Sad Girl Wallpaper Biography
(Source google.com)
Like plumbers and dentists, poets are fallible, and the possibility of genuine nonsense cannot be ruled out.' Well, Mark Haddon, you said it. The title - prolix, pretentious, shapeless (Haddon is a specialist in long titles - the bestselling Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes from his pen - is presumably intended to prefigure the collection itself and so serve by way of health warning. If so, it misses the mark, as nothing could prepare us for the tendentiousness, the unjustified formlessness, the ghastliness, of Haddon's verse.
But why be indignant? We live in a world where people display piles of plastic containers, or their unmade beds, in major museums and call it art. Personally, I'm fresh out of indignation, so I managed to get through Haddon's offerings without any great medical danger (that despite a near-fatal atrial fibrillation suffered earlier this year). If Tracey Emin can show her bed, I told myself whenever my blood pressure began to rise, why shouldn't this gentleman copy out the first thing that comes into his head and call it poetry? What difference does it make? Good luck to him. Surely these things no longer matter and thinking they do only causes one unnecessary pain.
Leavis is long dead, as is Eliot, whose famous dictum: 'No vers is libre' Haddon has evidently never heard of, if indeed he has heard of Eliot. No, strike that last: he does manage to slip in an arch little allusion to Chaucer quite early on. Well, as early on as possible, in fact, it being the title of his proem, though paradoxically not of his opening poem, as poetry it most certainly is not. If you don't believe me, try this one, entitled: 'A Rough Guide':
Be polite at the reception desk./ Not all the knives are in the museum./ The waitresses know that a nice boy/ is formed the same way as a deckchair./ Pay for the beer and send flowers./ Introduce yourself as Richard./ Do not refer to what somebody did at a particular time in the past./ Remember, every Friday we used to go/ for a walk. I walked. You walked./ Everything in the past is irregular./ This steak is very good. Sit down./ There is no wine but there is ice cream./ Eat slowly. I have many matches.
Except for being nowhere near as good, this reminds me of the efforts us brighter kids used to come up with at my primary school in the Sixties. We had heard, you see, that poetry didn't have to rhyme and scan. Haddon's mistake (which was ours also, but at least we were only eight or nine) is to think that just writing stuff out like this, anyhow, is the same thing as free verse. It is not. In good free verse, the juxtaposition of words matters every bit as much as in formal verse. In fact, it matters more, because without the glue, the cement, of rhyme and meter, the poet is facing an even tougher task.
As evidence of Haddon's failure to grasp this fundamental law of modern poetry, the above will amply serve. Take 'A Rough Guide' apart and reassemble it in a different order and nothing will have changed. That being so, it fails the acid test of good vers libre. And trust me, the stuff in this book is as interchangeable as the lines in the above poem.
I could have picked out anything in the collection and set it down to illustrate the same point. That makes 'The Talking Horse' ... no, I'm damned if I'm typing it out in full, so potentially annoying those of us who still care about poetry, but in the last analysis, thank goodness, and saving many betablockers, merely ridiculous - almost parodic, in fact, of contemporary 'vers libre' at its worst.
Why he should wish to do so is beyond me, but on no fewer than seven occasions, and with lamentable results each time, Haddon takes on the mighty Horace. Consider his rendition of 'Solvitur acris Hiems', where, for the immortal:
No comments:
Post a Comment