December 22, 2009

Jane Holland: Notes Towards Authenticity

Authenticity, the poet’s most plausible con trick: sine qua non.

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The spirit, rather than the letter, of authenticity is what marks out good poetry. Those who achieve both, or appear to achieve both, are gods.

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Don’t waste time on compromise. Even a botch job is better than a failure of nerve.

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The act of writing poetry is, by its very nature, ironic.

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‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ (John Keats) What could be more authentic? Or more calculated?

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Belief in authenticity is the gateway to Blake’s road of excess (and we all know where that leads).

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The Fool opens the Major Arcana: innocence and an openness to failure breed creativity.

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Good poetry can be written by an idiot. All things considered, it’s probably better to be an idiot and save yourself the burden of knowledge.

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Federico García Lorca: ‘The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.’

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Lorca and the duende. Arsenic lobsters. The raw and the cooked. What flies in one language may fall flat in another.

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Trust yourself. You don’t have to believe in angels to hear a bell ring. And vice versa.

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Still, poetry is hard; it demands energy. There must be an energy to the poem that propels each line toward and beyond the waterfall of the line-break: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (Dylan Thomas).

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Home is where the stress falls.

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The more authentic the idea, the more natural and unstrained the line, even when rhythm cuts across sense.

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The line that calls attention to its own idiosyncratic hiccups can be as authentic as the line that speaks of elegance and tradition: intention is everything.

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Rhythm that springs direct from the personality – however contrary and antipoetic – is authentic. Everything else is based on the way we think we ought to be writing.

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Mina Loy: ‘Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.’

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An adopted persona is still true to the self if chosen by the self.

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The truly authentic is never the other, only the self – even  when disguised, lying, psychotic.

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You cannot steal or borrow or learn authenticity. It’s either there in the work or it isn’t. Sometimes the only way to find it is to stop looking.

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The poem made up of undigested influences is to poetry what the plastic flower is to fresh blossom.

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The rules change over time, but one constant remains: the poet must believe authenticity to be possible, whilst faking it like crazy.

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The poet’s truest voice is an amalgam of second-hand fictions.

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If poetry is a fiction, how can it ever be true?

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Truth is perception, and typically includes at least one leap over error-infested waters.

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There is more authenticity in the dullest moment of our lives than there is in the greatest poetry. But that is no excuse for writing dull poetry in the name of authenticity.

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Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist and editor. Her latest full-length collection is Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing). She is the editor-in-chief of Horizon Review.

November 30, 2009

Mary Jo Bang: Byron’s ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’

So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

The poem begins with ‘So . . . ‘ and ends with ‘moon.’ Imbedded in every word, in every phonic echo, is the central subjectivity that says, ‘Too bad.’ We’ll go no more, that’s the key element. This ‘no more’ is the end of love, of youth, and ultimately the ‘no more’ that comes at the end of life. The poem captures the cold, utterly without irony, punctum (i.e., piercing) of the simple lacerating fact that something,  ‘it,’ is over. ‘It’ is at its end. We will go no more. This is the lyric pared down to the heart’s longing and the moon’s inconstancy.

Like Byron himself, Byron’s poems often strain against constraint. This poem proceeds by way of a cascade of opposites: a-roving/loving (seeking versus the sin qua non of love, the steadfast remaining faithful); night/bright; sheath (contraction)/breath (expansion); breast (breath heaving)/rest (death). The poem ends with a chiasmic reversal of the beginning. The end-rhymes of lines one and three in the first stanza — a-roving/loving — are flipped and become, in the first and third lines of the third and last stanza, loving/a-roving. Each line undergoes some transformation. The moon/bright in line four of the first stanza becomes light/moon in the last line of the last stanza. And so the poem goes forward. Of the many reversals and inversions, all can be read as stand-ins for the reversal of fortune of a possible fractured twosome and/or the retirement of the pack of once-active rovers that makes up the ‘we.’ Even the idea of night as the end and day as the beginning gets reversed. Now day is the ending. When night becomes day, we will go no more. We once did. We won’t any more.

It doesn’t make the poem any less poignant to know that ‘roving’ in Byron’s back-in-the-day day meant sex. We’ll go no more because we are all worn out. That’s sad too. Although that kind of exhaustion is remediable. It seems to me the exhaustion in Byron’s poem is more than sex. Its note of resignation is too cutting. The central lyric dummy who speaks for all of us — that’s the lyric mode — doesn’t only speak for the sexed-up moments but for the ponderous click of a casket lid. And the moment of falling out of love. And the moment of letting go and giving up on the unrequited. We, women and men in all combinations of coupling, or even those who are facing late night post-coital estrangement, we are, all of us, all done-in. The poem may be a cautionary tale as well as a dirge. When we lay down our metaphoric scabbard and put to bed our metaphoric priasmic sword with no hope of rising again, then we truly are no more. We are over.

[Regarding the persistence of the poem in popular music and literature, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So,_we'll_go_no_more_a_roving. The Wikipedia article also refers to the poem’s possible sources, most convincingly the Scottish poem, “The Jolly Beggar,” published in 1776]:

He took the lassie in his arms, and to bed he ran,
O hooly, hooly wi’ me, Sir, ye’ll waken our goodman!
And we’ll go no more a roving
Sae late into the night,
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne’er sae bright.
And we’ll gang nae mair a roving.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six books of poems, including Elegy, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recently book is The Bride of E (Graywolf Press, 2009). She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

This piece was first published by Poetry Daily.