Simon Turner - Writers' Journals and Plain Style: additional note

Further to my rather inconclusive comments earlier, I have managed to stumble upon a passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins' journals which illustrates my point about writers' journals: that they remain 'contemporary' in a manner which their poetry often fails to do. The passage is dated July 11th 1866:

"Oaks: the organisation of this tree is difficult. Speaking generally no doubt the determining planes are concentric, a system of brief contiguous and continuous tangents, whereas those of the cedar wd. roughly be called horizontals and those of the beech radiating but modified by droop and by a screw-set towards jutting points. But beyond this since the normal growth of the boughs is radiating and the leaves grow some way in there is of course a system of spoke-wise clubs of green - sleeve-pieces. And since the end shoots curl and carry young and scanty-leaf stars these clubs are tapered, and I have seen also the pieces in profile with chiselled outlines, the blocks thus made detached and lessening towards the end. However the star knot is the chief thing: it is whorled, whirled round, a little and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree: the leaves are rounded inwards and figure out ball-knots."

The density of the writing here is familiar to anyone who has read and enjoyed Gerry's poetry, but what is remarkable in this passage is the degree to which it manages to evade the worst excesses of his verse. Yes, it is dense, but is dense in a manner which is more easily adaptable in a contemporary mode. This could well be a personal connection with little basis in any real textual evidence, but this reminds me of Peter Larkin's prose excursions into the woods: the density of description, the jostling of registers (Hopkins' writing in this passage is always moving towards scientific diction, but yet always holding back). Larkin is the more 'modern' of the two, obviously, but the journal places Hopkins far less obviously in his historical era than his poetry does.

The idea of the journal as a means of getting at poetic speed and vividness is by no means a new idea, either. Some of Ted Hughes' most valuable prose material relates to the composition of Moortown Diary, the poems in which were rescued from prose jottings the poet made on the spot as it were. They did not begin life as poems, and as such are released from the burden of finish and formal unity with which we often associate the poem, as opposed to prose. But the poems in Moortown Diary are by no means chopped up prose: they are poetry by virtue of the quickness of expression, the keenness and freshness of Hughes' eye and ear. They are poetry, that is, because of the energy underlying them, an energy more easily tapped because the poems were created before they were conceived of as poems. They might well prove to be his most important work, though I've no doubt I'll receive a barrage of complaints and counter-arguments for that one. If anyone's reading, of course...

Simon Turner - Writers' Journals and Plain Style

I have not been reading a huge amount of poetry of late, but what has caught my attention, for whatever reason, has been a number of writers' journals. And what has struck me has been the modernity of the style on display in these writings, as opposed to the style of their poetry, which can be seen to become quickly outdated. Though perhaps I don't mean modernity as such, but rather the contemporary nature of the writing. For example, Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, and Edward Thomas's 'A Diary in English Fields and Woods', written close to a century apart, share a great deal more in common than their respective poetries. Why might this be? I think it is at least in part due to the fact that in every era, there is a certain idea of what poetry is, what kind of language it should contain, and every subsequent generation after that era inevitably attempts to overthrow those conventions, only for their own innovations to become dry and academic modes later on. So, the revolutionary poetries of Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc, developed into the high Victorian rhetoric that Eliot and Pound found so objectionable. (In their own quiet ways, less overtly modernist writers like Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were also attempting to shift poetic language away from the dead rhetoric of the Victorian era, though with markedly different results to their disruptive peers.) Later, Larkin and his Movement chums, with their simplicity and approachability, seemed to offer a way out of the complexities and tendencies towards elitism inherent in high modernism. Yet again, however, this reaction birthed its own counter-argument, and Larkin in particular has become something of a bug-bear for the alternative end of the poetry world due to his rejection of foreign poetries, his small minded Englishness, and his closing down of poetic possibilities. He would have been appalled by everything that makes the modern poetry scene so enthralling - from Prynne to performance poetry - and that can only be a good thing.

Anyway, back to my main point - if I had one at all. As I have attempted to show, in my deeply partisan overview above, poetic styles tend to go out of fashion pretty quickly. Journals, on the other hand, last longer, give or take a few aspects of phrasing or vocabulary, precisely because they are not intended for public consumption. Like it or not, every time we set out to write a poem, we are - consciously or otherwise - aware at some level that there is a poetry 'scene', that there are certain expectations for the modern poem (wherever we might stand on the mainstream-alternative axis), that 'thees' and 'thous' and 'myriads' went out with ruffs and top hats. In many ways, this is a good thing - no one wants to read a magazine full of poems who have no idea of the innovations which have occurred in modern poetry in the last hundred years - but it is equally rather restrictive in a number of ways, too. I generally don't get blocked in any serious way, thankfully, but whenever I do, it happens when I've sat down at my desk with the express purpose of writing a poem. The moment that happens, when I put on my poetry hat - and I have one too: a dark green and red tartan beanie - spontaneity flies out the window. The journal, on the other hand, existing as it does outside poetic style and the vicissitudes of the publishing market, allows for far greater freedom. One is less concerned with striving after meaning and perfection, and as such real poetry is often more likely to be found.

There is no doubt more to be said on this topic - I'm aware that I've quoted nothing from the journals I've mentioned - but that will have to wait for a day when I can muster more intellectual energy, I'm afraid. Saturdays aren't built for literary criticism.