Peter Russell - Something about poetry

I am often asked, whether by friends or strangers, by journalists or by TV interviewers, why I write poetry. Sometimes the question is posed sympathetically, other times aggressively, in a challenging manner, a provocation if not a dismissal in advance. To the obviously disagreeable questioner I reply with equal contempt that I write poetry because I want to make poems. At this point I hope the guy will just go away. However, I could make just the same remark to the sympathetic questioner, simply changing my tone of voice and the intonation of the sentence. Perhaps such a down to earth, analytic reply is just too bald and calls for a certain elaboration. I mean that one has to distinguish "poetry" as a general quality, or even as a universal, from the individual poem. All men and women have at one time or another felt the "poetry" in the starry sky, in a beautiful landscape or a lovely face. Quite a lot of men and women, especially in adolescence write "poetry" about it, but few write viable individual poems. In very early childhood, when I first heard the brother Goose poems, and a few well-known lyrics, I immediately felt that I must make up things like that myself. At that, stage I had not thought about "poetry" but simply wanted to make "poems". The concept of "poetry" is extremely complex and certainly beyond the grasp of a child of five or six! Quite apart from the obsessive need to write poems, linguistic artefacts as we may call them, in the fugitive turmoil of everyday life I constantly find myself wanting to "fix" my memories, and especially my reactions to situations, to observations of the world and "life", to my various studies, as well as to the accompanying feelings, or the sudden eruption of emotions, of thought or vision. Sometimes it's a bit like telling a friend a recent significant experience or a dream, at others it's more like "talking to the world". As with every story, realistic or imaginative, the poem has to have, or rather evoke, a psychic locus, a context, in time and space, or out of it. The poem then is a reorganisation of the stream of consciousness. Sometimes the whole thing comes in a flash, like a vision. At other times, one may be thinking more or less coherently following a train of thought, or one may just have a thought which seems to come from nowhere. The poems I write are largely spontaneous, rarely contrived. They come out of concrete experiences, genuine memories, actual dreams. In this sense, the linguist or sociologist would classify them as a sort of information, though I think that would miss the point completely. But I would say that at one and the same time they communicate something I have in common with other people and something which is entirely different from what other people know or have experienced. But why are these productions to be called poems, and not just anecdotes, descriptions, explosive ejaculations or dreamy ruminations? The reason is that they aim to be effective and suggestive communications, availing themselves of all the latent possibilities in language and all the faculties of traditional poetry from Homer to the present (in as far as one can know and master them!). In this way they have to be something different from plausible passages from best-sellers, or newspaper articles or old diaries. What then makes the poem a poem? It may start with an image, or simply with a single word or phrase. A mustard-seed doesn't look much like a tree, let alone one with a flock of birds perched and singing in it. The seed grows according to its innate form. Generally I have little idea of what the emergent poem is going to say (that is, the content). It grows like a plant or a young animal. In this sense it is largely a production of the unconscious mind but it is guided, and in part, informed, by conscious thought, in the same way that the living creature partakes at once of nature and nurture. There is a sense in which poems are like fractals, but formed out of words, not geometry. Some poems, of course, are far more conscious compositions than others. Some of my sonnets, for instance, are conscious ruminations on where I am and how I got there, not to say, where I ought to go, and are furthermore guided by the exigencies of rhyme and metre. Others are rather the productions of an autonomous voice that cries out, or better, sings, not from the centre of consciousness, the ego, but from the unknown nocturnal oceans and dark forests and everchanging clouds of the unconscious realm. These are the Muse poems, for me the most precious deeds and memories of my life. The shrink, of course, by various dubious techniques, can trace many of the most baffling or suggestive images and incidents in the poem, but note well, the poem, - if it's a real poem, remains, a unique and indestructibe entity. The post-structuralist critic can deconstruct the poem, and demonstrate not merely that he is intellectually superior to the Poet, but even that the poet or author doesn't really exist. The poet may even be dead anyway, but the poem remains. The structuralist is of course a public dependent and necessarily belongs to the Structuralists' or critics' trade union. The poet, who is an autonomous and independent member of society, could never think of belonging to the Trade Union of the poets, parasitic on University Departments and the Arts Council. When I read my "Manuela's Poems" at the University of Basel some years ago, a very agreeable and well-informed lady got up and said "Obviously Manuela is your Jungian anima" and seemed to think that she had said the last word about the sequence. I wasn't a bit put out because I knew that the poems exist in their own right independent of any interpretation, sound or unsound. I'd like to think that my poems are a living monument to my brief, insignificant and not always laudable tenancy in this world, not a cenotaph or empty tomb. We live in quantitative historical time, ontological and phylogenetic, our personal life-spans enveloped in the life-span or history of the race. But this time is a fallen time. In a poem we may reenter qualitative psychospiritual time and space. Eternity, no less! But it's all much more complicated and wonderful, marvellous and mysterious than anything I can say. If the world won't listen I'm not much put out. The gods and the angels and the daimons, the Pans and Silenoi and the nymphs and the Apsaras, listen and sing and love. Call this extended mataphor a mere myth, or an illusion. It's only through "illusions" that we get our glimpses of the truth, as Novalis said. When people lose their illusions they are surely finished. They live on "factoids" and are the prisoners of delusions. This conviction about the supreme value of poetry brings me tremendous happiness, little less than beatitude. A few hundred people who are my regular correspondents and friends, share this joy with me. They are housewives and industrialists, princesses and paupers, government Ministers and occupants of H.M. prisons, bank clerks and pathologists, -- anything you like. Without their help and encouragement I could not survive physically, let alone spiritually. What is hair-raisingly evident is that fact that with the exception of a mere handful, none of these good intelligent People are poets or professors of literature. As an economic entity in our enlightened society I am a nonentity, a striking failure. The great American poet and critic Dana Gioia whom I greatly admire and love, has observed that I am a "coterie Poet". The trouble is that I have no coterie nor belong to one. But all these contingencies really are of minimal importance. The satisfaction I have after sixty years of writing brings me a joy that no wealth, fame, success, power or influence could possibly destroy.
I believe that poetry is the most sublime of all man's possible experiences.

Pratomagno, 16th November 1997