With thanks to Chris Boultwood and Judy Kendall, my essay on the haiku of Caroline Gourlay, published in Presence #73 in July, is now on the journal’s website, here.
I owe a personal debt to Caroline, for a good deal of encouragement and friendly advice when I was starting out as a haiku poet 30 years ago or so.
Month: October 2022
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On the haiku of Caroline Gourlay
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On (Eavan Boland and Colm Tóibín, again, on) Elizabeth Bishop
Having savoured Colm Tóibín’s book On Elizabeth Bishop, I then re-read words on Bishop by another great Irish writer, Eavan Boland: the chapter ‘Elizabeth Bishop: an unromantic American’ in her wonderful book A Journey with Two Maps (Carcanet, 2011), available here.
The focus of that book is on Boland’s own poetic journey and how women poets helped her shape her ideas about how she could relate in poems her own experience as a woman, wife, and mother; therefore, her thoughts on Bishop are somewhat subsumed to that purpose. Nonetheless, Boland’s discussion of Bishop’s ‘tone’, as distinct from her ‘voice’, is illuminating. As is her dissection of ‘At the Fishhouses’, from Cold Spring (1955), available to read here: rightly, she notes that, in amongst Bishop’s usual litany of precise visual perceptions, there lurks a “superb meditation on water as an emblem of tragic knowledge”, interrupted by the lighthearted, cameo appearance of a seal: ‘He was curious about me. He was interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns’.
While Tóibín highlights Bishop’s paradoxical observation, ‘as if the water were a transmutation of fire’, Boland’s commentary oddly stops short of addressing the last 19 lines of the poem, in which Bishop’s description of the sea reaches a tidal crescendo, culminating in the poem’s brilliant, six-line final sentence:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
If a poet took lines like these to a workshop nowadays, the response, more’s the pity, would no doubt be that the poet should axe at least half the adjectives and re-consider the purpose of writing about an abstract noun.
What’s especially intriguing to me in those lines is how Bishop separated the adjectives with commas in the second and last of them, but didn’t in the third. Strict grammarians may say that in a string of adjectives qualifying the same noun, there should always be commas between them; in poems, though that often looks fussy, if not off-putting to the reader. It could be, too, that by not separating adjectives with commas, one can enable them to have a pleasing and surprising compound quality. In this instance, Bishop used commas where she wanted to slow down the reader’s attention. Judging when to do this in poetry isn’t necessarily straightforward. Pacing, though, is a key component of a poem’s efficacy – and it isn’t just a case of deciding which overall form suits the words, and the speed at which the poet wants the reader to absorb them, but also how the pace of the words in each line looks and, moreover, sounds.
I could witter on about how Bishop brilliantly and repeatedly shifted the focus within the poem as a whole without it ever seeming as through its coherence was slipping; however, Tóibín is a much better guide to that than I’d be.
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On a haiku by Sheila Butterworth
all day
the drop and roll of acorns
on a tin roof
The benefit of having the Haiku Calendar on my work desk is that the monthly selections quickly seep into my consciousness. This one, one of the three runners-up for October in this year’s calendar, must’ve been written, probably twenty-five or so miles to the north-west of where I am, on a day just like today here in Yorkshire: dominated by a keen south-westerly/southerly breeze; warmish, but fierce enough to shake the trees, specifically to loosen acorns from at least one mighty oak.
It’s a highly sensory haiku. The wind is implicit, as is the sound of the acorns hitting the roof, but the movement of the acorns and the surface of the roof – a tin roof – are clearly outlined, with an engagingly direct simplicity.
Underneath it all, and what makes this haiku really stand out, are the multiple timelines. The reader is told, first, that the action within the haiku has been happening ‘all day’ and, presumably, is still happening now. Yet set against that constant movement is the forensic focus on the journey of the acorns: they ‘drop’ onto the tin roof and then ‘roll’ along it, perhaps along its corrugations – and then almost certainly straight onto the ground, because a tin roof is unlikely to be a flat roof. Once on the ground, there is, of course, the possibility that some of the acorns will, over a much longer timeframe, furnish forth new oaks, in the great cycle of life, and all the biodiversity which oaks support.
It should be noted that the way in which Butterworth uses ‘drop’ as a noun makes the acorns’ movement seem more fluid, and, crucially, more incessant, than if she had used it as a verb – compare her haiku with this possible alternative:
all day
acorns drop and roll
on a tin roof
This version is passable, but Butterworth’s one is much preferable, because it shifts the emphasis of the poem from the all-day nature of the activity squarely onto the acorns’ journey from the tree; it is that ‘the’ which confers the central importance. We know that the acorns’ fall will not last forever, but it is as noticeable as all-day rain, with a similar, though more intermittent and therefore different, drumming sound.
A deeper reading could be, as it is for many autumnal haiku, a metaphorical one: that we too, as readers, will, if we reach that age, experience our own physical change, a slowing-down that leads inexorably in one direction. Whether, like the falling of acorns does, it will eventually lead to rebirth is, naturally, for the individual reader to decide or not.
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On (Colm Tóibín on) Elizabeth Bishop
There’s a good case to be made for October being the loveliest month, in England at any rate; though only really when the sun shines and the plentiful golden yellows are at their best, like Samuel Palmer landscapes before your eyes.
It’s also a month of melancholy, too, which suits me just fine. The ideal time to get stuck into some serious reading, which, in turn, will feed into writing. Over the years, early autumn has traditionally been a time when I will make a concentrated study of a favourite poet’s oeuvre, to see how the quality of their output, and the clarity of their thinking, deepened over time. Poets who, either by choice or premature death (yes, I realise that most deaths are premature in some respect), published in a disciplined and selective manner are ideal for this, Elizabeth Bishop for one.
Like everyone and anyone who loves poetry, I’ve long liked Bishop’s poems. Curiously, though, real, devoted love for them has been awakened in me through an apparently unlikely source, Colm Tóibín. His book On Elizabeth Bishop, published by Princeton University Press, is as fine a critical reader’s study of another writer as any I’ve ever read. I find it interesting that it should be a writer known until recently solely for his novels, albeit wonderful ones at that, who has really opened my eyes. I won’t spoil the book for anyone who might be tempted to buy a copy, save to quote just the first sentence of the opening section (‘No Detail too small’), which alone was enough to make me sit up and reflect:
She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling.
Tóibín continues:
The effort, then, to make a true statement in poetry—to claim that something is something, or does something—required a hushed, solitary concentration.
Much more than, say, his late compatriot Eavan Boland did, he gets to the heart of Bishop’s statement-making, her restraint – what’s unsaid in her poetry as much as what is said, especially in comparison to her close friend Robert Lowell – and the exactness of her writing. In so doing, he quotes extensively from Bishop’s stories and correspondence (primarily with Lowell, naturally), but also from another great poet, Thom Gunn, who, like Bishop, chose not to take the ‘confessional’ path blazed by Lowell in Life Studies.
On the strength of just a few pages of the book, I couldn’t resist buying Tóibín’s poetry collection, Vinegar Hill, published by Carcanet. It could’ve been a dreadful vanity project, but, as any of the recent online readings he’s undertaken attests (there are several on YouTube), Tóibín’s humility about his poetry appears genuine and heartwarming. By and large, it’s a very good collection, albeit rather bloated – thinning out by a third, maybe almost a half, could’ve made it brilliant. All the same, I enjoyed and admired it.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 