over on a beach. They combine words in unexpected ways. In an essay on Paul Muldoon’s poetry, Seamus Heaney refers to Muldoon’s ‘sleights of word.’ I’m co-opting the term because I think it well describes how words can jostle and shift according to linear placement, syntax, and verbal juxtaposition. They can speak to each other and to the reader not merely as signifiers but as material, sonic objects.
The wordsmith I most admire is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poets, by nature, are obsessed with language, but Hopkins was possessed by it. One of his chief virtues is that he doesn’t view words, even in his own poems, as extensions of himself. He reveres each word’s inscape—its distinctive, exercised identity. And yet, paradoxically, he saw all language as linked. His journals contain lists of words connected by etymology, by sound, or by idiosyncratic association: ‘Crook, crank, kranke, crick, cranky…’ Sometimes these read like wonderful tongue-twisters: ‘slip, slipper, slop, slabby (muddy), slide, perhaps slope, but if slope is thus connected what are we to say of slant?’ He also comments on individual words: ‘Altogether peak is a good word. For sunlight through shutter, locks of hair, rays in brass knobs…Meadows peaked with flowers.’ Word lists are everywhere in the poems, too: ‘Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous…’; ‘swift, slow; sweet, sour, adazzle, dim…’ Hopkins was a great inventor of words, but he was, more fundamentally, a great re-inventor and re-purposer of words. In the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), W. B. Yeats (who knew a thing or two about words) calls Hopkins’s work ‘a last development of poetic diction,’ and he describes the meaning of a Hopkins poem as something that ‘comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, and goes back into words.’ I know of no better definition of poetry than this.
Elizabeth Bishop, herself a great admirer of Hopkins, once wrote, in a letter to Marianne Moore: ‘I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly-shaped pieces of furniture…and I can’t help having the theory that if they are joggled around hard enough and long enough some kind of electricity will occur, just by friction, that will arrange everything.’ My poem’s are nowhere near as good as Elizabeth Bishop’s, but I know I am composing a true poem when I am not worrying about its meaning. Instead, I am joggling words and looking for the right friction.
Last year, Mark Edmundson whacked a hornet’s nest with his ‘Poetry Slam’ piece in Harper’s, which was an unrelenting jeremiad about the state of contemporary poetry. I disagree with much of what he says, but there is a phrase in his diatribe that does, to my mind, describe a failure in the work of some contemporary poets: ‘Their poetry is not heard but overheard.’ Instead of being in awe of words, they seem to want language to serve their ideas. To paraphrase Degas, they’ve got this great idea for a poem.
I hasten to add that I don’t see this as an epidemic. In fact, every year I discover poets who are writing stunning work. So let me end on a positive note, by recommending three recent books that, at least for me, tick all the boxes: Uncommon Prayer (Persea, 2014) by Kimberly Johnson; Witch (Seren, 2012) by Damian Walford Davies; and Heaven and Earth (Story Line, 2011) by Amit Majmudar.