Poetry "represents the possibilities to which all intelligent and humane social life should point. Poetry saves the world every day”
Bridget Riley, Shadowplay, 1990
At A/UK, we’ve long toyed with the overlap between poetry and poiesis.
The former you know as a literary form, or perhaps also a description of the beauty or uniqueness in some act or event. The latter is maybe not so well known - but it’s Ancient Greek (ποίησις) for "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before." Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, which means "to make".
“Beautiful, profound, creative work” is not a bad linguistic space to play around with. Particularly when we’re looking for the vocabulary to describe new kinds of action and intention, which can defy our climate and tech crises. So can, poetry itself help that?
We found quite a meeting of poetic/poietic souls in the pages of the New Statesman this week, when the Ex-Archibishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reviewed the new book from the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century.
But the title of the piece cuts to the chase - and asks “why poetry matters” in the current moment. Williams finds Burnside actively grappling with the question:
This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it does and does not mean in its context.
Auden is not shrugging his shoulders and accepting a place for poetry at the neglected margins of social life. Rather he is making a stark distinction between the ways in which human beings try to “make things happen” – the feverish efforts at political and technological control – and the tough imperative to find ways of echoing “the music of what is” in word and gesture.
The language that “makes things happen” in this context is the language of the Twitter feed, the advertising pitch, the chanted slogan at the rally or party conference (more and more indistinguishable from the advertising and entertainment world), the oafish put-down in parliamentary “debate”, the incomprehensible burble of policy documents and “values statements”.
As Auden says, poetry is “a way of happening”. It takes the passage of time, the reality of loss, the absorption in a sharpened kind of seeing or hearing, and makes all these into speech that can survive (as Auden also insists) and help others survive.
Its task of “turning noise into music” is thus irreducibly political, a sustained resistance to commodified, generalised language and the appalling reductions of human possibility that this brings with it.
Far from being a decorative adjunct to social or public life, it represents the possibilities to which all intelligent and humane social life should point. “Poetry saves the world every day.”
Burnside’s mission is to show how this works. In a series of reflections he weaves together some impressive close readings of poems in a good half-dozen languages.
He evokes both personal and political contexts where we need the right words in order to survive. These are the moments where mortality comes very close; or when the forms of social and economic life which have provided human and humane shelter for individuals come under strain and start to disintegrate.
They are the moments when we try to name the strange tensions of acknowledged failure and transforming hope that surround marriage in our culture; and moments when the poet is under pressure to say something with obvious public, political force and knows with even greater interior pressure that yielding to this would be fatal to the poetry.
….One of the things that the poet can do is to draw our attention again and again to the fact that human intelligence is bound up in a “collective intelligence”, a many-faceted interweaving of life and agency. Cut off from that collective intelligence, we are less than human, and we are “homesick for the other animals”.
Burnside notes sombrely that our actual encounter with the animal world, especially wild animals, is shrinking at an unprecedented rate (remember the recent press stories about junior dictionaries that no longer include the names of wild flowers or common birdlife).
We would also point you to this 2018 interview with Burnside from The Quietus, where Burnside reveals some of his existential and political insights. The poiesis implied by his poetry.
What belonging means for him
[ I use] the word ‘participation’ as a sort of shorthand for the pagan. As a kid growing up in the world I inhabited from birth to around sixteen years of age, the one great truth, the salient fact of my life, was that the world and pretty much everything in it belonged to other people.
I’m not just talking about property here; I’m talking about belonging. About the right, not just to hold the land and reap the benefits, but also to describe, measure, attribute significance: all of that, everything, belonged to others.
My social class – the way I walked, the clothes I wore, the lack of certain ‘manners’, a certain physicality – served to mark me out to those who knew as unworthy, not only of ownership, but of a meaningful cultural life.
T.S. Eliot said it all too well, when he murmured gently, but with total conviction, that it was “the function of the superior members and superior families to preserve the group culture” just as they “preserve and communicate standards of manners” – and it wasn’t hard to work out where I sat in all this.
It is partly a romantic idea, but it is an idea worth exploring, that a pagan sensibility does not – cannot – accept this kind of ownership of the land. Or ownership of land, period. Which would mean that anybody could ‘commune’ with the land, anyone could swim in its sacred waters or drink from its holy wells, anyone could peel a thin sliver of bark from a tree to release its guiding spirit.
So for me the release came with LSD, when the world around me exploded way beyond the bounds placed on it by others, and became, well, fields of energy, pulsating life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Psychotropics – LSD, mescalin, mushrooms, etc. – returned the world to me as a fully functioning miracle.
And this was mostly about a connection back to a pagan reality. Like the scene in Wind in the Willows where Pan appears, if you recall it? “All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”
That had been a kind of promise for me, along with the Celtic fairy stories I grew up with. I knew that justice and the land were inseparable: as long as one group or class could own the land, then justice would be that much more distant.
We’re going to die - but we’ll also value our privacy more
I like it that I am going to die. It beats the alternative of living forever. Imagine the horror of that. And I don’t think the ‘death drive’ should be repressed, any more than the sex drive. All repression is damaging: anything that sits in the depths, growing, feeding on the dark is going to go Creature From The Black Lagoon on us sooner or later.
This is why people fear death – because they don’t look at it. Of course, we need to be more careful with the drive that pushes us to go out into the world and kill, as opposed to the part that says, along with Whitman:
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward... and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
To be honest, I write because I’m trying to work something out. For myself. I don’t have any answers, but I am ready to speculate. It’s the difference between lazy fantasies and good quality guesswork that separates one writer from another. I try to be good at guessing, but I hope I never pretend I’m doing anything other than that.
… I can see a time when people will go to considerable lengths to have a secret life. It will end up being socially unacceptable, and people will commit crimes to protect themselves. I do not tweet. I don’t have Facebook. I don’t have a website, as such. I never use the phone except for short business-like calls.
I’m not making a big virtue of this, and I know it costs me professionally sometimes, and will do so even more, but it’s not worth it.
Also, I worked for a long time – ten years – in the computer industry and I know that, if ‘they’ can gather information on you, for whatever reason, however they choose to do it, they will. Even if they can’t use it immediately, they will see it as power.
Of course, I know they are doing it anyway, but I find it odd that we would all collaborate so readily.
More here. And here’s John Burnside’s page at the Scottish Poetry Library.