On Poetry

Glyn Maxwell is an award-winning British poet and dramatist, though not well known in the US. This modern text makes poetry accessible to those unfamiliar the 19th and 20th century poetry canon. For example, the first chapter draws the reader in with his comparison of popular music lyrics and poetry, showing how lyrics rely on the drama of melody and how poetic techniques and language provide those dramatic, emotive elements. Not a mere textbook; this book brings joy to the study of British and US poetry.

Book in good shape, but author is surely a prima donna!

ON POETRY is all of the above. Halfway into it, I would also have included the adjective "brilliant", but for me the book's scintillation waned somewhat over the last half. Still, it easily is one of the best books about poetry that I have read. I have added it to my list of books to re-read, which for me amounts to a fairly big compliment.Maxwell certainly is unconventional in his approach to poetry. His first two chapters are entitled "White" and "Black", and in them he introduces two of his central concepts. I confess that at least on first reading I don't fully comprehend those concepts. That reflects an overall pattern for the book: Some points I agreed with; others I disagreed with; some were genuinely insightful; and with yet others I ended up thinking, "What the hell is he driving at?"His touchstone, however, is clear: form. Maxwell's concept of form is sophisticated, and it includes sensitivity to poetic tradition, but for him, form (as he understands it) is essential. "A poet can shape time in a poem, and form is how that's done." Harking back to T. S. Eliot, which Maxwell does: there really is no such thing as free verse, because "the so-called verse libre which is good is anything but free"; "the division between Conservative verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos."Maxwell has taught poetry, or the writing of poetry, at the college level, and he uses a hypothetical class of four students to make some of his points. Indeed, the book as a whole seems more directed towards aspiring poets than "spectators" of poetry like me. Which is not to imply either that it is a manual of sorts or that devoted armchair readers of poetry would get little from it. Maxwell includes numerous examples from the tradition of Anglo-American poetry, a few of which were new to me and all of which were relevant and instructive.He gets in some zingers along the way. On contemporary American poetry: "To paraphrase what my teacher [Derek Walcott?] said when I interviewed him a few years back: if things go on progressing as they are in contemporary American poetry * * * it will soon have, effectively, no readership at all."On the difference (for Maxwell a more appropriate word perhaps is "dichotomy") between poetry and songwriting: "The other half of everything for the songwriters is music. For the poets it's silence, the space, the whiteness. Music for them -- and silence for us -- does the work of time. I think our gig is harder. Their enemy reaches out, plays chords, goes hey we could be friends if you play your cards right. Our enemy simply waits, like it knows the arts of war. Songs are strung upon sounds, poems upon silence. * * * Bob Dylan and John Keats are at different work." (One can easily imagine Maxwell's feelings about the Nobel Committee conferring on Dylan its prize for Literature. The Nobel Prize for Peace would have been more appropriate.)On blogs: "The fissure in writing poetry, the chasm between what I believe absolutely and doubt profoundly, is not between the 'metrical' (say Frost) and the 'musical' (say Pound) -- which is a crude reduction of the work of both * * * ; the fissure is between having a governing aesthetic like either -- or having no governing aesthetic at all, which leaves you with nothing but your next thought, or your latest feeling. That's an impulse which waited ninety years to find its true literary form. It's called a blog."Great cover, incidentally.