Anatomy of a Poem – Michael Hartnett and Harry Clifton part 1

Thought that I’d put off Rilke for a little while more and let some of my readers who are likely to be unfamiliar with the lesser known Irish poets of recent years get a taste for their work. To achieve this I’ll be taking a look first at a poem from the Limerick born poet Michael Hartnett [perhaps best known for his work in Irish-language poetry] from his English collection ‘The Killing of Dreams’ [1992] and a poem from Dublin born poet Harry Clifton [currently the Irish professor of Poetry] from his collection ‘The Liberal Cage’ [1988].

Let’s start with Hartnett the poem I’ve selected which is ‘In the Landscape’ – here I reproduce it as it is difficult enough to find I imagine -

” 1.

One more midge in the swirling ghost
that dances like a cone
above a pond with duckweed
spewing from its throat,
I love the tree as much as lightning does;
I care as much for sunset as the sun.

2.

Maps tell us nothing.
Marking the position of a well,
the presence of a granite spur,
the distance between monoliths,
they cannot trace
the mental rubrics of the deaths and myths
that occured here and occur
still in the mindscape of the race
that first enacted rituals
for the spirit of this place.
When the uneasy builders meet
to celebrate an alien laying-on of hands
where their newer churches rise
and they move together in imported stateliness
or in an over-frantic dance,
the old realities among the dancers stand
with sad and comprehending eyes.”

There’s no denying that this is a minor poem – the mark of such a poem being its self-contained reach. A poem that succeeds artistically reaches beyond itself and there is tangibly the sense of strain, particularly of a driving tension which seems against the odds to the hold the poem together and which grips the reader in its rhythmic procession such that the reader has little choice in the matter. There is in these kinds of poem a sense that the poem itself determines the experience of the reader, shapes the space into which the reader enters. The more space you feel in a poem the less determined or focused the force which produces the poem – therefore the less possibility that something, some distinct aspect of reality is uncovered in the poem. In fact it follows from this as I reflect that the greater tendency of the poet to rely on fall back on a set of images or experiences that are removed from the possibility of being re-appropriated poetically the weaker the output. This would seem to contradict common sense but the more realistic or natural the poet attempts to be the more dominated he or she is by the images, the sounds which he/she should be reshaping in light of the poems strain to overcome language. This reflects for example what I mentioned earlier about Heaney’s poem not recounting in a traditionally realistic fashion the described event but instead transforming that event entirely within the context of the poetic space created. So here are two suggested rules with regard to critically taking apart a poem – firstly that there should be a limited sense of maneuverability the poem ideally should fit exactly about that aspect of the real it uncovers and therefore no waste, no image or sound however well crafted that does not serve the poem’s strain towards overcoming itself and secondly no use of a backdrop which overwhelms the poem, in other words no traditional realism [that sense of mimesis or reproduction] ever – the poem has its worth by expressing something that can only be expressed within the poetic medium and therefore the poet who cannot master or subordinate the language to the challenge is ruled by the language itself and gets nowhere or is drowned in the emotional/intellectual [the two are intertwined] landscape he/she is creating.

The problem I face here is that while I would definitely describe Hartnett’s poem as finished, complete, self-contained and therefore minor it fulfills both of these demands quite exceptionally. There’s no room at all here for deviating from the poem itself. It takes control instantly and its pace and procession is so finely produced that as a reader one is led from beginning to end seamlessly, without slipping out over the edge of the poem, without finding a space in it to take up a position and begin trying to make sense of it – for the proper order is that the poem reshapes the reader and not that the reader must appropriate the poem to his or her own subjective self. There should be no room at all for the reader to ‘get into’ the poem and here there isn’t so I’m quite satisfied. As well as this the instant ring of the poem’s single movement from beginning to end marks a craftsmanship which must include a control over the poetic material [the imagery and sound and so on]. The sense of harmony is that the poem vibrates with singularity of purpose – like a bolt running clean from the first line to the last about which the poem sounds as the reader’s ear runs over it.

Interesting to note here is the fascination of the poet with a profound sense of history, not the Hegelian concept which is so wide and all-consuming in its movements but of the endless number of historical acts which in fact shape the present situation without ever being capable of being pried out and examined themselves. That are undeniably in the present but are also entirely silent in their observance of that present. This is of great importance for any understanding of the Irish sense of self-identity – while Yeats concerned himself with creating this sense of Anglo-Irish literature itself many poets from Kavanagh to Heaney have gutted the actual stuff of 1920s-1970s Ireland as prime material for their poetry Hartnett here has a more forward reaching grasp. Here is the sense of a collision of old and new, of the great pain of moving forward, of trundling limbs – here is the recognition that that same Ireland which was chewed up with great enthusiasm after Kavanagh [who I exclude from this criticism] was disappearing as quickly as it was being digested.

Another noticeable issue with a lot of modern Irish poetry is its attention to material detail – that is its fixation with actual experiences and its relatively omnipresent scorn for symbolic, cryptic or ‘post-modern’ [though I am reluctant to use the term] tendencies. This is in sharp contrast to how other alternative forms like the novel or the play have developed within Ireland with figures like James Joyce, Brian O’Nolan [Flann O'Brien] and Samuel Beckett leading the charge internationally in a sharp deviation from traditional literary forms and subjects, in the case of all three often by comically distorting the very literary form they were making use of. This influence however is not to be felt in modern Irish poetry where by and large there is a tenacious attachment to strange, almost disturbing pastoral imagery and a strong sense of the importance and centrality of a dark and painful past which continues to influence and shape the present. To account for this I can only suggest that the poet after Yeats who does most to shape the poetic sensibility of Ireland is the little known [internationally anyway] figure of Patrick Kavanagh who’s insistence on the significance of the simple and direct and who’s attachment to the imagery of his rural home in Monaghan and indeed to a kind of renewed even vigorous sense of the religious has created possibly an escape from the dominant trends in English language poetry. That is in so far as  Kavanagh remains entirely outside any recognisable literary tradition and remains uninfluenced by any ideological commitments with regard to how poetry functions fundamentally.

Anyway I’ll pick up on this theme again when I move on to part two which deal with Harry Clifton.