Ian McDonald is a Trinidadian poet, writer and social observer.
A sudden deluge of understanding and love
Someone read a column of mine on Shelley and meeting me asked, What do you see in poetry, Ian? Do you mean to tell me that you actually waste your time reading poetry?
A cocktail party, where all conversation has to be chopped ruthlessly into innocuous bits of gossip and if any discussion threatens to become interesting the accepted rule is that it must be interrupted - a cocktail party is hardly the occasion to deliver a considered answer to such a sneering question. But I think I might take a little space to try again to explain why poetry has always been one of my greatest passions, why I have always believed that true poets are infinitely more important than, say, even the most powerful politician or ruthlessly successful businessman, and why I consider the promotion of poetry, in schools especially, of the most vital importance.
The first thing to be said is that reading poetry gives me immense pleasure. But my questioner had a point. Poetry, as it is understood today, is not associated with the giving or getting of pleasure. It is considered a strange, dull business, written by eccentric people, and it is believed that the duty of reading and understanding it should be left strictly to those whose job it is to do such things. What has happened, and why my questioner represents the huge majority of people, is that poetry has become almost wholly a preserve of the specialists and the academics. The English poet, Philip Larkin, put it this way:
We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the ordinary reader and fails, but one that does not even try. Repeatedly he is confronted with pieces that cannot be understood without reference beyond their own limits or whose contented insipidity argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than re-creating it for a third party. The reader, in fact, seems no longer present in the poet’s mind as he used to be, as someone who must understand and enjoy the finished product if it is to be successful at all; the assumption is that no one will read it, and wouldn’t understand or enjoy it if they did.
Fortunately, I was brought up and taught to read poetry that at once delighted me and ever since the beauty and truth of the best poetry had enthralled me. Fundament-ally, poetry, like all art, must be bound up with giving pleasure - and that is the first reason why I read it.
The second reason for reading good poetry is because it has to do with clarity of expression and, therefore, clarity of thought. Poets work at the frontiers of language. They are engaged in the struggle for clarity and meaning and those who wrestle with and refine language in order to be lucid and articulate are, in a crucial sense, the guardians of the accumulated richness of our written and spoken inheritance. Anyone preoccupied with imparting the importance of writing well - expressing oneself clearly, concisely, and powerfully - must have poetry at the centre of their preoccupation. That is why the terrible decline in teaching poetry in the schools is such a tragedy. A nation can feel no greater loss than when poetry is neglected and language atrophies.
In the end, however, one cannot explain this love of poetry. A.E. Housman said that when he read true poetry he felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck. That’s it. When I first saw Rohan Kanhai bat I felt something like that. And I feel it when I read the best poetry - Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight or Martin Carter’s This is the Dark Time my Love for instance, or, just last night, a poem by the American poet Michael Ryan, previously unknown to me, which I read again and again and its truth and beauty climbed and climbed like a great wave rising until it broke in a sudden, final deluge of complete understanding and love within me.
Extended Care
I’m not ready to write my last poems -
Paeans to the glory of sun porch and duck pond
And inner peace that comes to me at last
When, out of terror, I begin to pray incessantly
And love all my neighbours as I love myself,
Including the unknown one who steals my crackers
And the former state senator who sings
God Bless America for every meal and snack time.
I’ll have to be ninety plus, maybe over a hundred,
Nine-tenths blind and needing a fresh diaper,
Before my blinding fear of losing and not-getting
Lifts like the huge purple curtain at the Metropolitan Opera
to reveal the extraordinary blessings of an ordinary day.
Maybe my hearing will also be so far gone
That I finally understand the voices in my head
Debating whether or not I deserve to live,
when in fact – I’ll realize – I’m living O.K. right now,
although I may still believe life could be better
if someone installed a lock on my snack box
and gave that state senator a laryngectomy.
How lovely (I’ll think) every person I’ve known.
Even the egocentric shitheels had a kind of charm,
And the ones who lied purposely to cause me damage -
Maybe they had kids they loved or parents they took care of.
They surely did nothing worse than the worst things I did.
Everyone will appear to me as a scarred soul
Struggling with the same sort of torments and disappointments,
as death rises like a dinosaur out of the duck pond
and lumbers dripping toward me on the sun porch
where I glow with the modest good I did with my life,
grateful this gorgeous world will be here for others when I am gone.
The truth is, if you do not read poetry, there is a terrible void, a God-shaped hole, in your life. But I couldn’t say all that at a cocktail party, more’s the pity.
© Guyana Publications Inc. 2003