Cold Comfort

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem posted last Monday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Shackled

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem posted last Monday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Facing Uncertain Death (26/42): Darkening into Night

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem posted yesterday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Facing Uncertain Death (35/42): A Light that does not Blind

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem to be posted tomorrow was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Facing Uncertain Death (36/42): Hints of Woodsmoke

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem to be posted next Monday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Elizabeth Jennings (1/4): why the sudden interest?

 

Given that my current sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet with a spiritual core.  

My trigger for this sequence of posts was finding I had copied one of Elizabeth Jennings’ poems into my notebook. I had no memory of having read her, though my copy of her 1985 Collected Poems was riddled with my highlights and glowing comments.

I began re-reading her poems and ordered her recent biography by Dana Greene – Elizabeth Jennings: ‘the inward war’. My excitement carried over into the Death Café even before I had done more than just begun the biography.

The 1964 poem I read to them there was VII: For a Woman with a Fatal Illness out of Sequence in Hospital  (Collected Poems – page 80):

The verdict has been given quietly
Beyond hope, hate, revenge, even self-pity.

You accept gratefully the gifts – flowers, fruit –
Clumsily offered now that your visitors too

Know you must certainly die in a matter of months,
They are dumb now, reduced only to gestures,

Helpless before your news, perhaps hating
You because you are the cause of their unease.

I, too, watching from my temporary corner,
Feel impotent and wish for something violent –

Whether as sympathy only, I am not sure –
But something at least to break the terrible tension.

Death has no right to come so quietly.

Another member of the Death Café group immediately recognized the book I was reading from.

‘I’ve got that one,’ she said.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked, as possessing a book is no guarantee that you like it. I speak from experience.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

Why it matters that two people, out of the six attending that evening, both had copies of her Collected Poems and liked the poems in it, will become apparent later. Incidentally, the others seemed to appreciate it too.

As I read further into Greene’s book and revisited more of Jennings’ poems, I came to realize how closely her thinking about poetry mapped onto mine and differed from the critical consensus which seems to favour obscurity over accessibility.

I collided with this issue at the end of my sequence of posts on Machado. I will recap briefly here.

I acknowledged that coherence should not be bought at the expense of new insights and that ‘solving for the unknown,’ as dealt with in an earlier post, is a crucial function of poetry, with which Elizabeth Jennings would not disagree. But there is a problem.

In their introduction to their edition of ‘The Poetry of Táhirih’ John Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat explore this further, initially referring to Hayden (page 16):

The poet Robert Hayden was fond of saying that poetry is the art of saying the impossible. . . Another thing Hayden was fond of noting is that often the most popular poetry – if poetry has any sort of popularity of these days – is usually mediocre poetry because it can be easily understood. . . . great poetry, poetry with lasting merit, takes us from our present state of awareness to some place else . . .

I was happy to go with them up to a point, though I am not so convinced of the general mediocrity of popular poetry for reasons I now plan to explore at greater length. And I am not happy to blindly accept that popular poetry cannot, at least sometimes and perhaps more often than we think, take us beyond ‘our present state of awareness.’

The debate sparked by Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry frequently touches on this issue, albeit indirectly at times. Was it too simple and naïve to be of any real value, in spite of its popularity.

Dana Greene’s biography contains many instances of this position, for example, concerning her Extending the Territory in 1985 (page 149):

The detractors depressed her. John Lucas, writing in the New Statesman, criticized her ‘vapid’ poems, with their unvaried language and uninteresting subject matter.’

Nonetheless the book won the Southern Arts Society prize of £1,000.

Michael Schmidt, as her editor for 25 years and publisher of Poetry Nation Review described her as (page 186) ‘the most unconditionally loved writer of the generation of poets of the Movement,’ and attributed ‘her popularity to her feel for ordinary people and her honest, straightforward, non-ironic, and non-satiric verse, which was generally written in strict form.’

I can’t join Hatcher and Hemmat again, at least as far as Schoenberg and Beckett are concerned, when they write (ibid):

It takes a bit more energy and training to appreciate the atonality of Sternberg [sic – should be Schoenberg], Eliot’s The Wasteland, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Joyce’s Ulysses.… a good artist does not talk down to the audience, does not ‘dumb down’ the art.

I think there should be something more in the mix, in the case of both Schoenberg and Beckett. Dissonance, no matter how well it reflects the jarring reality stretching tightly across the surface of our times, is not enough. There needs to be at least a taste of some sort of transcendence.

This is also something this discussion of Elizabeth Jennings and her poetry will return to.

Poems too obscure or repellent to match a large enough readership are hardly going to change the world for the better, no matter how brilliant their abstruse and inaccessible message is. However, poems that do not challenge their readers to step out of their comfort zone will not do so either, no matter how many people read them.

Striking the right balance is a matter of great skill, something only the greatest poets ever achieve: accessible enough to attract a wide readership and demanding enough to lift the consciousness of its readers to a higher level. I personally feel that Elizabeth Jennings, as well as Machado, rises to this challenge in many of her poems.

And what follows will try to explain why. Stick with me. It might be worth it.

Some Basic Information

I need to start with a few basic facts about her life and poetic career before plunging into the issues I want to address.

Greene’s introduction confronts us with some fairly startling facts about her obsessive productivity (page xiv): in addition to what she published there are ‘30,000 unpublished poems and autobiographical writings.’

She was clumsy as a child, and kept falling over (page 11): ‘By the time she was ten she had had six severe blows to her head.’ She convinced herself she was therefore unlovable. Her relationship with her parents was not close, especially in terms of her father, which caused her problems with both people and God (page 16): ‘Fear of her father and God the Father dominated her psyche.’

Poetry, religion and relationships had both positive and negative effects on her state of mind (page 17):

There were three major turning points in Jennings’ life: her discovery of poetry, her sojourn to Rome, and a mental breakdown.

While, as we will see, poetry helped her in many ways, the intensity of her pursuit of it, fuelled by her need for money at times, led to dangerous levels of exhaustion. Religion constituted the same kind of double-edged sword: in the positive experience of Catholicism in Rome she found solace to compensate for and to some degree counteract her fear of God, but in the end (page 146) ‘[s[he confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

Before we look at the main issues we need to explore in a bit more detail two other important aspects of her life: the effect on her of her attitude to sex, marriage and relationships, and the impact of suffering.

Neither are straightforward.

Sex, Marriage and Relationships

Sex was a paradox for her (page 23):

She convinced herself that sex was filthy and something to be feared, but at the same time she was intensely interested in it.

This was something that contributed to her reluctance to marry (page 33):

. . . she saw marriage as tedious drudgery… This, plus her lingering fears about sex, limited her interest in marriage.

But that was not the only thing holding her back from tying the knot. In To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, as Greene describes it (page 71):

Jennings directly explores her quandary over the vocation of artist. She writes that she has no desire to have children or to be a nun.

Her conflicted position extended beyond the sexual though (page 131):

The principal psychic issue Jennings wrestled with . . . was how to love. She considered the need for love a part of the human condition which demanded that one be in a relationship with another. But love raised the problem of possession, both being possessed and possessing.

Love was further complicated for her by her religious beliefs (page 132):

For Jennings, the issue was not merely how to love someone purely, but how to love both God and another human.

Which brings us back to the quote I used earlier (page 146): ‘She confessed that she could only love God through people . . .’

When we look at her experience of and ideas about suffering in the next post we will begin to see that all these conflicts served as fuel for her poetry. Popular it may have been, but trivial and superficial it was certainly not, at least at its best.

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