‘High hopes or none, we’ve no idea where we are’

If I’m unsure about a book of poetry, if I like some poems but not others, I will copy out the ones that work. It means I have the poems to re-read, but more importantly it slows me down enough to have a proper look, or listen (I could, after all just photocopy them). Copying helps me sense where the good lines are, where I keep or lose faith in the poem, whether it convinces all the way through.

Walter Benjamin said “the best way to understand (a book) is also to enter their space: one never really understands a book unless one copies it”. That’s a quote from Susan Sontag’s essay about Benjamin ’Under the Sign of Saturn’. She argues that Benjamin saw learning as a form of collecting, ’as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to friends’ (I try not to do that).

My daily reading recently has been ’A Double Sorrow’, Lavinia Greenlaw’s ’extrapolation’ from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I’m not convinced by all the poems, but there are some which seem to me luminous with a kind of poised simplicity. Here is ’So we set out’:

As sure of where we’re going as if climbing stairs
Not noticing how one step leads to another
And step by step we’re heading somewhere
Entirely other.
High hopes or none, we’ve no idea where we are
Until the stairs come to a stop
And the only way on is down not up.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the anguish of Troilus when Criseyde does not return. The use of dots to fracture his voice, to suggest all the rest beyond his fragmented words…

My bewildered soul commends itself…
Some time past you left… and have not
… This agony compels me…
Two months now… day by day I want more not less …
… To know why and if you have chosen this …
… Still my breath …
Tell me. End this.

In fact, this font doesn’t quite do justice to the look of the poem in the book, where the full stops are larger and more widely spaced. The whole volume is beautifully designed, in terms of the spacing of words and white space on the page.

Also worth noting Lavinia Greenlaw’s description of Chaucer’s stanza, borrowed and adapted from Boccaccio’s ’Il Filostrato’:

‘I’ve used a corrupt version of the form Chaucer chose for the poem, a seven-line stanza known as rime royal which has a rhyme pattern of A, B, A, B, B, C, C. It interests me that he untidied Boccaccio’s neat eight-line verses (or octaves), and contrived a pattern that suggests circularity as much as development. Seven lines offer a sense of progression without conclusion and that fascinating fifth line doesn’t quite fit. It’s a spanner in the works; its echoing rhyme, a glance in the rear-view mirror’

I like a bit of formal analysis. I wish there was more of it.

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