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Ford Madox Ford, who edited the English Review early in
the last century, tells how late one evening he was reading submissions
and briskly dropping most of them — the melancholy routine of all
editors — in the reject pile. He picked up a short story by someone
he’d never heard of, read a few sentences, and popped it among the
acceptances. His secretary — it was a different era — asked
him if he’d discovered another genius. ‘It’s a big one
this time,’ he told her. The story was ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’
by D. H. Lawrence, which had been copied and put in the post by Jessie
Chambers. It was Lawrence’s first publication.
I have been reminded of Ford’s anecdote often this past summer,
as I’ve sifted through my own pile of submissions. Is there a genius
to be discovered in here? And then the worrying thought: what if there
is and I should miss him or her? What made Ford so sure? Well, he gives
a helpful analysis of what he quickly recognized in Lawrence: the particularity,
the intimacy, the visual-ness of the writing — each of them qualities
the novice writer should aim for.
They are, too, qualities the attentive reader can recognize and linger
over. But, alas, it’s the instantaneous decision an editor needs.
The subconscious response preceding active interest is what may save him
from the ignominy of not seeing the hidden genius. Luckily poems have,
I believe far more so than prose, an impact which is immediate and pre-analytic.
This has often been described in physical terms — notoriously by
Emily Dickinson as having the top of her head blown off! Robert Graves
had a more homely, if effectively gender specific, test for a true poem.
He found when he recited the lines they caused the hairs to bristle on
his chin. Doing so before the mirror helped him with his morning shave.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the facial growth to put Graves’
test into practice on an editorial basis, but I do tend to work through
my pile in a sleepy unshaven early morning state of mind. I’m needing
to be woken up! And indeed just about every poem I set aside has administered
something like a mild electric shock, a tingling of the nerve ends even
as I’m no more than a line or two into reading it. On occasion in
fact I feel a charge from a poem before I start reading. This isn’t
as loopy as it sounds. I’d suggest it is an effect of claritas,
the ‘radiance’ a poem has because of its formal completeness.
Sometimes the very look of a poem on the page causes it to jump towards
one, as the moon does when it emerges from behind thin cloud.
Sometimes, that is — since a poem’s formal quality is not
necessarily visual. This is more true nowadays because poetry relies on
the manner of prose. A conversational pitch, clarity of detail and the
coherence of the sentence are virtues it often shares with decent fiction.
Yet this is actually a guise, an apparent and super-ficial resemblance.
At heart, a poem will have what the Italian Romantic poet Leopardi called
‘rapidity and concision of style’ lifting it on to a higher
plane. Rapidity is the interesting one here and Leopardi elaborates on
what he means by it in conspicuously physical terms. A poem, he continues,
should ‘keep the mind in constant and lively movement and action,
transporting it suddenly, and often abruptly, from one thought, image,
idea, or object to another, and often to one very remote and different;
so that the mind must work hard to overtake them all, and, as it is flung
about here and there, feels invigorated, as one does in walking quickly
or in being carried along by swift horses’.
That’s the sort of stuff I need in the morning to get the adrenaline
working. I sense almost immediately, or rather I hear, an athleticism
in a poem, a tightness of line and a syntactical speed and co-ordination
that distinguish it utterly from the norms of prose. There are of course
other qualities a poem must have if it is to draw one back, if it is to
excite many minds, if it is to prove memorable. But I believe it is the
sudden feeling of acceleration in one’s attention that first announces
the presence of a true poem; and first causes it, in Leopardi’s
phrase, to ‘flutter the soul’.
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