TONKS: No. Because first of all, I live with the idea of the poem, think about it before I write it, and then I find the right vocabulary for it, and then I find exactly what I want to say, then I test it a hundred times with life to make sure it’s true, so that it isn’t thrown off quickly.
ORR: So that the writing of a single poem is a long and rigorous experience for you, is it?
TONKS: It sounds long and rigorous, but it isn’t like that at all; it is frightfully exciting. All these poems have taken quite a long time, a couple of months, because there are layers of thought under them. Now I am trying to express the thought in a much lighter fashion with a colloquial comment. I am trying to develop an idea with a comment like Aristophanes. Cavafy comments also and, in fact, in the case of Cavafy the whole poem is held together by the quality of the comment, almost, which is the comment of a delightfully wryly-humoured man who has seen every kind and turn of human circumstance.
ORR: So do you feel at some point in the poem that the poet has to emerge as an editorial figure, let us say? Does he have to take sides, does he have to emerge, as one poet put it, as a bully or as a judge?
TONKS: I’m not sure about this. I don’t know whether this is raising a moral question or not. Everybody who writes takes a moral decision straight away, with the very act of putting down one sentence or another, there’s a moral bias to everything you write. I couldn’t take up one cause especially, and I don’t think I even want to stand outside my causes when I am writing about them.
ORR: Do you find yourself drawn to any particular set of themes?
TONKS: It depends. In this book, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, the themes, although different, are under the same driving force.
ORR: They’re urban mainly, aren’t they, with, perhaps, rural incursions, if I can put it that way?
TONKS: I’m a tremendously lyrical poet and this has had to be cut away. My poems are strongly backboned and thought out, and I would write one poem after another about nightingales and leafy grots, but I can’t get a satisfactory poem out of it.
ORR: Does this mean, then, that you are very critical of your own work?
TONKS: I judge it the whole time. Only, if a poem has come off tremendously quickly, I am a bit doubtful about the language, but the actual theme of the poem has sharp scrutiny from the very first moment it enters my head, and it usually comes in after I have had conversations with people about their lives. That is what sets it off.
ORR: Do you find inspiration from literature in any way: not particularly poetry, drama, but, maybe, historical works?
TONKS: Oh, yes, historical stories, not historical works, which are usually so terribly badly written, because historians can’t seem to learn how to write. I find French nineteenth-century literature tremendously exciting and inspiring. Once you have learnt that you can advance human sensibility in a certain way, you look at life in a new way; then you look back to literature, then you look out at life again. That’s how it works, isn’t it?
ORR: Have there been any writers, though, that have been a notable influence on you?
TONKS: All the great writers from Shakespeare to Chekhov, practically all French literature.
ORR: You have never found yourself writing like them and having to stop yourself consciously?
TONKS: Everybody does. The best thing about an influence is to realise it and to swallow it, and never to throw it away. It is like throwing away all the advantages of metre or rhyme, everything must be grist to your mill. You want to be on guard, but not afraid.
ORR: Somebody I was talking to in this vein recently said, ‘When you say so-and-so is influenced by, let us say, Dylan Thomas, what you really mean is that he isn’t sufficiently influenced by all the other writers in English literature.’ Is this a point of view you would agree with?
TONKS: Yes, one always tends to find somebody who is closer to oneself than the others, or whom one admires so desperately one wants to write like him, but this can be cured. You will only find your own idiom if you are grown up. If you are a person, in addition to being a well-read person, then you can cure your reading with your life.
ORR: In fact, the main stream of inspiration is a thing or environment which is around you and pressing on you directly?
TONKS: No, which I make. Inspiration is a home-made thing. Poetry is an artificial art. The assumption that it is like dancing and singing, very close to nature, is an absolute fallacy. It is artificial from start to finish. You make it, but if it isn’t based on life, however much it is praised at the time, it will die. If it works it is almost more powerful than life, in the end.
ORR: Is the sound, the physical, audible sound of your poems important to you?
TONKS: Yes, it is. But I don’t think a poem is only a poem to be read. I mean to say, it has a life on the paper which is quite as good as the life it has when it is read. It does not necessarily have to be read.
ORR: But you don’t feel, do you, as some of our contemporary poets do, that their poems exist really and fully on the printed page, but they don’t care how they sound when they’re read aloud?
TONKS: Well, you see, there is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear’s reaction. Some poems, the eye can see nothing in them, literally, until they are read aloud. Basically, it would be fine if a poem could do both, but there are certain poems which never will do both, and are great poetry anyway.
ORR: So that you don’t feel that poetry is purely and simply singing?
TONKS: No, it is not. It should do both. And, in fact, there are poems of mine which are quite difficult, but which I have put an awful lot of trouble into making musical, and the music has come over. ‘Poet as Gambler’, in which I laboured on the music, is difficult to read, but, in fact, it is successful, I think.
ORR: You see, when I pick up a volume of verses by someone whose verses are unknown to me, my temptation is to read them aloud to myself.
TONKS: Really? But isn’t this because your ear is so well-trained that you want to test it on the part of you which is best trained to take it?
ORR: That may be so, but on the other hand, this would destroy for me the enjoyment, if I applied it all the time rigorously to every poem written for the printed page. But what I meant to ask you is, you don’t have a person like me in mind when you write your poems, then, do you?
TONKS: No, I don’t actually. I wish I had somebody in mind, but I feel extremely alone, I may say.
ORR: But the idea of communication, of somebody receiving, is important to you, is it?
TONKS: Yes, because one writes poems to be read, doesn’t one, and there is no nonsense about that. If I make what I want to say well enough, somebody will respond to it, perhaps. I have to create my own sensibility forcefully enough for them first of all to recognise that it is valid, and also to like the sort of world I am giving them, because I am giving them a new world.
[Interview recorded in London on 22 July 1963]
FROM The Poet Speaks: Interviews with contemporary poets by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott Kilvert, edited by Peter Orr (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) © The British Council 1966 / Estate of Rosemary Tonks 2014
Cutting the Marble
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich
Studies for an Actress and Other Poems by Jean Garrigue
[New York Review of Books, 4 October 1973]
The first poet is very interesting. In order to understand her, we must go into a certain room in Manhattan where a light is on over a table. A serious woman is sitting there, writing a lesson, which is the lesson of her life. On the paper we observe free verse stanzas in a near-colloquial idiom with a somewhat scientific vocabulary; they have an anonymous appearance. An occasional cockney rhyme (sister / glamor) comes up. Reading the lines gives us the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts:
In a bookstore on the East Side
/> I read a veteran’s testimony:
introduces a fact, and related materials are used to describe thought later in the poem:
Pieces of information, like this one
blow onto the heap
This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility. The subjective factor, with all its distortions, appears to have been edited out.
What we think of as diction is something that brings us quickly to the boil on an instinctive level, by throwing coloured words at us in a way for which we are unprepared, as in the writing of Rimbaud or of Gerard Manley Hopkins; or a rigid, thrilling block of modern words, with a granite frost on it, which smashes us intellectually, like a phrase of Robert Lowell’s. Diction can then be identified by the autonomous life it leads; the poetry is already partly about the way it is written, and it becomes more difficult to paraphrase the content away from the page.
When a poet takes up a simpler idiom, like the one used by Adrienne Rich, subjects are of great importance. The presumption is that the poet has especially chosen a line that will allow her to cover ground of all kinds. Even so, we must be moderate in the expectations we form, for there are other difficulties in such a line – which, although fragmented, could be called a narrative line – and I shall try to show some of them. It becomes dangerous, rather than insidious, when there is insufficient fresh material within it; originally it did the work of prose and tends to be one-dimensional.
We must examine what is going on in the poems.
A cast of three or four men and women is living a life very close to the life of the newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper. There are refrigerators, airplanes, phone booths, hypodermics, chemicals, molecules, bombs – and subways, prisons, rooms where people all over the world become careworn in their efforts to face up to reality. But because these people, places, and objects are so little distinguished and personalised, we have to read minutely to assemble the essential data from which the story will begin.
There is a reason for this. The poet is careful not to impose herself on the landscape. She tries, on the contrary, to read exactly the meaning which is there, and no more, and to reproduce it without inflation. At times, a deliberately conventionalised sensibility is in fact placed so squarely before its public subject matter that we can check our emotional attitudes by it, to see whether we have them right, so to speak, as if we were checking our watches by a world clock. In the poem already quoted from, called ‘Burning Oneself In’, we note
the running down, for no reason
of an old woman in South Vietnam
by a U.S. Army truck
brings about the humane but unexceptional (and slightly ambiguous) comment at the end of the poem:
in bookstores, in the parks
however we may scream we are
suffering quietly
In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry? At once it’s obvious what has happened. She has taken on too much, and the imagination is exhausted by the effort required to familiarise itself with all the burdens of the modern world. The syntax is not there to reinvent the material, is not allowed to do so, but only to expose it. Therefore everything hangs on the uniqueness of the poet’s personal contribution.
But she has almost edited herself out of the picture in the initial effort to ‘get it right’. Furthermore, as we continue to read the ‘narrative’ line she is using, we notice that it is far more intractable than we had thought. What it can do to present facts it does very well. But once its basic character has been established in her poetry as a character of situation and event, the tone of the poetry sets hard, and it is extremely difficult to get anything else in. The line goes on quietly forcing the poet to produce more and more objective pictures in the interests of drama, tension, and news. It asks for the next action, the next scene, perhaps for the next statement – but not for the next thought. It would be impossible for example for an idea to be argued through to a conclusion. Similarly the lines can never have finish. It is not, regretfully we admit it, the ideal classical modern line, which can do every kind of work and for which we are searching; the one with which we can talk and think – cutting the marble with what Norman Douglas called ‘the thought-laden chisel of Lysippus’.
The only way thought and feeling can be introduced at all is on the same descriptive terms as material objects. And this, as I have shown in the first quotation, is exactly what the poet has had to do. They must match in kind and degree, or the line will not tolerate them. From now on she can only think in a certain way. The inner world that she shows us occasionally is furnished then in much the same way as the outer world; although a transfer of material objects into mental counterparts does not necessarily guarantee that we are inside, for the soul has its own landscapes.
We may perhaps conclude that the basic fault of this book lies in the nature of a subject matter already familiar being joined to impersonality of presentation the result is abstraction, or politics.
Now the actual poetry in the book is elsewhere. It’s entirely personal, and is to do with psychological survival. It appears out of nowhere, almost by accident:
Nothing can be done
but by inches. I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
and in another poem whose intention is hard to follow, but which is in general a series of pictures and comments on the poet’s afflictions:
You give up keeping track of anniversaries,
you begin to write in your diaries
more honestly than ever.
That is a personal admission which we find illuminating because it tells us something useful about ourselves. We know now that the private face that has been turned away from us is the one that can tell us things we need to know. From this snatch, we understand that the poet is rebuilding herself; the mind is still tough and fresh, even after the intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own, as in this good descriptive piece:
Walking Amsterdam Avenue
I find myself in tears
without knowing which thought
forced water to my eyes
It goes on, ‘To speak to another human / becomes a risk.’ The tears are said to be evoked by a sense of outrage at certain inhuman aspects of life today, according to the poem. Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.
At the end of the book is a section on The Wild Boy of Aveyron. Psychologically, it is most revealing. Some people may have read the book by J-M Itard, or seen the film by François Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage. Briefly, a child left for dead in the woods in 18th-century France manages to survive. Some years later he is discovered, caught, and brought back into society; a human wild animal. In the film (an extraordinary film leaving an indelible impression) we are shown the child reacting to rain falling on his head, to the taste of milk, and to the safety of the forests, with their hiding places, for they alone are trustworthy.
This child is the helpless animal within every lonely alienated human creature, every poet, who from early days has found himself cut off from the minds of his fellows. He does not know how to make contact with them; his only relationship is with Nature. I suspect that it’s for this reason above all others that he has entered Miss Rich’s imagination.
We can see that when her intellect and her ethics have got her into a corner once again in the name of poetry, and there seems to be no way out, nevertheless she manages to write in her lesson book:
stones on my table, carried by hand
from scenes I trusted
The most primitive part
I go back into at night
pushing the leathern curtain
with naked fingers
then
with naked body
The regression is to an almost sub-human ancestor, frightening to consciousness, but essential to spirit. The day consciousness of the poet appears to stand in direct opposition to the unconscious dreamer of the night – the compensating self, who is doing all the real work, and who rights the balance by releasing buried aspects of her personality. It’s no wonder that while this vital process of unification was going on the poetry regularly escaped from stanzas about current affairs. If we carelessly forget that Orpheus was especially famous for playing to wild beasts, trees, and stones, the myth which is active within us will remind us of its own accord.
Il faut être absolument moderne; but there can also be an out-of-date modernness. Early poems by Miss Rich, such as ‘The Raven’, ‘After Dark’, and ‘In the Woods’ (those essential woods) are more modern than many in her present book. That the contemporary nerve is wide awake in her poetry is shown in ways that pass unnoticed. For example, as we read forward we are struck by the observation that this poet never writes a love poem from which she cannot learn something useful psychologically; which forms an amusing and relevant comment on our society.
Bedouin of the London Evening Page 8
