There are too many populists, amateur versifiers and obscurantists. Don Paterson urges us to leave poetry to the professionals

Don Paterson Saturday November 6, 2004

Guardian

Poetry is a dark art, a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world. That is to say that it aims to make the texture of our perception malleable. It does so by surreptitious and devious means, by seeding and planting things in the memory and imagination of the reader with such force and insidious originality that they cannot be deprogrammed. A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself; a poem makes a fetish of its memorability. It does this because the one unique thing about our art is that it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect. We merely recall a string quartet or a film or a painting - actually, at a neurological level, we're only recalling a memory of it; but our memory of the poem is the poem. Its most primitive (and so we can probably assume its earliest) function is as a system for the simple storage and retrieval of information, and sometimes its concealment; the poets of certain nomadic Saharan tribes memorise the location of the waterholes, in way that will not betray them to others. No wonder that poetry, so deeply connected to the world and our own survival in it, was quickly invested with magical properties, and soon took the form of the spell, the riddle, the curse, the blessing, the prayer. They are - and poems remain - invocatory forms. Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing. But poetry invokes; the memorable word conjures its subject from the air.

Poetry is also an occult science but I think the language of our science, verse composition, has been lost - or at least disfigured to the point of uselessness. Poets no longer feel confidently expert in their own subject. The language of academic versification studies and "poetics" is only appropriate for something that describes the result, not the working practice; the noun, not the living verb. This language always makes the error of talking about the messy, insane process of verse-making as if it were a clean operation. Our business is not with rhyme, but with rhyming; not with metaphor but with metaphorising, the active transformation of the image; there is as much difference between the two as there is between checking a watch and building one.

Such description as exists of the real composing process is couched in the language of the beginner's workshop, with its nonsensical talk of "show-not-tell" and "good subject matter" - or the language of self-help. (Incidentally, the systematic interrogation of the unconscious, which is part of the serious practice of poetry, is the worst form of self-help you could possibly devise. There is a reason why poets enjoy the highest statistical incidence of mental illness among all the professions. Your unconscious is your unconscious for an awfully good reason. If you want to help yourself, read a poem, but don't write one.)

Only plumbers can plumb, roofers roof and drummers drum; only poets can write poetry. Restoring the science of verse-making would restore our self-certainty in this matter; the main result of such an empowerment would be the rediscovery of our ambition, our risk, and our relevance, through the confidence to insist on the poem as possessing an intrinsic cultural value, of absolutely no use other than for its simple reading .

"Risk" needs some redefinition. To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest living playwright. This kind of poetry is really nothing but a kind of inverse sentimentalism - that's to say by the time it reaches the page, it's less real anger than a celebration of one's own strength of feeling. Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in high possession, it will change no one's mind about anything; more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is "risk" the deployment of disjunctive syntax, crazy punctuation or wee allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too. Risk, of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable, excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their self-transformation - is quite different.

Real danger flirts with the things we most dread as poets. Real risk is writing with real feeling, as Frost did, while somehow avoiding sentimentality, or simplicity, as Cavafy did, and somehow avoiding artlessness; or daring to be prophetic, as Rilke did, and miraculously avoiding pretentiousness; or writing with real originality, as Dickinson did, while somehow avoiding cliché (since for a reader to be astonished by the original phrase it must already be partly familiar to them, if they are to register the transformation; a point fatally misunderstood by every generation of the avant-garde, which is one reason they often seem stylistically interchangeable). The narrowest of these paths, though, the poets' beautiful tightrope-walk, is the one between sense and mystery - to make one, while revealing the other. As our friend Michael Donaghy did.

Our problem is that the roles of poet and reader have become blurred; on the one hand we have the populists, who have made the fatal error of thinking that feeling and practice form a continuum. They infantilise our art: chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems; silly workshop exercises where you write a poem in the voice of your socks; ultra-"accessible" poetry programs, where the general public text-in poems to be read out on the show.

On the other hand we have the Postmoderns, who have made the fatal error of thinking that theory and practice form a continuum. They don't: this foolish levelling of the playing field in favour of the merely clever has led to an art-practice with no effective internal critique. Genuine talents such as, say, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley, working recognisably within the English and European lyric traditions, are drowned by the chorus of articulate but fundamentally talentless poet-commentators. Their situation is analogous to British free improvisation in the 80s, where one could hear great jazz virtuosi like Evan Parker and Derek Bailey sharing a stage with people who had barely mastered the rudiments of their instruments - simply because the valorisation of talent itself was felt to be elitist and undemocratic.

The populists, on one side, purvey a kind of straight-faced recognition comedy, and have no need either for originality or epiphany. On the other side we have the avant-garde so desperate for transcendence they see it everywhere: they are fatally in the grip of an adolescent sublime, where absolutely anything will blow your mind, as your mind, in its state of recrudescent virginity, is permanently desperate to be blown. The Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute.

At the end of the day, you cannot use the designation "poet" without introducing the highly undemocratic idea of Natural Talent. Poets are people with an unusual gift for the composition of verses. End of definition. Our disagreement, of course, is over what constitutes good verse.

But if you want true "access" to poetry ... remove all the mediators! Those self-appointed popularisers, who, by insisting on nothing but dumb sense, have alienated poetry's natural intelligent and literate constituency; and those exegetes in whose self-interest it is to keep poetry as incomprehensible as possible, that they might project nothing into it but their own wholly novel and ingenious interpretations.

It's important that poets remember that our first perception of the world is already a misinterpretation. Incarnated souls all get off to variations on much the same bad start (especially boys, those sobbing vessels of karma, whose first act is to penetrate their mother) and are given only the perceptual equivalent of a pinhole camera through which they are supposed to experience the universe. We are born, then, into a condition of metaphor, a metaphor really being a contextual restriction of sense. We are attuned only to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the universe our senses conjure up for us is not the universe. We know that the ears of the bat, the eyes of the bee, the nose of the dog, the sensitivity of the bird to magnetic field (to say nothing of the bird's infinite angles of approach to what it beholds, unlike the three ways we have to walk home) shape a perception of the world wholly different from our own, yet no more or less true.

But having fallen into a mammalian dream of the universe, we fall slowly into a much deeper human dream. The human dream is one of all things first recognised, and then named, in accordance with their human utility, translated and metaphorised into the human realm. It is just as flimsy a consensual reality as money.

I'm an admirer of the Post-Freudian theorist Ignacio Matte Blanco, and a travesty of his position is this: when we were born, everything was pretty much everything else. The breast was you, your mother the breast, and the back garden your mother, the world was an absolute and indivisible unity. There was nothing to tell you otherwise. This perception is atemporal, since the perception of the passing of time is dependent first on the perception of difference, of an asymmetrical and consecutive series of events, which we did not then know.

This sense of unity was gradually overlayed with the perception of discrete, causally successive and asymmetrical things and events. With the acquisition of language, this goes into overdrive. Now here's the important part; this new perception does not refute the observations of the first, but is necessary accommodation of the fact of our consciousness. That is to say in the fall into language, asymmetry, the observation that we are other than the breast, the mother and the back garden, the moon, the sea, does not occur at the expense of that first knowledge, of everything as everything else, of a unity; this continues running, mostly under the limen of our consciousness, as a kind of spiritual DOS programme. Why? Because it was true .

This is easy enough to verify. Stripped of their human presence and meaning, we can see in the cup, the bath, the shoe, the bicycle, how many strange, lonely and often ugly things we make for the world. The category-instability of the thing is easily made apparent: a chair suddenly looks like firewood when it gets cold enough. If a chair were in an art exhibit, you would be disinclined to sit on it; if it were persistently referred to as a bed it will start to look like something to sleep in. To a man with terrible piles, certain chairs will look like a reproach, and to an alien with no arse ... it would be an incomprehensible object.

All this, for the poet, is much more than a little perceptual game. When we allow silence to reclaim those objects and things of the world, when we allow the words to fall away from them - they reassume their own genius, and repossess something of their mystery and infinite possibility. Then we awaken a little to the realm of the symmetries again, and of no-time, of eternity. And when the things of the world that we have contemplated in this wordless silence reenter the world of discrete concept, of speech and language - they return as strangers; and then they declare wholly unexpected allegiances, reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. We see the nerve in the bare tree; we hear the applause in the rain. These things are, in other words, redreamt, reimagined, remade. This I think is the deepest meaning of our etymology as maker.

Poetry then, remystifies, allows the Edenic, unified view to be made briefly conscious - and re-entered via the most perverse (but perhaps only) tool for the job: language. Poetry is the paradox of language turned against its own declared purpose, that of nailing down the human dream. Poets are therefore experts in the failure of language. Words fail us continually, as we search for them beyond the borders of speech, or drive them to the limit of their meaning and then beyond it.

So what's the nature of this secret language we would need to restore amongst ourselves? Well, it would consist mainly of arcana. Arcana are things as small, specific, useful and horrible as the Horseman's Word. Actually the horseman's word - which gives the apprentice ploughman power over horses and women when it's whispered in their ears - is also the secret formula for all poems. It was unwisely published in F Marian MacNeill's The Silver Bough , so now it's in the public domain you might as well hear it. In Scots it's twa-in-yin ; two-in-one.

Or to put it with mind-numbing dullness: the process of the poem is that of a single unifying new idea being driven through the productive resistance of the form proposed by the marriage of two previously estranged or unrelated things. As readers, we usually have the sense of a new thing unfolding, with an argument or a story quietly but insistently proposed in the first lines. Listen to these of Donaghy's: "Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron"; "Not in the sense that this snapshot, a girl in a garden /is named for its subject, or saves her from aging ..."; "Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid's ink ... /Bear with me. I'm trying to conjure my father, aged fourteen / as Caliban ..." You feel instinctively there will be a journey, that the poem possesses a dramatic teleology, and are immediately intrigued.

But there's a deeper unifying force at work. Our defining heresy as poets is that we know that sound and sense are the same thing. Everyone else thinks them merely related. The acoustic and semantic properties of the word are not even interchangeable for us; they are wholly consubstantial. They arose together, and to talk of one is to talk of the other. We allow our ear to think for us.

Like the musical note, the word is an event in time; and like notes, words can be recalled into one another's presence, and connected in their sense and mystery by the careful repetition and arrangement of their sounds. This repetition therefore introduces a real perceptual distortion: it offers a small stay against the passage of time. Just as rhyme not only has the knack of consolidating sense, but finding sense where previously there was none - unifying the music of the line is, in good poets, an unconscious default. When we sing something, we make a little sense of it; and when we want to make the deepest possible sense, we always make a song. Now more than ever, we need to keep singing, and singing together.

· This is an abridged version of last week's TS Eliot lecture, commissioned by the South Bank Centre. Don Paterson's latest work is The Book of Shadows (Picador), a collection of his aphorisms.

Thanks for posting this. When you look for an answer, you find it everywhere! For the last 2-3 days, I've been thinking about the designations "poet" and "poetry" - what they portray, include and exclude. You can see a fragment on insmallpieces.blogspot.com.

Monica

Daddu Funny how the world turns around, and I keep bumping into you.. six years hence. Poet, Poetry. How can I forget how you killed my poem, and then admitted defeat! The day I become more of a Poet, I become less of a humanist. Or maybe not. Maybe that is an excuse for bad poetry. M triggered a little thought within. Read this, nehasri.blogspot.com

Peace N