on 28/12/01 5:19 pm, Bob Cooper at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> David wrote (about After A Snowfall):
> ... Sally, interesting point about abstractions. Do you think they're always
> wrong in poetry? (This sonnet's a gloss on the Great Creating Nature theme
> of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale", by the way, and no, it wasn't intended as
> just a Christmas greeting.) Best regards, David
> 
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> (if y don’t mind me joining in... and you asked the question mainly to Sally
> because of what she wrote...) So, I guess I’m just opening up the debate a
> little...
> 
> I think I really do believe that nothing is “wrong” in poetry... but the
> problems are always in the way of getting it as right as we can get it. It
> could also be that the word “abstractions” is also a very limiting way of
> talking about the big issues that belong to life and get explored in poems.
> It’s a word that got a lot of airtime in poet’s chatter maybe 80 years ago.
> Words that relate to abstractions are really tricky ever since Pound pounded
> out his phrase “Go in fear of abstractions” and William Carlos Williams said
> “No ideas but in things.” And I once blu-tacked up a quote from John Hartley
> Williams & Matthew Sweeney’s book Writing Poems on my wall: “vagueness is
> always a consequence of using abstract words ... abstractions should be
> avoided because they verge on meaningless.” I don’t necessarily agree with
> that – but I don’t want to forget it! So, abstractions and me?, I'd put
> myself on a word diet (reckon they're too fatty, too much chlorestoral), I'd
> ration them... and maybe (just maybe) pig out once in a while (get them all
> out in one poem, which, like burps, should only be done near those who
> understand your need and, even then, they may be too loud and long – but
> then you can go back to being a fit and lean poem machine...). I also sense
> the strength of contemporary poetry (stuff written, say, in the last 20
> years) is that big issues (that include reference to the things that are
> abstract) are tackled successfully – often in writing about small things.
> 
> Hey, mebbee’s ah’ve drunk too much this lunchtime, cos I’ve jus thort... “I
> think I ought to create and then explain The Biro Test: If A Poet Couldn’t
> Have Used A Biro Then His/Her’s Writing’s Different To Mine. In the days
> before Biro’s, for instance, Tetleys would never have meant Tea Bags it
> could only have meant beer! (Nouns, and verbs, and adjectives (and the rest
> of all the pesky little glyphs!)... they never stand still, they make up
> their own jokes, they make new friends, they sleep around, they all
> change!).”
> 
> And it might even be that lil ol Willie (the one with only one earring, who
> lived near Wolverhampton) might switch over from watching Crossroads (I bet
> he groaned at the imitations the actors used for the accents he knew so
> well) but if he came across a discussion about the Great Creating Nature
> Theme he’d want pictures, not just talking heads, and would soon be pressing
> the remote again. Unless he caught someone saying... “Whenever I hear the
> word culture (or anything else that sounds abstract like that) I reach for
> my revolver!” then he might linger for a few more seconds...
> before he clicks the remote again!
> But I think he might like the way you've nicked his language: a phrase like
> "retinue of stars raise lanterns" following on from "nothing mars the
> earth's serenity" are so pre-electricity, so not-2001 (not even 1900!), so
> pre-biro!
> 
> The Herdwicks poem, though, Crossing The Border, seems – as Sally’s also
> said – much more solid. More earthed in a world I feel could have existed
> and I could still discover today. So I like it more. I somehow sense I’m
> being invited into the poem.
> There's a few things I've noticed, tho...
> “Fences” (Line 1) seem so modern and I guess most of the reader’s of a poem
> about Herdwick Sheep in Cumbria might expect stone walls on the fells... so
> that’s a fine contrast to the lantern image in the last poem!
> Do sheep (Line 2) “grace” hills or do they nibble at them?
> And do they bleat “quietly” (I sense they bleat as loud as they can – and,
> when they’re not nibbling, they’re bl***y bleating!).
> Maybe I want to get so close to the sheep in the poem that I can even smell
> them!!!!! (eurgh) so they feel real and alive (and then really dead!).
> Did the Norwegian (illegal) immigrants (your Norse settlers) farm Herdwicks?
> I remember reading that the previous people there (who we could call
> Anglians – or Saxons) didn’t like what we think of as the open fells (they
> called them “the waste land”) and how many of the fells were then wooded and
> so not grazeable by sheep?
> Is “harsher husbandry” (Line 8) a powerful enough phrase – or is it a phrase
> that’s hiding deeper feelings (feelings more in keeping with a farmer’s
> experience?). I can’t imagine anyone in Cumbria (even those from the
> wellies-wi-buckles NFU, or may-ah-borrow-some-wellies-please Whitehall)
> saying “Ay, it’s arsh usbandry...”
> 
> I sense Lanky Willie Wordsworth, who knew Cumbria and the tough kind of
> things you’re dealing with, and who knew plenty about writing sonnets too,
> got pretty angry about those who preferred poet-speak to the more
> common/ordinary ways he wanted language to be used in poems.
> 
> And there’s been some great poets writing about Cumbria since Lanky Willie’s
> days, writing done in the days of the biro: Tom Rawling & Norman Nicholson
> are the two I like of the most famous, last century, indigenous ones. When I
> put their landscape poems alongside lanky-Willie’s poems (particularly the
> Duddon Sonnets) I saw why people recognised that Wordsworth began to get it
> wrong as he got older (get too preachy, too abstract, and – by all accounts,
> except for Dorothy’s - boring). But I also learned very positive things from
> Lanky Willie, too! How to sound loud in a sonnet, how to sound soft. How to
> vary rhythm, how to use (and avoid using) adjectives, how to be adventurous,
> how to make every word (in an iambic pentameter line, or any other line)
> count. Lanky Willie’s sonnets, tho, that stick in the mind aren’t the over
> preachy ones. They’re the gutsy ones and then the musical ones. If y read em
> as a poet who’s interested, and not as a teacher might want them taught,
> then technique also fades. So then there’s Nicholson & Rawling who showed me
> how to notice how things had changed, showed me particular things with a
> local eye (and particular words with a local ear). They brought me closer to
> where I see things from.
> 
> Hey - I also learnt in the pub that it’s possible to download all the
> Wordy-worth stuff and then do a sort of word-search for “sheep” or
> “herdwick” (and so save hours of, what for me, would be pleasure!). I also
> don’t know if that would help!
> (It probably wouldn't, would it?)
> Bob
> 
> 
> 
>> From: Sally Evans <[log in to unmask]>
>> Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Crossing the Border
>> Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 20:42:33 +0000
>> 
>> on 26/12/01 8:12 pm, David Anthony at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> 
>>> Crossing the Border
>>> 
>>> Fences are never needed: Herdwick sheep
>>> that grace the Lakeland hills with quiet bleating
>>> have learned the boundaries they are to  keep.
>>> 
>>> Norse settlers could recognise the greeting
>>> of every herd heathed to its native fell,
>>> and cared for them through hardship, knowing well
>>> that troubles pass and all revives with spring.
>>> A harsher husbandry is now depleting
>>> those ancient flocks, and old ways are retreating.
>>> Can thought forget the soul’s remembering?
>>> Is all there is the least that we will take?
>>> 
>>> May we reclaim that instinct lost to man
>>> to know our bounds; then nature shall remake
>>> a truer borderline than fences can.
>>> 
>>> (Foot and mouth epidemic, Cumbria, 2001)
>>> 
>>> David Anthony
>> 
>> I like this one, David, and I quite like the unusual split of the sonnet at
>> lines 3 and 11.  This time you have moved from particular to abstract
>> (lines
>> 10 and 11) and I think you pull it off fine. Though with moving from partic
>> to abstract there's always a risk of seeming "wise" or sermonising. It's
>> just one ofthose millions of things one has to try to get right. Sally-ee.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Yes - I think  Matthew Sweeney's point, which I heard him make once, had
impressed me, and I do think you need  reality  to give sense to
abstractions you make. But the reality can often be taken as read, if done
well. TS Eliot wrote that the value of philosophy to a writer was that it
was an attempt to use language in the most abstract way possible. I think
that INTEREST usually depends on real descriptions, anecdotes etc and one
has to get and keep the interest of the reader, but that abstractions occur
naturally from one's need to draw meaning from experience.
bw Sally-ee.