In 2009 I attended a seminar on ‘Pattern Completion’ at Gimpel Fils gallery in London. During the seminar, Dr Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at UCL, demonstrated how memory works with a marble game for children. He set off several marbles at the same time around a conical piece of plastic with a hole at the bottom. After a time, gravity claimed one of the marbles and they would drop through the hole. What he wanted to demonstrate was how random connections could be made by the human brain when a certain combination of triggers came into the consciousness of an individual, and that these triggers, like the marbles, were random. Memory is of course an endless fascination for a poet: how we recall events in our own lives, how we make sense of them and recreate them for an audience in a way that distils these projections from our hippocampus and enable us to craft them into something universal. When I watched the marbles drop I also thought of those sudden moments of creative thought or inspiration, how we stumble into an intricate set of combinations that trigger a new poem. Thom Gunn called this ‘the processes of magic’, when you suddenly have the right raw materials to form a poem about an abstract idea. Sometimes it can take years to find the correct process.
But what about the literature that stays with us like the memorable line of a poem? What it is about these poems that endures in our memories? The title of this piece is one that stays with me, a line that I read and felt moved every time:
RETURNING TURTLE
By Robert Lowell
Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,
raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage,
the room drenched with musk like kerosene-
no one shaved, and only the turtle washed.
He was so beautiful when we flipped him over:
greens, reds, yellows, fringe of the faded savage,
the last Sioux, old and worn, saying with weariness,
“Why doesn’t the Great White Father put his red
children on wheels, and move us as he will?”
We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle
rush for water like rushing into marriage,
swimming in uncontaminated joy,
lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface,
a turtle looking back at us, and blinking.
1973
The poem, from Lowell’s later period is a loose sonnet. The second line is the one that haunts me, but not in a straightforward way. It could be argued that it’s a quite disgusting image: uncooked mincemeat blocking a bath plughole, but it’s the unusual ‘mossing’ that lifts this image, that makes it somehow beautiful. There is tenderness to this poem, one of a family making concessions to each other over the care of a turtle and in the end deciding to return it to the water. ‘Mossing’ suggests a softness, a cushion against the waste pipe that carries the water away. Both ‘mossing’ and ‘stoppage’ are soft sounding words and have a lovely play of music when read aloud. It’s also startling to have these words work so beautifully together, I can’t think of another poem that features a hamburger for example, (maybe O’Hara is the go to man for American fast food) and makes it seem strange and new. But all this is not really nailing it for me – why does this line stick in my head?
I can probably think of a dozen more lines by other poets, such as Stevens ‘let be be finale of seem’ that rattle round my brain and make me want to go back to the poems. But more than that, it’s the feeling they produce, something in the music that makes me feel suddenly richer. It’s like someone has asked you to stop and listen in a park, until you hear the furthest away sound and you are aware of the world going about its business, that somewhere in 1973 a family are blocking up their plughole with a hamburger; that a train is pulling up to a station where no-one gets on or off; that there’s a game of Hide & Seek going on in downtown New York; that there’s half a hedgehog on a main road in the Czech republic; that there’s a single man eating a chow mein; that there’s a robot asking about the spines of snowmen; that there’s family having a day out in Belfast to see a new roundabout; that a South American general has a sackful of human ears on his terrace and so on. Those one liners rattle around my head like a marble and every so often one will drop through. But isn’t that the joy of poetry – the lines reminding us we’re alive like the knock of the blood at our wrists?
Music is perhaps the thing that helps words endure – in the same way a banal pop lyric can be lifted into mysticism by a great hook, (forgive me, but a guilty pleasure of mine is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, but try reading Go Your Own Way like a poem…) a poet with a good sharp ear can craft words in an order that becomes memorable, and it’s not restricted to sonnets, sestina and other precise forms, it also happens in prose poetry and novels. When we read poems, we sleepwalk beyond our defences and something often slips through and remains. For me it the raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage, and for you?
Andrew McDonnell performs his work with the multi-instrumental My Dark Aunt. He lives in Norwich and is involved with this years Voice Project ‘Singing the City’ on the 12th May for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, alongside George Szirtes.
