Volodya by Rosy Carrick

Author:Rosy Carrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enitharmon Press
Published: 2015-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

When you’ve got the basic building blocks of the quatrain and you’ve decided on your architectural plan, you can consider that you’ve done the essential creative work.

The rest consists of a relatively easy technical reworking of the poetic artefact.

You have to bring the poem to the highest pitch of expressiveness.

One of the most noteworthy vehicles of this expressiveness is the image. Not that essential visionary image which rises up at the beginning of one’s work as a first, dim response to the social command. No, I’m talking about the auxiliary images which help this central image to take shape. These images are one of the contemporary methods of poetry, and a movement like Imaginism, for instance, making them instead the goal, has in essence condemned itself to working on just one of poetry’s technical components.

There are endless ways of fabricating images.

One of the most primitive ways of making an image is by comparison. My first things, ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ for example, were entirely based on similes – ‘like, like and like’ all the time. Isn’t it just this primitive quality that makes later critics consider my ‘Cloud’ my ‘ultimate synthesis’ in poetry? In my most recent things and in my ‘Esenin’, of course, I’ve got rid of this primitivism. I’ve discovered only one comparison:

‘Drawn-out and droning like Doronin’s attempts.’48

Why like Doronin, and not like the distance to the moon, for example? In the first place, a comparison is drawn from literary life because my whole subject is literary. And in the second place, ‘The Ploughman of Steel’ (is that what it’s called?) is longer than the journey to the moon, because that journey is unreal, and ‘The Ploughman of Steel’ is, alas, real; then the journey to the moon would seem shorter because of its novelty, while Doronin’s four thousand lines afflict you with the monotony of a verbal and metrical landscape you’ve seen sixteen thousand times before. And then of course the image must be tendentious, that is, elaborating a large subject, and you must use separate little images that you come across along the way to help in the struggle, in your literary agitation.

The most commonly accepted way of making images is by the use of metaphor, that is, by transferring attributes, which up to the present have been associated with certain things only, to other words, things, phenomena and notions.

For instance the metaphorical line:

And they bear funereal scraps of verse.

We’ve heard of scrap-iron, and of table-scraps. But how are we to describe those odds and ends of poetry, left over otiosely, which can’t be made use of anywhere else when they’ve been part of other poems already? These, of course, are scrap verse, or verse-scraps. And in this case, the scrap is all of one kind – funereal, these are funereal verse-scraps. We can’t leave the line like that, because we get ‘verse-scraps’, which, when you read it, sounds like ‘verse-crap’, and there’s what the Formalists call a ‘shift’, which ruins the line from the point of view of the sense.

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