‘Poetry? It’s a hobby./ I run model trains./ Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons’ (Basil
Bunting, ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’) Comment on the view of poetry
offered here, making detailed reference in your essay to at least one work.
A hobby is a pause, an escape from the world, and a burst of activity that leaves you
feeling gratified and improved. It is a routine, a mechanical and comforting rhythm
like a pain-relieving pill that is taken on a daily basis. Poetry, however, bursts that
notion. Unlike a hobby, poetry cannot be split off into time but rather dictates a nonlinear time frame of its own. In his poem ‘The Last Saturday in Ulster’, Nick Laird
wrote that ‘time is how you spend your love’. This ‘love’ I understand to be a love of
life, existing, and writing. Poetry is the formulation of this love. If so, a scheduled and
time-constrained love of existence seems contradictory. In ‘What the Chairman Told
Tom’, Bunting’s ironic tone signals an acknowledgement of how easily (and
mistakenly) poetry is dismissed as a mere hobby and ultimately highlights the
absurdity of comparing poetry to running model trains and breeding pigeons.
If poetry is a hobby, however, then it must be subject to boundaries and regularity.
Poets often write within a particular form, like the fourteen-lined, iambically metered
Shakespearean sonnet, or the nineteen-lined villanelle, complete with rhyming
couplets and repeating lines. A hobby is similarly concerned with structure and
routine. However, despite the fact that poems are artificially assembled, the rules the
poet imposes on them are not constraints but rather, paradoxically, conduits for
freedom. Poetic forms are not limits; they allow the poet to mould an idea or express a
feeling. In her poem ‘To my Dear and Loving Husband’, Anne Bradstreet chose to
use a single stanza, suggesting the unity and wholeness of man and wife. Nearly all
the lines are end-stopped and all are rhymed, underlining the sense of cyclical
completion and renewal of the poem. Thus, the form suggests something regenerative
and never-ending in their happiness, love, and companionship. In other words, rules
and patterns are instrumental in the freedom of poetic expression.
If poetry is not a hobby, then it must be uncontrollable. Its very nature is to be
polyvalent and elusive like a slippery fish; the more you try to seize it, the more it
escapes your grasp. Unlike a hobby, where one is in command of the situation,
knows what to expect from it and what to get out of it, the poet is never fully in
control of the poem, as Plath suggests in her poem ‘Words’ about the elusiveness of
meaning and the uncontrollable nature of language. Words are described as
‘indefatigable hoof-taps’ that gallop away from her comprehension. Meanings
become concentric circles that ripple around the word, shifting into new levels of
meaning. The meanings of words are not consistent as they are perpetually changing.
Beneath the smooth ‘mirror’-like surface lies a hidden depth, an eerie place with a
white skull and ’weedy greens’. One object is rich with life and the other lifeless. The
ambiguous conflicting landscape suggests that the meanings of ‘nasty little words’
and ‘nasty long words’ (Basil Bunting, ‘What The Chairman Told Tom’) are not so
easily captured. Bunting’s use of ‘nasty’ concerning both short and long words shows
the absurdity of a position that refuses to come to terms with the complexity of
language.
If poetry is not a hobby, then it is a daring act. It is a practical risk; a poet can rarely
make a living out of his work. As Bunting writes in his poem, ‘It’s not work. You
don’t sweat./ Nobody pays for it.’ However, perhaps his awareness that poetry is not a
profession suggests that he is berating the part of him that thinks that one can make a
living from being a poet. The voice of the accountant in the poem could be another
version of himself; the speaker and the poet become a single person. Bunting almost
chastises himself for not ‘Go[ing] and find[ing] work’. The italicisation of ‘work’
highlights poetry as non-work, not approved by the sardonic social voice of the
accountant in the poem. Indeed, anything creative starts off as a hobby; the impulse to
go running is very similar to the impulse to write poetry. Perhaps the fact that poetry
is not a profession according to financial and societal rules means that it remains a
hobby. As soon as it stops being a hobby, the element of spontaneity and of a nonlinear time frame is harder to achieve and hence, the poet loses two fundamental
aspects of the process of writing.
If poetry is not a hobby and is made public, then it is a personal risk. Noticing,
speaking out and making oneself heard are radical and unconventional actions. Poets
are radicals because they acknowledge conflict, death, pain, and knowledge - the
things we are invested in avoiding. It puts the unseen into words and in doing so, the
poet takes the position of the observer, which requires distance. In order to see, or to
expose the nucleus of society, one needs to stand on the edge, which could result in
the poet’s necessary alienation. Hence, the poet carries a wound that allows him to see
as Ted Hughes suggests in his poem ‘That Tender Place’ about the torturous process
of electro-therapy on a woman. As a result of the therapy, her words ‘hold… in their
entrails’, ‘over-exposed, like an X-ray’. Hughes’ image is that of a gruesome creative
exhibition, where words are damaged and hold within them both poetic genius and
suffering. The revelation of the inconsistencies, the dapples of life, and the
questioning of society are painful. Poets are indeed ‘reds, addicts,/ all delinquents’
(Bunting, ‘What The Chairman Told Tom’).
If poetry is not a hobby, if it is a radical life’s work, then it is not only separateness
but also a connection. Poets can train themselves to see what others cannot, both
outward realities and internal invisible ones; they are able to forge a connection from
their alienation. In his poem ‘Digging’, Seamus Heaney sees his trans-generational
connection with the men of his family and affirms his existence through his relation to
them. His grandfather digs ‘down and down/ For the good turf’ and although he has
‘no spade to follow men like them’, the grandson echoes that action. The ‘good turf’
becomes, for Heaney, the essence of ‘what it means to be a living person’ (Stanley
Kunitz), the distillation of words and the meaning found in the process of writing. His
pen, which was at first ‘snug as gun’, turns into something more benign- a tool like
the spades of his ancestors. That transformation reflects the trans-generational
connection that has been made through poetry. The pen is no longer a tool of attack or
defence, a creator of boundaries, but a symbol of the atavistic bond between
grandfather and grandson, a breaker of boundaries. Poetry therefore becomes not a
hobby but a way of expressing another reality. Even if poetry is a hobby, it can
nonetheless be an expression of new personal realities. A hobby is also a
manifestation of an individual at their fullest, connecting with themselves, doing what
they love. However, perhaps a hobby does not dig into oneself as poetry does. Heaney
did not physically dig with a spade, he thought, felt, and wrote, which allowed him to
reach the part of himself that could accept his role as a man in his family as a poet not
a farmer.
If poetry is not a hobby, then it not only forms a link with the personal identity of the
poet, but also between the reader and the poet. The poet’s words create in us a secular
spiritual experience that provokes an alchemical reaction between poet and reader.
Unlike a hobby, it cannot be limited by time and place. The poet tells a story and as
Ben Okri pointed out, stories are codes of experience, ‘one of the most human things
that we do’. By writing poetry, we are establishing a relationship between our own
story and the stories of the world. We can tell our story by conjuring a feeling,
affirming an experience, seeing or noticing for the very first time, which in turn
incites a feeling in the reader, and perhaps a glimpse of a previously obscure level of
reality. Stanley Kunitz, in an interview with Gregory Orr, said that poetry
‘magnif[ies] what has happened to us so that it becomes for others emblematic’.
Poetry becomes a means to define and put words to a felt and known emotion. In his
poem ‘The Difficulty of Seeing’, Ben Okri highlights the illusory element of reality.
Reality does not want to be found- ‘reality resists the gaze’. Therefore, although
poetry helps us grasp levels of reality, it remains by definition ambiguous. This
ambiguity makes poetry the most intimate relator of the difficulty of existence; it
conveys the impossibility of fully knowing a reality since a reality is what one
understands it to be and ‘every reality has unutterable depths of reality within it’
(Bernadette Ward).
If poetry is not a hobby, then it could result in a religious spiritual connection,
particularly within a Roman Catholic framework. Poetry can break the boundaries
between the moral and spiritual realm. Nineteenth century poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins’ poem ‘God’s Grandeur’ seems to transcend the material world through its
sacramental imagery- nature is ‘never spent’ and becomes a vehicle for God’s neverending constancy and majesty. The ‘freshness deep down things’ is the uniqueness of
things, or what Hopkins called their ‘inscape’, which is a pale echo of God, the Holy
Spirit. Despite the Divine having an inexpressible transcendence, the Christian idea of
God accepts Him as accessible through the Incarnation as Jesus. John’s Gospel refers
to Jesus as the Word of God- Logos - which not only means ‘word’ but ‘explanation’
or ‘intelligibility’. Just as an understanding of God is provided through Christ,
Hopkins offers Christians a refreshed understanding of Him through poetry. In their
chapter on ‘The Spirit and Creativity’ (1989), the Church of England suggested that
despite the limitations of a human artist, creative expressions are a way of
transcending our fallen world and of ‘discovering…a new order of existence.’ The
poet himself, therefore, becomes the creator and an image of God. Hopkins tried to
write this ‘new order of existence’ that is far away from the ‘blear’ and ‘smear’ of
nineteenth century industrialisation. Although he does not create ex nihilo (out of
nothing), he creates new worlds through his descriptions, new styles of poetry through
his interpretation of sonnets and neologisms. Hopkins is innovative and creative yet
stays within the strict bounds of the Roman Catholic Church’s tradition of God. The
report also claimed that God is the supreme Creator but humans are made in the
divine image (imago dei) and human creativity fulfills this role. Therefore, religious
poetry becomes more than a hobby. It can satisfy our duty as images of God and
allow a singular understanding of religious spirituality. Thus, his poetry cannot be
simply a hobby because in his hand, it becomes an intimate relator of the Divine and
of our relationship with God.
Basil Bunting’s poem ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’ does not offer a clear view of
poetry, but one that has many levels. Bunting was certainly aware that poetry could be
classified as a hobby, just as one would ‘run model trains’, because it is outside all
normal work/wage relations. The speaker of the poem embodies that awareness.
However, the poet is disagreeing with that voice. By writing the poem, he is satirizing
the view that poetry can be categorized and dismissed as a ‘hobby’. Perhaps then,
poetry is what it is to the beholder, whether that person is an accountant or a poet. The
first word of the poem seems an appropriate conclusion: ‘Poetry?’ Indeed, we are left
with a question because poetry cannot be classified either by what it is or by what it is
not.
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