In the second in our series of close readings, Ben Wilkinson unpacks ‘The Circle’ by Don Paterson
The Circle
for Jamie
My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run
in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up …
Read ‘The Circle’ by Don Paterson on the Scottish Poetry Library.
As Sean O’Brien pointed out not so long ago, Don Paterson’s poetry has come a long way in a short time. Back in the early nineties his were often dream-like yet ominous poems of football, sex, drink, music, and class politics, full of both demotic and linguistic ostentation, self-deprecation and braggadocio, typically delivered with a swaggering, loose formality, intoxicated with the power of musical patterning. This was poetry as a game – “I took myself on for the hell of it” says the pool-playing, Guinness-gulping speaker of ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’ – albeit one with often serious consequences: the black pocketed and the black stuff sunk, the narrator’s demonic doppelganger is left “stuck in his tent of light, sullenly / knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time.”
But even when an imagined footy team’s grimly hilarious decline gave the poet excuse to show off a playful wit and buzzing vocabulary (“from the top, then, the zenith, the silent footage: / McGrandle, majestic in ankle-length shorts, / his golden hair shorn to an open book, sprinting / the length of the park for the long hoick forward, / his balletic toe-poke nearly bursting the roof of the net”), there was always a hunger for greater seriousness in the writing’s barely disguised existential and spiritual dimensions. From Paterson’s debut Nil Nil (1993) to the near-grandiose ambition, playful self-aggrandizement, and lyrical scope of God’s Gift to Women (1997), the surface show of jokes and flamboyance were, if anything, only cranked up; gravitas often came with a smirk, sometimes to deft purpose, but elsewhere the impression was of a poet afraid to fully mean it. (A notable feature of Paterson’s early poetry is its constant repositioning and cocksure unassailability). Beneath it all, though – and often breaking through – was the earnest sense that poetry wielded real power, and that its weird mix of music and logic could actually make stuff happen. “A poem is a little church, remember, / you, its congregation, I, its cantor” intones the poet-priest of ‘Prologue’; or take ‘Exeunt’’s magical-realist moments: “The coughing stops: / he has unlocked the hammer within the anvil. / It drills on the workbench, begins to levitate”.
‘The Circle’ illustrates what can still be achieved in traditional forms at a time when some might imagine adherence to, say, end-rhymed quatrains in iambic tetrameter belongs to a bygone era
The conflicts between Paterson’s increasingly lyrical address of complex philosophical questions and the arch demands of a postmodern zeitgeist came to a head in a third book. The Eyes (1999) saw Paterson move into translation – or more specifically, ‘versioning’ – in poems written ‘after’ and under the influence of fin de siècle Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Looking back, it seems to have given the poet license to embrace a much freer, adaptable lyric style in his follow-up volume of original verse, Landing Light (2003). Adopting and absorbing aspects of Machado’s unshowy philosophical bent, gripping chiaroscuro, and ego-stripping anonymity – the lyric ‘I’ used almost purely as a means of calling any idea of a stable identity into properly serious doubt – led to what was, in many ways, a surprising and wholly accomplished fourth book. Arriving only ten years after Nil Nil’s shape-shifting and sometimes riddling excesses, Landing Light saw the poet at home with emotional candour, frank declarations and, alongside lyrical elegance, a growing, unfashionable adherence to traditional poetic forms. Compare one of Nil Nil’s sonnets – the rarefied, potentially wrong-footing formal strain of ‘Restitution’, say – with the clarity and considerable emotional force of ‘The Thread’ from Landing Light, a touching portrayal of the frailties of family life, recalling the difficult birth of a child. “And so today I thank what higher will / brought us to here, to you and me and Russ, / the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us / roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill / and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving / every engine in the universe.”
Which brings us – via a woefully quick mention of Orpheus (2006), in which Paterson renders Rilke in English as a poet of moral conviction, vertiginous edge, and intellectual rigour – to 2009’s Rain. On the surface an extended elegy to the poet Michael Donaghy, Rain is more fully an extension of the emotionally fraught, philosophical, and deceptively unadorned lyricism explored in Landing Light, shorn of that book’s elsewhere ludic and lengthy narratives. It also brings us to ‘The Circle’, the poem I want to talk about here, not because it’s emblematic of Rain as a book, though in certain ways it is, but because it’s an interesting poem to illustrate what can still be achieved in traditional forms at a time when some might imagine adherence to, say, end-rhymed quatrains in iambic tetrameter belongs to a bygone era.
Recently I discussed another poem from Rain, ‘The Lie’, in the pages of Poetry London (#101, Spring 2022), a brief essay that was excerpted from my recent study of Paterson’s work, published in Liverpool University Press’s Writers and Their Work series. ‘The Circle’ is another poem that exposes the possible transformative inadequacy and inauthenticity of even the most apparently well-crafted poem, suggesting that poet and reader alike must differentiate between purposeful, interrogative use of forms and their habitual rehearsal. But much more than ‘The Lie’, ‘The Circle’ offers an emphatic example of a poem where form and content combine in wholly productive tension. As Paterson argues in an aphorism from The Book of Shadows (2004): “The poet’s only chance of being taken seriously as any kind of thinker depends on the reader also accepting the heresy that there is something in the style alone of our presentation, in its pretty sound and its rhetorical flourish, that reveals a little more of the truth than its mere information-content.”
Paterson is rather in search of the individual poem’s ability, by whatever stylistic means best suited to that particular poem, to keep reader and writer constantly alert. In other words, whatever makes the poem an effective and affective site for renewed understanding and discovery
Paterson is talking here in general terms about all good lyric poems; which is to say, the kind of rhythmically-attuned verse that pays attention to both the sense and music of its lines. But in Rain, his own poetic style and ambitions for poetry as a means of powerful intellectual enquiry have advanced to a point where the formal qualities of the work can at times seem indispensable to the meanings a poem generates, and the ideas it consequently proposes. When he states, in his lecture ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’ (2004), that “our defining heresy as poets is that we know that sound and sense are the same thing”, and that “we allow our ear to think for us”, Paterson’s suggestion is of a defining credo apparently held by all poets. But on the evidence of his work, it is one which he demonstrates and subscribes to much more than most. ‘The Circle’ illustrates what can still be achieved in traditional forms at a time when many practising poets might consider adherence to such rigours beyond the pale, or perhaps simply beyond their scope. For Paterson, though, like his near-contemporary the late Michael Donaghy, the idea that poetic innovation somehow occurs through a smooth progression of ‘new’ styles replacing ‘old’ ones is no more than a spatial illusion, one encouraged by twentieth-century consumer capitalist ideas about ‘advancement’ and ‘progress’, in which the economic concept of the ‘new’ gives it an all-pervasive fetish value. Subscribing to Donaghy’s example, Paterson is rather in search of the individual poem’s ability, by whatever stylistic means best suited to that particular poem, to keep reader and writer constantly alert. In other words, whatever makes the poem an effective and affective site for renewed understanding and discovery.
Like ‘The Thread’ from Landing Light, ‘The Circle’ is dedicated to the poet’s son Jamie. Similarly, the focus is the aftermath of a child’s especially difficult arrival in the world. But ‘The Circle’ takes place several years down the line, as the poet focuses on a persistent reminder of that time, the “flutter in his son’s signature” which is “all / (thank god) his body can recall / of that hour when, one inch from home, / we couldn’t get the air to him”. The poem begins by depicting a young kid absorbed in activity:
My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run
in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.
The paired full rhymes and consistent iambic tetrameter of these quatrains are employed to very deliberate effect. In accurately mapping the surface impression of a comforting universe governed by strict, unwavering scientific law, the formal constraints of the poem offer the stylistic equivalent to the intended neat “circuitry” of the painting, the “one great heavenly design” of the orbiting and orderly “comets, planets, moon and sun”. Form and content are in seemingly perfect harmony. In doing so, they achieve a wholeness of purpose that a freer stylistic approach simply couldn’t accommodate. Just as the child is unable to “close the line” and complete his perfect picture, neither can the poem maintain that a complete understanding of the complexities of the universe is within our grasp, and certainly not reducible to some totalising theory of everything. As Paterson’s poetry is so often at pains to wake us, there are forces, drives and cycles that exist beyond our blinkered perceptions. And yet, despite such forces being vast and powerful, they are nonetheless incapable of correcting a child’s (relatively minor) impairment:
and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.
In the late Modernist style, and in the poetry of contemporary writers who align themselves with such a style, rejections of traditional form and metre are often argued on the grounds that supposedly inorganic formal strictures are inadequate to the task of addressing the uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion of the complex world we inhabit. In his 1950s manifesto Projective Verse, the critic and ‘experimental’ poet Charles Olson argues for the benefits of working in what he figuratively calls “the Open, or what can also be called composition by field, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base of the non-projective”. In the latter, he claims that “what we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination”. That a fractured and fragmented world might seem to demand a fractured and fragmented poetry is a potentially persuasive view, of course – even if to accept such an approach would involve subscribing to a rather baldly mimetic style. A more persuasive argument is one in favour of form’s continuing potential and resonance, one that chimes with, say, the ‘evolutionary necessity’ of the sonnet that Paterson has argued for.
In his ars poetica essay Wallflowers, Michael Donaghy refers to Paul Lake’s research into the origins of conventional forms, in which he suggests that they: “evolve, like plants, through a process of iteration and feedback. The regular metre of formal poems is not a dull mechanical ticking, like a clock’s; it coalesces out of the rhythms of randomly jotted phrases through a process of ‘phase-locking’ – a natural process that occurs when many individual oscillators shift from a state of collective chaos to beating together or resonating in harmony, the way the randomly flickering lights of fireflies become synchronous through a whole tree.”
This is a compelling suggestion, convincingly arguing for a specific poetic form’s fundamentally organic nature, but also the manner in which successful poems of all kinds share in common a productive tension between, and symbiotic resolution of, form and content. What is rarely argued for, however, and what can be easily overlooked in Paterson’s later work, is the way in which – as in ‘The Circle’ – form can become the very engine with which to interrogate form itself. By extension, it can both depict and undermine the comfortable notions we cling to, as shored up by life’s habitual routines, serving to radically displace, but also to productively realign, the reader’s means of engaging with the world. In this way, ‘The Circle’ catches us off-guard, altering the tempo of its previously steady iambic lines with caesura and enjambment. The poem sets a perceptual transformation into motion, as the cosy quotidian that lured us into the poem leads, in typical but never predictable Patersonian fashion, onto stranger and more philosophically demonstrative territory:
But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark
and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
These lines are initiated by the poet’s attempt to explain, both to his son and to himself, why things are the way they are, through the kind of metaphysical reasoning to which Paterson has become increasingly committed, and willing to risk. The first suggestion is that human agency and the notion of free will, while not quite mirages, are much less decisive and potent than we might be inclined to think. Sometimes life doesn’t work out as intended because of human failure; other times it doesn’t work out as we might have hoped (or even imagined) because, the poem suggests, forces outside of our control exert a powerful effect on us. “The dream is taxed” is a more cryptic statement, and seems to apply as much to our hopes being diminished by the unforeseeable collisions of happenstance as it does to the exterior demands that the vast forces of the universe make on the human dream we inhabit. The reified condition of order, knowledge and control that language as a systematic tool has allowed our conscious minds to develop, dividing up the world into discrete objects and categories, is inevitably exposed, whether we choose to recognise it or not.
As such, the poem argues that our desire to be masters of our own destinies is destined forever to be compromised by “the dark” of (often unseen) forces beyond our control. However imperceptible, these forces shape our lives just like those that act on an arrow shot from a bow, altering its course “between the bowstring and the mark” of its target. Krishna – a manifestation of Vishnu, the deity in Hindu belief who protects and sustains the world – and “fate” are thus indiscriminately cast as higher powers that we cling onto, to make us feel safer in a world that is fundamentally chaotic, random, mysterious and, as the poem implies, often violent and unforgiving.
‘The Circle’ ends by bringing its poetic form and thematic focus into stylistic and imaginative alignment, enacting a perceptual transformation
At this point, the reader might expect the poem to settle on its bleakly perceptive conclusion. Instead, it performs a counterbalancing shift of perspective in its final three quatrains, as the poem’s metre steadies, form again reflecting content. “But the target also draws our aim”, claims the poet-speaker, “our will and nature’s are the same”. If we are lost in the human dream, placing our trust in false gods to stave off the isolating fact that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control and full comprehension, one possible solution, the poem suggests, is to recognise the miraculous in the everyday, the material unity of self and world. Rather than “a book it wrote and then forgot”, the poem states, we are nature’s “living word”, which is to say a very physical part of our immediate environment. As Paterson has argued in The Book of Shadows, discussing the leap to religious superstition we may instinctively make when faced with the universe’s mysteries, “our revelation on these occasions is precisely not the Great Presence, but its summary disappearance – leaving us a happily earthbound monkey, suddenly and joyously continuous with their element.”
‘The Circle’ ends by bringing its poetic form and thematic focus into stylistic and imaginative alignment, enacting a perceptual transformation. The poet’s son may “bring his fist down like stone” in frustration at his “spoiled work and useless kit”, but at the same time, he “can’t help but broadcast” the fact that his “muddy water-jar” is filling with the very ring he has tried to paint himself – a ring, the poem offers by way of conclusion, that is “singing under everything”. Just so, the human compulsion to make sense of a confusing, distant, and often unknowable universe, producing the “spoiled work” of scientific law through the often “useless kit” of our distorting sensory perceptions, may yet be counterbalanced by reconnection with our element, and the intuitive enquiries of art. It is through striking this balance, the poem proposes, between the fracture of human perception and the fundamentally monistic state of the universe, a unity “singing under everything”, that we might more fully inhabit both our lives and the world in which we live them. For Paterson, poetic form and clarity of diction are the means of achieving this realignment, however fleetingly the poem may offer its momentary stay against confusion.
As he once claimed in a 2013 interview: “I think there’s a kind of fruitful risk in playing it as close to sentimentality as one dares – and maybe a dumb sort of clarity, and adopting an almost pretentious rhetorical height. You fall off the tightrope and make a fool of yourself, but I think you have to risk it. It strikes me that that sort of game is worth playing, because the stakes are a lot higher; potentially you win a lot more in terms of the force of what you communicate, the strength of feeling you can share with or elicit from the reader, the coining of speech that is both familiar and radically destabilising. The poem can heal, and the poem can also fracture – but in both instances it can present itself as a unity. Its purpose can be to fracture – but I think it fractures more effectively when it’s a unity.”
