Quotes I've Saved #4: Clive James on Poetry

There is a “clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any.”  (from his essay in Poetry magazine).The second half of his “division” recalls to my mind, of course, the legions of students I’ve taught who start by knowing nothing of craft, nothing about the stream they’re swimming in, students who disdain studying meter and form because it doesn’t “fit” their ethos. How many of us have assigned exercises in meter to develop some healthy humility in our students? In the past, I’ve told students that anyone who wants to have any control of the language must be able to manipulate it enough to get a smooth meter, at least as an exercise.Clive James says:  “We tend to assume that the poet needed to be able to write the rhymed stanzas of “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and then sit on the knowledge,” but he goes on to say that “the idea that form can be perfectly free has had so great a victory, everywhere in the English speaking world, that the belief in its hidden technical support no longer holds up. Or rather, and more simply, the idea of technique has changed. It is no longer pinned to form.”Okay, I have to think about that. He says, it appears, there are so many successful poems that are “informal” that we have to question whether it’s necessary to have young poets master meter and regular stanzas. In other words, we’ve moved so far from that organized way of thinking about form in relation to technique that we may just need to drop it.Thoughts:One: Clive and I agree that there must be technique in order to “drop it.”Two: There is an underlying regularity, a fractal quality, in our universe, I think. It may not match the regularity in other universes, and it may shift as we look at it, á la Heisenberg, but all evidence points to its existence.Three:  All our writing, all our lives, I think, play with and against that regularity.Four:  Granted, technique spans a wider field—line endings, voice, etc. Denise Levertov made all those arguments back in the 70s for organic form, the function of the line, inner voice, i.e., how to talk about the game when the net is removed. What is a line? What does it mean when a line is interrupted by a break? What are the forces that stop our eye? The ones that push us forward?Five:  I’m not sure I entirely agree that technique can no longer be “pinned to form.”  Technique, it seems to me, comes from hearing. Hearing the sounds we make on the page. Knowing what we want them to do and WHY. It seems useful and, indeed, maybe even necessary, to know how to make words make particular sounds, nay, even rhythms, together, as training in listening, if nothing else.Six:  I am old, Father William (If you don’t know the allusion, you’ve missed a vital part of your training). But ask any young composer of music if he/she hasn’t needed to adhere to the stanza, the musical phrase, the subtle notations for how long to hold a note, and so on, no matter how insanely wild the sounds. Jazz players with no formal training? There are only a few very good ones, and they hear it. They’ve listened so long and so hard that they hear it.Seven: I always get nervous when I make declarations. One of you is going to flatten me with your intelligent and learned remarks. I await my fate.