Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry
By all accounts, Basil Bunting was some kind of genius prodigy. He also was Iran correspondent for the London Times for a bit, and was very interested in Persia and Persian poetry, so I love him for that. Born in 1900 and died in 1985 (God, that generation – what they saw), he grew up in the north of England. A sort of Ezra Pound type, didactic and bossy (when he was a teenager he apparently “edited” Shakespeare’s sonnets, because he thought they needed a bit of work – hahaha) he embraced modernism and all of its themes wholeheartedly.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
[Bunting] may have spent several years in Persia, on the edge of a real desert, yet the poetic landscapes he created are greener, often English – the England of his native Northumberland, with its history. “I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice,” he writes. Voice again, and “nipped”, suggesting Objectivist concision. But Bunting as an English poet could lend himself to a movement only in part. The rest of him was empirical, pragmatic; he trusted himself more than he trusted dos and don’ts. He might sit at Pound’s feet, but he never merely imitates Pound. Attending to the mature mastery of another writer, he sets out to find his own.
In the early 1950s, he was sent to Iran as a correspondent. As a youth, he had taught himself Persian, so that he could read Persian poetry. Aha. So he was one of THOSE. Like Joyce, as a college student, teaching himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen in the original. Bunting was in Iran during a time of enormous upheaval, the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadeq, the Prime Minister, a defining event for Iran as a country. It made CERTAIN that 1979 and the hostage-situation would occur. (Here’s some excerpts about “Old Mossy”). Bunting was in Iran at that time, and things got nuts, and his life was threatened repeatedly, and he finally was tossed out of the country.
Bunting, like the rest of his generation – Pound, Williams, Eliot, Yeats – really thought about and wrestled with poetry. It wasn’t enough to do your own thing. You had to tell others how to do it as well. You had to have opinions about poetry itself, what it should be, what its purpose was. I love all of the different struggles of this period, in poetry – the titanic arguments between giants – all about POETRY. Humankind is a beautiful thing. Because if we can’t argue about poetry, in the same way we can argue about politics and war, then we are nothing.
Bunting wrote something called “I Suggest”, which is a list of tips for poets – which gives a good idea of who he was, his concerns, his sensibility, and to my mind, he followed all of these “suggestions”. Good tips for writers of any genre:
I SUGGEST
1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shapePut your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.Never explain – your reader is as smart as you.
I don’t know all of his work, but I do know that there is a rough immediacy to the things I have read, a grappling with reality – as it comes across in objects – that is original and fresh. He wrote Odes, that’s one of the things he is most known for, and also a long poem called Briggflatts, his master work, I suppose – but a poem is included in the Norton Anthology that I’ll post here as the excerpt of the day. Bunting was big on “voice” – as he wrote in “I Suggest”. He thought poems should be like music, and he also felt that everyday speech should not be jettisoned from poetry. I love this poem, because it is an indictment of populist thinking, and also a perfect example of the kind of sneer that artists encounter, every day, all day, for their entire lives, by people who honestly believe that they should “get a real job”. The arrogance of the ignorant. It’s all spoken in the voice of the “chairman”, a self-righteous “man of the people” (look out for those “everyday folk” – they often seethe with resentment, as we can see everywhere today, towards anyone who does anything different, or learned, or in any way tries to separate from the pack). The poem is called “What the Chairman Told Tom”. “Tom” is modeled on Tom Pickard, a British poet who studied with Basil Bunting, so perhaps there is a grain of truth in this encounter.
What the Chairman Told Tom
Poetry? It’s a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It’s not work. You don’t sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.
Art, that’s opera; or repertory –
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.
But to ask for twelve pounds a week –
married, aren’t you? –
you’ve got a nerve.
How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?
Who says it’s poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.
I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I’m an accountant.
They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?
Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it’s unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.
They’re Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.
Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.
