Spares

Some Epigrams and Aphorisms

Speaking ill of the dead is one of the surest ways of keeping them alive.

My grandfather could never master driving, but was a great believer in hitching, especially in his old age. To hitch a lift was to marry two of his pet delights, thriftiness and talk. Getting from A to B was strictly secondary; a car was a vehicle for the captive audience.

Project ‘Iffy’: to refashion Kipling’s most cherished (and possibly worst) poem. The first stanza might begin:

Never mind keeping your head, if you’ve some idea
Where heads are located, while idiots who haven’t a clue
Are scrambling, rifling the dictionary, the fridge, IKEA…
Then blaming their headless-chicken-shit on you

Tragically, the decline of religion in the West has done little or nothing to discourage the average individual succumbing, every now and again, to sociopathic orgies of self-worship.

God is not Great

says Christopher Hitchins. I say
god is great, only
with a small g
and atheism with a small a.

Memo. Beware taxi drivers who talk politics. Especially those who announce ‘I’m voting BNP’ and follow this by declaring ‘They should pull the shutters up!’[sic] These are the kind who may curtail your incredibly naive attempt to discuss such matters with a Travis Bickle glare and the accusatory conversation-stopper: ‘You’re toying with me mate, you’re toying with me!’

Racism is the refuge of the deranged sheep, the kind that has managed to furiously pull the wool into its own eyes.

Politics

we can set aside as easily as the cat its fur-ball,
the hedgehog its ticks.
Just remember: any creature can scratch, bring up its gall.

On Radio 4, a woman on the joys of wandering naked in a garden with fellow ‘naturists’, sniffing the roses etc. As if, while enacting a reversal of Adam and Eve’s shameful discovery, they might forget to notice each other’s nakedness. And that is what naturism is: dressing for indifference, as if this were, somehow, a virtue.

Unless it is intended to remain hermetic, I think the worldlet created in any given poem should have at least some aspect of the familiar. But its greater obligation is to provide the Three S’s: Surprise, Surprise, Surprise.

Aerialist

To condemn the wide-eyed, well-balanced poem for staying on the fence
that is its glory
makes as much sense
as reprimanding a novel for telling a story.

Auden (who sang the praises of the permeable limestone landscape) called poetry ‘memorable speech.’ I think great, or even just good, poems should have at least an element of this; they should resonate in the way that a good song or piece of music does. If they manage that I will forgive them much, including a good deal of impermeability.

Historical irony should come tempered with humility. What Milosz called ‘praising art with the help of irony’ can ruin a poem. And weak irony, the smirk behind the frown (or behind the scream, in silly movies such as ‘Fright Night’) is good for nothing but guffaws. Yet irony is the iron in literature’s blood. Life itself is intrinsically ironic, its brightening flare never quite touching the end of the bricked-up tunnel.

Diversion

Having long since bypassed the old distillery,
we overshot the bypass. These days
most tributaries are in a hurry
to forget how to praise.

An Ars Poetica In Fragments

I am not familiar with Jennifer Moxley's work, though I have come across her name before, usually on Ron Silliman's blog. And it is Ron I owe thanks to for providing a link to her recent Fragments of a Broken Poetics on Poetry Daily.

Moxley concludes her series with an Afterword, in which she describes how 'three French points of contact converged to create the conditions for the writing and occasion of these fragments', such as René Char's Fureur et mystère—

particularly his writing on the architecture of the poem, "Partage formel" ("The Formal Share")—that sparked some new thinking in me. Char's use of aphorism, as well as his delightfully fanciful logic, suggested a refreshing way to avoid the line-in-the-sand rigidity of writing a contractual poetics—those manifestos of orthodoxy that, in laying down the poetic law, always manage to spontaneously recruit an army of cops to enforce it. Reading these statements activated my critical muse and I began to write my own series of aphoristic statements; to think from where I was, to try and state—simply, concisely—what I believed at that moment about the poetic art.

I am glad she spared us yet another orthodox manifesto. And I have a fondness for aphorism (Auden and Don Paterson come to mind, as do Beckett's versions of Chamfort). I like the form's constraints, the way it pushes a thought or idea to be fully born then cuts the cord. And the aphorism's yen for clarity can certainly be refreshing, especially when many contemporary offstream poets seem less interested in fragmentation than disintegration; their poetry (or 'poetics') is all too often bursting to explain itself while simultaneously tightening the gag. Anyway, here's a small selection of Moxley's [apologies for the disrupted formatting]:

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.


VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.


IX

Poets whose readings lead us to believe ourselves part of a spontaneous and instinctive consensus have left poetry behind. Perhaps for the better.


XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.


XIII

The book is the means, not the end. It should conform to the poem, not vice versa. Otherwise the imagination becomes a small box, which thinks only of the larger box it wishes to resemble. An ideal book is a bed: a comforting place in which poems can sleep while awaiting illumination. Both poem and book, however, are subject to the capricious lens of human attention.


XIX

A momentary bewilderment arouses the mind. Many words, lines, and phrases may temporarily baffle without spoiling the reading experience as a whole.


XXIII

The poet is buried in the obliterated whiteness beneath the dark letters of poem.


XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.


XLIII

Poetry is not politically efficacious in countries where it is not valued as a cultural necessity by the general populace.

I am not sure all of these work (though this may just be due to my own misunderstanding). For example, I suspect IX may be read in at least two very different ways. And XXVIII seems, to me, a bit overwrought. Overall though, many of Moxley's Fragments did what good aphorisms ought to do: they made me think.