Poets Learn from Poetry

Poets learn from poetry. My learning has been haphazard, dependent at first on hearing the poems I liked in a school's curriculum or those we had to memorize. Ever since, I have both read and written with my ear. In my younger days, "Creative Writing Courses" were unheard of. Poets were famous Englishmen, we thought -- and I liked Robert Browning's lively but verbose long poems better than his wife's lyrics. More natural to my ear were the few modern American poems that turned up in our Readers.

In my early teens, I wanted to choose for myself what I would read. I hunted for poetry in my father's library (which was largely theological), and took his Palgrave's Golden Treasury up our cherry tree, with a cushion. My perch proved unromantically awkward, and a groping 13-year-old made no headway with the poems. They were written in an English language I would have to learn from books. Then in the library, far too early, I found Robert Bridge's Testament of Beauty, stiffly English to my Canadian perception, though its solemnity moved me. The incantatory music of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven", too, stuck with me long after I first read my father's copy.

What I read apart from school was mine in a special sense, my choice. For example, Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, its architectural vaults and spaciousness, suited the frame of mind of a groping reader in those Depression years. And the border ballads read to us by Miss Gladys Story in her after-school Poetry Club, one brief precious high school term (she died soon after), gave time past a new magnetic force, and wakened in me a hunger to learn how poets spoke in faraway places and times.

It is hard, at the end of life, to remember which experience came before or after another, although certain discoveries in early adulthood stand out. Somehow I had my own copy of D. H. Lawrence's poetry; I felt the electric charge of his diction and imagery. To me, another Canadian, Archibald Lampman certainly flashed a new glimpse of what poetry really is:

... sometimes I hear
The dreamy white-throat from some far off tree
Pipe slowly on the listening solitude,
His five pure notes succeeding pensively. (from "Solitude")

The mesmerizing chant of patches of T. S. Eliot put iambic pentameters into my own vatic utterings! And his echoing of street talk, encouraged by Ezra Pound, Ezra says, taught me to listen in my place and time, though I never heard anything to rival "Mrs. Porter /And her daughter/They wash their feet in soda water" (The Wasteland, Section III).

Then came Elizabeth Bishop's North and South. It took my breath away because of the poet's matter-of-fact focus, in everyday words so precise that she seemed to speak of things I, or some double of me, had seen before. (When I read her line "An old uncle painted a bad picture", I felt she must have visited my uncle's living-room and seen its large framed amateur painting of a lakeshore at night where the path of the moon gleamed across the ripples -- to a focus somewhere left of one's shoulder!)

A later American style, imagist verse, I knew through the eyes and voice of W. W. E. (Eustace) Ross -- too restrictive for my temperament but disciplined, clear: a new virtue to cherish. Yeats's jewel-set words reinforced these values, in a more lyrical style, inimitably; his "Sailing to Byzantium" lingers in my ear over the decades. William Carlos Williams showed me the motiveless precision of simplicity in style; he wrote with the careless freedom of poems shed around the edges of a busy medical practice.

At the other extreme from these widely respected poets was Robert Penn Warren. His "The Ballad of Billie Potts" is a rollicking dark story written for the ear's delight (e.g. "For Little Billie never was much of a hand with a pen-staff": the Southern accent was automatic, as I read). It takes a rare plot-sense to sustain suspense through a long poem like that.

Another poem in my memory, although I never "learned" it, is E. B. White's "I paint what I see" from a 1930's New Yorker. In fact I misremembered it. To start with my wording:

'What do you paint when you paint a wall?'
said John D's grandson Nelson.
'Do you paint just anything there at all,
like a hunting-scene or the trees in fall?'
'I paint what I paint,' said Rivera.

The actual text reads:

'For this, you know, is a public hall
and people want doves, or a tree in fall,
and, after all, it's my wall.'
'We'll see if it is,' said Rivera.

I am not a scholar. My jackdaw's familiarity with verse comes from leisure reading although prescribed reading was necessitated by a Government of Ontario grant in return for two years' subsequent university teaching when a student population was cresting, in the early 1960s.

Two poets, in those years of graduate study, registered indelibly in my awareness, even if not traceably in my writing. First, bp Nichol. He and I exchanged light-hearted verses while he worked on the same library level where my carel was. "In Porphyreal Harness" (The Dumbfounding) is one of my offerings for him, and he published one of his for me, "What the Frag/Meant". Second, Byron: my thesis work on his Don Juan made mischievous and conversational usage clearly apt for poetry, a welcome note, given my tendency to solemnities.

American writers have refreshed me consistently. My scribblings in a college library's edition of early Emily Dickinson poems I ruefully remember; at the time my response, seemingly one-on-one, was irrepressible. Walt Whitman's voice was audible in his work, though I kept listening for more poems as musical as his "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed'. Vachel Lindsay's Chicago celebrations appealed to me, another city dweller. Because the Lowells were a storied aristocratic family, I resisted Robert Lowell's lyrical authority, but resistance melted away when I read "For the Union Dead", his evocative, New Englander's memorial poem.

Robert Frost's precision, nobody has touched. Theodore Roethke's "My Father's Waltz" had such an impact that I went on and on reading him, finding my own highlights in his work. In the 60s the Beat Poets carried all before them; even in Toronto, I rode with the flood-tides. It was unexpected and very touching at a U.B.C. poetry conference in 1963, when Allen Ginsberg followed me out to a quiet spot on the night campus to speak kindly about my first public reading of "The Dumbfounding" earlier that evening. He said it had communicated.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens I hunted up because one or two commentators on my first book (Winter Sun) saw his "influence" in it. (Was it the dense texture of his verse? Not likely the caustic undertone.) When I read his "Emperor of Ice Cream", it recorded willy-nilly in my memory -- though years passed before I tumbled to the fact that it was about a dead girl, laid out.

W. H. Auden I prize above all, not for the poetry primarily, but for the astringent wisdom of his prose work, The Dyer's Hand. Every poet needs that book!

Anthologies help me identify poets I want to look further for, as do magazines. In one British journal devoted to other (prose) matters, I tripped over a brief poem that charged all my circuits. It was signed Micheal O'Siadhail. Coincidentally, I mentioned the poet to someone off to visit in Ireland. In triumph she returned with an autographed copy for me of O'Siadhail's Hail! Madam Jazz. It was well worth her trouble.

I long to know Homer and Virgil. In graduate school I was game to try for a Ph.D. when a sympathetic professor, who introduced himself as Billy Wallace, said he would sponsor a thesis on my proposed topic, "Figures of Speech in the translations of Homer by Alexander Pope and Robert Fitzgerald". But he suffered a sudden heart-attack and died. He had known that the only Greek I knew was gleaned over one summer from an Oxford graduate who had answered my Toronto "Want Ad" for a tutor! Any other thesis sponsors in Classics considered my knowledge inadequate for assessing translated figures of speech.

Dorothy Sayers' translation of Dante, with the Italian text on facing pages, in paperback too, made that classic accessible to a grateful amateur. Translations of the Bible gave me one ancient, monumental source truly explored. I found it fascinating, in time inexhaustibly nurturing: the poetry, the story-telling, astonished me when, after my conversion to Christian faith, I found, increasingly, that daily reading kept pace with everyday living.

All is grist to one's mill, I suspect; everything informs, inly forms, the place where one's voice arises. Very early I learned to notice pacing in what I read, for example, the langour of "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!" (from a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney's); or the crisp "Desiring this man's art and that man's scope" (absurd words to come from William Shakespeare in his Sonnet xxix).

For me, a recognizable experience is expressed in another sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney (from his Astrophel and Stella):

Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write!"

Looking into his heart was safer for him, using the formal conventions of poesie in an earlier day. For us now it might be taken as inviting therapeutic writing, an abyss against which my Grade IX guide, Gladys Story, warned me.

I do not prescribe for other writers my scramble to gather in various poets' musics. Writing with my ear forced it upon me because I could avoid picking up any one voice only by mixing voices this way.

In the Seniors' Residence where I live, any number of us can go on, from memory, if someone starts Byron's first line "The Assyrian came down like a wolf from the fold ...". All of us once had it as "memory work" in elementary school. All of us also knew Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse (the idea of a bed with a "counterpane" was wonderfully exotic!)

Rhythms create community, just as finding a "voice" depends on hearing many voices.

Contents © 2005 Margaret Avison - Updated: 14 February 2005 by Tim Inkster
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