On Poetry

T. S. Eliot said that to me in November 1950, in the form of the First Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University. No I wasn’t there, I couldn’t make it, but still he said it to me.

The poetic encounter is a meeting in life. Let it be like that, let it be that. Whether or not I achieve that myself, only time will tell and it won’t tell me, but what I teach, all I teach, is how to aim there.

Look at me. Don’t look at me. Look by me into the past. Look past me into the distance.

Look at what I’m not doing. Look somewhere else. Look at you. Look at how I’m doing this (though I’m not doing this). Look at nothing.

Solar, lunar, musical, visual. Four ways of meeting, four ways of meaning. Real-life meeting can add to that three other senses – smell, taste, feeling – and all we synaesthetic oddballs who write poetry know full well that words can do all three of them for us – smell, taste and feel like things – but let’s calm the excitable metaphor down: it’s our servant, after all.

I think a poem you read has to meet the same criteria as a person you meet: did it mean anything to you, matter to you, affect you? If it didn’t do those things you won’t remember it long. Think of ourselves before language again, hiding or hunting somewhere on that lonely bright savannah – you have to remember a thing to know about it, so others can be shown. You have to remember a thing to learn from it, so others can be told. You have to remember a thing to care about it, so life can be borne easier.

IN MY WORK the white is everything but me, and the black is me. In poems the black is someone.

If you get any poems out of it, any lines at all, pin them to your breast. If you get any white sheets, bury them with honours. Remember where you won, remember where you lost. Wonder why.
~

No one will ever know who you are, and you will never need to tell them.

Poets were real, walked around, sat down, shouted. Poems are responses to needs, urges, hungers, thirsts, they have sprouted forth in moments like the moments we know, passing beside us now, five-to-nine in the morning, four-twenty in the day, indoors, outdoors, sun and rain, with a king on the throne, with a fool or a child or no one. They get worked on, worked at, thrown out, messed with, but there is a moment, we all know there’s a moment in which the poem (the black signs on white surfaces) takes over from the self, becomes the self for now. I spend my allotted slice of forever contemplating that moment.