Free Poetry Notebook by Clive James

that any poem which comes to exist without
having first been built might be destined for the same pit of oblivion that all the well-wrought dross went into. Such a fate seems especially likely when the poem without form has nothing else to
grab your attention either: no little low heavens, no gauze babushkas, nothing to see or even hear. Today’s deliberately empty poetry can get a reputation for a time: there will always be a
residency for J. H. Prynne. But it will never be as interesting as the question of how it got there. Some would hold Charles Olson personally responsible, but I fear – fear because of the
size and volume of the scuffle I might get into – that the culprit was William Carlos Williams. When he realized, correctly, that everything was absent from Whitman’s poetry except
arresting observations, Williams, instead of asking himself how he could put back what was missing, asked himself how he could get rid of the arresting observations. The result was a red
wheelbarrow: no doubt intensely significant, but a long way short of those little low heavens.
     
Interlude
    To speak of the poetic moment, and then of the rhythmic framework in which it is contained, brings us naturally to the rhythmic progress from moment to moment, and hence to the
question of how, in any poem that strikes us as being integrated, the effects seem joined up by an inexorable progression. From that progression, any poem that impresses us with its integrity is
likely to gain an extra poetic charge, sometimes to the point of convincing us that the way it goes is the secret of what it is. In the course of a lifetime there might be several times that a
reader comes across a poem that can’t be fully explained but can’t be left alone either. For me, two examples would be ‘Gone to Report’, by Brian Howard, and ‘War of
Nerves’ by Frederic Prokosch. Both poets were well-known literary names in the 1940s, and both of them are forgotten now, but each of them wrote a poem whose driving force of argument I still
can’t get out of my head even though I have spent half a century wondering about what the argument actually is. (I leave it to the reader to track those poems down. The search will be part of
the puzzle: Raiders of the Lost Text!) The Australian poet Francis Webb wrote several strangely beautiful poems whose authoritative coherence refuses to be reduced to ordinary comprehensibility:
but Webb was a mental patient. At times in modern poetic history the temptation to let go of rationality has risen to the status of a command, just as, in the history of modern painting, it became
compulsory to let go of the figurative. To ignore the results would be wilful obtuseness, yet surely, if only to secure a brief respite from the barely intelligible, it is forgivable to favour
those poets who show signs of knowing what they are saying. From them we might get, occasionally if not always, the poem that gains extra vitality from the way it has been made complete. Stephen
Edgar’s ‘Man on the Moon’ is just such a poem: clear from moment to moment, and clear in the way that one moment leads to the next, it accumulates so much clarity that you need
dark glasses to look at it.

ON A SECOND READING
    On a second reading of a poem that has wowed us, we might grow even more interested, but we start to sober up. For my own part, initial admiration for a single poem often
tempts me into a vocabulary I would rather avoid. The Australian poet Stephen Edgar’s poem ‘Man on the Moon’ can be found in his collection
Other Summers
, or – more
quickly, and for free – in the selection devoted to his work in the Guest Poets section of my website, clivejames.com. With a single reservation, I think it is a perfect poem, although
‘perfect’ is an adjective I would rather not be caught using. The word just doesn’t convey enough meaning to cover, or even approach, the integrity of the manufacture. I knew that
already on a