Another interesting topic to come out of the poet-critic article in Poetry...

What do you think to these comments on simplicity and solemnity in articles by Adam Kirsch?

On Merrill: "A poet gives the impression of strength only if  his linguistic powers seem to meet and overcome the challenge of significant statement. Simple things said simply are graceful; difficult things said with difficulty are impressive; but simple things said with difficulty are merely showy."


On G Hill: "Solemnity however has always been Hill’s besetting vice. Solemnity is to seriousness as sentimentality is to emotion: the attempt to induce a feeling that refuses to occur spontaneously. What’s more, solemnity provokes a kind of resistance — mockery, or sheer disbelief — which genuine seriousness never does. And it takes courage for a poet to realize that such resistance on the reader’s part may be justified, that it demands a genuine reform of his poetic methods. That is why there is something truly impressive in the stylistic evolution of a Yeats or a Lowell. Hill, however, has never embraced the kind of humility necessary for such a change. Instead, he has been the Coriolanus of contemporary poetry, proud of his refusal to compromise or condescend."

That's an elegant but slightly crooked lynchpin for an argument. It attempts to curse solemnity with The Bad Thing of sentimentality, and they are not really in the same category of literary quality. Besides, it strikes me that sentiment which provokes emotion (and solemnity which provokes seriousness) suggests an achievement - more so than emotion which provokes emotion and seriousness which provokes seriousness: The reader is transformed and so is the poem. And I can't imagine that Hill - with his interest in ritual, liturgy and so on - would be too troubled by the idea of poem-as-ritual, which is what the effect of Solemnity > Seriousness suggests.

Another poet-critic talks more colourfully of Hill's quality of 'gravit-arse', and you know what he means. But Hill's problem of late has been, for me (and I'm a fan), that he just writes too much - and I'm not convinced that his inner and actual editors are earning their keep.

What about difficult things said simply?

There seems to be a huge vogue, especially in the USA, for "simplicity", "accessibility" etc; you know, culture for "down-home folks". This affects sophisitcated urbanites possibly as much as those who really do drive pickups for a reason.

I've often found that what may look "difficult" to one person is in fact not difficult at all to another. Even one person's obfuscation is only another's symbolism.

This popular trend in the States reached its apogee 30 years ago with the seventies "country" aesthetic and the godawful blowdlerisation of Laura Ingalls Wilder's memoirs of her childhood as a pioneer. It is a form of nostalgia, reeking of both solemnity and sentimentality, and in its adherence to the imagined past, it carries a very loaded subliminal message. It worries me when I see it applied to literature.

I expect Kirsch's epitome of the difficult said simply would more likely be Walcott than Bly. He seems to have a taste for poets of annunciation, latching on to ideas and mathematics and being less concerned with music and mystery.

I'm sure I'm not alone in not accepting that the development of a poem proceeds from the Thing to the Saying of the Thing. It seems to me that poets often work on the Saying before being fully aware of the Thing. So the idea of a pre-planned strategy in which we have made decisions about simplicity, difficulty etc. doesn't hold, for me.

Thus we might muse on the Porta Nigra in Trier and only realise some way in that it's about a great shag in the hotel the night before. By then, it's probably too late to satisfy Kirsch.

I think I am suspicious of solemnity in poetry. It's a tone that relies on the odd, typically reactionary, idea of 'poet as sage', full of wise saws and instances. The least engaging lines in Keats, for me, are those where he attempts a solemn pronouncement, of the "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" variety (an execrable ending to an otherwise engaging, even playful, imaginative engagement with a work of art).

A quick comparison of Edward Thomas's 'The Signpost' with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' illustrates the difference for me. While Frost turns his swithering at the junction into a hoary sort of wisdom, a pronouncement, Thomas retreats inward, with one internal voice (a younger self) mocking his indecision as a sign of creeping age and conservatism, and another voice (presumably older) mocking the supposedly more decisive younger self for the self-pitying angst it seems, conveniently, to have forgotten was another part of its character. No pithy resolutions here. It's a serious dramatisation of anxiety about identity, and it sidesteps solemnity. I respond more to Thomas than Frost. Perhaps he's more intrinsically modern (though they were writing at the same time)?

Having said this, I don't think solemnity (in the bad sense) is fair on Hill. I don't share his religious perspective, but I'm struck by his dark and serious engagement with it. Again, the voice strikes me more as a dramatisation of, than a pronouncement on, particular experiences.

I also dislike solemnity, a self-important tone which goes very badly with the marginal status of contemporary poetry. You can hear it in 'the poetry voice', that singsong intonation, dying away at the end, which some poets adopt at readings. I would have raised this issue in the readings thread, but I don't want to name names, as some otherwise very good poets do it.

Yes. The final line of a poem is often asked to bear far more weight than it should, and the strain becomes particularly pronounced when read aloud, or when the final line hangs on its own on the page.

Do people have favoured final lines? Ones that either provide closure (while avoiding solemnity), or take the reader somewhere new and unexpected? What should a final line do?

I particularly like the end of Matthew Caley's 'The Critics Who Failed to Define Their Own Epoch':

"It's closing time. And if I'm unapologetic, then I'm sorry."

I like it. It reminds me of a lecture I once went to, where the lecturer kept repeating himself, alternating the comments, "And if I'm repeating myself, I make no apologies for that,' and "If I'm repeating myself, then I apologize, but..."

I think the last lines of Grecian Urn are less a 'solemn pronouncement' than a joyful, risk-taking leap. It is worth noting that it is not actually Keats who is making the statement, nor even the poem's main narrator/persona. The inverted commas suggest that "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" is being spoken by the urn itself, the 'bride of quietness', (apparently quoting or paraphrasing Sir Joshua Reynolds). Such a statement would have been disastrous in one of the early stanzas, but by the end of the poem it seems to me that it is well-earned, like the final line of James Wright's Hammock poem: 'I have wasted my life.' Such lines are essentially meaningless when taken out of context.

Yes, you're quite right to clarify that it's the urn speaking. It's also speaking, in comforting tone, to a hypothetical future generation, not specifically to the persona. Perhaps this does make it less solemn, and more a 'spontaneous overflow of emotion'?

I think I just find those final lines attempting a summary of the (more complex) encounter that the poet/persona has so vividly conjured and suggested during the rest of the poem, and they feel, to me, reductionist and disappointing. I'd rather it finished on "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity." If it's a 'silent form', should it go on to speak? Perhaps if it spoke with a touch of Larkinesque uncertainty, expressing a sort of almost-instinct that's almost true (or almost beautiful), I'd like it more. But that probably says more about me than the poem.

This is just a passing comment, but it sometimes seems to me that us British poets are so schooled in irony that we feel very uncomfortable even with somebody being "serious" rather than solemn. So sometimes we look at a poet like Hill and want him to take a chill-pill, not taking himself so seriously.

But perhaps that's not entirely his fault; and maybe he slides over into "solemnity" because he thinks that what he's writing ought to be urgent.

We were earlier, I remember, quite eager to have a go at poor old Henry Treece for being over-the-top in his "Notes on A Personal Apocalypse." We, however, did not have bombs raining down on us, and haven't experienced anything more cataclysmic than a tree falling down in the high winds.

A few last words on poetic development, by Philip Larkin (in an interview in the London Magazine in 1964): 'I suppose I am less likely to write a really bad poem now, but possibly equally less likely to write a really good one. If you can call that development then I've developed.'

I like that. If you want to develop, move on and grow you need to risk failure by taking a few leaps and the more established you are, the more scary it becomes to take chances because you have a reputation to maintain and expectations to fulfill - you know what you can do well and you know that your audience are resistant to change so the temptation is to carry on doing it. Picasso understood that and never gave in. He just kept trying new things. That wide-eyed joy in experimentation was one of the qualities that made him a genius.

Critics would do well to remember that 'failure' is often part of the process of artistic growth. Terrible to end your artistic life as a pastiche of yourself.

You don't mean Larkin, I hope. His last book, 'High Windows', was his probably his strongest: a triumph, anything BUT a pastiche.

Regarding the earlier quote, I should have added that I think Larkin's summary of his work was hugely self-deprecating, part of that mask he assumed to deflect unwelcome or merely tedious questions. I agree with Ricks, who thought the statement 'needlessly modest.' But I like the very Larkinesque humour, and (what I take to be) the implied dismissal of that silly vogue, current then as now, for development-spotting.

As for Picasso (whom Larkin hated of course), he certainly kept at it; I think it was Gertrude Stein who saluted him as a 'worker'. But his latest works (apart from such flashes as the Artist & His Models series of etchings/lithographs) were hardly his greatest: all those erotic doodles... you could certainly call them pastiches, or worse.

Although, to be fair, Larkin never really had a "late poems" period. Compared to eg Picasso, he died comparatively young and hadn't produced a book for years. Though the few late poems do generally keep up the standard. Maybe he was afraid of becoming a pastiche...

Compared to many poets, he also produced a relatively small corpus of poems - unless there's a file somewhere with lots of self-rejected poems that hasn't been published yet. Considering the way they even dragged his juvenilia and soft porn out of a cupboard somewhere and published that, I can't see it myself...

I loved hearing Kenneth White reading at StAnza 2008, especially his Ballad of Kali Road which is prefaced with: "A sociocultural extravaganza for several voices, a tin whistle, a Jew's harp and a sense of supernihilism".
The tone of the ballad is mostly sombre (about poverty and working class life in Glasgow) but finishes with -

"let it all
go down the river
to the long shore
the long white shore
where John Knox
is a hermit crab
and Plato
is a jellyfish."

which had the audience in absolute stitches and makes me laugh everytime I read it.

I like it. Certainly made me chuckle during an otherwise fraught day at work. And again, in fact, now that I've found a moment to post. Where would you recommend someone shamefully unacquainted with Kenneth White begin reading?

To be honest I'd only read a couple of his poems before StAnza so I'm not entirely sure of the answer to that.

Here's a link to an interesting essay on him with a couple of his poems -

http://ebc.chez-alice.fr/ebc48.html

I'd certainly recommend his collected Open World which I picked up at the festival.

£7 for Handbook for the Diamond Country his Collected Shorter Poems. Mind you, the recent chunky Collected is only £11 or so on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1...10100179&sr=1-1

Handbook for the Diamond Country is perhaps the only book I've bought full price and given away within a week or two. Not a value judgement - White is just not to my taste. Mind you, that was 17 years ago, so perhaps I'd find his work more interesting now.

I sense a geopoetics thread coming at some point!

'You don't mean Larkin, I hope'

No no, my comment about self-pastiche wasn't directed at Larkin. Not at all.

Thanks for the tips on White, chaps. I'll try the full collected and, hopefully, not feel compelled to give it away.