tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post1613390315916033298..comments2023-10-03T11:41:21.191+01:00Comments on The Truth About Lies: The optics of poetryJim Murdochhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-39815771765619813832014-10-04T17:24:15.846+01:002014-10-04T17:24:15.846+01:00Glad you liked this post, Ken. I wrote it several ...Glad you liked this post, <b>Ken</b>. I wrote it several months ago when my head was a lot clearer than it’s been of late. Hardly written anything for the last two months but my brain’s given me a break over the last week and I’ve been battering out book reviews (which is good because I was down to two or three). It’s the way I have to work. Write when you can and try not to fret too much when you find you can’t. I am short on articles though. I have a folder with ideas—never short of ideas—but sometimes even the simplest can take days to research.<br /><br />Truth as you well know by now—and if you don’t <i>where</i> have you been?— is my whipping boy. I’m not really a strong opinions kind of guy (which is why you never heard a peep from me about the Scottish referendum) but I have very strong opinions on the nature of truth. I simply don’t believe in it. As a nice idea, yes, by all means. And it is a nice idea, that what we mean is what we say. And most people—and this includes me—do aspire to tell the truth. Perversely I’m know for my honesty in fact I recall being dragged into an argument at work once and asked what really happened because the guy who asked me believed that I didn’t lie. <br /><br />Mostly I don’t lie except by process of omission—people conveniently forget about that one—but how truthful I am—how truthful I’m capable of—is another matter entirely. It’s purely a matter of communication—with myself (my recollections and interpretations of events) and with others (how much I say and how I say what I say). I rarely set out to mislead but I know I often misrepresent. We all do it, all the time: “How’re you feeling?” “Fine.” What does ‘fine’ even mean? It’s pure deflection. Of course were I to say “Fine” and my eyes were full of tears it’d be pretty obvious that ‘fine’ was the last thing I was.<br /><br />Poems—and the fiction too but primarily poems because people always assume there’s an autobiographical element lurking there—are different because there are no visual clues. There are the words and the lines to read in between: this is what he said but what did he really mean? People drive themselves mad reading into people’s words. Up to a point it can be fun but only up to a point.<br /><br />But you are right. Sometimes—most of the time probably—it’s not wise to tell everything. And the main reason is that we can’t tell everything. We’ve all done bad and stupid things and so were I to reveal some of the bad and stupid things I’ve done you might nod and go, “It’s okay, Jim. I’ve been there too,” or you might never speak to me again. Or you might ask for more information because the bare facts never tell everything. But where do you start with the extenuating circumstances? Everything we do has some effect on everything we’re going to do and everything we’ve done has had an effect on everything we’re doing. Ultimately it’s all God’s fault for creating us in the first place or the Big Bang’s for exploding: take your pick. <br /><br />People don’t do well with limitations but we all have them. I’m not physically capable of climbing Everest. That’s a fact. I’m also incapable of communicating absolute truths; they’re too complex. So I content myself with relative truths. How am I feeling just now? Fine. Fine-ish anyway. We can get on now.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-69494705162542934132014-10-04T10:35:19.633+01:002014-10-04T10:35:19.633+01:00This is great, 'leaps up the charts of 'Gr...This is great, 'leaps up the charts of 'Great Jim Posts'. There's none of us can be totally honest in what we write. If I was totally honest about myself, most people would never talk to me again, I reckon. :)<br /><br />It's a good thing though, a necessary thing. If we do it right, the things we don't say (or almost say) colour the things we do say. Well. not 'colour' really. It's more of a charcoal shadow that smudges increasingly the longer you poke at it.Ken Armstronghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07775956557261111127noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-87867432884879658632014-10-02T03:22:32.113+01:002014-10-02T03:22:32.113+01:00Thanks for that, Kass. Nice of you to say that. Yo...Thanks for that, <b>Kass</b>. Nice of you to say that. You might also want to have a look at the <a href="http://mcvoices.weebly.com/jim-murdochs-blog/naturals" rel="nofollow">short article</a> I’ve just posted on the McVoices site plus the comment I made to Angus. Carrie’s fonder of Piazzolla than I am. I like him well enough and often listen to him but there are so many classical composers out there and I’ve such broad tastes. Plus I’m always discovering new composers and wondering: <i>How come I’ve never heard of this person?</i> And then you look up their back-catalogue and they’re been working for fifty-odd years and all you’ve heard so far is one lousy symphony or a string quartet. The great thing about music, the really great thing, is that after all these years and the thousands—tens of thousands?—of pieces I’ve listened to I can still get genuinely excited when I stumble across a new work. There really aren’t enough hours in the day.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-54115197357693671732014-10-01T17:32:58.328+01:002014-10-01T17:32:58.328+01:00Jim, what a wonderful response to my comment. I lo...Jim, what a wonderful response to my comment. I love that you mentioned Piazzolla, one of my favorites.<br /><br />In your own way, you are a great teacher. I've learned so much from you.Kasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05233330248952156754noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-25117191100760146632014-09-30T14:29:58.606+01:002014-09-30T14:29:58.606+01:00Interesting article, Tim and good comment. I think...Interesting article, <b>Tim</b> and good comment. I think the thing we need to remember when it comes to words—this applies every bit as much to prose as it does poetry—is how ambiguous our day-to-day language is. We <i>assume</i> we understand what people are saying and mostly we do, get the gist at least, but something is always, always lost in the translation. I’ve talked before about how Beckett deliberately set out to, to use his word, 'envaguen' his texts. The word isn’t helpful. What he really was seeking to do was universalise his material. In early drafts of his <i>Krapp's Last Tape</i> Beckett includes a number of details which never made it to the final draft. The year in which the play is set was originally 1986, amended to '1985' and then 'the nineteen-eighties' until finally all he says is that it is set in the future all of which is pretty much irrelevant to the viewer. Because here’s the thing: even when provided with details often a reader or viewer will choose to disregard them. I, for example, almost always skim over lengthy descriptions in novels. If a story takes place in a seaside town then that’s all I need to know; I’ve been in enough seaside towns to add my own details. Where some specific detail is important to me—e.g. the “big pointy thing” in my novel <i>Stranger than Fiction</i>—then I’ll highlight it and any reader with any common sense will say, “Ah, Jim’s included a bit of description here; it must be important.”<br /><br />We read into stuff all the time. We know what people are saying but what do they really mean? This is why I’m continually puzzled by how resistant many people are to poetry. I think it’s the whole idea of the frame. A guy will happily look at and enjoy a sunset but show his a photograph or a painting of a sunset in a frame suddenly it becomes art. Likewise with a poem. It’s just words but stick it on a page framed with a white border and suddenly it’s something else, something difficult. You’ve commented before how I sometimes slip poems or bits of poems into my books. It’s quite deliberate. I once considered doing away with all my line breaks and only presenting my poems as blocks of text so as to make them appear to be something easier. After all, who hears a line break anyway?Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-33701921068514759282014-09-30T13:48:41.829+01:002014-09-30T13:48:41.829+01:00I can’t imagine trying to teach anyone how to writ...I can’t imagine trying to teach anyone how to write poetry, <b>Kass</b>, or anyone trying to teach me if it comes to that. It’s like someone trying to teach you music. Now, of course, there are things that can be taught. In western music chord sequences are limited, there are only a handful of cadences and time signatures but once you know what a treble clef is as a bass clef and the shapes of all the notes and rests you’re about ready to go. Only none of that’s music, is it? It’s encoding. And there’re plenty of musicians who know none of it and yet still manage to play by ear. And it’s the same with poetry. There are a whole host of techniques—similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, various kinds of rhyme—and I can tell you here and now that my mother knew nothing about any of them and yet she could write poetry. Of course she <i>was</i> using some of these techniques, the ones that came naturally to her, but she could never have explained the mechanics behind her poetry; she wrote what sounded right to her ear. Would a child brought up in New Orleans naturally veer towards classical music? It’s not impossible but it’s far more likely that he’d turn out some kind of jazz. And if you went to a music class there what would they teach you? Sonata form? How to write a rondo? <br /><br />One of the most important things for every writer to find is his or her voice. You’ve probably seen <i>The Glenn Miller Story</i> h half-dozen times like me. It’s not great cinema but it was one of those films that really stuck with me, one scene anyway, the one where the trumpet player cuts his lip and on the spur of the moment Miller has to improvise and suddenly there it is: his sound. I wrote over 450 poems before I produced one in what I’ve come to think of as my voice. And since then I’ve written just over 600 and fundamentally my style hasn’t changed. I’m a bit like Piazzolla in that respect. He’s a tango composer. How many of those are there in the world I wonder? But it’s just music. It’s all music. And he uses the 2/4 time signature and perfect cadences and standard key signatures but what he produces is uniquely him. As is the case with composers like Messiaen (with his bird songs) and Bartók (with his folk melodies) and Schoenberg (with his serialism). It’s all music. Just like Bashô and Whitman and Plath and Soyinka all produce some variation on this thing we call poetry but can’t quite define to anyone’s satisfaction. <br /><br />When I was still at school you could see me mimicking other poets—Wilfred Owen primarily—but I suppose I was quite lucky in that I discovered that that thing-I-wanted-to-get-right very early on. And that’s really it for me. If I can use a musical analogy again: I want to write a poem that’ll make your hair stand on end. Not every piece of music does that. Some damn fine pieces of music don’t do that—I’ve been listening to Chopin all the time I’ve been writing this and nothing—and then this track by ABBA or the Bee Gees’ll come on and there it goes. With me it was the end of Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’. I got this feeling—and despite perhaps coming across as a bit of an intellectual my poetry’s very much about feeling—and I wanted to replicate it. And a few times I think I have. I talk about it in this <a href="http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/poetry-and-zen.html" rel="nofollow">blog post</a>.<br /><br />It can be fun trying to write out of your comfort zone and oddly enough over the last few years I have found myself writing in other people’s voices—Pinter, Beckett, Larkin, Bukowski, Jenny Joseph—but it’s just a bit of fun and I’m always happier when I return to my own voice. I am limited, I admit that, but as I’ve said before not ever singer has a broad range and yet they do fine with what they have. Look at Leonard Cohen. I’ve read that Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith only had about an octave range in their prime.<br /><br />I wouldn’t be discouraged by your experience at the local library. If you don’t test out new waters you may miss out on that Glenn Miller moment. And that’d be a shame.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-25569418752859328272014-09-29T11:35:09.472+01:002014-09-29T11:35:09.472+01:00There's sometimes a case for being more vague/...There's sometimes a case for being more vague/ambiguous. A vague shape ahead in the fog is more scary than a shrub in full daylight. Language lets you be vague - in a poem you needn't mention the gender, hair-colour, etc of the narrator, perhaps hoping that the reader will have more of a chance of identifying with the narrator. Another reason for vagueness is that there's a trend again the well-made object (e.g. Longley was criticized recently for using "a rather overworked technique for preventing the well-made poem from being, or appearing, too well made")<br /><br />Instinctively I think I rather dislike that type of ambiguity, but like the other type of ambiguity that Bernstein mentions. The rabbit-duck image for example isn't vague - when you see it as a drawing of a rabbit it's clearly a rabbit. The artist's intentions are clear. Ditto with some Dali pieces. They're like puns. More upsetting are some Escher pieces where the orientation of a staircase is unstable - it's not a depiction of the real world. Some poems are like that. <br /><br />I was going to say more, but <a href="http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/vismath/igor/" rel="nofollow">Ambiguity and Art</a> made me stop searching.<br />Tim Lovehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00578925224900533603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-20341623739103352612014-09-29T01:00:11.336+01:002014-09-29T01:00:11.336+01:00Jim, I'm a fan of your poetry. You know this. ...Jim, I'm a fan of your poetry. You know this. Your poems make me smile.....and think. Those posted here are a good example of why I like your poetry.<br /><br />I recently took a poetry class at the public library and got a little discouraged because the teacher wanted my poems to be more ambiguous. He wanted me to take all the articles out and change word order to be more obscure. Obviously, he didn't appreciate my style.<br /><br />Interesting post, especially what Leonard Bernstein had to say.Kasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05233330248952156754noreply@blogger.com