Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language by Clive James (review)

Clive James, an Australian poet and writer born in 1939, is well-known as a trenchant commentator in several media on poetry, writing in general, music, and other subjects. His own poetry is resolutely in the New Formalist camp—he calls it the “new classicism” in an essay on Stephen Edgar’s poetry—and his poetry heroes include Frost (“the greatest modern poet of them all”), Yeats, Auden, Larkin, Wilbur and others; he is even kind and obeisant to Betjeman, and T.S. Eliot has been a lifelong spiritual companion in poetry. Pound, Stevens, Olson, Ashbery and other poets whom he identifies as enjoying or taking advantage of technical “freedom,” please him far less. He does not so much believe in poetry as in poems—he says this repeatedly—the lines and whole works that stand out for their technical brilliance and their ease at being memorized. (James has hundreds of lines and whole poems in his memory.) The poet’s central job, he thinks, is to write the great memorable line, stanza, or whole poem. He generally prefers single slim volumes to collected tomes.

Poetry Notebook began as a series of short articles for Poetry that Christian Wiman commissioned when he was the editor. (Included is an admiring piece on Wiman’s own poetry, originally published not in Poetry, of course, but in The Financial Times.) Most of the essays in the book are quite short, and each is preceded by an “Interlude” that is sometimes merely reflective in general and sometimes specifically tailored to introduce the essay that follows. Although most of the essays concentrate on an individual poet or a group of poets, general aesthetic bon mots and concentrated sage saws are liberally sprinkled throughout the book, energized by James’s self-summation as “a diehard formalist.” So we are told that the “elementary truth that there are levels of imagination that a poet won’t reach unless formal restrictions force him to” (p. 59) has been supplanted by an anything-goes approach to writing poetry; that “you need the ability to build a stanza” if you are going to be a poet; that “poetry is essentially the business of finding a form by fitting things into it.” So much for the century of Anglo-American modernist and postmodernist poetry that stretches from the early Cantos and Spring and All to Zukofsky and Olson and Creeley and many other highly accomplished poets who haven’t the least discernible alliance with statements of that kind. (Creeley, admittedly, could certainly compose a stanza.) James recognizes that the “ragbag technicians” and “anti-technicians” rule the roost, in Australia (his home country, though he has lived in England since the early 1960s) as in other centers. He is even generous enough (though barely, really) to acknowledge that the freedom fighters sometimes achieve “the most concentrated possible version of an effect,” though by limiting his praise to “an effect,” he seems to be damning with faint praise, important to him as effects may be.

As serious as Clive James undoubtedly is, and agree with his bedrock principles or not (I don’t), it is disconcerting to find him allowing himself certain slangily dismissive characterizations or expressions. Poets in conclave, huddled around bottles of wine and cheap food, will naturally sometimes be caught referring to the poetry biz, but I found it a bit unsavory to hear James allude to the “game,” the “contest,” and even to having the “knack.” (He also has a tendency to refer to the modern poets as “the boys.”) Any critic’s prose will have its unique tessitura, but these words and phrases strike the ear—in context—as unfortunately demotic. Then there are the phrases and sentences clearly intended as zingers. Critics need to be wary of zingers, since they tend to bring more attention to themselves than to their intended targets. So when James dismisses The Cantos as “a nut-job blog before the fact,” one is more revolted than amused. Jack London...