Davenport: “Craftsmanship
is all, when you get right down to it.”
Kenner:
“Craftsmanship is not all. Having something to say is prior. . . .But when you have projects worth
consummating, then naturally they deserve the utmost finish.”
On first reading,
as noted in a commonplace book a year and a half ago, I sided with Kenner. Too
much writing is polished and pretty like cheap porcelain, a collection of gewgaws
on a shelf. We quickly lose interest. Writing presumes substance – and finish.
In a sense, both Davenport and Kenner are correct.
The OED defines
craftsmanship as “skill in clever or artistic work; skilled workmanship.” That
might apply to anything from a rocking chair to a villanelle. The first impulse
for homo faber is creation, an aping of the divine: “I want to make
something.” That might be as idle as scratching human figures in the dirt, but
let the figures be lifelike or witty, not just passively there. Craftsmanship
suffuses material of any sort – wood or words -- with energy. In “The Quest of
the Opal” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1976), J.V.
Cunningham distinguishes verse from mere poetry:
“Verse is a
professional activity, social and objective, and its methods and standards are
those of craftsmanship. It is a concern of the ordinary human self, and is on
the whole within a man’s power to do well or not. Its virtues are the civic
virtues. If it lacks much, what it does have is ascertainable and can be
judged. But poetry is amateurish, religious, and eminently unsociable. It
dwells in the spiritual life, in the private haunts of theology or voodoo. It
is passive to the powers it cannot evoke.”
Davenport
wrote that Cunningham’s poems were “as well made as wristwatches.”
2 comments:
Kenner has to be right, surely. You can do the what of a poem without the how (no doubt badly) but you can't do the how without the what. The raison d'être of a word is to convey meaning (not to fit felicitously into some as yet unimagined future poem according to its texture etc) and, unless the poet has something to say there is no poem. You can't have a house with just the paint. You can never divorce a word from its meaning. Meaning is what it is. The craftsmanship can only come along after the poet has established roughly what he wants to say. A great poem delights because of the interplay of meaning and craftsmanship but the meaning precedes.
It was Eric Hoffer who said “When you have something to say any style will do.”
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