On poetry PDF
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ON POETRY 2 Glyn Maxwell On Poetry OBERON BOOKS LONDON 3 First published in 2012 by Oberon Books Ltd 521Caledonian Road, London N7 9RH Tel: 020 7607 3637 / Fax: 020 7607 3629 e-mail: [email protected] www.oberonbooks.com Copyright © Glyn Maxwell, 2012 Glyn Maxwell is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s consent in any form of binding or cover, stored in a retrieval system or circulated electronically other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on any subsequent purchaser. Full acknowledgement for extracts reproduced in this book can be found on pages 172-173. ‘The Byelaws’ by Glyn Maxwell was first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 2012 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-085-2 EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-531-4 4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. 5 for Mara Jebsen, Charlotte Walker, Jesse Ball and Arthur Moffa 6 Contents White Black Form Pulse Chime Space Time 7 ‘Oh, then I must be going, child!’ said Meet-on-the-Road. ‘So fare you well, so fare you well,’ said Child-as-it-Stood. Anon 8 White THIS IS A book for anyone. There are as many outlooks on poetry, on poets, on poems, on poetics, as there are people who read, but my book is for anyone. So forgive me if I leap as far back in time as possible to find a place where we all agree. * This far: alert, curious, more or less naked, without language, looking out over the green savannah. Now that was a leap, that’s an outlook. You see an open space with trees whose branches spread out near the ground and bear fruit. You see a river or path that winds away out of sight, beyond the horizon. You see a few animals, you see changing clouds. You like what you see. Two hundred thousand years later you’ll call this outlook ‘beautiful’ but the word’s no use to you now. Time after time, in the field of evolutionary psychology, the children of today, from anywhere on earth, in test conditions, point to this picture, choose it over all others – forests, jungles, mountains, beaches, deserts – as the view most pleasing to them. What are they looking at? What are they really looking at? 9 Well, evolutionary psychologists think they’re looking at this: an open space (we can hunt) with trees (we can hide) whose branches spread out near the ground (we can escape) and bear fruit (we can eat). We see a river (we can drink, wash, eat) or path (we can travel) that winds away out of sight (we can learn), beyond the horizon (we can imagine). We see a few animals (we can eat more), we see changing clouds (rains will come again, we can tell one day from another) and, all in all, we like what we see. What evolutionary psychologists – and I – believe is that aesthetic preferences, those things we find beautiful, originate not in what renders life delightful or even endurable, but in what makes life possible. * Art, drawing, writing, poetry – are marks made in time by that gazing creature. Poetry has been unnecessary for almost all of creation. Strictly speaking it still is. But it happens to be my savannah, this strictly speaking, and it may well be yours, so let’s advance together, alert, curious, naked – or at least two of those – into our first landscape, admiring once again what we can’t be without. * And, since this is a writer’s book about writing, let’s stop to take with us a leaf from one of the earliest such books to have reached us, Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher observes that ‘practically everything has been discovered on many occasions…in the course of 10
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