Verbose, funny and infuriating answer to: What is poetry?

Although large parts of Don Paterson’s new book are fascinating, Nick Major says it is not for him – or you

Poets cannot trust the dictionary if their use of language is to be subversive

IWISH to declare at the outset that Don Paterson’s 700-page tombstone of a new book very nearly put me in the grave. I should have heeded the warnings. My editor, my partner, my friends, the postman and even Paterson himself, in his preface, advised me against reading it. Yet, fool that I am, I could not resist. Why? Because for years people have been asking me the same question: “What is a poem, exactly?” Never having been able to answer adequately – and, no, it is not just prose with odd line breaks – I looked forward to Paterson’s elucidations.

I endured two weeks of slow reading about linguistics, “conceptual domain” theory and new systems of poetic metre, during which I had countless headaches, wrote ten pages of notes and went through several packets of Post-its. Then, my eyes alighted on this innocent footnote: “While one is at liberty to say what one thinks poetry is, one should never say what it is not: poetry is whatever we call poetry”. Well, if it wasn’t a full-blown brain haemorrhage I had, it was a minor stroke, at least.

In all seriousness, this really was not a book for me (although I happened to find large chunks of it fascinating). Unless you are one of Paterson’s “constituency” – an odd word to use – which means, “all those with a professional interest in poetry”, it is not for you either. To translate, this book is for academics, of which Paterson is not one. Rather, he is one of those “writers who work in the academy”.

Most of us know him as a fine poet and musician who has also published books of aphorisms and a rather good, light-hearted introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets. In The Poem, he turns his pseudo-academic pen on two questions, of which you already know one. The other is: “Does the

Poets, apparently, have always known what many experts in linguistics refute, that language “operates on a principle of iconicity, which is to say words sound like the things they mean”. Words that begin with “gl”, for example, all have a brightness to them. They glimmer and glow.

If only this were true, the world would be a less gloomy place. Later on, he admits he “has no particular evidence for his ideas”. We just have to trust his feelings and his experience “as a poet”.

Putting aside his wackier notions, it is exactly when Paterson draws on his creative practice that he is most engaging. Why, for instance, does a poet choose one word over another? He implies that poets – unlike, say, many prose writers – pay more attention to the connotative rather than denotative aspect of language. Or, take his discussion of metaphor in part two, which examines the development of poetic tropes. For Paterson, a metaphor works in a poem not just because of how original it is, but because of its “nativity”, how at home it is within its locale.