I wrote the following short piece a while ago for a fanzine that's yet to happen (yet to happen, mind you) for the group I'm in, The False Poets. Kind of rambles on a bit til Coleridge takes over for some reason...
A few years ago, when I was 22 I think it was, I got heavily
into the Incredible String Band. I’d known of them from my dad’s record
collection growing up yet, due to their outlandishness they weren’t often given
an airing and on those rare occasions I caught the odd song or two it was
difficult to get a handle on it, so I kind of dismissed them as whacked out
hippy nutjobs. Yet happily something finally clicked and those first five or so
albums of theirs were pretty much all I listened to for a month or two. I can’t
recall another band having such an impact upon my outlook on life. The
musicianship was great, the arrangements fresh and inventive, the melodies
interesting, there was a joy in the playing and, perhaps mostly lyrically, an
intellectual vision that was positive and life-affirming. It was like a couple
of colourfully dressed farmhands were up in my headspace, scything at the
long-grass saying “Let’s get a little more light in here!”
What struck me was that initially to my ears they seemed to be
singing nonsensical psycho-babble, yet it didn’t take long to become
apparent that the florid word-play was genuinely poetical. I like to check out
the influences of those people I am a fan of and so it was I picked up a copy
of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess from a second-hand bookshop in Sunderland
(now gone) for a couple of quid. I knew that the String Band were borrowing
heavily from this challenging book for their earlier albums. I read the book
once through and found it hard to figure out what it was all about with its
arguments of alphabets based upon trees, shape-shifting witches and the
peculiar dietary habits of Pythagoras. I’ll certainly go back to it with my
older head on but, basically, Graves states there is a Muse whom true poets
know and honour in their songs, a White Goddess who, in the words of Apuleius
is “the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of
time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the
immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.” True
poetry is a votive offering at the same time as gaining grace from the mother
of all true inspiration. I wondered on the total drop in quality of the String
Band’s records once they became followers of Scientology and how the magic of
the early work all but vanished. Maybe the Muse no longer shone favour their
way?
Towards the end of The White Goddess Graves cites four english poets who he
identifies as True Poets, divinely inspired and in communion with the Muse -
John Skelton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and John Clare.
So, a few words in honour of the non-John punk poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. I say punk as at the end of the 18th century Coleridge, along
with friend and co-conspirator William Wordsworth published the book Lyrical Ballads. Together they rejected
poetry as a highly stylised imitation of life. Poetry was weighed down with the
heavy university traditions of studies of ancient greek and latin. Initially
published anonymously, Lyrical Ballads
was revolutionary in that the lives of common men were legitimate subject
matter and sources of inspiration. Both poets wanted to kick out the jams and
bring force of feeling from within into poetry and they succeeded.
Coleridge was the more wayward of the two. Regularly using
opium since his teens, engaging in public demonstrations of the use of nitrous
oxide, student of science (not least to provide him with a wider stock of
metaphors), reported to have been an impressive preacher, prone to outrageous flights
of fancy. Check out
Kubla Khan said
to have been there in his head pretty much self-composed after an opium induced
dream. His conversational, blank verse poems such as
Frost at Midnight, and
The
Aeolian Harp can be seen as the seeds of beat poetry. He’s just riffing on
his own thoughts and frames them in crystal clear images. He would’ve loved a
turntable, a few choice Coltrane lps and the chance to kick-back in a cottage
somewhere. The guy was pretty hip!
In The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge gives us a clear description of
The White Goddess herself:
Her lips were red, her
looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as
gold:
Her skin was as white as
leprosy,
The Night-mare
LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood
with cold.
That poem wasn’t particularly well
received at the time, but time has proven a wiser judge. One of the great poems
of the english language. Along with Christabel
it pre-figures the weird fiction of the 1920s and 30s. Lovecraft was a big
admirer of Coleridge who was an influence upon his work over a century later.
Vancouver’s garage band The Painted Ship took their name from this great poem
whilst Peter Green took his mescaline driven meditation upon the poem’s central
image to the top of the UK charts in 1969. It’s said that during a stormy night
in a Geneva hotel Mary Shelley ran screaming from the room as Lord Byron read Christabel to the gathered friends.
Sounds better than Wes Craven. People should read poetry to each other more.
Personally, the greatest feeling of terror I’ve ever received from any work of
art, be it film, music, painting was a reading of The Three Graves. Seriously spooky!
The muse kind of departed from
Coleridge in his late-twenties. Opium took a stronger hold, disillusion in the
aftermath of the french revolution, unrequited love and heartache, but there
were glimmers in his later years. Those early works of his tho - True Poetry -
when he finds his groove he cooks like no other. Salutations to the wide-eyed
star child of wonder and his power of imagination!
