The Poem – Lyric, Sign, Metre

Don Paterson

Faber and Faber, £25

Review by Nick Major

I wish to declare at the outset that Don Paterson’s 700-page tombstone

of a new book very nearly put me in the grave. I should have heeded

the warnings. My editor, my partner, my friends, the postman, and even

Paterson himself, in his preface, advised me against reading it. Yet,

fool that I am, I could not resist. Why? Because for years people have

been asking me the same question: “what is a poem, exactly?” Never

having been able to answer adequately – and, no, it is not just prose

with odd line breaks – I looked forward to Paterson’s elucidations.

I endured two weeks of slow reading about linguistics, “conceptual

domain” theory, and new systems of poetic metre, during which I had

countless headaches, wrote ten pages of notes, and went through

several packets of post-its. Then, my eyes alighted on this innocent

footnote: “…while one is at liberty to say what one thinks poetry is,

one should never say what it is not: poetry is whatever we call

poetry.” Well, if it wasn’t a full-blown brain haemorrhage I had, it

was a minor stroke, at least.

In all seriousness, this really was not a book for me (although I

happened to find large chunks of it fascinating). Unless you are one

of Paterson’s “constituency” - odd word to use - which means, “all

those with a professional interest in poetry,” it is not for you

either. To translate, this book is for academics, of which Paterson is

not one. Rather, he is one of those “writers who work in the academy.”

Most of us know him as a fine poet and musician who has also published

books of aphorisms and a rather good, light-hearted introduction to

Shakespeare’s sonnets. In The Poem, he turns his pseudo-academic pen

on two questions, of which you already know one. The other is: “does

the existence of the poem point to a basic poetic function of speech?”

The first part, Lyric, addresses the music of poetry. Paterson uses

some linguistic intuition and theory to show how the specific

interplay of vowels and consonants and their phonological attributes

combine in speech. In poetry, sense is often dictated by sound. Poets,

apparently, have always known what many experts in linguistics refute,

that language “operates on a principle of iconicity, which is to say

words sound like the things they mean.” Words that begin with “gl”,

for example, all have a brightness to them. They glimmer and glow. If

only this were true, the world would be a less gloomy place. Later on,

admits he “has no particular evidence for his ideas”. We just have to

trust his feelings and his experience “as a poet”.

Putting aside his wackier notions, it is exactly when Paterson draws

on his creative practice that he is most engaging. Why, for instance,

does a poet choose one word over another? He implies that poets –

unlike, say, many prose writers – pay more attention to the

connotative rather than denotative aspect of language. Or, take his

discussion of metaphor in part two, which examines the development of

poetic tropes. For Paterson, a metaphor works in a poem not just

because of how original it is, but because of its “nativity,” how at

home it is within its locale.

He is also very accomplished at poetic analysis and unusually funny

for an academic writer. His deconstruction of Seamus Heaney’s

Underground, showing how the late poet’s use of classical myth infused

his poetry without overburdening it, is simply a wonderful piece of

criticism. His study of poetic metre, as examined in part three, might

seem too exhaustive, but the first half greatly enhanced my knowledge

of rhythm, for which I am truly thankful. By the end of The Poem, I

found myself reading lines of poetry over and over, exploring with a

new intensity their sense and sound, right down to the most seemingly

inconsequential grammar mark or phoneme. That is a sign of a good

teacher: someone who can help others improve their own understanding

of the world.

Still, one cannot escape the fact that Paterson’s writing throughout

this book is verbose, repetitive and at times infuriating. For instance,

who in their right mind would think that “intralineal syntactic break”

is a better way of saying “caesura”? Who needs to clarify that a

“line” in poetry is “a series of words with a typographically

indicated pause at the end”? How can you spend whole chapters

explaining how poetic meaning is entirely subjective, and then say we

cannot fully understand a poem without knowing the author’s intent?

As for the big question I started out with, I spent a long time

searching for a clear answer. There is this: “Ideally, poetry is

radical thought expressed in appropriately radical language. It often

finds this language directly through the attractions of an inflexible

metrical frame.” (Paterson suggest that “poets cannot trust the

dictionary if their use of language is to be subversive.” Any

subversive poets out there, please bear in mind, Paterson’s book is

“not a primer” or “how-to guide.”) Then, I found this: “poetry is just

speech placed under a spatiotemporal constraint, behind which lies an

emotional impulse: to say something which will maximise language’s

power and density.”

Almost. But it’s missing something. Then, some bright spark suggested

I look in the dictionary. So, I opened my handbook of literary terms:

“What makes a poem different from any other kind of composition is a

species of magic, the secret to which lies in the way the words lean

upon each other, are linked and interlocked in sense and rhythm, and

thus elicit from each other’s syllables a kind of tune whose beat and

melody varies subtly and which is different from that of prose.” I’m

going to go with that and get on with my life.

Don Paterson will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August