“Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect,” Clive James writes of poets and poems he admired in his student days, “and perhaps some of our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing.”
In his book, Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language, James, writing in the twilight of his career as poet and critic, still has that pure, nourishing, childlike joy and intensity about his subject while his delight as creator and critic in the wooly art of poetry is fully and maturely informed.
James is old school. Educated in Australia at a time when memorizing poetry, knowing something by heart, was something everyone did, he can talk the talk and walk the walk, “when to invert the foot, how to get a spondee by dropping a trochee into an iambic slot, and things like that.”
He’s not living in la la land. There is none of the “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” hyperbole gunking up the whole thing. Poetry, he writes, is an art form where “a limitless supply overwhelms an almost non-existent demand.” And a lot of compost in that limitless supply. “The more a poet’s creativity might be lacking,” he warns, “the more his productivity will be torrential.” James knows what time it is: and he acknowledges that no one, at least no one young, knows much or could care less about meter (although he sees an upside: “all the dull poetry that was ever praised for its technique is effectively no longer in existence.”).
But the pleasure James derives from poetry---he reads it for pleasure, can you imagine?---leads to pellucid concentration on the good stuff. He is erudite (translation: “super smart”) and writes with an elegance that has somewhat fallen out of fashion. He can’t wait to find and point out in a poem what he calls “the moment”---that stanza, line, even phrase, that transcends everything, makes everything worthwhile, “the consciously lyrical bits—what the Victorians would have called ‘the beauties.’”
“It’s the moment that gets you in,” he writes, with “in” being the magic. Poetry Notebook is full of show-stopping moments, and incisive explanations as to what makes them so. He sees clearly that “whether in a formal poem or an informal one everything…depends on the quality of the moment.” (He’s no fool: it’s all show business. He refers to Frank O’Hara’s Lana Turner poem as “a coup.”)
No doubt because of his background, formality is privileged. James allows that things don’t “have to” make sense, but for him they do have to be consistent. He sides with skilled work versus unfettered expression. Free (or abstract) poetry is suspect. “Like abstract painting, abstract poetry extended the range over which incompetence would fail to declare itself.”
But he’s equally tough, if not tougher, if not at times merciless toward the poets he likes. As though they’ve got it coming just for being so important. He can praise and promote Ezra Pound without feeling the least bit guilty about also calling the Cantos “a nut job blog before the fact.”
He isn’t shy either about bringing giant reputations down a peg, such as this introductory sentence: “Early in the twentieth century, e.e. cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.” But his praise, also, is unabashed and uninhibited. “How did he think of that?” he’ll ask rhetorically about the writer of a favorite “moment” he is sharing. Or, of a poem he can say it is “not only wonderful throughout, it is especially wonderful because it is wonderful throughout.”
One obvious weakness in the book, one he mans up to because, he says, he cut his teeth on poetry when “men dominated the art,” women poets do not figure prominently in the manuscript. He rightfully worships Elizabeth Bishop, and spends more than a little time on Sylvia Plath; a couple of other women are mentioned honorably. But it is definitely boys’ night out (and mostly old boys at that): Yeats, Auden, Keats, Eliot, Shakespeare, Milton, Pound, Frost, Siedel, and a number of his Australian mates, not to mention some odd choices (the poetry of John Updike?).
I remember at college when I would attend physics department symposia, not because I understood a damn thing they were talking about (I didn’t), but because I delighted in the enthusiasm with which they conveyed their discoveries. It’s fun to be around such an overflow of genuine enthusiasm for a topic. In James’ case, stylistically, the deft use of absolutes (“No poet has ever…” “He has always been”) combined with a breezy scanning attitude (“In Canto XLVI there are a catchy few lines about snow and rain…”) and the prejudice toward the lyrical makes for enjoyable reading.
There’s a bittersweet, melancholy aspect to this as well, involving Clive James personally, but you can Google him for that. Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language itself is a symposia; all you have to do is supply the wine.
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2015
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Top reviews from other countries
- Peter KettleReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2014
READ THIS BEFORE YOU CALL YOURSELF A POET
- LexReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2015
Five Stars - thoroughly enjoyable!
- ReaderinozReviewed in Australia on February 13, 2015
Lovely, informative book to keep dipping into.
