Walking and Talking

Ah, today was quite a day: at one stage I was in the company of a Welsh poet, a Sri-Lankan poet and an English poetry student. And now I am about to put you in the company of a Russian poet - Vladimir Mayakovsky. A member of a poetry list I am on asked for a quote when I mentioned that Mayakovsky wrote about walking as a rhythm for poetry, so I dug out this old Cape Edition:

‘I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps.

‘So the rhythm is trimmed and takes shape – and rhythm is the basis of any poetic work, resounding through the whole thing. Gradually individual words begin to ease themselves free of this dull roar. (...)

‘Rhythm is the fundamental force, the fundamental energy of verse. You can’t explain it, you can only talk about it as you do about magnetism or electricity. Magnetism and electricity are manifestations of energy. The rhythm can be the same in a lot of poems, even in the whole oeuvre of the poet, and still not make his work monotonous, because a rhythm can be so complex, so intricately shaped, that even several long poems won’t exhaust its possibilities.

‘A poet must develop just this feeling for rhythm in himself, …’

Vladimir Mayakovsky ‘How Are Verses Made?’ (Cape Editions, pp.36, 37 – trans. G.M.Hyde)

I wonder if this little gem is still around ... Anyone else got it? In the same series was Mayan Letters by Charles Olson, Although by Miroslav Holub, and Cold Mountain 100 Poems by Han-Shan - great little books all. Here's Holub:

'Although a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done,
although a poem is a last attempt at order when one can't stand the disorder any longer,
although poets are most needed when freedom, vitamin C, communications, laws, and hypertension therapy are also most needed,
although to be an artist is to fail and art is fidelity to failure, as Samuel Beckett says,
a poem is not one of the last but of the first things of man.

~ ~ ~

'Certainly a poem is only a game.
Certainly a poem exists only at the moment of origin and at the moment of reading.
And at best in the shadow-play of memory.
Certainly one can't enter the same poem twice.
Certainly a poet has the impression from the beginning that no purpose exists, as Henry Miller has said.
Certainly art becomes generally acceptable only when it declines into a mechanism and its order becomes a habit.
But in its aimlessness, in its desperate commitment to the word, in its primal order of birth and re-birth, a poem remains the most general guarantee that we can still do something, that we can still do something against emptiness, that we haven't given in but are giving ourselves to something. The most general gurantee that we are not composed only of facts, of facts which, as Ernst Fischer says, are deeds withered into things. Provided a poem, which is the poet's modest attempt to put off disintegration for a while, is not regarded as the philosopher's stone, bringing salvation and deliverance to stupefied mankind.
For art doesn't solve problems but only wears them out.
For art is fidelity to failure.
For a poem is when nothing else remains.
Although ... '

Miroslav Holub 'Although' Cape Editions 1970