Ten words on any matter is enough.
After that the cargo lists, the helm wanders,
and the rats eat the cat.
The most important thing a poet can do is shut up. The next best thing is to cultivate the cruelty to strangle a bad line before it stands up in its crib.
There’s an adage that newspaper training is good for a writer. But if it’s good for a poet, the poet better live a long life, because learning to write newspaper style might just tighten his line to the point of cryptology.
At least that’s what happened to me. I got the idea that terse and verse weren’t just rhyming cousins. You can pursue a notion to the point of madness. I started writing poetry when I was thirteen and by the time I was thirty-five I was teetering on the brink of the idea that nothing is worth saying. And, as we know, the back wards of mental institutions are filled with people who toppled off that brink.
Nobody’s going to pin a medal on me for it, but by the time I was forty (I’m a slow learner) I figured out the immense vanity of what I’d concluded in my thirty-five-year-old adolescence: it wasn’t that nothing is worth saying, it was rather that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said. You hear the same thing every day in Washington or the United Nations. It actually passes for news. When you give up obscurantism you have to put your cards on the table—the very thing a politician and many a poet would rather die than do.
(I’m not talking about poets like John Ashbery, who doesn’t worry about your not getting him. He has his own language and it comes to me when I let it, when I’m not being a smart ass).
I still think taciturnity is a good thing in poetry, but you have to listen to the madman in the attic and the hit man in the cellar, the faerie in the garden and the poor damned child you left in the burning house just so you could strut around like a grownup. You have to listen, listen, listen, and then maybe, if you’re still alive and not too tired, you might pinch out a few true lines. (And then some critic will wonder aloud if you can do it again.)
We’ve all encountered the blighty soul raring at the bit to get his two cents in. His impatience to be heard has already deafened us to him. And we’ve met the poor soul we ourselves are keen to interrupt or ignore. I’ve met them both in me. I’ve outgrown the former, and the latter’s not in my hands, except as poet. In that role I can show this poor soul some respect.
William Logan, writing about the selected poems of Lawrence Durrell in the July 28 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, has some elegant things to say about reticence. “Faulkner and Joyce would never have been great poets,” Logan writes, “not just because they were not talented enough, but because they loved the lushness of language too well.” (By the way, on the same page there’s a poem, Andante Favori, by Ashbery.)
Later in his essay, writing about Durrell’s early, wordy and often obscure poems, Logan writes, “It’s not that a little of this goes a long way, but that a lot of this goes such a little way.” I think that neatly sums up what I’m trying to say about reticence.
There’s a certain inevitability to the best works of art, Titian’s green, for example. Once you’ve seen it it enters your glossary and you think it always existed. Once you’ve seen a great work of art your world is no longer imaginable without it. Great works couldn’t have been executed any other way. Their reticences and shadows are perfect, and they shape the rest of your life. What you feel for their makers is beyond gratitude or admiration—they are angels; they have illuminated your footstep.
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