by Clive James
When I watch her describe that graceful arc,
So perfectly alive. I can’t be dying
If I see this. The sky will not grow dark
While she spins through it, setting it alight,
Making my day by staving off the night.
Play it again. A poem that has taken
Its final form is radiant like this.
Beginnings left behind, but not forsaken,
Its history beyond analysis,
What starts by growing slowly, like a pearl,
Takes off and turns into a whirling girl.
Use of Space
My granddaughter has scored, for Modern Dance,
Good marks in all departments, with a nine
For “Use of Space”. Give me another chance
And her certificate might well be mine.
I moved well at her age, and when I grew
I thought of Dance as something I could do.
I never could, of course. I merely flung
Myself about with untrained feet and hair.
No gift at all, except for being young,
And gradually that faded on the air
As I became another crumbling face
Scoring a pittance for his Use of Space.
Now I score zero. But because I’ve seen
Her switch to different corners of the room
Without, it seems, crossing the space between,
Delight reminds me time is a new broom:
It clears the floor our youngsters use to get
The compartmentalised certificate
That we’d have liked to have, but didn’t put
The work into, and so did not deserve –
Although we might have been quite fleet of foot
And God knows that we would have had the nerve –
But we had other things to do and know.
Let her do this. Be glad, and let it go:
For you the Use of Space comes to an end
With your collapse into a spill of dust,
And you are for the wind and waves, my friend,
And all of this is timely, true and just.
The old ones disappear, the young dance on;
They use the space we make by being gone.
Photo File
The photographs in the manila folder
Are all of me when I was strong and bolder,
But now I’m old, and illness makes me older,
And winter’s coming and the nights grow colder.
This photograph is me when I was swimming
At Inverell and sent the pebbles skimming
Across the river. Now my eyes are brimming
Because my arm aches and the light is dimming.
And in this one my wave of hair is showing
The gleam of Brylcreem, and my mother sewing
Has told me that I am a sheik, and going
To stun the girls when I have finished growing.
And here I am as the high-school debater.
A Cicero with an accelerator,
I talked too fast but I got better later.
That pimple left a noticeable crater.
The snaps of me when young are less narcotic,
I think, than those in which I look robotic,
Decked out by fame in various exotic
Bad hats and a fixed smirk that grew sclerotic.
I finished growing and the years went flying,
But there is no time now to waste time crying,
Although these pictures prove, beyond denying,
That once I was alive and not just dying.
Indeed because they show the treasure gleaming
Of good health I was granted beyond dreaming,
These constant posturings need no redeeming:
They are the substance. I am just the seeming.
The world I conquered is a tide retreating,
And with my maker there will be no meeting,
But look at this and see how time is fleeting:
Here, I am one year old. My heart is beating.
Time to pack up this packet and forget it.
The past would overwhelm me if I let it.
The clock ticks like a bomb. I didn’t set it.
Let’s just say there’s a deadline and I met it.
Injury Time
This is a pretty trick the fates have played
On me, to make me think that I might die
Tomorrow, and then grant me extra time.
By now I feel that I have overstayed
My welcome. Every night I face the climb
Which might as well be straight into the sky:
The Himalayan slog upstairs to bed,
Placing my feet so carefully I seem
To tread on rolling logs, and there I dream
I come back down next morning, still not dead.
This nightly dream can turn out to be true
Only so long, and one day this notebook
Will lie untouched, to show how long it took
Silence to do what it was bound to do.
This Being Done
Behind the trees across the street the sun
Takes down its last pale disc. This being done,
No soft pale light is left for anyone.
There is a further comedown in the night.
Outside, unheard, asphalt is turning white:
White swarms of butterflies in the streetlight.
The morning comes, and through the spread of snow
In candy-coloured coats the children go.
Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.
Notes on the Text
Greatly gifted and prematurely cut down, James Elroy Flecker invented the Gardener in White at a time when death and decay, in order to fit the globalised imperial picture, were thought to need a touch of orientalist exoticism. Some of his rhythmic momentum, however, was permanently musical. Back in the days of black and white television, the BBC did an enchanting production of Flecker’s Hassan, with Gielgud proving that there was nothing kitsch about the sonorities.
“Finch Conference”: Phil Spector richly deserved his second-degree-murder rap but for anyone of my generation his tainted name still spells rhythmic power. The massed strings and guitars for “River Deep – Mountain High” gave so many of us the idea that the true object of popular music should be to move the male listener as close as possible to Tina Turner riding on the storm. Karsavina’s little book Theatre Street is still always somewhere near me. Dynamism was part of her lyricism. At the time of writing, I am hooked by the way Zenaida Yanowsky can lean into a turn as if her speed was holding her upright. Every page of YouTube is a worm-hole to Andromeda.
Singing Panis Angelicus with his father in the gallery of Modena Cathedral, Pavarotti proved the truth of his unblushing contention that his gift came from God. He was a modest man, however: too modest to believe that the music he made gave him a right to be untrue to his obligations. Finally, as Cavaradossi in Tosca, he was so big that he had to sit down to be shot: but he still turned up for as long as his voice was true.
My poem about Beethoven is in seven parts to echo the structure of his greatest quartet. “They used to say he wrote only one opera, but he wrote the only opera.” I first heard that idea from my dear friend Tony Locantro, who, back in the day when we first hit London, did so much to get me started on the love of serious music: and especially of the great operas. (As an apprentice A&R executive at EMI he had free access to the upcoming releases when they were still in “white label” form.) But for a long time much of the great chamber music was beyond me, and I am still finding out about it now, as the time approaches when it might not be so easy to read a book.
“Declaration of Intent”: Back when I could still travel, in the dance halls of Buenos Aires I would study the way the tango masters, some of them a lot older than the hills, would maintain a hesitation step until the accumulated potential energy delivered them into a surge of forward movem
ent. The rallentando hiatus gave the maestro’s partner time to prepare for the searching reach of a long backward step. It often occurred to me that the parallel with writing poetry was very close. In a poem, to retard the impetus is often to prepare for power.
Carlos Fuentes has been gone now for several years but I still remember the humanist magnificence of the private library at his house in Mexico City. He said the place to see, in the historic Americas, was Oaxaca; but I never got there. The way he talked about Unamuno, however, I have remembered for all the time since. Even in old age, Carlos was a beautiful man in every respect, and the young women on my film team would sigh arias just from being in the same house.
I wrote the first drafts of “Not Forgetting George Russell” when I was locked up in the Closed Ward at Addenbrooke’s after a psychotic reaction to steroids. The editor of the C-text of Piers Plowman was already dead by then but my conversations with him continued; as, indeed, they do today. I should add, however, that the poem didn’t find its final form until I was back in the clear. The idea that scrambled brains are an aid to insight is not one I favour.
Finding the actual world quite bizarre enough, I never found surrealism interesting even when Magritte did it. But I can quite see how the subject of surrealism’s validity might come up with some force if a surrealist as beautiful as Lee Miller gets herself photographed in Hitler’s bathtub. Defending this poem from accusations of triviality, however, I would feel bound to say that she was almost certainly not concerned with making a surrealist statement but merely with having a bath, and that I was justified in calling her “sane”. Later on she got clinically depressed about having taken her famous photographs in the concentration camps but that was a different part of the forest. There is room for an infinite amount of journalistic comment on these topics but perhaps it should start with the fact that Lee Miller was raped and given a dose of gonorrhoea at the age of seven.
Years ago now, on the daunting favela where my production team filmed a key sequence of Postcard from Rio, our local fixer made the mistake of wearing a conspicuous pair of white leather shoes. But the mistake was ours to give him his stipend in advance. He was murdered for it. The extreme tonal range of that city has haunted me ever since.
In “Aldeburgh Dawn”, one of the last poems I began writing “on location”, as it were, most of the factual points about the setting can be easily googled, but the mention of the Falaise Gap might be a mystery to younger readers, because it gives the name of a place to an event happily forgotten. The turkey shoot at Falaise, where the rockets fired by the Typhoons punched holes in the retreating German armour, was the true end for the Wehrmacht in the West. In Aldeburgh at night, and in the early morning, the continent seems not all that far away. The “Duck” was a DUKW, an amphibious vehicle.
Perhaps conserving his powers of effect, the imaginary narrator of “Tactics of the Air Battle” praises the superiority of the P-38 while neglecting to mention that it was limited by its short range vis-à-vis the Mustang (P-51). A better sky in which to look for the true glory of the twin-boom fighter was in the Pacific theatre, where Richard Bong won his forty victories. My device of the ghost pilot narrator enabled me to draw upon the enthusiasms of my childhood: a mental storehouse that fills, I am convinced, far in advance of any urge to write poetry, and goes dim only at the end of life.
Though I was never a true student of gymnastics, I vaulted well enough to be part of Sydney Technical High School’s team that won the Pepsi Cola Shield. I mention this achievement here because the time for securing any further athletic triumphs is running out.
Letter to a Young Poet
First of all, give up if you can. Nobody who isn’t neurotically driven should be in the game, because the chances of failure are too high, and the disappointments are too cruel. So we can safely assume that you are writing poetry because you must, and not just because you think it a more rewarding activity than stacking shelves. The latter assumption is statistically wrong anyway: the average stacked shelf is not only more useful to society than the average poem, it is actually superior as a work of art.
Thus committed by a burning, Miltonic compulsion to your lifetime’s destiny, you will have already noticed that your work attracts more blame than praise, and more indifference than either. Train yourself to care less about the praise. You should work your new poem to perfection not because it will please more people that way – it might please fewer – but because in its finished state it will prove itself an independent artefact invulnerable even to your own doubts. If the poem has its own confidence, the day will come when you can look back on it and wonder how you did it. Usually that day, if it comes at all, comes soon; but it seldom comes immediately, so keep back anything you write until you are sure that it is really finished. Through this point runs the dividing line between the amateur and the professional. If the initial formative impulse is strong enough, there is a tendency to overlook soft spots and decide prematurely that the thing is done. Don’t trust your enthusiasm until it dies down.
Geoffrey Grigson, a powerful editor in his day, thought that a poet should not keep a notebook. He claimed to be able to detect a “notebook poet” a mile off, in the way that the ageing Malcolm Muggeridge claimed that he could tell a woman who was on the pill by the dead light in her eyes.
Grigson was wrong, though his critical sympathies were so acute that he was valuable even when he wasn’t right. Keep a notebook: an ordinary quarto exercise book will do fine. If the observations you put into it are registered with sufficient precision, they might start to become poems, and can be transferred to your work book. The work book should be folio, so as to let you scan the whole poem as it builds. The work book can also be used for technical exercises. As a general rule nothing should go into your work book except poems asking to be finished, but few of them will get that far if you haven’t mastered a range of manoeuvres for shifting the order of words about in service of a form. You can do without technical competence and still have a career, but you can’t have very many finished poems, and no poems at all which will be shaped in unexpected directions by the set form you have chosen for them. Without technical expertise you can never surprise yourself, and thus will rarely surprise anybody else. There might be no need to master the villanelle or sestina, but you should certainly never stop practising your iambic pentameters and tetrameters, if only to have a name for something you have done accidentally. To get your caesura and anacrusis working smoothly, you can safely work on sonnets of pure nonsense as long as you resist the urge to give them titles and submit them to Poetry magazine.
In a properly kept work book there will always be a clear distinction between the technical mock-up and the real poem on its way towards completion. If the latter takes twenty years to get there, console yourself with the thought that your notebooks and work books are visible proof, if only to yourself, that waiting for inspiration is part of the process. When the final, provably inspired work is lifted from the work book and transferred to the computer, the process of eternal modification might very well seem to start all over again, but don’t abandon it yet. Eventually the poem will tell you it is done by asking no more. Or else it will tell you it was misconceived by just lying there, saying nothing. Abandon it then.
Play a long game. To aid you in this judicious patience, it helps to have a brilliant, sensitive, and critically scrupulous friend to read your completed manuscript, but only if his objections are those that you would have made yourself, given time. If you find that what he really objects to is not mere detail but your basic individual tone, shoot him.
There is no reason to shoot critics as long as they quote you. Even the most hostile critic is working for you if he quotes you; and the chances are, he being his tin-eared self, that the line he picks out as self-evidently absurd or clumsy is one of your best, and will induce his readers to buy the very book on which he is ineptly pouring his brain-dead scorn. The dangerous critic is the bright, cultivated one who tells the
world how wonderful you are. Begin learning straight away not to depend on his approval, which anyway he might be inclined not to repeat next time, lest he compromise his own renown for implacability. If you start thinking about your reputation, or even about your career as a poet, you are in the wrong frame of mind. What matters most is the poem, not the poet. A poet who worries because he hasn’t been in any of the ritzier periodicals often enough lately would be better off busking his latest poem in the town square and seeing how it goes over. And there is always his personal website, as long as he remembers that everything written carefully for print should be written twice as carefully for the web. But if you need reminding to take pains, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff anyway. A poem is something that never stops telling you to be careful until it’s done: you get it started, go on developing it, and keep watching its tone until the whole thing sings.
To that end, if you feel the need of a role model, copy the sense of order that he brings to his phrases, and not the disorder with which he lived his life. If you are a male poet, there is nothing to be learned from how Robert Lowell, in his mania, stomped around pretending he was Hitler, or proposed to the air hostess on a transatlantic flight. Try to learn instead from how he put his images together in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”. If you are a female poet, and lucky enough to be a lesbian, copy Elizabeth Bishop’s verbal precision but don’t imagine that her alcoholism helped her towards it. It didn’t. As for Sylvia Plath, it wasn’t her suicide that made her a great poet; just as Anne Sexton’s suicide didn’t make her Sylvia Plath. For poets of any gender, the idea that only an intense life can produce intense poetry is a very bad one. If saying interesting things doesn’t strike you as an interesting enough activity, join the army.
In the periodicals and publishing houses, the best editors already know about most of the things I have advised you of; and the very best are usually poets themselves, so they have felt all this on the skin. That doesn’t mean you should respect their opinion if they dislike your current poem, but with any editor it’s always worth trying again with the next poem. There is plenty of bitchery among editors, and some of it is towards contributors: but all editors are united in their desire to print something by you if they find it good. The editor’s position is a practical one: he or she is more concerned with printing something attractive to read than with helping to decide starting positions in the world-historical struggle towards immortality. You should have the same priorities. Nobody is asking you to descend to the level of show business, if that’s the way you feel about the clueless punters; but if you can’t bring yourself to write something readable, their fickle glance will move on.
