Pinks #2: A Scribble Underneath the Galaxy
Stevie Smith, Milan Kundera and swifts
Welcome to Pinks: poetry cuttings from Some Flowers Soon
Last week it was reported that, in the official correspondence released by the National Archives around the appointment of a new Poet Laureate in 1967, Stevie Smith was dismissed as “unstable” on the grounds that she sang her verse in the Royal Festival Hall.
As Smith admirers know, she was in fact an accomplished public performer of her work, for whom singing was just one way to command an audience. It is a pity the many recordings she made are not more widely available (a 50-track British Library CD from 2009 has sold out but not yet been digitally reissued).
In the latest issue of PN Review, Anthony Vahni Capildeo acutely describes one of Smith’s readings of her most famous poem:
Stevie Smith’s recording of “Not Waving but Drowning” punches holes into the sea. […] The wave-and-sink look of the lineation of the second stanza (second of three) enacts the social isolation that surrounds, perhaps led to, his loss.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
The first line is eight syllables long; the second only half that length. The third line is twelve syllables long, taking us “far out” indeed into the blank of the page. Before Stevie Smith lets the fourth line drop, she pauses, much more than you might expect; much more than at other commas or line breaks. She delivers “They said” with unashamed judgment, in a sharp tone like her delivery of the word “dead” in line one of the poem.
The death this month of novelist Milan Kundera sent me back to The Art of the Novel (1988, translated by Linda Asher). This was a touchstone book when I began to teach literature for a living and needed quotable ideas about fiction that had some overlap with my comfort zone of poetry. Kundera doesn’t address lyric poetry directly in these essays, but his interest in poetic composition informs his insights into the construction of fiction e.g.
A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words […] the way a house is based on pillars.
I also like the distinction he draws between the two modes:
To take on the requirements of poetry is quite another thing from lyricizing the novel (forgoing its essential irony, turning away from the outside world, transforming the novel into personal confession, weighing it down with ornament). The greatest of the “novelists become poets” are violently antilyrical: Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz. Novel = antilyrical poetry.
This definition came back to me while talking with a friend who, like me, can read any amount of poetry but often finds the commitment required by fiction a struggle. What we both agreed on was the brilliance of Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, with its relentlessly ironic attitude to both the narrative and lyric sentence:
I listened to a nightingale. And to distant corncrakes. If I had heard of other birds that cry and sing at night, I should have listened to them too.
A work of non-fiction I’m enjoying at the moment which balances the lyrical and the factual is Mark Cocker’s One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth (Vintage, 2023). Last night, I got to a Beckettian paragraph on what is not known about various African swifts:
Nothing is known about the food or voice of the Bates’s swift. No one has yet seen a nest of the Cassin’s spinetail. In fact, barely anything has been discovered about its whole breeding cycle. Nor the black spinetail: in the seven-volume Bird of Africa the appropriate entry for the latter reads, “Breeding Habits. Unknown.” The sum of knowledge of its general behaviour runs to fewer than 170 words.
“At some level,” Cocker concludes, “swifts are always receding from view. They are on the edge of knowability.”
This reminded me one of my favourite writers about birds, R.F. Langley. First, a journal entry from August 1995:
Friday evening I watch the swifts over the garden and they finally vanish about ten minutes past nine, with darkness coming on and the clouds filling the sky […] The birds were a party of fifty or so, maybe not so many, but high for most of an hour, not getting higher. They moved gradually north over the village and their places were not taken by others. […] The swifts shrank, their voices just prickling the edge of silence, I could still see them with the binoculars, trembling, planing… but were they higher or just further away? I could not tell.
And then Langley’s poem “Tom Thumb” (1997), which reworks his prose sentences into twelve-syllable, internally-rhyming lines:
[…] it’s nine pm and
this is when, each evening since we came, the fifty
swifts, as passionately excited as any
particles in a forcefield, are about to end
their vesper flight by escalating with thin shrieks
to such a height that my poor sight won’t see them go.
Though I imagine instantly what it might be
to separate and, sleeping, drift so far beyond
discovery that any flicker which is left
signs with a scribble underneath the galaxy.