The indispensable poet

I have been re-reading, slowly and with renewed love and admiration, all of Martin Carter’s poems. Every time I read them they provide a stronger testament. His Selected Poems is an indispensable book in any public or private library. I appeal to that national benefactor of the reading public, Mr Lloyd Austin, to keep his invaluable bookstore constantly stocked with Martin’s works.

Martin Carter spoke about poetry with serious intensity. His observations on the art and craft of poetry and on individual poets and poems were entangled in his ordinary conversation.

Poetry was an essential part of his daily life. He scribbled lines on whatever was near to hand ‒ scraps of paper, the flaps of cigarette packets, the backs of discarded envelopes. His thoughts were filled with poetry. Once I lent him the first volume of a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and some weeks later he returned the book with an apology for marking up the margins with comments; I replied that the book for that very reason had become one of the most precious in my library!

Let me select three of Martin’s mantras.

• Martin was often asked to “explain” his poems. What does the poem mean? What did you intend when you wrote those lines? Martin often replied with a counter-question: what do you think the poems means? When he took more time he would explain that when he allowed the publication of a poem he gave up sole ownership.

The reader became an owner also. It was as if the poem had entered the mind of the reader and there generated new significance, symbols and intentions and what the poem meant to reader contained as much truth as that which the poet intended to convey. Good readers create the best poems.

• Martin often said he never felt any poem he wrote was finished. Surely it could be made better with a little more work, a little more thought, a further reach of the imagination, a sudden new stroke of inspiration. He never finished his poems, he “released” them for others to have a look. I understand that. I always feel nervous after completing a poem, wondering whether it is really done to perfection, thinking that with a little further application a nearer approximation to the ideal might be achieved. Martin even hinted to me once or twice that his poems when “released” might be improved by the suggestions of others, though I am not aware that this ever actually happened. But it is not out of the question. After all, the original version of what is considered the most influential poem of the 20th century, T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, was chopped and changed drastically by Ezra Pound before Eliot published the famous poem. It begs the question: can a poem be a collaborative effort?
• Stanley Greaves, the great Guyanese painter and a poet himself, told me this and I think it is wonderfully true. He told me that Martin often said that all of his, Martin’s poems, were fragments of the best poem that would never be written. I quote Stanley’s words of truth extrapolated from Martin’s thought: “The ideal will ever remain seen but resting on the horizon … seen but unreachable… but no harm in trying… many interesting things are there to be discovered on the way.” Martin and Stanley are right. I feel that about my own poems: “fragments of the best poems that will never be written.” It is an ever-fascinating voyage of discovery which never reaches its destination.