`You Are Bound to Acknowledge the Gift'

Why read so much poetry if you only write prose? The short answer: precision, concision, musicality, metaphor. Mostly I read poets, ancient and modern and especially in-between, whose work favors these traditional poetic virtues, whether Chaucer or Les Murray. The dull poets – Allen Ginsberg, for instance, Charles Olson, Pablo Neruda – I got out of my system a long time ago. Whatever small interest they possessed was extra-poetic and their verse is slipshod prose, at best, and a prose writer can learn from it only by negative example, what to avoid.

I'm reading David Solway: Essays on His Works, edited by Carmine Starnino and published in 2001 by Guernica Editions of Toronto. Its final piece is a 1998 interview with Solway conducted by Starnino, also a Canadian poet-critic, who asks him about his use of the phrase “ethical fervour” to describe poetry. Solway replies:

“…I use the word `ethical’ and not `moral’ because there is a distinction. A moral force is what I would associate with the principle of right conduct in general. An ethical fervour is something very different, and may not necessarily express itself as arranging distinctions between right and wrong. An ethical fervour, for me, is a commitment to that inexplicable, overwhelming, self-justifying passion that enables us to identify ourselves not only with any given program or project, but with life itself. It is really an expression of the near-inexpressible gratitude for being alive. Gratitude for the ability to read, the ability to think, to observe this universe, and to participate in it in some way or another. It is such an enormous gift as to be monstrous.”

Solway’s words are terribly moving, and I wish I had said them. I'll go another step and suggest that superior art is always a song of gratitude, a great thanksgiving for the gratuitous gift of being. Starnino asks another question: “And so the poetry is an acknowledgement or response to this life-force?” Solway answers:

“More than that. Poetry is the attempt to come to terms with the divine. That is really the litmus test, the touchstone that enables you to tell the difference between a poet and a poetaster. There are very few poets; there is an infinite number of poetasters. The difference is that the poet worships, the poetaster merely writes. However unfashionable it is to say this, poetry is a form of prayer. You’ve been breathed into by God. You have been literally `inspired.’ And you are bound to acknowledge the gift.”

In “Praise (II),” one of those great in-between poets I mentioned, George Herbert, puts it like this:

“Small it is, in this poore sort
To enroll thee:
Ev’n eternitie is too short
To extol thee.”