‘Hours of Boredom’

‘What are people waiting for? What is the seed that they will endure hours of boredom to extract?’ That’s from Christopher Middleton’s ‘Jackdaw Jiving: Selected essays on poetry and translation’ (1998 – and I guess the compulsory reading of poetry must refer to the USA, none of that nonsense here..). I think I must be one of the people prepared to endure hours of boredom. The simple answer to Middleton’s question is that I want to find the good stuff, and there’s no other way but to read what’s out there, some of which will bore or irritate me, but not all of it. And the good stuff, when I find it, is worth the time and effort.

So I have something of a poetry magazine habit. I’ve subscribed, not simultaneously but over many years, to the following: Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Nation Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry (Chicago) and Dark Horse magazine. I used to buy old poetry magazines cheap in Oxfam bookshops. Far too much already, and it got worse during Covid when I couldn’t browse them anywhere. Now it’s reduced to a couple on subscription, and I glance over the others in bookshops or the Poetry Library at the Southbank. I don’t keep magazines because the bookshelves would very soon get crammed. I do copy, or tear out the poems I like best. And so there are files, which soon proliferate and bulge and need a clear-out, which is what I’m doing now.

I’ve arranged the files alphabetically (you have to be able to find the poets, after all) and some of the pleasures are the unlikely juxtapositions, poets sitting next to each other for no other reason except that their surnames start with the same letters. So Richard Wilbur comes shortly before Sam Willetts, and they both sit not far from Susan Wicks (‘April is the month for cutting up a map with scissors’ – great poem title) and her wonderful translations of Valerie Rouzeau (who should perhaps be filed under R, but it’s my filing system and I can do what I like). There are the delights of re-reading; some poems re-affirm their importance, and I try to keep Matthew Siegel’s words in mind: “Be an active, hungry reader… you have to be willing to not look for reasons to dismiss work too quickly.” But re-visiting, with the intention of discarding, means I become more conscious of the poems that have lost whatever it was that made me pick them out. Time and long acquaintance matter; poems have to stand up to repeated readings (otherwise, how could you justify the price of slim volumes?).

So why do I discard poems? It’s difficult to say, and I’m prepared to ignore any reason I give if I find a poem that works, but here are some things that tire me; poetry that just recounts an anecdote, that points a moral, that wants me to be impressed by the brilliant/quirky/messed-up character of the poet, that sounds like cut-up prose. I don’t want poems that are impenetrable; I have a high tolerance for difficulty, but I want some sort of foothold, I don’t have limitless patience and persistence. I’m not impressed for long by poems that want to shock or surprise me; they stop working on the second or third reading. I don’t want poems that exist just for the perfect pay-off final line.

And what would make me keep a poem? Even harder, and you know it when you read it, but here’s an attempt at a wish-list. I want poetry that doesn’t care if I like it or not, that has a reason to be, not just a reason to draw attention to itself, or a need to entertain me. It must have some sort of musicality, some awareness of the rhythms of the language. I like free verse, free to ignore the traditional forms or to embrace them, as required. I want to be haunted by a poem that won’t let me forget it, to be taken somewhere I can’t easily get back from. I want something I can nearly, but not quite, understand.

Here’s John McCauliffe’s list, from his introduction to New Poetries V111 (Carcanet). “If you read poetry every day, and then add in the hundreds of poets, thousands of poems under consideration for an anthology, you quickly start to privilege and value certain effects: those images which almost stammering refuse to take their leave; insistent rhythms sustained line after line; the knitting together of form and tone where tone presides; poems so engaging you want them to keep going and never stop.”

Improbable demands, and it may be that definitions tell us a lot less than demonstrations. Show me a good poem, and I’ll decide if it’s a keeper. I’m just trying to put together a gazofilacio- that’s the word Clive James borrowed from the Italian, a ‘treasure chest of the heart’.