Capturing animals

This morning as I sat at the computer, I happened to look to the right, where the bookshelf is and I spotted Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making (Faber and Faber, 1967). The modest paperback, text of a series of children’s programs Hughes did for the BBC, has sat in my to-read stack for years. Not sure why this morning it struck my eye. It’s not as though I’m not already simultaneously reading half a dozen other books. I just decided to follow my nose here on April Fool’s Day and the first day of National Poetry Month.

And I found some thoughts worth sharing in the first chapter, “Capturing Animals:”

In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special . . . something perhaps which we are very curious to learn.

. . .

How can a poem, for instance, about a walk in the rain, be like an animal? Well, perhaps it cannot look much like a giraffe or an emu or an octopus, or anything you might find in a menagerie. It is better to call it an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit. The living parts are the words, the images, the rhythms. The spirit is the life which inhabits them when they all work together. But if any of the parts are dead . . .if any of the words or images or rhythms do not jump to life as you read them . . . then the creature is going to be maimed and the spirit sickly.

An exemplary poem from the anthology:

The Donkey

Sometimes it brays
Bathes itself in dust
Sometimes
And then you notice it

Otherwise
You just see its ears
On the head of a panet
And no sign of it.

— Vasco Popa
(trans. Anne Pennington)