Writing on the Side, Or on the Sly
Emily Dickinson wrote her "letter to the world" but somehow never got around to mailing it. Her hundreds of poems, which she stitched carefully together into tiny booklets, were only published, to great acclaim, long after her death. She was an amateur in the best sense of the word; she wrote out of a compelling love of the art. She did try on one occasion to publish her verses but got nowhere and never tried again. In the end, publication was incidental to her passion. The notion of the poet as an "amateur" sounds odd. Is writing a poem like putting a model airplane together, a pastime you engage in for fun? If you say, "I'm an amateur painter," nobody will blink, but say, "I'm an amateur poet," and you sound like an imbecile. An amateur painter, however untalented, has to learn some fundamentals about brushes and pigments, composition and perspective, to produce even the clumsiest canvas. But poets "are born, not made." We all possess language and we use it to express ourselves every day. Isn't writing a poem just an old-fashioned way of sending our own "letter to the world"?
In "The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within" (Gotham, 357 pages, $15), now out in paperback, the brilliant English actor and author Stephen Fry makes the case for writing verse as a pleasurable activity in its own right. This is an idea so novel as to be revolutionary. Not a word is said in his often hilarious pages about placing poems in magazines or putting together a first collection or cottoning up to the right editor. By ignoring such petty concerns, Mr. Fry succeeds in liberating the writing of poetry from the grim professionalism that has deadened it for so long. He makes the prospect of turning out a sonnet sound suspiciously like fun.
Anyone who saw Mr. Fry in the role of Jeeves in the televised series of the P.G. Wodehouse classics some years ago will recall that from time to time, that suave and unflappable "gentleman's man" would deliver himself of a line of verse perfectly suited to whatever ridiculousmishapBertieWooster, his feckless master, found himself entangled in. Mr. Fry always intoned these lines in a sonorous and plummy voice and the effect was startling. As now becomes clear, this was no mere actor's trick. Mr. Fry knows all there is to know about English poetry; even better, he is as smooth as Jeeves himself in spooning out that knowledge to resistant readers. As a result, this is easily the best guide on the market to every aspect of poetic technique and form.
For all his wit and lightness of touch, Mr. Fry is a taskmaster. He begins with prosody, proceeds to rhyme, and concludes the book with virtually every form that has been used in English, from ballads and odes to haiku and "silly, silly forms," such as "rictameters" or "diamond-shaped poems." He coaxes, he nudges, he cajoles, until every meter, from the sturdy iamb ("da-dum") to the exotic molossus ("dum-dum-dum"), has been analyzed and illustrated; his examples, some of his own making, are perfectly chosen. Every chapter ends with exercises as useful as they are ingenious.
This is a very funny book with a deeply serious purpose. Mr. Fry takes great pleasure in poetry and uses every means at his disposal to communicate it because he believes that
It is worth remembering that for those of us with a high doctrine of poetry, the art is precisely concerned with precision, exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything. Poets, like painters, look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what they really, really are.
Mr. Fry may hold a "high doctrine of poetry" but that doesn't keep him from rummaging in some pretty low corners; his examples of limericks and other "impolite verse," unprintable here, are especially pungent. By "high" he means formal, not as in stilted or quaint but as in the form a poem must take to give a reader, or its writer, delight. He has little to say about free verse; he claims, rather unconvincingly, to like it, but is mistrustful of its pretensions. He is suspicious of "a doctrinaire abandonment of healthy, living forms for the sake of a dogma of stillborn originality." This may sound like Jeeves but Mr. Fry can be refreshingly blunt, too, as when he refers to some "avant-garde" verse — admittedly his own — as "worthless arse-dribble."
In one of his "Roman Elegies," Goethe writes of tapping out his hexameters on his mistress's back while making love. He wasn't just being naughty; he wanted to suggest that intimate fusion of passion and form gives a good poem life. As Mr. Fry shows on every page, counting your hexameters can be a surefire method for stoking a passion. Emily Dickinson wouldn't have approved, but her fingertips were secretly tapping, too.
eormsby@nysun.com
