’Joseph Conrad – A Personal Remembrance’ by Ford Madox Ford, written immediately after Conrad’s death, published 1924. I bought it in a secondhand bookshop at The Guildhall in Lavenham (Suffolk). Ford is always engaging, entertaining and completely unreliable. So these comments may have no basis in fact, but this is what he says Conrad thought of poetry, and the English language:
“Conrad, however, knew nothing of, and cared less for, English verse – and (had a) hatred for English as a prose medium……. Conrad’s indictment of the English language was this, that no English word is a word: that all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions. ‘Oaken’ in French means ‘made of oak wood’— nothing more. ‘Oaken’ in English connotes innumerable moral attributes: stolidity, resolution, honesty etc.. The consequence is, that no English word has clean edges: a reader is always, for a fraction of a second, uncertain as to which meaning of the word the writer may intend”.
I doubt this is a distinction between English and other languages (though Conrad was fluent in Polish and French). It may express the non-native speaker’s frustration at all the nuances he may never quite acquire. It might well be a distinction between poetry and prose. What Conrad calls ‘blurred’ in prose can be a virtue in poetry. Just a few years later, at the end of the twenties, William Empson was saying (in ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’) that it is fundamental to poetry that ‘a word, a syntax, or a grammatical structure, while making only one statement, is effective in several ways at once.’ That’s what poetry does, it suggests more than it states.
Ford himself was a poet (mostly unread now) and enthusiast for poetry. He lauded praise on Pound’s Chinese ‘translations’ in Cathay: ‘Mr Pound’s little volume is like a door in a wall, opening suddenly upon fields of an extreme beauty….. the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly..’ Too much puffery? That was Ford’s style. He knew what he liked, and what was worthy of mockery. In ‘Ancient Lights’ he remembers the poetry readings of his youth, a Pre-Raphaelite childhood ( the Rossettis were his cousins, his grandfather was the painter Ford Madox Brown):
“Mournfully then, up and down the stone staircases, there would flow two hollow sounds. For, in those days, it was the habit of all poets and poetesses to read aloud upon every possible occasion, and whenever they read aloud to employ an imitation of the voice invented by the late Lord Tennyson and known, in those days, as the ore rotundo — ‘with the round mouth mouthing out their hollow o’s and a’s.’ The effect of this voice heard from outside a door was to a young child particularly awful. It went on and on, suggesting the muffled baying of a large hound that is permanently dissatisfied with the world.”
They don’t read them like that anymore. So how do they read them? There may be a house style of the present day, but it’s always easier to see (or hear) with hindsight. It’s also easier, looking back, to realize which were the poets with real presence, amongst the many forgettable performances. Peter Gizzi, reading (very well) at the LRB bookshop last year, paused about three poems in and asked ‘Are you with me?’ I was, but so often I’m not. So often the experience is ok-ish, but that’s all. The reason I keep going is that every once in a while something marvellous happens.
And when was that? Who has stayed in my memory like a touchstone? The first was when I was taken by an English teacher in the late 70s to the Young Vic in Waterloo to hear Adrian Mitchell. I had a classmate whose parents voted for the far-right National Front, I was a left-leaning teenager and here was Mitchell reading a poem about stamping on Enoch Powell’s grave. I was captivated. I saw him again at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge when he was poet in residence in 1980. I remember he solved the applause problem by asking us not to clap individual poems ‘because they’ll start competing with each other’. He was a teenage enthusiasm I don’t regret. Perhaps his poems don’t hold up so well on paper as I once thought, but his voice, his character and politics carried me with him.
Who else? Robert Creeley at the DIA arts foundation in New York 1987. I had recently discovered all sorts of American names – Berryman, Bishop, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Ashbery – and here was one of them in the flesh, gravelly-voiced, with a patch over his bad eye. Creeley’s poem ‘I know a man’ was already a favourite of mine and I asked a question about it (the first time I’d plucked up the courage). His reply was about his mind, as he aged, being like an old tv set; working a little less well, needing the odd bash to get it going. Memorable. I don’t think he answered my question.
Ciaran Carson at the Southbank, 2004. Each of the other poets had given us a more or less engaging introduction. Carson didn’t. He started straight in, reading from ‘Breaking News’; minimal poems of one to three word lines, each word given its right and proper weight. Magnetic.
Kamau Brathwaite at the Purcell Room, 2007, reading (as I recall) the whole of ‘Rites of Passage’. He was commanding, his rolling cadences sweeping us on. Introduced by Linton Kwesi Johnson, who said how much Brathwaite meant to him, how he had, so to speak, given him permission to be a poet and singer.
Alice Oswald at the poetry space upstairs at the old Foyles in Charing Cross Road, demonstrating the opposite, that you don’t need a huge presence to hold your audience. You can speak quietly, and your focus and conviction will draw your listeners in.
Hannah Sullivan, reading from ‘Three Poems’ at the 2018 T.S.Eliot event. The real thing, intense, utterly compelling and a deserved winner of the prize.
And then there was the one that got away, the one I never noticed. W.S.Graham read at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in June 1981. I was there in the town but I don’t recall knowing anything about it. I only found out about the event thirty years later in Denis O’Driscoll’s article ‘Readings Remembered’ (The Outnumbered Poet, 2013):
”A bit the worse for alcoholic wear Graham may have been, but his reading….. was unforgettable – every word illuminated, every silence sculpted. ‘I am not at my best. Forgive me. But me, even not at my best, is still pretty good’ was his own just assessment.”
Clive Wilmer was there too, and wrote a poem about the occasion (this poem I came across just last week).
“…….He sat there turning the pages
unable to fix on a single verse
plaintive and truculent
quarrelling with the book,
as if to surrender to a single instance
of language
was to surrender.
Then: ‘Read any one of them,’ somebody cried:
‘They’re all marvellous!’
And we beheld a marvel:
an Archangel
a little damaged
igniting the dark firmament with speech.”
Graham died in January 1986. I didn’t read him, and realise what a wonderful poet he was, until the late 90s. The name of this blog is, of course taken from one of his poems. I haven’t been able to find any trace of the event online. If I could time-travel, I’d walk down the street to the town centre with my old hand-held tape recorder and press play/record..
the word-road home 