The Poem - Lyric, Sign, Meter by Don Paterson
I heard about this on the Frank Skinner Poetry podcast - he had read it. I am determined to record my notes on the book here.
These will be rudimentary, childish, half-baked and of no use to anyone - probably not even me.
As the Preface makes clear, the book is basically three long essays. Part 1 is “accessible to lay readers”. Part 2 is domain theory. Part 3, on metre, is technical and only of interest to “specialists and students”. Despite that warning, if I get there, I will probably at least try to read Part 3.
Part 1: Lyric: The Sound of the Poem
Poetry and Music
Poetry is probably a mnemonic system for preliterate cultures
Obvious example:
Where did you get those tasty strawberries you had the other day, Tommy?
I got them by the river
The bit of the river shaped like my quiver.
There by the pit
Where we do our shit
A nice field of berries
Go there and pick.
I said it would be childish.
Includes stories, histories and geneoligies. The first form of external storage for the brain, perhaps.
Art’s memorability.
Mnemosyne: the muse of memory.
Poet and reader agree to an imaginative contract
The deal is that the poet and the reader bring an abundance of imaginative energy to bear on the poem.
This can bring into reality a dimension that is denied to other forms of speech and writing.
The raw material of music occurs without humans
A wind whistling though the grill on a door to the laundry room in the stairwell of a brutalist East European tower block.
A drop of forest rainwater off the tree canopy, plonking into a hollow log.
A great deal of sense can be made of a conversation through a wall.
This makes sense. Our cats don’t understand what we’re saying but they take get the idea mostly from tone.
Song is a distinctly human business. When whales and birds make song - which can be beautiful - it is about territory or sex.
Poetry introduces music into language
Word can be called into another person’s presence and have their meanings yoked together by the repetition and arrangement of sounds. Going back to the idea of the memory device, this gives the words a better chance of “hooking” on a single reading.
Memory
Poetry seeks to transcend the human limitations of memory
The reading and intonation of a poem can be emphasised to enhance the memorability. Go listen to Tennyson reading one of his, or T.S Eliot on YouTube. They practically sing it.
When you remember a poem, you own the whole thing
This is not the case with a story or a novel, where you might be able to recall the story, but you certainly can’t recall the whole thing from memory. You can with a poem. They say memorising a poem is a good thing, which is probably related to this.
The poem is a little machine for remembering itself.
Is memorising a poem a good thing, though? Or is it a bad thing?
Mnemonic devices: brevity, patterned and original speech
I’ve highlighted and underlines these in the book so they must be really important. This is why, because you can come up with a nice bulleted list:
- brevity of speech is the poem’s most basic formal strategy
- originality of speech is its most basic literary virtue
- patterned speech its most basic identifying feature
And these all arise naturally from the composition process. This is intriguing, and I want to get there, but there are several hundred pages of dense reading and note-taking to go before I do.
Poetic speech is made under two conditions: urgency and shortness of time
The former is inspriation, the latter is form. The result is the cultural convention, the poem. That kind of makes sense.
Needing to jump start the imagination part of this in writing workshops, through the use of trivial games such as word-association or other pump-priming techniques, is unnecessary. If the imagination needs to be jump-started in this way, perhaps it’s better left dormant. (He has a point here, but I’ve been in the camp that’s needed a jump start, so I don’t want to be too hard on myself).
This is a nice line that I am going to quote verbatim from page 13 (yes, I am only that many pages in):
Language behaves in a curiously material-like way and, placed under the dual pressures of emotional urgency and temporal restraint, it will reveal its crystalline structure and intimate grain; whether written or spoken, it becomes rhythmic, lyrical and original.
[To be continued…]
- Started: 9 Oct 2023