The only poem he has written in the past year is a mere five lines long:
The wives of the rock-lobster fishermen
Have grown accustomed to waking alone,
Their husbands having for centuries fished at dawn;
Nor is their sleep as troubled as mine.
If you have gone, go then to the Portuguese rock-lobster fishermen.
The Portuguese rock-lobster fishermen: he is quietly pleased to have sneaked so mundane a phrase into a poem, even if the poem itself, looked at closely, makes less and less sense. He has lists of words and phrases he has stored up, mundane or recondite, waiting to find homes for them. Perfervid, for instance: one day he will lodge perfervid in an epigram whose occult history will be that it will have been created as a setting for a single word, as a brooch can be a setting for a single jewel. The poem will seem to be about love or despair, yet it will have blossomed out of one lovely-sounding word of whose meaning he is as yet not entirely sure.
Will epigrams be enough to build a career in poetry on? As a form there is nothing wrong with the epigram. A world of feeling can be compressed into a single line, as the Greeks proved again and again. But his epigrams do not always achieve a Greek compression. Too often they lack feeling; too often they are merely bookish.
‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion,’ says Eliot in words he has copied into his diary. ‘Poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.’ Then as a bitter afterthought Eliot adds: ‘But only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’
He has a horror of spilling mere emotion on to a page. Once it has begun to spill out he would not know how to stop it. It would be like severing an artery and watching one’s lifeblood gush out. Prose is like a flat, tranquil sheet of water on which one can tack about at one’s leisure, making patterns on the surface.
Quotation: Youth by J.M. Coetzee
