I read Don Paterson’s cranky, magisterial The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Meter, last year when I had to write a lecture on metaphor; The Poem was largely unusable for my purposes, but I read it through anyway, because it has such a rich discussion of the various things a poem can and must do in it. Ever since I’ve found myself trying to figure out what I think of it. This is a tentative first step towards that.
What’s so special about The Poem?
British poets have regularly written books about poetry, even about how to write it, though less than you might think, certainly less than American poets, say. Off the top of my head, in Paterson’s rough generational and aesthetic cohort (what used to be called the mainstream of British poetry), there’ve been books of craft and argument from Fiona Sampson, Glyn Maxwell, Ruth Padel, probably others. In some ways Paterson’s fits on the shelf next to, say, Padel’s 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, or Maxwell’s On Poetry. They’re all professors of Creative Writing and the books share a certain terroir from that field. There are useful writing tips: If you want some extra euphony, try to begin and end two consecutive words with the same letter (brindled dawn, nicely yearning). But the writing tips are not what makes The Poem fascinate. That is all down to its metaphysical assumptions.
The Poem is an honest-to-god work of aesthetic theory. These, especially among the cohort of successful ‘mainstream’ poets of Paterson’s generation, are thin on the ground. Maxwell’s book, for example, is pregnant with statements about deep stuff. The words of the poem are at war with the white space of the page, which is Time, that kind of thing. But there is no theory as to how Time gets into the page. How it is that words fight time. You just kind of figure out which ones might be good.
For the most part, British poets who write what are obviously recognisable as poems, the kind you might look at on the tube, tend to dislike theory. Paterson, however, is interested in the theoretical justifications for why we should write a poetry that is, like his contemporaries, largely hostile to theory in the sense they tend to use in English departments. He wants to explain why it makes sense to write poems that make sense.
His poems, therefore, are not ‘events in language’, nor disruptors of ideological functions of whatever. They do not critique or performatively fail to evince the metaphysics of presence. More concretely, perhaps, they are not written with their eye on language as an impersonal system. Your avant-garde poet, she writes for an audience, yes, but really she writes into language itself, in the hope that a pebble thrown into it will ripple out and change its shape. If we’re lucky this will result in the spontaneous abolition of the value form or something, but the main thing, traditionally, has been to demonstrate words in novel relation with one another. The reader right not recognize the analogy between this writing and freedom, but it’s there regardless of whether or not you see it.
Paterson is not interested in that kind of self-aggrandizement of the workings of a poem. In his conception, poems are about experiences, they are experiences. They are transactions between one mind and another. Somebody is reading these poems, and that person has, because of various facts about the nature of the mind, to approach it in certain ways.
He explains his own view better than I could in a poem in what is still my favourite of his collections (though I like them all!), God’s Gift to Women, called ‘Prologue’:
A poem is a little church remember,
you its congregation, I its cantor;
Of course, it is a church in the way that Larkin’s church in ‘Churchgoing’ is a church, not a house of god, but something of an empty shell. The poem has nothing to do with God, or it does but only in the negative:
Fear not this is spiritual transport
albeit the less elevated sort;
while the coach will limp towards its final stage
beyond the snowy graveyard of the page
no one will leave the premises…
Just as we are all going to die, the poem itself does not contain any people. But in the space, where we experience it, in the poem, there is still, Paterson seems to suggest, something to revere. The possibility of a shared experience. This is what the poem is about. And this is what The Poem is about. Or perhaps its better to say that explaining how a poem participates in this possibility is how he explains our experience of reading well-made poems.
In this respect, I think the most enlightening comparison for the book might be Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Like Paterson, Coleridge was interested, fundamentally, in one question that can be reformulated backwards or forwards. What do the workings of poetry tell us about the mind, or what does the nature of the mind tell us about the workings of poetry?
Coleridge’s messily arrived at conclusions, that poetry springs from a faculty called the (secondary) imagination, which is, in a sense, the echo of God’s creative act, and reveals, if only analogously, that the mind is fitted to the world, that they are fundamentally connected, that everything is one thing when seen one way, and an infinite number of different things when seen another, provides us with a theory of poetry that gives poetry enormous importance. Through the new relations between things noticed in a poem, you see both a truth about the mind, and how this truth connects you to the world. You see that life is full of meaning. This meaning is not just in the poem, but in the world that the poem makes available to you. The poem concentrates your imagination and you notice how meaningful existence itself always is.
Paterson has other ideas. His book takes in an impressive, Coleridgean amount of contemporary psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience, to try to show how the deep structures of the mind, of which language in general is of course the product, prepare us to read poems. Knowing this, his argument goes, (and my gisting of it will do some violence to its pleasures and complexities), we can know how to write poems which in some way take maximal advantage of the reader’s faculties for using language and reading poems. These (poems) are, broadly speaking, the most language-like pieces of language, and also those which can startle us into seeing the principles of language itself, and of the mind, perhaps as it confronts an indifferent, disordered universe.
That is the point where Coleridge and Paterson part ways. The connection between mind and world, which Coleridge makes through analogy, or metaphor, is severed. Paterson’s focus on metaphor, or figuration more broadly, likewise credits the poem with bringing us to a kind of insight, but it is the opposite one to Coleridge. The poet’s self-consciousness obedience to the compositional principles necessary for language to make meaning creates a kind of perspectival unbalancing (a realisation that we are always describing things in terms of other things) that is the experience of meaning in its purest form. Something means when a principle outside of that thing appears to govern it. Marks on a page mean because they are governed by rules that dictate how one should make air move in the mouth, the air is governed by rules etc etc. But what we ultimately confront is not the necessary shared nature of what he calls the two ‘conceputal domains’, it is simply the fact of there being a an outside force that shapes it, but there is no ultimate reason for this shaping. Ulitmately, outside everything is nothing.
Paterson himself puts his argument about metaphor in the following terms, which are an instance of his rather endearing jargon:
I trust by now it will be clear that I believe not just poetic meaning but all meaning to be the consequence of a tropic process. Meaning is the epistemic corollary of a power structure, and is the consequence of the subordination of one conceptual domain to another. A conceptual domain is a set of arbitrary rules. When one domain is enclosed by another, its contents are altered by the arbitrary rules of the enclosing domain, which narrows their sense, overdetermines the strength and direction of their valencies, and renegotiates their value. From the perspective of the subservient domain, the rules of the governing domain often do not look arbitrary, but this is the definition of a subservient relation. Furthermore, the components of the enclosed domain may now have the illusion of intrinsic meaning, but this is merely the apparitional result of the specific semantic attenuation, valencies and values dictated by the rules of the governing frame – as well as its frequent invisibility. Generally speaking, governing frames are not placed under scrutiny (though it is the work of poetry to see that they are).
So, the ‘meaning’ of a poem, is a kind of experience. To the reader, a series of, say, liturgical images or references, helps to give the poem its meaningyness. Well enough organized, we experience some particular sense, as in ‘Prologue’, that the concept of ‘the poem’ is subordinated to what Paterson would call the ‘conceptual domain’ of the church service. The service itself is also a set of arbitrary rules. ‘A poem’ is not really like a church service, any more than life is for example, like a sea voyage, or the word is really made flesh.
Thus, in the absence of the word being made flesh, maybe what some kinds of poem also do, in their more than perfect obedience to the determining power of their own conceptual domain, is allow us to see the limits of the frame, its arbitrariness, to experience subordination to a rule without feeling the necessity of obeying it. There’s something almost, but not quite Kantian about this, but it’s the not-quite that is Patersonian. We experience the nothingness at the heart of his view of the world. He does not think that the world has meaning. At least outside our heads.
The ability to impose conceptual domains is simply part of the function of humans’ interface with the world, much like Kant’s faculties; but these faculties, for Paterson have nothing to do with the way the world is. Or let me put it like this. The poem in Coleridge’s comparable theory, I think, is fitted to the mind, makes use of its capacities, in a way that reminds us of the way that the mind is fitted to the world. One is a miniature version of the same shape. And if you imagine that shape to be a circle, say, you might imagine a bigger circle, circles rippling out to touch infinity. Poems don’t just show us using our faculties most concentratedly, but hint at how our faculties can give us the whole world. Poems can, when really imaginative, show that what we think of as meaning is in the world, and not just in our heads.
Not so in Paterson. Why should a small circle within a big circle suggest expanding ripples? Or why should we interpret those expanding ripples as an expansion, rather than what they really are, the decay or entropy of information from the original splash. Each ripple is a signal weakened from its passage across a gap.
What I find most interesting, in Paterson’s account of metaphor, are these gaps, in addition to this gap between concept and world, the gap within the process Paterson calls meaning—the subordination of one thing to another thing by the mind—between poet and reader.
On one level, it’s convincing enough. We have roughly speaking the same conceptual apparatus, a brain which works, Paterson (drawing on cognitive linguists like Lakoff) thinks, by imposing concepts on one another. But this imposition has no validity. There is nothing inherent in the object of our perception that is ‘meaningful’. There is also nothing inherent in the poem that contains meaning. What it does is trigger, through largely comprehensible stimuli, a kind of sympathetic process of experiencing meaning, of experiencing imposition in the mind of the reader.
This whole worldview is echoed in Paterson’s long, extremely sensitive and convincing discussion of metre. Its final conclusions, again, unjustly condensed, are that what a poem does is trigger the imaginary drumbeat of the mind, a process of rhythm-imposition on the text, which need only be notionally correspondent with some actual stress value of given words. A good metrical poem tricks you into thinking you can hear what cannot ever be heard.
This trick is, however, connected to the nature of physical laws:
Language is hopelessly rhythmic because we are hopelessly rhythmic – in our circadian cycles, footsteps, heartbeats, breathing, in the oscillations of our brainwaves and the circulation of the blood. We are rhythmic because physical law has created a rhythmic universe, and settles everywhere into periodicity: patterns of regular gravitational orbit, spin, electromagnetic pulse. (If there was a god or prime cause, they clearly had a hell of a groove on them.
That word hopelessly there is one that I think pointedly echoes Paterson’s worldview. This worldview is a nihilist one. Or perhaps better, a naturalist one. There is no meaning or value in nature. That’s entirely the wrong kind of place to look for it. Or rather, it is nowhere, it is an experience of something else, that is not meaning or value, but which we call meaning or value because it’s something like an intensification of the nature of nature. There, in nature, we do find repetition, and pattern, and we are driven, desperately to call this meaning. It is not meaning, it’s not even law, which is too close an idea to meaning, it’s power or force. And what it ultimately means is nothing.
What I find fascinating in Paterson, is to see someone try to work out the correct way to write a lyric poem given this basic assumption of naturalism. In order for it to work, I think that ‘nothing’ has to perform a certain function.
Let’s see how this applies to Paterson’s discussion of metre more generally.
Quantifying the unquantifiable is an endless and pointless project which can nonetheless do a fine impersonation of a rich and insightful one, with the prosodist confirming his brilliant findings again and again – through what, on closer inspection, often turns out to be sheer subjective projection, and the circular confirmation of one’s own discoveries. What is required is a description of the system which includes its subjectivity as integral to it, and does not try to eliminate it.
It was natural that we emerged with a series of rhythmic instincts in language, in imitation of the general physical laws of the universe, at least as we experience it. But beyond that ineluctable basic, original repetition, there is only a kind of fatal relation between poem and the music of the spheres. They are both entropy misunderstood, by the mind, as rhythm. Circles rippling out into nothing.
For Paterson, and I think he is broadly right about this. Metre is a subjective art, shareable only because we are subjective creatures. It is also a kind of illusion. It is a way of making us think that difference is the same, that we are not moving towards death, but hearing the resurrection of the beat. His discussion of meter is superb, and I agree with him about 75% of the time and understand him about 75% of the time. But the general point, the gist, the geist, is that the poem is a way of setting the cogs turning in the mind of the reader, which neither brings poet and reader closer, but deludes them into thinking they share a space, because we hear a certain kind of repetition and think we are in a certain kind of space, like the echo specific to a church.
For Paterson, a poem is a sort of emulation, with exaggerated grace, of the bonds of nature. Metaphor is the kind of subordination of one thing into the terms of another which the mind has evolved in order to make complex decisions. Metre is likewise. A poem takes advantage of that to create this experience, this moment we call meaning. But at its heart, that moment is empty.
It is the emptiness which justifies how Paterson then approaches what a poem should do. A poem does not open out onto a world. There’s nothing there to really call a world. A poem is a transaction between people, their law-bound sensory apparatuses, across this gap of nothing.
Paterson is open to a whole range of possibilities of ways that one might appreciate the meaning making process of a poem. But what he does not believe, is that there is any way to break outside of the small circle of how the mind processes information. Because, and here, he is (I think not deliberately) speaking metaphorically, this is an echo of the shape of the universe. The nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
This all sounds fairly cosmic, but it has implications for hyperspecific beefs within the poetry world. Between what used to be called the mainstream and the avant-garde. Beefs to do with whether poets published by Faber or small presses based in Cambridge and Brighton are better. On a deeper level, these spats have to do with whether certain ways of writing are closer to the true dignity of the art. Is poetry in the service of what many of these small-press poets would see as political freedom or what Paterson would see as connection with the reader bound by unbreakable laws, across his great gap of nothingness?
The question of what politicial freedom in a poem is, how it could possibly be there will have to be set aside for now. Instead, let’s see how Paterson frames the wrongness of his opponents. They’re wrong because they don’t understand how the experience of meaning works. When a poet writes a radically disjunctive poetry with the intention, say, of subverting the language, refusing the economy of reference that somehow (?) reinforces the ideological bonds of capitalism etc… they are merely being parasitical, to no end, on the general conventions of the language. There’s nothing really real in their disjunction other than a petty negation. Paterson admits, magnanimously, that perhaps there are some local beauties for the reader inclined to treat the poem as nothing more than it is. He comes across as pleasantly inclusive and nondogmatic as he does this. Some of the poems of JH Prynne et al aren’t bad. But they have the wrong criteria for success in poetry. They are wrong to exclude Heaney or Michael Donaghy or whoever from greatness. Ultimately, the radically disjunctive poem can’t show you what its author probably thinks they’re showing, you something better than reality as it is generally experienced, something maybe more full of meaning:
The most direct challenge one can offer most radically alternative poetic manifestoes from Charles Olson onwards is just to say – and then prove – that this simply isn’t how the human mind works.
I am, in one sense, inclined to agree. But I do think that Paterson’s vision leaves us with a kind of emptiness. We value a poem because it performs well within the parameters of information processing. This experience may or may not be combined with words that also contain some general moral truths. The melding of these two things, done well can give us an experience we might, in our more wistful moments, call profound. But the poem itself is just an experience. In being an experience it also ceases to be an object. It is isn’t outside of the mind of the reader. It is only ever the decayed signal that has made it across the gap. In a certain way, Paterson’s poem is not really there.
To me, some of this argument reminds me of the philosopher John McDowell’s attempt to solve an opposition between what he calls Rampant Platonism and Bald Naturalism. Again, at the risk of wild oversimplification and misprision, McDowell labels as Bald Naturalism the view that everything can be explained in the terms of the natural sciences, including such things as our values, judgements and reasons. Rampant Platonism suggests simply that reason, value etc are real but exist in a different space altogether from physical reality. Bald Naturalism is the opposite view; our thoughts are about the world, we should seek to understand it empirically, but what we think of as reason and value have to disappear, consequently, naturally. Our thoughts are not really thoughts as we normally understand them. They are vibrations, and vibrations cannot contain reasons.
I don’t think that poets who write poems that do not fit into Paterson’s view of the mind are Platonists, but perhaps some would reject much of Paterson’s empiricism. Because without real reasons, you can’t really write freedom. The natural is unfreedom. Nothing is free.
Another philosopher, Robert Pippin, I think phrases the problem of the natural quite nicely, in an essay responding to McDowell:
It is with Lucretius, and De rerum natura, that what would eventually become the great issue in modernity first appeared with clarity, even if in an undeveloped form: the claim that everything is natural, and natural in pretty much the same sense, and so all bound by the “bond of nature” (foedus naturae), including the unusual, the freakish, and even the instituting of, and changes in, human customs and laws. And it is quite important that this most comprehensive appeal should be so immediately associated with the idea of being bound, since this sets out the contrast with our common sense experience quite well—that we do not seem to ourselves bound, but to be able to evaluate and settle on claims about the empirical world and to initiate action as we deem best, not in the way that bees build hives or bloodhounds sniff out trails or water flows downhill.
Paterson’s vision of poetry, both in this book and more widely, is of the illusion of Platonism, of value or meaning floating free from nature, collapsing back into nature. He gets a lot of the pathos of his poetry from the disappointment we feel when we see, first, the incommensurability of what we think of as meaning with the natural world, and then, its deeper, sadder, commensurability. Its trickle downhill towards death. Paterson’s great poem ‘Rain’, climaxes with the image of the downpour as both representative of a final entropy and not at the same time, as the illusion of meaning that reveals a deep human delusiveness:
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.
It would take another essay to explain how I think poetry is not like this moment of collapsing illusion. Or not entirely. I think there is something else, something that we can get not from the mind but from the world, or at least from a poem of the mind which sees a world that is like itself, free, valuable, full of meaning, and puts this meaning into the poem. It is not a question of being doomed like water to flow downhill. I think of this moment of metaphor or symbol in Biographia Literaria:
Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
How should we read Paterson’s definition of metaphor into this image? Is the conceptual domain of the mind here tyrannising this tiny insect? Or is the insect teaching the mind a real lesson about how to alter what we would see as fate. Ultimately, Paterson, I think, imposes the wrong analogy to govern his whole understanding of meaning. His great nothing.
His conceptual domain, the empty godless universe, is not what so much of our life is really like. Sure, that ultimate fate is inevitable, but if we listen too hard for its echoes, we hear nothing. There are other things worth hearing. Other things worth seeing. The ripples expand as much as they decay. We might be condemned to live in an entropic universe, but that doesn’t mean we have to flow downhill.