Poetry in performance, often in conjunction with music, seems
hugely popular. Written poetry, on the
other hand, struggles. Hardly any major
publisher in South Africa even accepts poetry submissions now; the small
magazines battle to keep afloat. It’s
not for lack of people writing: that
wonderful, humorous poet and publisher Gus Ferguson once joked, not entirely
inaccurately, that there are 523 poets for every reader. Even poets seldom buy one another’s
volumes. Young poets, even those doing
creative writing courses, often seem to think that reading others’ poetry is
unnecessary. Hence, for all their frequently
courageous exploration of new and urgent themes, a lot of it is simply mediocre,
a recycling of phrases sucked up from the banal swamplands of popular music.
Try being an ageing
white male poet steeped in the textuality of previous ages. Even worse, try being dead. Don Maclennan, one of our finest and most
prolific poets, passed on some eight years ago now, and despite some lovely
reviews (see P R Anderson's in the latest issue of English in Africa) and the publication of both his Collected
Poems and a volume of essays on his work, No Other World, he is yet hardly a mainstream figure.
This is grossly
unfair. (OK, OK, he was my teacher, mentor, and great friend, and I had
everything to do with producing the two aforementioned volumes – but it is
still unfair.) He is a phenomenally
lucid and humane poet who, whatever walk of life or age you might be, has a
great deal to teach and, just as important, to think about. He may not seem to address some of the Big
Issues of Today, like race, politics, and rape – but he does, just from a
different angle. He sees those issues as
embedded within even larger ones; he obliges us to reassess our politics by
revealing the beauty that persists despite politics’ griminess; he addresses
rape by exploring its difficult opposite, love and ecstasy. There is no difficult question of being,
relating, writing, dying that he shies away from.
I mentioned music earlier. Don
lived with and within music always. He
played the violin, he listened to and understood a great deal of music, and he
often wrote about it. One of his very
first volumes was a collaboration with music lecturer Norbert Nowotny, entitled
In Memoriam Oskar Wolberheim. Some of his poems were memorably set to music
by South African composer Michael Blake, and Don conducted a spirited
conversation about music with Blake’s wife, Christine Lucia. His poem “Autobiography” is all about his
playing music. He had been raised on
music by his Scottish father, as he wrote in an early poem, “To my father
playing his bagpipes”. Don imagines him
playing the instrument across the veld at sunset, as after a battle, “with a sense of sweet
massacre” yet somehow taking possession of “the tilting planes of light”. Music fills the world. Don then compares that braying instrument to
a captured bird, trapped under the player’s armpit:
You clasp under your arm
a giant northern bird
one wing lame
the other hugely spread
like fingers of some universal hand.
You hold this creature
solicitous and afraid
for reasons far too ancient to express
coaxing him to utter his distracting cries.
Proudly and with military care
you have begun to strut bird-like
protecting the wild creature
and yet twisting his lame wing.
Out of his long black beak
pocked as branches in the sea
wail the ebony endless cries,
bird music ancient as stones.
There’s so much one
could say about this, reading from various perspectives. But if Don wants us to see the musician as a
kind of poet, or a model for the poet, as I think he does, it’s especially
interesting. Music and poetry, Don used
to insist, had evolved together, from social and biological origins too
mysterious now to really comprehend, for “reasons far too ancient to express”. He wrote to Christine Lucia:
I have never bothered to ask where words come from. Language is quite mysterious enough. ... In
this respect poetry is like music. Where
do melodies and harmonies come from when you sit composing at the piano? From all the other music that was ever written,
of course, but from deep inside you, at the root of the ear’s Venetian canals,
at the roots of the tongue.
At the same time the
bagpipe music’s funny and weird, both proud and distracting, both protecting
and twisting – not an easy or simple process.
It’s also self-deprecating: unlike some of our heroically noisy and
self-promoting youngsters, Don knew that poetry is a fragile defence against
the depredations of the changing world.
He ends the poem: “It is the end of a time ... It will soon be dark/ and
that will make an end of it.” The poem
is its own elegy.
Don hints here, too,
that the origins of music are even pre-human.
Perhaps in the earliest stage of human consciousness we first imitated
the primordial music of birds: the “mourning” of owls, the “conversation of the
pigeons”. His poem “Bokmakierie” reads,
in full:
Rising liquid
he repeats his phrase
to the rising sun.
Can we estimate
whether he’s begun
loving the fresh day
from a broken bit
of future tense
stuck in his throat?
Take each note,
its originality –
can we say?
Rising liquid
he repeats his phrase
to the rising sun.
The repetition of a
phrase: that’s it, that’s the first step of music. Its provenance is simple but mysterious, even
if we accept David Rothenberg’s theory, in his book The Survival of the Beautiful, that beauty is intrinsic to such
displays as birdsong and vivid feathers, that the pursuit and appreciation of
beauty, even amongst non-humans, was always necessary to evolution. And by writing another poem, we repeat the
note. Only in that way does it outlast
its own dying into silence, as every musical note must. It might even survive the writer.
On crucial
occasions, then, Don connects music with death, too. There is the music that is
played at funerals, for instance, a music laden with both tribute and loss. This is clear in various poems about his
sister, who herself was truly musical.
In the end, Don humbly
thinks, poems – or the musicality, attentiveness, challenge, humanity and craft
intrinsic to good poetry –
... might just do
– reveal the arc of light
that touches earth
and makes us sing.
Don seems to me to
be asking: What leverage do we have against the world’s self-evident ills if
our response does not embody what we love, if we do not sing praises to the
beautiful even as we labour and dread?
Moreover, there are not just poems about
music: there is the musicality of poetry itself. The echoes of birdsong within words and
combinations of words. Despite the apparent
conversational simplicity of Don’s characteristic short lines, many poems are
subtly rhythmical and musical. Of
course, if rhythms and patterns get too rigid, you induce a head-banging
numbness. Don sent this up in one of the
pieces in Oskar Wolberheim.
A la marcia With military
gestures
1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4
1 2 3 4
bang bang bang bang
bang bang bang bang
bang bang bang bang
bang bang bang bang
bang bang bang bang it goes on
you see
bang bang bang bang steadily
orderly ...
And on it goes,
until “the damned thing gets a hold of you ... stoppit ... stoppit”.
Compare that with
the wavering and nuanced effects of “Funeral I” from The Poetry Lesson:
From the tired sky
the low-angled sun has burned
a dead robinia to gold
and gold a mulberry tree.
Two owls that laboured
through the failing light
are mourning in the folds
of darkness out of sight.
I, too, in the dark mourn
the death of my belief,
my small, uncertain faith that life
is proof against its own defeat.
It is just
beautifully done. Neither mechanical nor
meandering, lightly stitched together with lines balanced against each other (“robinia
...gold / ...gold ... mulberry”; “mourning ... darkness ... dark mourn”),
occasional rhyme (“light ... sight”), vivid contrast (“gold ... dark”; “faith
... defeat”). The owls and the speaker
are fused into a single feeling of complex loss, the loss of the nameless person
of the funeral seeping out into something existential that anyone can identify
with.
Don Maclennan wrote
some 600 poems, all included in the Collected
Poems, published by PrintMatters. The
book makes a wonderful gift, even for people who might not normally read
poetry, but who could hardly help responding to these lucid yet elusive,
questioning explorations of issues we all know, in some form, in our very souls.
Thank you. This is a wonderful tribute and portrait of a great human and a great poet. I always remember him speaking of the trout in the pond - those rare glimpses of insight that rise briefly and swim away into the depths again. I feel very lucky to have been a student of his.
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