It’s his birthday today.
By all accounts, including his own, Basil Bunting was some kind of genius prodigy. Along with everything else, he was also Iran correspondent for the London Times for a bit, and was very interested in Persia and Persian poetry. Born in 1900, he grew up in the north of England. A sort of Ezra Pound type, i.e. didactic and bossy (when he was a teenager he apparently “edited” Shakespeare’s sonnets, because he thought they needed some help) he embraced modernism and all of its themes wholeheartedly. He died in 1985.
He was educated in Quaker schools which led him to become a conscientious objector in WWI (he was imprisoned). He moved around a lot after the war, befriending Pound and Ford Madox Ford. In the early 1950s, he was sent to Iran as a correspondent. As a youth, he taught himself Farsi so he could read Persian poetry in the original language. (Just like James Joyce, as a college student, taught himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen in the original.) Bunting was in Iran during a time of enormous upheaval, including the CIA-engineered coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq, a defining event for the country (still). Bunting’s life was threatened repeatedly.
Bunting, like the rest of his generation – Pound, Williams, Eliot – really thought about and wrestled with poetry: what is it, what should it do, what should it be. It wasn’t enough to do your own thing. You had to tell others how to do it as well. I love all of the different struggles of this period, the titanic arguments between giants. These kinds of arguments – while they may seem academic or pointless – spur people on to do great work. Or mediocre work. Or whatever. It activates everyone. Everyone’s got their eye on everybody else. The same type of battle is going on right now in hip-hop: there are the “lyricists”, and then there is the new generation, who prize cool beats over words, and this style is referred to as “mumblerap.” Each side despises the other. They write songs about it, they make proclamations in interviews, they fight it out in Instagram-live debates. It’s hilariously entertaining. This divide isn’t a generational thing, by the way. There are younger lyricists (see: Kendrick Lamar, Joyner Lucas, NF), and lots of the earliest hip-hop wasn’t about intricate rhyme patterns, but about the beat. At any rate: this debate can get tiresome, and is sometimes positioned as “old fogeys” hating on the young … but what’s cool about it is that everyone is involved, and everyone gives a shit about the artform, otherwise they wouldn’t be arguing about it, and writing songs about it. I think it’s a good thing.
Bunting’s “I Suggest” is a list of tips for poets. It’s a reply, in a way, to Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” and gives a good idea of who Bunting was:
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 there is a rough immediacy to what I have read, a real grappling with the reality of objects, and this feels original and fresh.
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. I love the poem below, because it is an indictment of populist “thinking”, and a perfect example of the sneer artists encounter, every day, all day, through their lives, sneers from people who honestly believe they should “get a real job”. The arrogance of the ignorant and mediocre. It’s all spoken in the voice of the “chairman”, a self-righteous “man of the people” (“men of the people” seethe with resentment 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.
QUOTES
Basil Bunting, Poetry (1966):
War, poverty, and love oppressed and illuminated him. He hated law, dogma, press pimps, and the pedlars of culture. He liked life and risk when he could afford them. As for dying, he would be content to let the servants do that for him, if he had any.
Ezra Pound:
[He] simply will not melt himself into the vile patterns of expediency.
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.
W.B. Yeats on Basil Bunting:
One of Ezra’s more savage disciples.
Basil Bunting, Objectivist:
To me it seems that history points to an origin that poetry and music share, in the dance that seems to be part of the make up of homo sapiens, and needs no more justification or conscious control than breathing. The further poetry and music get from the dance and from each other, the less satisfactory they seem.
Michael Schmidt:
Those who insist on his debt to Pound tend to overlook a prior, and more than equal, debt to Wordsworth, to Tudor and Elizabethan models, to Yeats, to the French symbolists, and despite a settled personal version, to Eliot. He adds to the list others “whose names are obvious”: Dante, Horace; among the Persians Manuchehri and Ferdosi; Villon, Whitman, Zukofsky.
Michael Schmidt:
The themes are timeless: poverty, particular loves, departure, exile, return, regret, being misunderstood (that great troubadour and modernist sentiment), solitariness, social disgust, literary flyting, and so on.
Basil Bunting:
“Chomey at Toyama” is a poem that, whatever its worth or worthlessness in itself, might have a useful influence: showing, for instance, that poetry can be intelligible and still be poetry: a fact that came to be doubted by the generation that took most of its ideas indirectly from Eliot.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Although English poets often disliked Pound’s eclecticism, a kind of cultural tourism they found too American, they were drawn to Bunting because he adapted Pound’s discoveries to a distinctively English locale. His poetry proved a valuable resource to those who sought for contemporary English verse rougher surfaces and greater dynamism than the Movement and other postwar developments provided.
