Defunctive Music
These poems ring changes on Montaigne’s idea of ondoyance, the flux of personality. They are ghost stories in the same way Henry James’s works of fiction and of autobiography often are. Ghost stories too (or perhaps especially) in the substantial section of translations with which the volume concludes: the poet assumes or is haunted by the voices of others. This was to describe the poems in terms of subject matter, by the basic slant of their content. To my mind they are also unified by formal concerns, my devotion to the traditions of English poetry.
"I have an idea for a poem," Degas once said to his friend Mallarmé - Degas was showing some nerve here speaking in this rather callow way to a real master of the art of poetry. And he got a rather interesting put-down for his efforts: “A poem, my dear Degas, Mallarmé replied, “is not made up of ideas but of words.”
An interesting formulation, one that points in the right direction, but one which does not quite go far enough in my opinion. A poem is made up of words all right, but the words must be arranged in a pattern, an exacting pattern. It is the combination of arresting and/or right words and an of appropriate rhythm driving the engine which makes a poem. The complete consort as Eliot called it.
In my long years of studying the master poets under many master teachers of poetry, I was schooled in English scansion the same way one has to be schooled in the techniques of music in order to perform it. One has to learn how to read a poem, to find the pulse of it, to “perform” it if only in one’s head. It has been astonishing to find that those standards I learned about from my professors, those rules and those criteria of poetry, no longer matter to, perhaps no longer even exist for many people who say they love poetry--on the basis of what they publish I would say that these rules matter least of all to those who edit poetry journals and who person the poetry departments of publishing houses.
There is a good fight still to be fought for poetic standards and I am trying to fight it. It would not be enough just to say that my book of poems represents my way of looking at or perceiving the world (as if sincerity were the measure). The form matters as much as the content. Herein by the way lies the challenge and the importance of translation for someone who is trying to be a poet. It is not enough simply to bring across the content of a poem written in another language, to find the “right” words if there are such things in a translation. One must find an English form for it too. An interesting tension arises from the wish to be true to the original while at the same time taking that original over, turning it into (in my case) a Guy-kind of poem.