Yesterday's post included Frayed Opus for Strings and Wind Instruments by Ulrikke Gernes, translated by Patrick Friesen. I opened it to a bio with photograph of Gernes, then Acknowledgements, and a short, interesting Afterword: 'I write poetry for roughly the same reason that I give blood...'. The more acute reader will have realised by now that I was reading the collection backwards. I usually do, at least for the first visit, because my dominant left thumb says I should. For us left-handers the end is where we start from (I was disappointed when the google told me Eliot was a right-hander). We read back towards that enticing first poem the author spent hours agonising over. After my retrograde scan, I'll usually flip to the beginning, and give it a go, then riffle through to find other poems short enough to keep me engaged. And so on. The longer poems need to work harder, and sell themselves to me, but when the way the words say themselves intrigues me, I can easily spend a half hour reading through that one poem, again and again, trying to figure out exactly why it exerts its hold over me.
This may seem bizarre or even disrespectful to many readers who assiduously trek through the suburbs of Contents and Epigraph, then down the long High Street of poems from first to last, and out into those eastern suburbs of Notes and Acknowledgements. Few linger in the shanty town of Blurbs.
I've always experienced acute issues with concentration and distractibility. I did very well at school up until the age of 11, when studying became essential to success; then I crashed and burned, scraping a handful of mediocre Highers (enough in those pre-Free-Tuition-for-Scottish Students-Fiasco days to gain a university place), then dropping out after two years. I'd engage in what I termed tangential study: in the Literature section of the library, intent on genning up on Pope or Milton or - God love him - the muddier Wordsworth, I'd veer off to one side, drawn by a brightly coloured spine, and find myself two hours later lost in Battiste Good's ‘Winter Count’ from Technicians of the Sacred or Bouttell's Heraldry, Ancient and Modern. Sitting with a set text in front of me, and an exam looming, I'd be so overcome with anxiety I couldn't take in any of the words. I didn't consider it an issue - it was just my relationship with the world and the word. It's no coincidence that most of my ars poetica poems are about butterflies.
In a recent LRB I came across the Hawking Index - a tongue-in-cheek measure of how much of a book the average person will read before giving up, using data extracted from the Kindle 'popular highlights' feature. It was dreamed up by a mathematician, Jordan Ellenberg, and named after the author of 'the most unread book of all time'. He simply checked how far through the chosen book the highlights reached as a measure of its overall readability. 'A Brief History of Time' has a HI of 6.6% - not too bad compared with Hillary Clinton's 'Hard Choices' (1.9%), but way behind Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch on 98.5%.
How would the average poetry collection fare? Given it would be something like 15,000 words as opposed to 300,000 in The Goldfinch, it should be up there close to 100%. But is the poetry collection a different country? Do we engage in a different relationship with words when we read poetry?
In 2024, getting ready for a ten-day visit to Italy, I made a decision to take just one thin volume with me. I was going to try Slow Reading - spending significant time with each poem, living with the words rather than speeding through them; savouring the text, using the last line as an excuse to return to the beginning and read again. The book I chose was Nick Laird's Up Late. I'd bought a copy when it won the Forward for Best Single Poem, and though I loved that poem, I found myself struggling with others. Many of them ran over into two pages - some three, even four, and long, determined lines - such a lot of words. A poem has to prove itself imperiously to me if I'm going to stick with it into page two. I coped with 'Up Late' itself because it's composed of a sequence of brief, linked sadnesses, like Denise Riley's 'A Part Song'. I can handle that, where there's a breather between sections. Just as I can handle the visual pandemonium of an art exhibition so long as I can go and sit in a quiet dark corner every now and again.
Don't get me wrong - I could sense how good those poems were, how accomplished and confident, but my attention would drift as I read them, or leap towards the end, as if the poem was deeper than I'd expected. The poem which sold me on this book for slow reading, though, was the heftier bulk of 'Attention', which I came across first in The New Yorker. ‘Attention’ is an astonishing, long-limbed, gravitational descent from detached observation into rage and grief. He uses words in there as if they had no price attached to them. It is written in memory of Laird's friend Martino Sclavi, the Italian film director who died of glioblastoma in 2020. The cancer ate away at the very part of his brain which processed the written word, so he couldn't read. His memoir 'The Finch in my Brain' begins: 'I have written this book without ever reading a sentence of it. Words do appear on the screen as I am typing away, but upon trying to read them, something funky happens.' He would edit by listening as the computer read back his lines. A marble with a turquoise wave in it rattles downhill through the poem. I imagine the bird-like lesion in Sclavi's brain, the sadness and anger held in the poem itself and my attention too, somehow or other, continuously held in the marble of the poem. I had no interest in pulling things apart to find out how it worked; I simply wanted to experience the emotional effect the poem was having on me again and again. So I spent a good portion of that holiday simply reading that one poem - how that marble rolled downhill, again and again.
Years ago, I read of Solomon Shereshevsky - the subject of A R Luria's 'The Mind of the Mnemonist'. Shereshevsky had an eidetic, synaesthetic memory which meant he couldn't read poetry with any sense of enjoyment - every word had so many random, conflicting connotations - colours, smells, noises and memories - 'a junk heap of impressions'. He had no ability to read below the surface meaning of words, into their metaphorical weight. He saw too much in the words Sclavi couldn't see.
There's far more in 'Attention' than I'll ever be able to explain - it's a poem I keep going back to (that subtle tweak after it appeared in the New Yorker, where 'you can write / still but not read' becomes 'you can write / still but no longer read';how important that sense of reaching out is, just as the poem seemed to reach out for my attention, despite - or perhaps because of - my dreadful attention span.
Up Late opens with a concise topography of grief and ends with grief set aside, as if it were nothing more than a finished book. It's interesting that Laird places the Acknowledgements at the beginning, so the final words of the final poem are followed by eight completely blank pages and not a word more. I've read it many times, in all directions, and still I'm puzzled why it didn't win every prize going that year.
John Glenday's first event, A Weather Eye, is on 15th July.
The North Sea Poets autumn course ‘Writing With …’ is open to book. The last course sold out fast, so get your ticket now!
Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊
I am glad to meet someone who reads poetry collections just as I do - backwards and inside out! And yes agree on Up Late, it's an extraordinary collection.
Thanks John, I just read the poem Up Late through your link, what an astonishing piece of writing, gripping and tender, moving from that strange detachment of witnessing, that creates space for the smallest observations to speak with significance. The kind of poem that sends me outside to feel the air move. And your fab essay. Great to read your process and thoughts.