ANDREW MAYNE POETRY
From Envoi (133), October, 2002.
A fellow poet and friend, William Thomas - I’ve checked with him and he does not mind if I mention his name - told me recently that he had made a bonfire of all his worksheets: seventeen crystal files full of the stuff - all the various drafts, carefully dated, through which his poems had passed. Why had he hung on to this stuff for so long? Well, wasn’t that the thing poets did, fascinated as they are by the creative process? He confessed, too, that in his early days he had had the presumption to see these thickly-layered geological accumulations as, possibly, a sound investment. (He dared to believe someone else might be interested. Young poets sometimes have great hopes of American universities). The middle-aged poet continued to keep his worksheets because he had come to view them as a kind of testament. Those files, he claimed, had become the equivalent of having a tachograph in his writer’s cab: they provided proof, at least, of the long hours of labour he had put in. However, given the more honest appraisal of his declining years that the actual achievement of most of his poetry was of a very modest order, it had gradually been borne in upon him - when he viewed draft after carefully worked draft as they might strike the critical eyes of others - that their very voluminousness would be likely to count against him. “So,” William Thomas said to me, “I've allowed my poems at last to stand clear of their scaffolding; better that there should be no evidence to undermine their sense of uncertain spontaneity.”
I have been thinking about his words a lot as I have considered the advisability of responding to the Editor’s suggestion that I should give an account of how five poems I submitted recently to Envoi came to be written. Putting on the record what you were trying to do in a poem may become a far more serious and binding matter than merely leaving behind a dusty bundle of drafts - for whatever interest posterity may find in them. There are so many dangers involved in this enterprise, not least those of pretentiousness and the manufacturing of self-satisfied rationalisations after the event. Moreover, I hope, with luck, that my poems mean more than I intend and I do not really know all that much about their true source. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that any appeal to the vanity of a poet still struggling to get his first volume published is a strong one. So, maybe it would be best simply to obey orders, get on with it, and offer here what I remember about the circumstances in which I came to write these five poems and my version of what I was hoping to achieve.
The first poem derives from something I came across in Jean Aitchison’s Language Change: Progress or Decay? (CUP, 1991). In Chapter 15 I was fascinated to read that every breeding season humpback whales gradually evolve a new song to attract a mate, and the song goes on changing from year to year. Aitchison writes: “Since the whales only sing during the breeding season, and since their song is complex, it was assumed that they simply forgot the song between seasons, and then tried to reconstruct it the next year from fragments which remained in their memory. But when researchers organised a long-term study of humpbacks off the island of Maui in Hawaii, they got a surprise. The song that the whales were singing at the beginning of the new breeding season turned out to be identical to the one used at the end of the previous one. Between breeding seasons, the song had seemingly been kept in cold storage, without change. The songs were gradually modified as the season proceeded. For example, new sequences were sometimes created by joining the beginning and end of consecutive phrases, and omitting the middle part...”
Aitchison is obviously interested to develop a parallel here between whale-song and changes in human language, but what struck me was the sheer unexpected inventiveness of our whale brethren. So I decided to make the whale my singer.
FRESH ALWAYS: MEGAPTERA NOVAEANGLIAE
The humpback whale sings only in its breeding season,
but it is a new song every year:
lei lalaei walla wei lalawei ial.
Is the whale trying, faultily, to recreate its last year’s
breeding season song?
la ia laei wallwei la alall ailwei.
No. Because it rehearses note for note its last year’s song
at the beginning of each season:
lei lalaei walla wei lalawei ial.
And it gradually reshapes this song - like some New Orleans veteran
stretching out over several choruses:
lalei wallei al al lei ai laweil iaiol wail.
Certainly its song will throw up frequent borrowings from other whales’
motifs and variations:
weialala leia wallala leialala.
Though whether its own definitive form reflects the season’s fortunes,
is something we don't know:
walleiei lei lei lalala weiaweiaweia.
But it is a new song every year. And for that year it has a final version.
I had some fun inventing the variations of the whale’s song: maybe it is the surfacing of the repressed ‘concrete poet’ in me. I think that there was probably an echo at the back of my mind (not entirely apposite) from the Four Quartets:
Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
“Another voice” may come from the same singer; my whale bounces back next season to work out a different chorus for the fullfed beast. Yet maybe it was this echo that led me to what many readers will recognise as, I hope, a kind of shared literary joke: I make my whale go through a series of variations which are somewhat reminiscent of the way Eliot, in Part III of The Waste Land, renders the lament of Wagner’s Rhine Maidens. I have always been a little amused by the recording of Eliot reading this passage (and others) - the sense he betrays of uneasiness, stiffness and the apparent repression of the music of his poetry. (Indeed, I suspect that Eliot probably recorded readings of his poetry under a kind of constraint. He recognised that to read a poem aloud with any kind of feeling is to suggest one definite line of interpretation, but at heart he wished to preserve his mask of supposed impersonality and to maintain the possibility of a multiplicity of meaning.)
Poem 3