This has been brought on by Jason Guriel‘s new semi-regular column for the Contemporary Poetry Review, ‘Hard to Get Rid of’ (recently tweeted by the Poetry Foundation). These are reviews of single poems as opposed to collections or anthologies, and Guriel prefaces his comments on the poems selected for this edition with an anecdote in which he asks poet Samuel Menashe what he reads. Menashe is reluctant to say, but Guriel insists:

[Menashe] eventually conceded a “wonderful” poem he’d come across in one of the bigger East Coast magazines. Thinking I would look up the poem, I asked him if he remembered the title. “No, no,” he said. “But the point is it was one poem. One poem can nourish me.”

This made me think about poems and collections.

Like most people I started by reading individual poems. Most of the poems I read were in school and they were in little textbook-anthologies and I was told those poems were important. There are other problems with that, of course, but the point is: the commitment was always to one poem. From the eighth to the tenth standard, when it became incumbent upon us to analyse these poems, we began to look at related work, if we weren’t too lazy, but it all lead up to one poem, how brilliant or clever or meaningful it was.

Later I started reading poems on my own. I found them either in anthologies — I rarely, if ever, read the entire book — or, like any self-respecting teenager, on the Internet.

I never quite thought of it in the way that Menashe did. But reading that article made me feel that that was exactly what I was doing for so long: being sustained by single poems. I would be obsessed for weeks on end by one little thing I found in a journal somewhere. I remember, I used to do this thing where I would print out the poem — I am very careful about printing anything out; I hate wasting paper — on clean, fresh paper, reading it several times, and making notes.

Three or four years ago I decided to grow up and read collections. Everyone was and I felt I had to, too. I’m not sure what the first collection of poems was that I read on my own; I may have been younger, but I guess I was about sixteen or seventeen. (Although it’s a novel of poems rather than a collection, I think Vikram Seth‘s The Golden Gate may have been my first, which would have made me thirteen or fourteen.) Suddenly collections became very important. I read about how there were themes and narratives and ideas and inquiries made within a particular set of poems, and I wouldn’t have full access to these if I didn’t read the whole book.

I don’t mean to be disparaging about collections at all. It’s just that I feel I was being a little naïve, and elevating collections to a position higher than the individual poem. Bizarre. A weird kind of communism of poetry reading, if you will.

Here’s a couple of things I know: I like writing in sequence. I keep thinking I will write one that is fifty poems long and maybe someone will want to publish it. I usually stop at around fifteen; more commonly, three or four. It’s another strange, naïve thing to want.

The other thing I know is, it’s not easy to read a collection. When they’re incredible and near perfect, it’s pretty easy. Most of the time they’re not and you have to search for the poems you like or love and give the rest a fair chance.

I maintain a fairly rigorous record of what I read and anyone who chances on this blog is likely to notice that. But there is a lot I don’t record. Last year I read, maybe, six, seven books of poetry? Less? It’s not very impressive even if you consider that  contemporary poetry is not always (physically) accessible here. Most of the poetry I read is still on the Internet. Poemhunter, online journals, blogs, whatever I can find, whatever catches my eye. This doesn’t get recorded. I’m beginning to regret that.

When Ruth Padel was in Bangalore a few months ago, she said something along the lines of, ‘The direct relationship is one-to-one — one poem, one reader.’ I later asked her how true that was considering a poem’s relationship to other poems within a collection, and she quickly said, ‘Oh yes, you’re right. [Something I don't quite remember.]’

Increasingly, I’m beginning to think that the poem, a good or great one, always triumphs over the collection — in the way that it is apprehended, experienced and remembered. If you read a novel and fall in love with it, you may remember its characters or humour or language or plot — any number of things, but you are unlikely to remember it for a one or two particularly special chapters. You may love certain moments in a play, certain scenes or acts better than others, but you eventually assess it as a comprehensive whole. With poetry collections, things can go quite differently. A couple of poems may redeem an otherwise dull enterprise. Or even if the book is good, certain poems are more important or more loved. In the poetry books I own, I usually mark which poems I like best in the contents page. That way I know which page to turn to when I got back to the book.

Of course, there are no rules, nothing clear-cut. Each book is different. How do you judge one long poem with many sections, after all? At the end of the day I am not arguing that poems and collections are enemies of each other — the title of this post is a cheap trick to get a few readers — but I am suggesting that perhaps, perhaps, the poem resists its milieu, resists what it’s forced into, so as to be remembered on its own terms. And more importantly, there is something exciting, and special, about friction between a poem and the collection to which it belongs.

||The Dog, Francisco Goya, 1819-23||