Hopkins and Me

I have said I various places that my first real influence as a poet was Gerard Manley Hopkins, the British poet of “God’s Grandeur”, “Pied Beauty”, and “The Kingfisher”. Sometimes I have hesitated about admitting this influence because it can sound a tad quaint (black Jamaican school boy taken in by the work of a so-white-he-probably-did-not-know-he-was English poet of the 19th century), and like a failure of post-colonial and reggae resistance. My reticence s especially acute when I am speaking to Euro-shaped poets of the Tradition, who will find a point of affinity in my admission to this connection to Hopkins, at best, and at worst, an affirmation of the ascendancy of Great Tradition of Pound and his “ABC” rubric to western poetry. But I resist al of this for the sake of truth. Hopkins was an influence. But calling him an influence is a poor way of describing the role of his work on my coming into poetry. The truth is that after my encounter with Hopkins, chances were quite good that I would not continue to be a poet. Hopkins got me interested in the writing of poetry, but Hopkins was not enough to make me want to continue to be a poet. When I faced that challenge, the question I was asking was not “Do I like to write poems?” but “Do I have the right to write poems?” I was also asking, “Do I have anything to write about as a poet?” I was asking a question about possibility and permission, and Hopkins was in no real position to offer me permission at that point in my life

Yet there was something like permission-giving in the first encounters with Hopkins. My Sixth Form English teacher was a Guyanese man, Mr. Bob-Semple, whose laid back manner, sharply tuned sense of humor and capacity to indulge teenaged boys made those classes especially enjoyable. Hopkins was a strange poet for us. There was much talk about sprung verse, anti-Romanticism, and experimentation around his work. For Hopkins, it was not enough to simply understand the “meaning” of the poem, but we had to pay careful attention to formal matters, matters of technique and craft. Mr. Bob-Semple brought to class a lovely coffee table book filled with color photographs of the landscapes from which Hopkins may have drawn inspiration. There was something extremely enlightening about seeing the pied of the sky, the brindle of cows, the boots of a farrier, and so on. This connection between the poem and the physical place fascinated me and filled me with a certain envy for Hopkins and his tradition because in this book, it was made clear that he was busy writing into time the world of a country, a people, a generation. There was something important about this act and I understood this at some level as a sixteen year old.
Yet, all of this was not enough to make me want to write poetry. What did it for me was the competitiveness of quite idle school-boys. For a long time we had found certain joy in collecting from Shakespearean plays as many of the swear words and insults as we could muster and then throwing them back at our classmates and teachers with knowing pleasure. Soon we were invented our own hyphenated insults by drawing from one Shakespeare passage and connecting into to another cluster for somewhere else. In an odd way we were learning something of the innovative play of swearing of the Elizabethan period. But we were not dealing with something alien. Jamaican swearing is a fascinating art form that reaches startling levels of genius by the number of compound constructions someone can invent and deliver in one long breath.
Hopkins did not offer any swear words, but he offered another kind of challenge. Poems. He wrote poems. Sonnet length poems. One of our number arrived at the idea that he would write an imitation Hopkins poem. I still don’t know how this started but I was not the person who started it. I did join soon after. And we were, after a while, writing our own versions of Hopkins—imitation poems that we shared with each other. Mr. Bob Semple did not have any part of this—I am not even sure he knew. But we kept at it.
Why Hopkins? Because he was the poet we were studying. That is the easy answer. But we studied other poets and they did not elicit this response. It may have been the connection between place and language that Hopkins offered us. It may also have been the act that his formal experimentations seemed to us quite rigid and thus allowed us to play around with formal things without feeling inadequate about this engagement. But whatever the reason, we did write poems. I wrote poems and enjoyed the process of trying to make the words hold together and make sense. I liked the sense of completion when a poem ended. I enjoyed that sensation—something like doing a crossword puzzle.
Eventually, I was the only of the class of eight or nine boys, who would continue to write poetry. These are normal odds. It had nothing to do with talent. Others were more talented technically, than I was. Their poems were cleaner, more successful. There is another kind of talent for poets that is hard to identify, and it rarely looks like a good SAT score. It has to do with a need to make art—a knowing sense of inadequacy borne out of a realization of the extent of an master artist’s genius. In other words, I knew how poor my work was compared to Hopkins, but more importantly, I knew how hard I would have to work to reach the place where I felt it was worth putting the two together. Often, it is the capacity to see one’s limitations that serves as a good indicator of promise. I know that many fledgling poets actually gave up the art when they encountered a poet who they felt was the real thing, and when they concluded that thy simply don’t have that thing. Yes, an awareness of one’s inadequacy can destroy any willingness to make art, but I am convinced that this awareness is necessary for poets who hope to go further in the craft.
By the end of my sixth form, I had started to write poetry regularly, but I rarely liked what I wrote and I never saw a genuine space in my life that I could call a poet’s space. I meet many young people today who have long decided that they are going to be poets before they have reached the age of twenty. There are some of that kind in history, also. Many of them died young, others went on to long lives. Paul Muldoon was clearly given to serious verse before he was twenty. Keats, Wordsworth and the other Romantic types seemed to have been smitten very earl. Walcott was published by sixteen and in his telling, his mother treated his poetic life in the same way that some parents treat sports talent—nurture, guide, encourage and even cajole. I saw art as a possible life for me—painting, pen and ink drawing, that kind of thing. I was a good draftsman even if quite inadequate in composition. I could see a life there for me. But I had also invented a narrative for me that was marked by a series of Plan Bs, contingencies.
I would go as far as I could go in cricket. If I made the West Indies Youth Team, I would push hard to go further by playing semi professional cricket at the club level, and if things worked out I would play for the country, and perhaps for the West Indies. I would go to University in Jamaica where it was possible to play serious cricket and even qualify to play for the tp team in the world at the time while studying. If cricket did not work out, I would continue in my studies and teach or do law, or go to art school, or become a missionary tent-maker.
Any ideas of being a poet would not settle in me until I was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old. By then I was a playwright, I was theatre director, I was seriously planning to be a teacher, and all my hopes of playing cricket for the West Indies were long dead. For some reason, I was not able to see the ball as well as I used to. Hopkins was by now just one of the many poets I liked to read. By the end of my first degree, I had added to that list much of Donne and his seventeen century friends of the metaphysical ilk, and of course the poets who gave me permission to be an artist—the West Indian poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite and the lyrics of Bob Marley. I knew then what I had to do to be a pet, and I knew what the challenges were. But these writers gave me permission to write about the world I knew, but, more importantly, they assured me that success in this was possible. They offered possibility. Hopkins was part of a tradition that allowed him to say he was a poet even when he was barely published and even though he would never be really published all his life. The great West Indian poets of the forties, and fifties offered a model of possibility that would be helpful to me in ways that Hopkins could not be.
I have been thinking about this a lot these days. I am, I have come to understand, what people call a “mid-career” poet. This takes some getting used to. After a while, one is always seeing oneself as a promising new poet—someone who is trying to make it. But I am not that anymore. I am a mid-career poet, meaning that I have made something of myself, and I have published enough to be seen as established. Now I am looking at models of poets to see what happens to a poet after their mid-career positioning. Hopkins is not useful to me. He was never a mid-career poet I like to think that now I can write just about whatever I want to write; that I must use the rest of the time I have left to write the poems that I think need to be written regardless of the impact that they might have on me and on those who read them. I can tell already that my next collections are going to be troubling, a kind of challenge that may prove difficult for me and for those who care about my work. There has to be some value in this business of surprising oneself, of pushing the envelope, of stretching things as far as they can go.
Ironically, it is in this that I may still find my way back to Hopkins. He proposed so much that was new and daring, much of which was theoretical and almost impossible to achieve. But he went for it, stretched himself—his miserable, unhappy self—to make poems that eventually reshaped British poetry in profound ways. I have no ambitions to reshape anything, I just know that I want to dig out of me the limits of my ability as a poet. It may not be pretty what I find, but if I can taste even a hint of the sheer elation and hopefulness of a good Hopkins’ line, I will be happy:
As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.