POETS WALKING

Nobody seriously doubts that there’s a vital connection between walking and poetry.  Not even me, although I do sometimes struggle to grasp what most contemporary poetry is “for.”

There is, I'm told, a rather good book on the subject, edited by David Kennedy, titled Necessary Steps: Poetry, Elegy, Walking, Spirit. It contains an essay by Jeremy Noel-Tod , “Walking the Yellow Brick Road: A Pedestrian Account of J. H. Prynne's Poems.”

As some of you may know, JH Prynne, or Jeremy as I always called him, was my Director of Studies at university, and he taught me a great deal about poetry.  His own poetry is not a walk in the park by any means, but I do occasionally read his work as a kind of intellectual and linguistic cage-fighting. But here’s what I think are some pretty great lines by Prynne from the poem the “Holy City”

There’s no mystic moment involved just
           that we are
       is how, each
       severally, we’re
       carried into
the wind which makes no decision and is
a tide, not taken. I saw it
       and love is
when, how &
       because we
       do: you
could call it Ierusalem or feel it
as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.

*

When I was prose editor at Ambit magazine, great swathes of poetry arrived as submissions on a daily basis, far more than the prose, and I was very glad indeed that I didn’t have to deal with all those poems.

Still, here’s one poem that Ambit published, and I remember it fondly, by James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Publishing, as well as a poet.

I’m pretty sure Jeremy Prynne would not approve of James Laughlin’s work, I think he'd find it lacking in rigor, although they were both admirers of Ezra Pound – back in the days which such a thing was much more permissible than it is now.  Here's a poem by Pound.

Ione, Dead the Long Year 

Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk
But seems like a person just gone. 

*

And here's old Ezra walking.