John Agard: Poetry to Energise the Soul

I was interested to hear the poet John Agard talking to Kirsty Young as a guest on Desert Island Discs in November 2014. Born in Guyana, Agard came to the UK in the 1970s with his partner, the poet Grace Nichols. Carol Ann Duffy says of him: “John Agard has always made people sit up and listen. He has done this with intelligence, humour and generosity... He has the ability to temper anger with wit, and difficult truths with kindness... In performance he is electrifying – compelling, funny, moving and thought-provoking. His work in education over the years has changed the way that readers, writers and teachers think about poetry,” 

His poems are often satirical, addressing subjects such as slavery and, as the BBC website puts it "the historical myopia of a shared past judged solely through European eyes". His humour is sometimes achieved by provoking an abrupt change of perception in his audience, a disruption of an accepted way of seeing. His readings are, as Duffy says, electrifying, giving language an almost physical quality in which words are played with, emphasised and delivered for maximum impact. Have a listen to him over on the Poetry Archive if you haven't heard him before.

Asked about how he felt about being awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry he says that that the medal is given for your contribution and oeuvre as a poet and that it would be ungracious to reject it. Young people, he says, both black and white, need to be motivated by people who channel the word with positive energy; they need models who can energise the soul, beacons who give them a positive hope that poetry is also something that is worthy of being honoured. For that reason he says he had no qualms in accepting the medal and felt honoured and touched to be in the company of many great poets.

He talks of the process of writing poetry, how the poet uses the same 26 letters of the alphabet as everyone else but there is "a magical moment when you happen to put the right words in the right order and this can trigger off a verbal chemistry that can touch your depths and language begins to fly". A line might come to you, he continues, like a benediction, like grace, like it's a gift. It has spiritual overtones but is not divorced from the mundane of life.

He says he believes that "the poet keeps us in touch with the vulnerable core of language that makes us what we are."

That's certainly something to ponder on.

Where Does Poetry Come From?

The Inspiration of the Poet by Nicolas Poussin

In the past, where did people think poetry came from?

For the Greeks, inspiration came from the Muses, the goddesses of literature, science and the arts, or from the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Poetry was given to the poet while he was in a state of divine frenzy. Because of this the philosopher Plato believed that, as the poet didn’t invent anything himself but was simply inspired to utter what the Muse gave him, he was dangerous,  an imitator rather than someone who used the faculty of reason to arrive at the truth.

In the Bible God is the source of inspiration and from Anglo-Saxon England we have the story of Caedmon, who looked after the animals at the monastery of Whitby. Although he was unable to compose songs, one night he dreamt of a figure (later identified with Jesus) who asked him to sing about the beginning of creation. The next day he remembered the poem and found that miraculously he was also able to compose more of it. He was taken to see the abbess, Hilda, who believed that the vision had been a gift from God. Caedmon became a monk and retained the ability to turn the scriptures into beautiful verse.

The 17^th century poet John Milton, echoing the prophet Isaiah who describes how he is inspired to speak when his unclean lips have been purified by a seraphim with a live coal, announced that he wrote ‘by devout prayer to the Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases’. [Quoted in Press 1955, p 2]

In the Norse sagas, the Mead of Inspiration and Poetry was stolen from the giants by the god of the Æsir, Odin who then gave it to those he thought worthy. In the pre-Christian Celtic world, there is evidence that poetic inspiration was thought to be derived from a cauldron, or from a liquid in a cauldron brewed by a supernatural being. A rather late medieval source, thought to be based on a much earlier version, tells the story of Taliesin, the supreme native poet, receiving awen or poetic inspiration, from a potion that the witch Ceridwen had been brewing for a year and a day in her cauldron.

However, in one of the poems attributed to Taliesin, he follows the Christian belief saying: ‘He [God] with his miracle bestowed immeasurable inspiration’.  In another poem there is a reconciliation of the native tradition with current Christian beliefs when Taliesin uses the magic of words, whereby one thing may miraculously be something else at the same time. In Kadeir Teyrnon, the word for cauldron, ‘peir’, can also mean ‘sovereign’ which is often used to mean God. So there is a double meaning: ‘there emanated from the cauldron or Sovereign/the ogyrwen of triune inspiration’.   [Haycock 2007, page 296, see also p 293 and p 304, note 35]

A parallel development came about in Ireland. There, an Irish poet in the persona of the renowned father of all poets, Amergin, singing of the Cauldron of Poesy, the source of poetic ability, also reconciled the two beliefs although in a more straightforward manner:  ‘warmly God has given it [the cauldron] to me out of the mysteries of the elements’.

Elsewhere, in the medieval Irish tale Scél na Fír Flatha ('The Tale of the True Lord'), Cormac comes across a shining fountain with five streams flowing out of it. Nine purple hazels hang above the well and drop their nuts into the water where they are then cracked open by five salmon and the husks sent floating down the stream. We are told that ‘… the sound of the falling of those streams was more melodious than any music that men could sing...’ Manannán tells Cormac that the fountain is the Fountain of Knowledge and that the five streams are, ‘…the five senses through which knowledge is obtained. And no one will have knowledge who drinks not a draught out of the fountain itself and out of the streams. The folk of many arts are those who drink of them both.’ [Cross and Slover 1936, p 507]

Inspiration then could be in the form of a liquid, drunk from the cauldron of poesy, or as Odin’s mead, or the waters from the Greek fountain of Hippocrene, sacred to the muses. But there was also a strong belief that poetry is blown into the poet. Awen, the old Welsh word for poetic inspiration, is derived from the Indo-European root meaning 'to blow', which is also the source of the Welsh awel meaning 'breeze'. In Irish the word, aí, also meaning ‘poetic inspiration’, comes from the same root. Our word inspiration itself is derived from the Latin inspirare meaning ‘to breathe into’.

Afflatus is a Latin word coined by the Roman Cicero to describe the sudden rush of an idea that appeared like a breath, a powerful force whose origin would be unknown to the poet. The word meant ‘to blow upon’ and in the 18^th/19^th century, English poets used it to mean the mysterious poetic inspiration that was a divine wind blown into the poet making him sing, in the same way that the wind would play on the strings of a harp producing sound.

The poet Edward Young  (1681 – 1765), author of the then acclaimed Night Thoughts, was influential in setting out his ideas about inspiration which gave it a mystical status but didn’t locate it so precisely outside the poet. He wrote in his Conjectures on Original Composition that genius was the god within. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 –1822) and S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834) believed that the poet had a special disposition or genius which meant that he was attuned to the mystical winds and could receive visions and inspiration. (Although Shelley professed himself an atheist, he wrote in The Necessity of Atheism that although there was no God in the sense of a creative Deity, the ‘hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.’)

The Experience of Modern and Contemporary Poets

But what about in our own time? Surely any concept of poetry arriving from a divine or supernatural source is well past its sell by date? Maybe - but it seems that many poets still have the experience of being inspired by something that seems to be outside themselves. Often it is a question of hearing the poem. Let’s have a look at what modern and contemporary poets have said about the origins of some of their poems:

The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 –1926) wrote: ‘In a few utterly gripping days when I had actually intended to take up other work, these sonnets have been given to me.’  ‘…it is late and I can scarcely hold the pen any more after some days of tremendous obedience to spirit.’  ‘All in a few days, it was an unspeakable storm, a hurricane of the spirit… I never even thought of eating, God knows who fed me.’ [Rilke 1972, quoted in the Introduction]

Similarly, the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941 ) described: ‘It is as if the whole piece is given to me from the very beginning – a kind of melodic or rhythmic picture of it; it is as if the work being written at this moment (I never know if it will be finished) is already written somewhere, very exactly and completely. And I am only restoring it. Hence this constant alertness: am I getting it right? am I not diverging? am I not allowing myself - self-will? To hear correctly is my concern. I have no other.’ [Tsvetaeva 2010, p 51]

The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (1906 – 1967) tells us, speaking about his poem Yeats in Dublin: ‘… It [began with] a musical cadence, almost out of earshot, to which I gradually gave substance.’  ‘I have never heard a poem – not even ‘Griefs of the Sea’ which I heard coming out of the grass of the cliffs of Pennard and Hunt’s Bay – in quite that way. What Yeats called “an articulation in the air”.  It was momentary and extraordinary. The whole poem took place in less than a second.’ [Watkins 2006, page xvii]

Contemporary poet, Alice Oswald (1966 - ), reports something similar: ‘I like the body to take part in writing a poem… a whole poem which I just can’t quite hear. It’s a question of trying to take down by dictation what’s already there. I’m not making something, I’m trying to hear it.’  [Mslexia Writer’s Diary 2012, page December 31-6 January]
And Ruth Padel (1946 - ): ‘It helps to think and speak of poems as having an urgency and purpose of their own; as if they come from somewhere not yourself. I don’t want to know why… The first stage of a poem is when a phrase or rhythm, a feeling or thought or image turns up and says: drop everything, work at me now… if you lose that moment you lose the poem.’ [Padel 2000, p 12-13]

All forms of creative writing have their mysteries I believe. Novels’ mysteries include the way that events and characters suddenly appear in the writer’s mind and seem to have a life of their own. But although some prose writers will say that rhythm in their writing is important and that they read their work out loud to see if it sounds right and to make the flow consistent, what seems almost unique and is certainly widely reported by poets though not by novelists (but see below for an exception!) is the way that inspiration is intimately connected with rhythm.

The American poet, Gary Snyder, writing about how a poem emerges for him, says: ‘The first step is the rhythmic measure, the second step is the set of pre-verbal images which move to the rhythmic measure, and the third step is embodying it in words… ’ [Quoted in Elder 1996, p ?]

Selima Hill: ‘I think I start with a rhythm. Once I’ve got that, it begins to take shape, like water. I’m not one of those A-B sort of poets. I’ve no idea where I’m off to. Poetry is a big space and I see if I can launch myself into it with as little baggage as possible… You get to a place where nothing can hurt you. Time stops… You have to… implicate your whole being - but not impose yourself on it either’.  [Hill 2000, p 26-27]

Anne Stevenson says that rhythm is ‘the unconscious engine of poetry, the pulse or muscle that governs it and has a physical source in walking, breathing and heartbeat. For although rhythm is more kinaesthetic than aesthetic, it is felt and shared like an emotion. Rhythms also matter in prose. But where in prose the controlling unit is the thought-phrase, the lift and fall of the language in sentences and paragraphs, the energy that drives poetry is the beat; as in the drum beat (heart beat) of primitive ritual and dance.’  [Stevenson 2000, p 4]

 T. S.Eliot touches on this idea of rhythm coming from a primitive part of ourselves:  ‘What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.’ [Eliot 1933, pp 118-19]

‘For other poets – at least, for some other poets -  the poem may begin to shape itself in fragments of musical rhythm, and its structure will first appear in terms of something analogous to musical form; and such poets find it expedient to occupy their conscious mind with the craftsman’s problems, leaving the deeper meaning to emerge from a lower level. It is a question then of what one chooses to be conscious of, and of how much of the meaning, in a poem, is conveyed directly to the intelligence and how much is conveyed indirectly by the musical impression upon the sensibility – always remembering that the use of the word ‘musical’ and of musical analogies, in discussing poetry, has its dangers if we do not constantly check its limitations: for the music of verse is inseparable from the meanings and associations of words.’ [Eliot 1941, p 18]

Although novelists don’t seem to report these visitations of rhythm as being of major importance in the genesis of their work, a notable exception is this from the prose writer Virginia Woolf describing beautifully the role that rhythm played for her in formulating thought and putting it into language:

‘Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.’
[Woolf 1977. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, March 1926]

This seems close to the poet’s experience, although a possible difference might be that for the poet, as for Gary Snyder, the rhythm often comes first before the image or emotion and it is only after the rhythm has made words to fit it that the idea or emotion is perceived and identified.

The Unconscious Mind and the Collective Unconscious

T S Eliot refutes any notion that an ‘efflux of poetry’ comes from outside ourselves, from the gods or a friendly daemon. He believed that it is rather the product of something that has been incubating in the mind of the poet which is released when the anxious and fearful concerns of the poet are lifted:

“I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia, may (if other circumstances are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing – though, in contrast to the claims sometimes made for the latter, the material has obviously been incubating in the poet, and cannot be suspected of being a present from a friendly or impertinent demon… to me it seems that at these moments, which are characterised by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to re-form very quickly…”  [Eliot 1933, pp 144-8]

Coleridge was the first person to use the phrase ‘the unconscious mind’ in English (it had been coined by the 18th-century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling). By the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th, psychologists were beginning to describe inspiration as coming from inside the poets themselves, from the realm of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud was influential in seeing the artist as a traumatised or wounded individual. He formulated the idea that repressed memories of events or thoughts and ideas deemed unacceptable to the conscious mind were stored in the unconscious. Inspiration coming from the unconscious would then appear to the poet as coming from elsewhere since his conscious mind had no knowledge of it.

Carl Gustav Jung has a more in depth and complex explanation of poetic inspiration. In his lecture ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’ (published in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature) he identifies two types of works of art. In the first type the poet knows what he wants to express and his material is subordinate to this; he considers the form and style and chooses his words with complete freedom. He is ‘so identified with his work that his intentions and faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself’.  [Jung 1984, pp 65-83]

The second type of work Jung describes is of more interest to our quest. Here the poem springs into the world ‘fully formed like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus’. The work forces itself upon the artist so that ‘his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement… he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being… Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside of it, as though he were a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will.’

There may, however, only be a difference of perception between the two types. In the first instance it maybe that the poet, even though he thinks that he is in control of his material and producing what he consciously intends, is actually so carried away by the creative impulse that he is no longer aware of an “alien” will: as Jung puts it ‘… he fancies he is swimming but in reality an unseen current sweeps him along’. In the second type, the poet may not be aware of his own will speaking to him and so experiences it as alien.

Today I think most poets would acknowledge that although a few precious poems might arrive ‘as if fully formed from the head of Zeus’ and need little or no editing, even those poems which are, as it were, breathed into the poet, require what Graves has called the secondary process of composition when the conscious mind sets about editing what has been created in trance.: This is what the American poet Elizabeth Bishop is referring to when she says  ‘I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work’.

The Creative Impulse and the Unconscious

For Jung the creative impulse arises out of the unconscious. He calls it a living thing, describing it in parasitical terms as something which lives and grows in the poet like a tree in the earth or, elsewhere, like a baby in the womb. In the terminology of Analytical Psychology it is an autonomous complex: ‘… a split-off portion in the human psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Depending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate authority which can harness the ego to its purpose’. This autonomous complex is subliminal until the energy charge becomes strong enough to make it conscious. The poet has no control over it; it can’t be summoned or prevented by his will. ‘It appears and disappears in accordance with its own inherent tendencies, independently of the conscious will’. This is what makes it autonomous. I think many poets will recognise in this the way that the poetic process can’t be accessed at will but appears seemingly randomly - although there are perhaps ways that it can be wooed.

The autonomous complex arises when a part of the psyche which has been unconscious is awakened (by what Jung declines to say here) and grows by ‘activating the adjoining areas of association’. The energy needed to do this is, he says, naturally drawn from consciousness. This explains the way that the usual conscious awareness of the poet is diminished so that, for instance, Selima Hill experiences time stopping and being in a space where nothing can hurt her or Rilke forgets about eating and is unaware of who fed him during his ‘tremendous obedience to spirit’.

Jung does not identify this artistic process as necessarily pathological: ‘the divine frenzy of the artist comes perilously close to a full pathological state, though the two things are not identical’. Normal people may be subject to the domination of an autonomous complex (indeed instincts have more or less the same character) and in itself there is nothing morbid about it unless the manifestations are frequent and disturbing in which case it is a symptom of illness. This arises because the intensity of conscious awareness diminishes (drained, you could say, by the autonomous complex) which can lead to apathy or ‘a regressive development of the conscious functions, that is they [the artists] revert to an infantile and archaic level and undergo something like a degeneration… the instinctual side of the personality prevails over the ethical, the infantile over the mature and the unadapted over the adapted’. The lives of great artists show, Jung says, how the creative urge can be so overwhelming in its demands that it ‘battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary happiness’.

What is the Unconscious?

Jung describes two layers to the unconscious - the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is close to Freud’s idea. As the name suggests, these are the contents and processes of the psyche that are personal to the individual and may have been conscious but have been suppressed. Works of art receive ‘tributaries’ from this sphere but they are what Jung calls ‘muddy’ and if there are too many of them the work becomes not art but a symptom. ‘We can leave this type of work… without regret to the purgative methods employed by Freud’, he says dismissively.

The collective unconscious is the deeper layer which has never been conscious and therefore isn’t suppressed. It is a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in specific forms or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain. ‘There are no inborn ideas’, Jung says, ‘but there are inborn possibilities of ideas’. The specific forms are described as archetypes - ‘a figure - be it a daemon, a human being or a process - that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed..’. These figures are essentially the psychic residue of innumerable experiences of our ancestors. They represent the psychic life of human kind, manifest in the many figures of mythological pantheons. ‘In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our human history …’

Great art speaks through archetypes, Jung believed. ‘Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and empowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transcends our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night…The creative process… consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.’ Every person shares the collective unconscious with the entire human race. [Jung 1984, pp 65-83]

But what about rhythm?

Yes, after that rather heady paragraph, let’s get back to rhythm. Why is rhythm so important to the genesis of poetry? The answer seems to be that certain repetitive rhythms, perhaps because they reflect physical processes in the human body we are exposed to in the pre-verbal state before birth (heart beats, inhalation and exhalation, footsteps), are able to induce a trance-like state in which the usual everyday survival thought-processes are suspended and other areas of the brain, other ways of knowing, are accessed. As John Press has said: ‘One of the functions of rhythm in poetry is to lull asleep those obstinate mental habits in a reader which prevent him from accepting what the poem is trying to convey, and to awaken that imaginative sympathy without which a poem is bound to receive a stony reception from its readers. The poem can perform its work only when the minds of its readers are attuned to its mood. It is possible that a similar process take place in the mind of the poet before the poem can begin to ripen. The fret and fever of the alert questioning intellect need to be lulled and the clairvoyant faculty must, at the same time, be awakened.’ [Press  1955, p 80]

Robert Graves also linked rhythm and trance, saying that: ‘The nucleus of every poem worthy of the name is rhythmically formed in the poet’s mind during a trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought… The reader too must fall into a complementary trance if he is to appreciate its full meaning’.  [Graves 1995, pp 3-4]

Richard Dawkins has some interesting things to say about the sound of words and their effect on the human brain. He takes the beginning of Keats’ famous poem, Ode to a Nightingale, and tells us that if read aloud ‘the images tumble into your brain, as if you were really drugged by a nightingale’s song in a leafy summer beechwood. At one level it is all done by a pattern of air pressure waves, a pattern whose richness is first woven into sine waves in the ear and then rewoven together in the brain to reconstruct images and emotions’. Try it for yourself: 

 

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of they happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest in summer in full-throated ease. 

 

He continues to say that it’s not totally far-fetched to think of the nightingale’s song acting like a drug. Although some ornithologists have believed that the song of the male bird contains information about his territory and his mating status, Dawkins prefers to see it as a case of the female bird being manipulated by the song because it acts like a drug on her brain. He cites evidence for this from research done on female doves and canaries that shows that their sexual state is directly influenced by the songs of the males. ‘The sounds from a male canary flood through the female’s ears into her brain where they have an effect that is indistinguishable from one that that an experiment can reproduce with a hypodermic syringe. The male’s ‘drug’ enters the female through the portals of her ears rather than through a hypodermic, but this difference does not seem particularly telling.’ 

Because of this, Dawkins goes on to suggest that the nightingale’s song may have acted in a similar way on Keats’ brain. He states that most drugs that work on humans also work in a comparable way on other vertebrates (and presumably he’s inferring that this is possible vice versa).  [Dawkins 1999, pp 79-81]

Even reading the poem - and certain types of poetry in general  - silently, and hearing with the inner ear, can have the same effect I believe. How this might work physiologically I’m unable to say, since this process does not involve a pattern of air pressure waves entering the brain via the ear, but it doesn’t seem unlikely to me, admittedly as a non-biologist, that our brains might be predisposed to respond to sound experienced in the mind in the same way as it responds to external sound.  

Certainly this hypothesis creates interesting resonances with the traditional picture of male poets wooing females with their poems and songs. We’ve tended to see this as driven by the meaning of their words but this may point to another aspect. However, the fact that Dawkins himself is susceptible to the sound of Keats’ poem demonstrates that the effect is - happily - not gender specific.

This faculty of poets to manipulate their audience is precisely the reason that Plato was suspicious of poets and would have banished them from his Republic. The poet with his words and phrases is able to influence his listeners who believe he knows what he speaking about, 'such is the sweet influence that melody and rhythm by nature have'.

Of course this doesn't throw any light on how the rhythm is formed in a poet's mind in the first place. What causes the 'trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought' - apart from nightingales?  Graves said that for him a cloud descends and he realises that something of importance has to be solved. He realises that a poem is around and then, echoing other poet's whose testimony we've already seen (and to them we could add W. H. Auden according to John Carey in his book The Unexpected Professor), it's as if the poem is already there and he's trying to reconstitute it. [Graves 1965] The problem that Graves has to solve seems to be an emotional problem - and this may be what triggers Jung's 'autonomous complex' - but why this recurrent sense that the poem has already been written and that, in Blake's words, the poet is only the secretary, 'the Authors are in Eternity'? 
 

Perhaps we can assume that poetic inspiration simply comes from a part of our brains we’re unconscious of? From ourselves?

Well, it’s not as simple as that. Scientists still don’t know how the brain constructs consciousness let alone what the unconscious is. In fact the most they seem to be able to say with confidence about consciousness is that it is a state of awareness… something I think you and I already knew. In Jung’s day, research had indicated that ‘there are all sorts of ways in which the conscious mind is not only influenced by the unconscious but actually guided by it’. More recently the American scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments which suggest that the conscious will is an illusion. It appears that unconscious processes in the brain initiate action before we are aware of having decided to perform the action. Although the methods and conclusions of Libet's experiments are disputed by some scientists, if true they seem to mean that what we consciously experience is merely a recording of unconscious processes. To me, this calls into question not only free-will but also the nature of the self as we experience it.

Jung had already asked in 1930 in his essay “Psychology and Literature”: ‘Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches and is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny?’ [Jung. 1984. p 95]

It seems that there are no definite answers to the question I started with. If the nature of consciousness and the unconscious is still mysterious, maybe attributing poetry to a divine source - whether a god without or a god within - is as good a proposition as any. Perhaps the best thing I can do is leave you with the words of the Irish poet, Michael Longley: ‘If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.’ Would you?

***

(Apologies for some formatting problems in this article. It appears to be caused by the use of accents in the Irish words which I've been unable to remedy.)
 

References

 

Cross, Tom Peete; Slover, Clark Harris. 1936. Ancient Irish Tales. London: George G Harrap & Company Ltd.
Dawkins, Richard. 1999. Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin Books
Elder, John. 1996. Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. University of Georgia Press; 2nd revised edition

Eliot, T. S. 1933. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber

Eliot, T. S. 1941. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. London: Faber and Faber

Graves, Robert. 1965. BBC Interview with Malcom Muggeridge. http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12243.shtml 

Graves, Robert; O’ Prey, Paul ed. 1995. Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry.
Manchester: Carcanet Press

Haycock, Marged. 2007. Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin. Aberystwyth: CMCS

Hill, Selima. 2000. “God’s Velvet Cushions”.  In Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. Mark, Alison; Rees-Jones, Deryn. Palgrave Macmillan.

Jung, C. G. 1984. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. London: Ark Paperbacks
Jung, C. G. 1984. “Psychology and Literature” in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. London: Ark Paperbacks

Mslexia Writer’s Diary. 2012. Newcastle upon Tyne: Mslexia Publications Ltd

Padel, Ruth. 2000. “How and Why in Contemporary Women’s Poetry.”  In Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. Mark, Alison, Rees-Jones, Deryn. Palgrave Macmillan.
Press, John. 1955. The Fire and the Fountain. London: Oxford University Press

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Trans. Garmey, Stephen, Wilson, Jay. 1972. The Duino Elegies.

New York: Harper & Row

Stevenson, Anne. 2000. “Defending the Freedom of the Poet”.  In Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. Mark, Alison, Rees-Jones, Deryn. Palgrave Macmillan.

Tsvetaeva, Marina.2010. Art in the Light of Conscience. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books
Watkins, Vernon. 2006. New Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet.
Woolf, Virginia; Nicolson, Nigel ed.  1977. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume 3 1923 - 1928 London: Hogarth Press

Re-emerging and 'The Goddess and The Gardener' book launch

I've been away from the blog for quite a few weeks now. It's been a very challenging start to the year, one way and another. As the sun rises in the sky and graces us with its presence for longer, I'm very slowly coming back to life.

Apart from my health, one of the challenges has been publishing another small poetry book under my Brigit's Forge imprint - this time not my own book but the first step in publishing other poets. For various reasons the process has been fraught with difficulties but at long last it's come to fruition. The Goddess and The Gardener by Jane Whittle is a sequence of poems written after she moved to Wales and began transforming a wild space into a garden, working with the energies of the land and of nature and absorbing them to such an extent that she herself grows along with the landscape and the voice of the goddess begins to speak through her.

We had the book launch at the Penrallt Bookshop in Machynlleth and I'm pleased to say it was a great success. Many books were sold so it was a good night for us and for Penrallt Books while the audience appear to have genuinely enjoyed it - the feedback passed on to us by Diane at the bookshop after the event was lovely to hear: 'enjoyable and enlivening', ' a wonderful evening of words', 'inspiring', 'a special evening'. All I would want for Brigit's Forge!

The picture above shows the book on display, in very august company. As well as talking about how my very small press, Brigit's Forge, came about, I also read some poems from The Sea Road and  tested some new ones which led to selling more copies of The Sea Road. I promptly spent some of the proceeds on the book you can see in the picture, The Art of Robert Frost by Tim Kendall, an action I haven't regretted as it's a fascinating introduction to his poetry which includes 65 of the poems with commentary showing how Frost's poetry and its themes developed.

I'll be making a page or another blog for Brigit's Forge Press in due course and will say a bit more about the book and offer it for sale here. For now I'm taking things slowly and surely and just saying 'hello again'.

(Just in case you want to order a copy now, or have a closer look at it, it's on the Waterstones website - CLICK HERE)

Amergin, Keats and Dōgen, Poets and Mystics

Pamela Budge:The Croft Studio 

I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Bull of Seven Fights,
I am Vulture on Cliff,
I am Dewdrop,
I am Fairest of Flowers,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am Lake on Plain,
I am a Mountain in a Man,
I am a Word of Skill,
I am the Point of a Weapon (that poureth forth combat),
I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head.

R.A.S. MacAllister's translation from Lebor Gabala Erenn (Irish Texts Society, 1941)

So sang Amergin Glúingel, poet of the Milesians, when he first placed his right foot on the soil of Ireland. In Wales, the medieval bard Taliesin claimed to have been many things, animals, wild and domestic, the tools of farmers and smiths:

I was a blue salmon,
I was a dog, a stag,
I was a roebuck on a mountain,
I was a block, I was a spade,
I was an axe in the hand,
I was an auger [held] in tongs,
for a year and a half.
I was a speckled cockerel
covering the hens in Eidyn;
I was a stallion at stud,
I was a fiery bull. 

( Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, edited and translated by Marged Haycock)

Some people see these proclamations as evidence of shamanic practices, shape-shifting or time-travelling, while scholars studying the Taliesin texts have sought to demonstrate that they are not the work of an early druidic bard but rather of a medieval professional poet promoting a mystique about the knowledge and talents of his profession, incorporating learning derived from such diverse sources as medieval science, folklore, biblical and continental texts.

But can we see these particular utterances of Amergin, (‘Born of Song’) and Taliesin (‘Radiant Brow’) in poetic terms as exemplifying the ability or skill of the poet to inhabit other bodies, other times and situations through his imagination or mystical experience?

Famously John Keats described the chameleon poet who has no colour of his own but takes on those of others, whether good or bad:

The poetical character... is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.

It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. [1]

Keats is even able to imagine how an inanimate object might experience its existence, telling his friend Richard Woodhouse that he could conceive of a billiard ball taking a sense of delight in 'its own roundness, smoothness, volubility and the rapidity of its motion’.

Coleridge wrote in a letter of 1819 that he too experienced "a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object" and nearer our own time T. S. Eliot has described how the poet continually surrenders himself to something more valuable (in this case an awareness not only of the time in which he lives but also the presence of the past, an experience of the timeless and the temporal) and asserts that  ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ (Tradition and the Individual Talent)

There are some similarities between this ‘progress of the artist’ and the Buddhist way. The 13^th century Chinese Buddhist Dōgen said:

To study the Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things
is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.

But, although Dōgen himself was a poet, he taught that the Way led beyond language to a state of being fully present and enlightened. The way of the poet and the way of the mystic share steps on the journey but lead to a different place. When I was 16, sitting by a tree-lined lake with my cat, I had the classic mystical experience that we are all One. This was no conscious musing or reaching after meaning; there were no pictures, no words at the time, it was a sudden, unexpected and involuntary shift of perception - one which hasn’t recurred  to date, although I suspect that my sense of the world and my being-in-the-world has been informed by it. But it's an experience that is impossible to put into words beyond 'We are all One'; impossible to describe of what that consists, how it feels, how it looks - because it is outside the usual bounds of perception and therefore of our usual modes of description which rely upon the senses. We may try to use words to describe it further, but in my experience they taint and dilute it.

In her essay Two Secrets: On Poetry’s Inward and Outward Looking [2], Jane Hirshfield considers poetry’s relationship with the outer world. She suggests that poems which carry reflective and indirect meanings take one of three stances: the subjective in which a ‘human-centered consciousness [is] dominating’; the reflective in which ‘the poet and the outer world stand face to face in mutual regard’ and the objective in which ‘the poet becomes an intermediary, a medium through whom the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness may speak’.

But is it possible for the world of objects and nature beyond human consciousness to speak to the poet and for the poet to communicate it to others? As Hirshfield herself says, ‘The earth does not speak our language’ (and Wittgenstein thought “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him”). Miriam Gamble points out in her review of Ruth Padel’s recent poetry collection Mara Crossing, that ‘Padel tussles…with the paradoxical truth that we can gain access to other perspectives only by filtering them through the networks of our own’. We cannot ‘conjure the experience of animals without sinning through usurpation’.

I think there are two ways in which we endeavour to engage with the consciousness of other beings and objects. One is through a mystical communion with nature, with aspects of reality that are normally beyond human perception – an experience which is beyond words and is often corrupted if an attempt is made to communicate it in language. The other is through the imagination.

What is the imagination? It is the faculty which gives “the power to visualize and build mental images; dream about things that have never happened; feel intuitively; and reach beyond sensual or real boundaries” (Elementary Art - Glossary of Art Terms) Colderidge defined the Primary Imagination as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”. James Volant Baker thought that for Coleridge, "the creative act… is a godlike-act-of-power and causing-to-be, imagination being the divine potency in man”. (James Volant Baker, Sacred River: Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination) The Primary Imagination says Coleridge, is the necessary imagination as it "automatically balances and fuses the innate capacities and powers of the mind with the external presence of the objective world that the mind receives through the senses".

“I am God who fashioneth Fire for a Head” said Amergin, the pronouncement often taken to mean that he is the god who kindles the fire of creative imagination. But is that what he said? The original says “Am dé delbas do chind codnu" and codnu is obscure. It may be a plural form of the noun conn / cond which could mean a 'protruberance, bulge'; so 'horns, antlers', or it could mean 'intelligence, sense', or even 'chief, leader, sensible person'. The meaning ‘fire’ (tene) only comes from a later gloss on the text. Dennis King has questioned, could the line read "I am a god who shapes/creates horns/antlers for the head" - which might link it, perhaps, with Cernunnos, the antlered god. John Carey (The Celtic Heroic Age), meanwhile, translates the line as “I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler”. Problems of translation are not only between nature and ourselves…

But if Amergin is saying that he is a god that shapes intelligence or sense (meaning), then that is perhaps not a bad way of describing the consummate poet who uses his imagination to engage with the external world and filter his vision through language and form to his or her audience, enabling us to expand our perception of the world, its diversity and its wonders.

^[1]   Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, edited with commentary by Robert Gittings, Heinemann, 1966, p 87

  ^[2] Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield, Harper Perennial, 1998, pp 127-152

Poetry at Strata Florida Abbey

                       

 The church next to Strata Florida Abbey.
Dafydd ap Gwilym's yew tree is to the left of the picture.   

                                                                        

Recently I went to the Open Day of the Centre for Advanced Celtic Studies at Strata Florida, or Ystrad Fflur, the site of a Cistercian abbey. Although the weather was cold and grey, it was a truly lovely and inspiring day. Just what I needed as I had been decidedly lacking in hwyl (enthusiasm, humour) lately.

The abbey is about a mile from the village of Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion, some 15 miles from where I live. Originally founded in 1164, many important manuscripts are thought to have been written there, namely Brut y Tywysogion, The Chronicle of the Princes, a major source for early Welsh history;  Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, The White Book of Rhydderch, which contains the stories of the Mabinogi, and the Hendregadredd Manuscript which contains an anthology of poems of the 12^th and 13^th century Beirdd y Tywysogion (the Poets of the Princes) or Y Gogynfeirdd (the Not So Early Poets). Around 1330 a number of poems by contemporary poets were added and there is one poem of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s which is probably written in his own hand.

Dafydd ap Gwilym was born not far away in the village of Penrhyncoch and it is likely that he was educated at Strata Florida by the monks and was buried in the churchyard there when he died. A fellow-poet, Gruffydd Gryg, wrote an elegy to him, addressing the yew tree which grew over his grave. It was the custom then, however, for poets to write elegies to each other when they were still alive so it isn’t certain that he is buried there. However it is thought that the yew is old enough to have existed in his time and there is a memorial to him placed there.

 

Yr ywen i oreuwas
Ger mur Ystrad Fflur a’i phlas;
Da Duw wrthyd, gwynfyd gwŷdd,
Dy dyfu yn dŷ Dafydd.

This yew-tree for the best of men,
Near the walls of Strata Florida and its hall;
God’s blessing on you, happy tree,
For growing as a house for Dafydd.

In an earlier exchange of funeral odes with Dafydd, Gruffydd had written:

Tristach weithian bob cantref,
bellach naw digrifach nef.

Sadder now is every area of land,
but heaven is nine times more joyful.

Dafydd Johnston gave a talk among the ruins about the poets of the abbey, quoting from the medieval poet Dafydd Nanmor’s poem about Strata Florida. He tells how the Abbot  Rhys ‘cut ten complete windows, half the cost of this went in glass’; the abbey had roofs of 'heavy lead', 'so woven as to leave no holes for ice, water, snow or rain'. Between her walls were 'acres for burying lords' and there was music too – he heard the fair sounds of treble, mean (the refrain or chorus of a song) and burden there.  He related how there was a great belfry, lime dressed, huge and white, with a cock on top of it. It was so large that if Noah’s flood were to come again, all the saints inside would be protected.

The talk filled the empty spaces of the abbey with the words of the poets and thoughts and images of how magnificent it had been once…

No sun
but the stones
shine with history 

After this it was time to go and learn about cynghanedd from Eurig Salisbury who perched on top of the wall by the garden. It had a rather medieval feel to it – being taught something in the open air, the words blown on the cold wind. Not so much a hedge school as a wall school perhaps… It was a very clear and concise introduction to complicated Welsh metres with an excellent handout. I was motivated the next day to try a few lines of (rather clumsy) cynhanedd sain to give an image of the day:

Sitting in the cold in the fold of Strata Florida
hearing the tale of the travail of the venerable
I catch sight of the flight of the falcon
which soars in the sky like the sigh of a soul

Ideally the lines should have 7 syllables (such as in 'Make fish the dish of the day' - remember that ad?) although I think more are permitted.

And then back to the impressive West Gate to hear poems about Strata Florida by the Welsh poet, Gwyneth Lewis. CADW commissioned her to write them in recognition of its literary and cultural associations and to celebrate the re-opening of the abbey. The poet said that this was for her the high point of her career and she planned later to light a candle at Dafydd ap Gwilym’s memorial ‘in gratitude and humility’.

The English poem had, at times, a bare, somewhat staccato feel to it, and it wasn’t until I saw it written down that I felt I understood the concept underlying it (although who knows whether it is what the poet intended). To me it seemed to contain, in almost concrete fashion, some of the feel of the abbey. Its incomplete sentences were fragments, like the surviving stone fragments of the abbey... only the great West door remaining intact, offering us through through absence rather than presence an opening into something greater, an expanding universe. But the poem ends by reminding us that we have to find our own door; a gateway to all ages, to the timeless in the temporal. Perhaps the picture below will give you some idea of what I mean.

                       …Pass
Through this door
Into Christ, the expanding
Universe. Dimension:
Wonder. Uplands bare,
Riches below…

… This
Door. Find your own elsewhere.
Now. The future. Then. Then now.

I remembered that the medieval Welsh poets were sometimes referred to as builders and their poems were not composed but built...

The Welsh poem was quite different, the poet asking for her ashes to be scattered in Ystrad Fflur (which in an article in CADW's magazine Etifeddiaeth Y Cymry she describes as being a cornerstone and frame of her life) and ending:

...Gwisgaf y gwynt, fy nghorff
Ac, mewn munud daw awel lem
O'r mynydd gan iasu'r glaswell yn emau byw.

(I'll wear my body, the wind, and in a moment a cold breeze from the mountain will thrill the grass into living gems.)

                                                                 ***

Lunch was a cream cheese and salad roll I’d prepared earlier, finished off with digestive biscuits and a flask of tea. I ate it sitting in the car which was consolingly warm, looking out over one of the fields. Then it was a spell of finding out how to add shapes to a mosaic of an archway with the words STRATA FLORIDA above it. Rob Turner is the artist commissioned to display the poems in a permanent setting at the abbey. You can read about his design and progress HERE 

There was a final talk on manuscripts and princes by Ann Parry Owen with a very useful illustrated booklet she had produced (I only managed to get one of the Welsh copies but it is proving very good for me having to translate it). Before going home, I went into the visitors' centre to’ make my own tile’. This consisted of buying the tile which resembles unset plaster of paris (but has dried into something that feels very light, rather like polystyrene) and then choosing one of the designs from the several tiles which have survived at the abbey and impressing it on the tile. I decided on ‘the man with the mirror’ – perhaps a symbol of vanity although other interpretations suggest he is a hunter. I like to think he’s a poet of the green wood holding up a mirror…

And finally, not to be forgotten, the Flowers - bluebells and the promise of foxgloves .