Will Harris
"Of all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art." - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
1.
A poem isn't a rabbit hutch just because they look the same from a distance. By which I don't mean that poems and rabbit hutches look alike, but that to the untrained eye all poems look the same and all rabbit hutches look the same. Their samenesses, though, are different.
We're taught that poems have certain formal features in common: rhyme schemes, iambic pentameter, "summer's lease hath all too short a date". But really they can take any number of forms and do what they want - have one-word lines or no lines, include dialogue and pictures, even be in prose.
A rabbit hutch is limited by form in the real sense that if its form changes too much it's no longer a rabbit hutch; if it fails formally it fails completely. The food tray might be badly placed or the gate's faulty lock might cause it to swing open at the slightest nibble. If so, the craftsman has failed.
Rabbit hutches are defined by their form. Poems only make use of - or avoid - forms and techniques. A poem could decide to set itself political, moral or aesthetic goals that it fails to communicate or realise, but in an important, literal, sense poems can't fail.
As Wallace Stevens put it, "poetry is a revelation in words by means of words." (Imagine how a tradesman would react if you told them a wardrobe was a revelation in wood by means of wood.)
Though I say this now, for a long time I was under the thrall of craft. Maybe I was scared that someone was going to expose my lack of it. At university I spent two months on a poem that began: "A necklace of stem that's easy to snap./ A thinly hairy stem of granny's nightcap." I pored over its sound patterning and rhythm, repeating "thinly hairy" over and over again in my head. I was stuck.
I thought that, as with building a wardrobe or fitting a horseshoe (things I definitely can't do), the more I practised the better I would get. But 'real' craftsmen work with materials that have consistent properties. If you heat up or hammer metal it reacts in a consistent way. No one pulled me aside to explain that writing a poem isn't like that; poems don't just improve over time corresponding to effort.
More than that, no one pulled me aside to explain that 'craft' was a misapplied metaphor. It takes formal or technical features, embedded in a particular cultural-linguistic tradition, and then extrapolates them into a false, pseudo-mystical idea of what poetry should be. It's about granting access and denying entry.
What do we mean when we say some poems are "beautifully crafted" and others "lack craft"? Who decides what value should be placed on any given set of formal features?
Instead of saying poems should have evenly-spaced vowel sounds and an internally consistent thematic domain, what if we said that all art should be done in felt-tip pen and applied directly onto the flank of a cow? Because that's how it felt to me back then. Trying to write my long poem featuring a "thinly hairy stem of granny's nightcap," I thought that the more the cow squirmed and the pen slipped, the harder I needed to push. Resistance showed I was on the right track. So I didn't stop to question why I was knelt beside a cow holding a felt-tip pen in the first place. This was craft.
2.
The Poet's Freedom by Susan Stewart begins with an anecdote about a trip to the beach where she describes seeing a small boy building an elaborate sandcastle replete with turrets, crenels and a little moat. Having finished, the boy steps back to admire his work and then runs at the castle and proceeds to kick and stamp it to pieces, smiling all the while. Stewart writes:
Since then, that boy has represented for me a certain relation we have to making. Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking, or at least always present as the potential for unmaking, we cannot give value to our making. Was his castle a work of craft rather than art - one he felt could be replaced easily? Did this object that implied, but could not realise, an interior acquire an interiority in being a memory alone?
By destroying the mere thing, and using all his physical might to do so, the boy seemed to be returning the power of the form back into himself, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorisation or, better, learning. Once the skills used in making the castle in its entirety were internalised, they were ready to be used again. Unwilling or unable to be the curator of his creation, the boy swiftly returned it to its elements, that is, to its pure potential.
I take from this a kind of parable about the differences between craft and art, or about the dialectic that exists between the two. With craft, you're making something that can be replaced - a commodity. If you spend all day building a wardrobe and then someone comes along and smashes it, you'll be angry because that wardrobe represented a day's work and could have been used or sold (it was also unique in its way) but the power to remake it is still inside of you. In fact, as that boy on the beach discovers, you might find your power affirmed in the act of its destruction.
With art objects, broadly defined, there's a quality of irreplaceableness. If you rewrote the Divine Comedy it would be a different poem. The art object is defined by the threat of destruction in a way the craft object isn't. Its terminal fragility is the site of its value. And whereas the destruction of the craft object proves the strength of the maker, the (possible) destruction of the art object proves the strength of the work. It affirms what Stewart calls its "interiority", the vital flame of its inner life.
But the division between art and craft isn't clean-cut because, of course, the maker is crucial to the work of art, and the alternating impulses towards art and craft are generative. Seeing them in dialectical terms should bring out the risks of an excessive focus on either. Too much art leads to a vatic emptying out; an abnegation of ethical responsibility. Too much craft leads to a narrowing of vision; the production of mere commodities.
When I was obsessed with craft, I thought there were models I could imitate that would show me how to make and remake indestructible little poems like stainless steel spoons. But putting together a poetry book I've realised just how insufficient good writing is. What's important is that the work has that sense of "pure potential". A life that exceeds itself. Which lives because it can be destroyed. Which wants to live through others.
Because a living thing is much more than a crafted thing. It can't be bought or sold or replaced. It's death-aware, shaped by the same "freedom of reversibility" that shadows our lives. It tells us that we're more than just form; it tells us to cradle, for as long as we can, the potential that defines us.
3.
Reading Kamau Brathwaite's History of the Voice, I rediscovered a poem I'd forgotten about by Derek Walcott called 'Blues'. Often I find it hard to know whether I like a poet's work. It can take me by surprise when something clicks. It was a while before Walcott clicked for me, and then it was less because of anything I'd read by him than because aged 18 - around the same time I was writing "granny's nightcap" - I heard an old recording of him reading 'Blues', a poem about a nighttime assault in New York City. This is its first stanza:
Those five or six young guys
hunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.
It looks like a conventional poem: lines of equal length, a clear (though loose) metrical tick, a compound adjective ("oven-hot"), and rhymes (guys/nice, stoop/stop, night/light). But said out loud it's transformed. Or not transformed, which suggests changed. Rather its submerged rhythms float up to the surface. In Brathwaite's essay he says you can hear in Walcott's voice "the sound of Don Drummond's trombone". Drummond was a key player in the ska scene in Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s and perhaps Brathwaite is saying that, although 'Blues' is a poem about an assault, it sounds as joyful and raw as a trombone solo.
Listen to that languorous first sentence ("Those five or six young guys"), the way it unfolds over four lines before coming to a halt: "So, I stop." The trap has been laid; we know where this is going. But the poem's narrative2 doesn't tell the whole story. Rather than describe the fight, the speaker talks about his new sports-coat, which he hangs on a fire-plug for safekeeping: "They fought/ each other, really." His voice conveys a mixture of presence and absence; pride and shame; he's physically welded to the...
