What about the English poetry tradition
in an interview in the late 1980s the poet John Ashbery said, of those who were important to him, ‘Auden was the most important because he was the first’ – Ashbery did not end up writing like Auden, and I don’t write like George South, but George was the most important for me because he was the first – we met, introduced by poet & singer Margo Sutherland, in Wellington, New Zealand in the early 1960s, and I last saw him probably in early January 1963 when he left for India – he took his own life in Parkville, Melbourne in 1965, when he was 30 – I have nine of George’s notebooks – a typescript of poems, and some 40 letters George wrote to me, all by hand (he wrote with a fountain pen), mostly aerogrammes, but many are several pages long, from January 1963 to late 1964 – thruout the letters and the notebooks are as many more poems as there are in the typescript, notes towards short stories and a novel that were never written – when he died on Tuesday 5 January 1965, I lost a friend & mentor whose kindness, intellect and encouragement I still miss – there are names in my life that initially came from him : Martin Heidegger, the preSocratics, especially Parmenides & Herakleitos, Jane Ellen Harrison, Edward Conze & the Heart Sutra, Hui Neng, Han Shan, Franz Kafka’s Diaries, John Keats’s Letters, Mary Barnard’s Sappho, and all of them remain central to me 60 years later – he was my first & last real teacher – the first line of the first letter he wrote to me says ‘Dear Alan, just a note to encourage you to reply!’ – I have remained in a condition of ‘reply’ to him ever since –
George was a poet within the English poetry tradition, and could not abide Gertrude Stein or Charles Olson, precisely because these writers abandoned the very basis upon which George had based or lived his poetic life – he told me once that there were a few great poets at the top of the tradition, and beneath them were a large number of lesser but very fine poets, among whom were such as R S Thomas, Alun Lewis, James Reeves, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Muir, Laura Riding, while the modern ‘greats’ included Robert Graves, T S Eliot, W H Auden – many years later, reading Robert Duncan reinforced the notion that the ‘greats’ are the wells we all need to go to, but the fine poets of the next layer as it were are those who ‘increase our share’ –
there was one anthology George recommended to me and one critical work – Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither : A collection of rhymes and poems for the young of all ages – and James Reeves’s A Short History of English Poetry – I still have these volumes, and still open them with pleasure fairly regularly – they reflect the basis of the beginnings of my first poems – they still resonate in my own hearing of the writing I do today – for the first seven years I wrote entirely within this understanding, and practised the craft by treating many of the entries in Babette Deutsch’s wonderful Poetry Handbook as exercises in poetic form – so there were many sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, etc, and littler ones using specific examples of poetic lines – for seven years I showed the work to almost no one, and only a few of those very early pieces (1963-65) still exist, and they will be printed by Peter Vangioni at his Kowhai Press in Christchurch later this year –
my encounter with the work of Charles Olson is by now well known, as is Ezra Pound’s remark that ‘the first heave’ in a new poetry for a new time lay in ‘breaking the pentameter’, tho Herakleitos had broken the Greek hexameter 2500 years ago – Olson showed me how a different kind of rhythmic energy could inhabit and energise the poem, and as Roger Horrocks well observed, that tallied with my experience as a progressive jazz drummer in the late 1950s early 1960s – the beats in progressive jazz or ‘bebop’ were often cross-rhythmic and incredibly complex, and were seen at the time to reflect a new, post-war understanding of the rhythms of city life, as if the pentameter and the English pastoral poem had both to be broken as models for how those born in cities might express the real and specific sorts of life they were obliged to live –
and yet, and yet – I can still get ‘all teared up’, so to speak, at poems like this –
The maidens came when I was in my mother’s bower I had all that I would The bailey beareth the bell away The lily, the lily, the rose I lay The silver is white, red is the gold The robes they lay in fold The bailey beareth the bell away The lily, the lily, the rose I lay And through the glass window shines the sun How should I love, and I so young The bailey beareth the bell away The lily, the rose, the rose I lay
circa 13th or 14th century, anon., and no one really knows what’s going on here (tho many have firm views on that) and I don’t definitively know what’s going on when my voice breaks at ‘And through the glass window shines the sun’ –
~
what the English poetry tradition has that contemporary poetry does not is recognisable craft – the ways in which a poem is made, how its elements are put together, pose real problems when the clues and boundaries of fixed form structures like sonnets or sestinas are no longer there to guide the poet – in a sonnet, you and everyone else knows where the line ends, and that there are only 14 of them – but abandon all such guiding structures and the question of where one line ends, and where a new one begins, takes on a different kind of urgency and requires a fresh understanding of what on earth the craft of poetry might consist – after all, in making a poem one is making something, and in making anything, one can do it well or badly, and without rules, how can one know which it is – it is all too easy to fall into Oscar Wilde’s trap of ‘If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly’ – but, as Igor Stravinsky trenchantly remarked : ‘Sincerity is no excuse’ –
~
for me, the traditional forms of English verse have never died – a Shakespeare sonnet or an Ode by Keats or a poem by Edwin Muir enters my reading as if the poem is my own and not that of another – yet, for many years, I would change a line if it reminded me of any traditional rhythm – now the work comes as an amalgam of English, American, & ancient Greek, Chinese, and Japanese traditions where anything is possible, nothing is automatically allowable, everything can be questioned – so I have this double debt, to Charles Olson and to George South, with no need to choose between them, to value one over the other, to reject one if I accept the other –
~
the traditionalist James Reeves pointed out the necessity, thruout the histories of poetry, for a poet to renew their technical resources – he writes : ‘One fact which emerges from the history of poetry is indeed the absolute necessity for a continual renewal of technical resources; again and again one sees how a situation in which poetry has become sterile, and sensibility atrophied, is changed by a return to a diction and a rhythm more in conformity with common speech . . . . There are occasions when a poet can only revitalise his diction by detaching himself from society’ – this is not from a radical iconoclast who wants to tear the tradition apart, but from a traditional English poet who thought deeply within the tradition in order to understand how it can accommodate very different spirits such as Keats and Hopkins – it is a kind of thoughtfulness I admire, and hope to one day achieve as I have myself conducted experiment after experiment, made up very different forms (some obvious to looking, some not), and sought always to renew my capacity to see clearly, to hear exactly, and to honour my encounters with things in the ways that I meet them –
~
going back to Ashbery’s ‘the most important because he was the first’ – it’s clear to me that the English poetry tradition, as I knew it thru George South, was the context in which I was obliged, at the end of the 1960s, to renew my technical resources, and Olson gave me the means to undertake that renewal – with time, it has become more important to integrate those sources & resources rather than separate them or put them in opposition to each other – it has been, of course, a little more complicated than that