NEIL POWELL 3

A slight angle I started writing for the most compelling of all possible reasons: because I was no good at anything else. Although it‘s true that my deeper interests and, such as they were, natural talents ought to have led me to music rather than to literature, I was as a schoolboy musician both lazy and self- conscious - reluctant to practise, still more reluctant to make a fool of my unpractised self - so writing it had to be. In my early teens, I read widely and precociously in twentieth-century fiction, wrote (and subsequently des- troyed) a novel, founded and edited with some tenacity a school literary magazine, and had a slim collection of work absurdly accepted by a ’vanity publishei who advertised for manuscripts in Private Eye: fortunately my vanity was not matched by my financial resources, for I can’t imagine that the Citizen Publishing Company of Southend on Sea would have been a very secure foundation for a literary reputation. By the time I reached the sixth form, I’d decided with a characteristic mixture of vagueness and obs- tinacy on a literary career - supposing that to comprise regular reviewing, an effortless output of novels, and an unstrenuous, complementary but luc- rative job in publishing or education - when I found myself invited to join the school’s Poets’ Group. ‘But I haven’t written poems for ages,’ I protes- ted. ‘Well, you’d better write some now,’ was the reply. And so I did

I thus came relatively late in my school career to the business of trying seriously or even solemnly to write poetry, having already been both an editor and an aspiring novelist. The editorial experience had sharpened my awareness of the adolescent poet‘s pitfalls (it couldn‘t, of course, provide a foolproof formula for their avoidance); the fictional attempts had taught me the difficulty of writing good prose. Both combined to make me deeply sus- picious of the poem as an easy receptacle for adolescent angst and, con- versely, particularly aware of writing as a craft. My first real poem - the one which I doubtless envisaged might eventually begin a Collected Poems, all the other juvenilia relegated to an appendix - was a villanelle, and I remember precisely why I wrote it. I’d come a m s s William Empson’s ‘Missing dates’ in Robin Skelton’s then recently-published Penguin Poetry of the Thirties and, though I didn’t altogether understand what the poem was about, I was intrigued by the obviously challenging structure and thought, ’I want to make one of those.’ And I still believe that to be the way in to the making of poems, through an interest in skill and craft: the writer who is not fascinated by the challenges of metre and rhyme but who thinks he is none the less producing ’poetry‘ is likely at best to be writing ornamentally fragmented prose. Most so-called ’free verse’ is just that - the indolent utterance of

4 Critical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2

writers who are unable, or who can’t be bothered, to learn their craft; suc- cessful free verse, on the other hand, is much more difficult to achieve than metrical poetry, since it lacks the helpfully structuring constraints and scaf- folding of metre and therefore requires much finer judgements on the poeYs part. I would no sooner trust a ’free verse’ poet who couldn’t write a sonnet than I would trust a twelve-tone musician who couldn’t master classical harmony.

Some time ago, in a radio talk, John Wain sensibly advised young writers of prose to read masters of the plain style such as E. M. Forster and George Orwell. For the poet learning his craft, parallel advice: not just to read the ’plain style’ (for that phrase can have rather special polemical implications in poetry) but to learn from all those poets who have clear heads and fine for- mal skills, from the Elizabethans to Auden and beyond. The best influences (indeed, the best poets) are not necessarily the most distinctive or original those who seek to imitate Dylan Thomas, for instance, or Charles Olson will either produce good imitations, if they are lucky, or pretentious and incoherent nonsense.

The craft, then, comes first: usefully so, since it’s possible for the writer to practise his craft when he has relatively little to say - an emptiness which notoriously afflicts young writers but which can equally blight established authors for quite lengthy periods. Yet craft, however admirable and neces- sary it may be, clearly isn’t the same thing as art, which at its simplest requires a meeting between literary skill and the appropriate occasion: ’occasion’ rather than ’subject‘, since there is absolutely no guarantee that an apparently promising subject will turn itself into an achieved poem.

In my own case, there was again a clear starting-point. In the summer of 1966, my parents rented a cottage on the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh; ner- vously awaiting A Level results and the confirmation of a university place, I joined them there. Although I didn’t M y appreciate it then, thegenius loci of Aldeburgh was subsequently to haunt me. It would be eight years before I returned in July 1974, to rent that same cottage in Crabbe Street, suddenly and incontrovertibly sensing that it was the right place, and to write a sequ- ence of ’Suffolk Poems’. Anyway, it was at Aldeburgh that I first wrote poems which seemed inevitable, and one from the summer of ’66 even sur- vived into my first book, At The E d 8 . We had driven inland on a rainy Sun- day evening and had stopped for a drink at the little hotel, the White Hart, in the centre of Wickham Market. There were a few staid-looking locals prop- ping up the bar; but after a while a roaring of engines outside preceded the entry of two very wet motorcyclists who seemed at once to alter and to col- onise the room:

A slight angle 5

The smell and feel of leather fill the bar. The farmers fake oblivion, or else stare Resentment, looks more weatherbeaten than The invader‘s crumpled armour. There the rain Has streaked a relic of some recent battle, Evidence that elements are more brittle Than his shell. And yet he stands rain-scarred, His hair is limp and his rough cheeks are teared From the storm still ragmg in his eyes: Possessing and possessed, they half-despise Their ambiguity, for they gleam that Quick self-knowledge which will never let Him be touched, though it will bid all try, Reflecting all, a mirror to each lie - The tragic clown. He turns towards his friend, Buys him a drink, and laughs, sensing the end Of the last storm is also the beginning Of the next, that loss is in his winning.

Obviously enough, the eighteen-year-old poet had been reading Thom Gunn: the rhyming couplets are borrowed from ‘Lines for a book’ rather than from any more venerable source; the motorcyclists seem to be straight out of ’On the move’. Judged by any objective criteria, the poem is derivative and poor, and I preserved it in At The Edge mainly from a perverse wish to have something from my real literary beginning inconspicuously buried in the book. And yet ’Wickham Market’ does indicate rather clearly the neces- sity and the unpredictability of the poetic‘occasion’: it starts from a demons- trably real situation but quickly moves into speculation, and by the end the central character has been transformed (for the author can’t actually read his mind) into an image of separateness and isolation- the poet‘s own, of course, as much as that of the motorcyclist. Though Gunnish, the poem has grown into something inevitable and personal; yet Gunn had taught me both the structure and the potential of this apparently unlikely poetic occasion. The poem may serve, vulnerably, to suggest that a young writer shouldn’t be afraid to learn from, even to imitate an established one whom he particularly admires.

The sense of place is crucial in my own work, but place is not the same as occasion: I return frequently to Aldeburgh - to the kindest people in the world, Adnams’ beer, the vast bleakNorth Sea, the enigmatic river inland to Iken and Snape, the melancholy but consoling ghosts of Crabbe and Britten - yet there have been times there when I have written not a word, when I have felt as blocked and frustrated as 1 do in my worst inland depres- sions. Conversely, there have been times when I’ve itched to write some- thing down in the midst of a packed underground train; and I’ve written at

6 Critical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2

least two poems while invigdating in the arid silence of examination rooms (how many requests for extra paper I inadvertently ignored I daren't guess). But the sense of place has, nevertheless, a special significance for the poet: if asked to choose a literary equivalent to Desert Island Discs, I'd be reluctant to discard Jonson's Penshurst, Marvell's Appleton House, Crabbe's Aldeburgh, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Yeats' Coole Park or Auden's less particularised limestone landscape. Similarly, the poems of my own which please me most tend to be place poems: I've been called a 'topographical poet' and I like the doubly down-to-earth implications of the phrase.

Place provides one axis, time the other: the rare, right combination can provide the most potent of poetic occasions, as in Hardfs 'After a journey' for instance. Unexpected shifts of the relationship between place and time are more than a useful poetic trick: they refocus or redefine the two limitations of human existence, place and time, distance and mortality. I'd like to think that something of the sort happens, in a modest way, in a poem of mine called 'In the Distance':

First, the foreground A class is reading, Gratefully engrossed and undisturbed By coughs or scraping metal chairs on wood. Now is a time to watch unwatched, observe The chin upon the wrist, the narrowed eyes, The stifled yawn, the silence; and outside An autumn bonfire flaring in the distance. Consider this October close-up: hands Clasped after the cold in new discovery Of each other's throbbing warmth; a pen Composing doodles no one understands; A briefly broken train of thought; and then The meditative meeting, nose with thumb. Mist is blurring the horizon distantly. The years are misting over. I recall Something I didn't say a dream ago, Return abruptly to the reading class. The weeping condensation on a window Becomes the image of another day, A conversation in a different place Minutely glimpsed,. and very far away. What casual things define me! Clothes I wear, Books I carry, a ballpoint on the desk Upon a half-corrected essay: there Is all the life I seem to have. The trees Branch from the mist, their structures become clear: The bonfire flashes sharply as I stare Across a hundred yards, a dozen years.

A slight angle 7

In the distance, on a Kentish hillside, A boy is writing a poem I know by heart

The bonfire was actual enough, a hundred yards away from the classroom window in the grounds of a public school at which 1 was teaching; but the poem 1 know by heart was that first villanelle. In another poem of mine - called 'Out of time'- the meshing of place and time springs from an apparently trivial occasion, but is still more potent. I'd returned to the Suffolk coast (the 'you' of the poem) in 1978:

I come to you again Aaoss the years; aaoss The miles of poppies, gorse, And tattered villages; Aaoss the line between The Midlands and the East Where land gives way to sky; Across the Suffolk plain.

Three stanzas later, the years unexpectedly close up, for a pub juke-box is playing a reissued record which I'd previously heard in the Same place twelve years earlier:

I hear this song once more After a dozen years: Unnerving synthesis Of timelessness and time. Chris Farlowe sings it still On a juke-box in the pub- Summer of '66, The future all in stow - Time-capsule of a song! This continuity Of shin le and of sea,

As faded summers flare In a song across a bar, Reminds me that I've 'been Away for much too long.'

Past-se If and future-self,

It is through the inter-relationship of place and time that the poet - or, at any ;ate, this one- finds his vantage point: perhaps as an outsider, an observer, detached yet ultimately, if only through the act of seeing, involved in the scene. The footpath between the beach and the town in Aldeburgh is called Crag Path; in my poem about it, I took the liberty of moving a building or two between Crag Path and the Town Steps, which lead up the abrupt slope inland from the High Street, to provide an uninterrupted view from

8 Critical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2

one to the other. The poem describes at some length Crag Path and the visitors walking along it on a summer evening before concluding:

On the Town Steps, a solitary cat surveys them, off-centre, just under halfway from the top;

I respect that asymmetrical contemplation. It glances downwards, tucks in its paws, and yawns.

The cat’s position - and happily I didn’t have to move thaf - is like the stance of the poet who stands, as E. M. Forster put it, ‘at a slight angle to the uni- verse’. The slight angle is essential if the poet is to avoid, as I think he usually should, the kind of undisciplined and untransformed confessional writing which may belong in a journal or possibly an autobiography.

Given sufficient persistence (a quality which his slight angle may encourage him to develop), the poet can still get published in England, even in a recessionally squeezed literary market place; and every published writer has anecdotal evidence of just how sustained that persistence may have to be. I sent my 1966 poems off to Alan Ross at the London Magazine on my return home from Suffolk; he rejected them, of course, but with a scribbled note rather than a printed rejection slip: ‘I like these though not enough to take’, that kind of thing. It was slender encouragement, but it was enough. For years I submitted poems to the London Magazine, without success; and, although I’d published prose there, it wasn’t until fifteen years later (in the November 1951 issue) that. I finally managed to get some poems into the magazine. It‘s an extreme, though hardly a unique case. In the meantime, of course, I’d been published elsewhere, in magazines, anthologies, pamp hlets, and eventually in hardback. Like most writers of poetry, I began with the ‘little magazines’ and it was some time before my poems appeared in literary magazines such as Critical Quarterly, Encounter, PN Revim (and Lon- don Mugmine) and weeklies like the Nau Statesman and TLS. The best little magazines - it would be impossible b attempt a list, not least because they are often local and short-lived - can, I suspect, provide the poet with a much more attentive audience than some prestigious journals: most readers pass over the column-filling poems in the weeklies, but the small number of sub- scribers (many of them doubtless contributors too) who receive a little magazine are at any rate likely to read the thing. There is, of course, no money to be made from writing poetry and little from literary reviewing: although most magazines pay something the writer who keeps a record of his expenses (typewriter, paper, photocopying, postage, and so on) will soon cure himself of the illusion that he is making a profit- Books are, or should be, a different matter - though a first book of poems will be lucky to pay more than its advance of f 50 or €100. The young writer who takes his craft seriously will do better to aim for a modest fame than a modest fortune.

A slight angle 9

And taking the craft seriously is, in the end, the main point. Yvor Winters wrote in 1930 a poem called 'To a young writer' which ends:

Write little; do it welL Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch.

There, in as terse a.form as one could wish, are both the insistence on creative precision and the warning against confessional slackness. The patient craftsman may sometimes be rewarded with the inevitable, apparently 'effortless' work of art; but the patient craft comes first.