‘The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry’

In Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ (1977) she quotes Hannah Arendt writing about Walter Benjamin: “nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral’ “. In Sontag’s words “ it was Benjamin’s conviction that… in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage”.

In the spirit of which, here are some of the poems and critical comments that have come my way in June.

A comment from Christian Wiman in PNR magazine. He’s writing about ‘Domination of Black’ by Wallace Stevens – ‘This may be my favourite poem. In all of poetry I mean’. How do you choose? A top ten might be just about possible… But it’s the follow-up comment that’s been resonating for me. It could apply to any poem. ‘I don’t know what the poem means, except that it means more than I know. It teaches me nothing, unless the surge of spiritual alertness it sends through my nerves counts as an increment of knowledge”.

I’ve been reading some Billy Collins. I’m not a huge fan. When someone’s that popular I get extra critical, my poetic hackles rise. But I must admit he can begin a poem well:

‘The trouble with poetry, I realised
as I walked along a beach one night-
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky-
The trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry…

Or this, about a lost and unwritten poem (Lines Lost Among Trees)

‘These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic
I devised to hold them in place-

The poet that’s stuck with me the most last month is David Ferry. I first noticed him a few years back in Poetry magazine. I was in Amsterdam for the Vermeer exhibition and I visited the Book Exchange, a wonderful secondhand bookshop stocking English language books, where I picked up a copy of ‘Bewilderment’. Ferry writes beautifully in response to other poems. There are superb long translations from Virgil, and then short poems echoing those versions. He prints whole poems by Arthur Gold, and comments on the poem in his own subsequent lines. Best of all, to my mind, are short lyrical pieces, more than one of which sound a little like W.S.Graham, in his tiny Cornish cottage, writing to the great silence. That’s how good Ferry is in this book. Here’s the start of ‘Scrim’.

‘I sit here in a shelter behind the words
Of what I’m writing, looking out as if
Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here.

The words are like a scrim upon a page,
Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim.
I can dimly see there’s something or someone there.

This is the beginning of ‘That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember’

‘Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step we’re going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,
Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking.’

And a note on Christine Buckton. She has four good poems printed in the latest copy of PNR. ‘Copper Beech’ is the best of them. But it’s the biographical note that caught my attention. ‘Christine Buckton was an educationist and a therapist before focusing seriously on poetry in her eighties, publishing her collection “Holding it Together” in 2022. she died, aged 86, in Jan 2023”.

It’s never too late.