Living More, Living Better

PETER URPETH considers the significance of the work of poet and theorist KENNETH WHITE in the wake of publication of his long-awaited Collected Poems.

THERE ARE TIMES when the reader sadly wishes that he or she had never explored an author’s work beyond that first golden book, those first magic, glowing pages that opened to them a new world, a new way of words.

Sometimes, the follow-up encounter reveals the author’s inability to hit the target more than once, leaving a sense of disappointment that can taint the memory of that first moment. At other times, the newly read work questions, deepens, worries at the original, casting a shadow of complexity over those first brief moments of pleasure.

For this writer, the first golden encounter in question came ten years ago with The Bird Path, Kenneth White’s collected longer poems 1964-88, (Mainstream, 1989). The writing was sparse and spoke directly of the poet’s encounters, sometimes with ideas or with history, sometimes with urban landscapes, other times with the wilderness. The poet had a rare wisdom, even authority, in elucidating the force of his encounters with nature and his explorations of other cultures, writings and ideas.

He was free yet seemed compelled to be on a journey, and each encounter seemed to take the destination further away, but then, that was the intention. The poet as outsider who travels, knowing more, seeing more and then is gone having left a poem pinned to your door.

If memory serves me, it was the French writer and philosopher Gaston Bachelard who once wrote that the world is intense before it is complex, and that is often the way it is with poetry, too, when after subsequently reading the poet’s theories nothing can return the reader to that first frisson of excitement.

Writing as one who has always thought of theory – literary or philosophical – as being the antithesis of the poetic, the sense of ‘disappointment’ in the later encountering of the poet’s work is tempered by the fact that the theory is itself a monumental work of the imagination, but, theory still has its weight, and it encroaches on the poetic, leaving the reader almost constantly looking out for key flag points that say, here is the theory in action. The beauty in White’s work is in the purity not of his language or imagery but of their combined effect, the relocation of the reader in the driving seat of the poetic process.

In White’s work there is no florid, flowery indulgence, and while the writing is fragmented, it is also free of the crackling of modernism. The poet is a guide through landscapes and cultures, through states of open, dissolved consciousness constructed in and with the wilderness, akin to a kind of deeply engaged meditation.

The word ‘shaman’ has been cruelly misappropriated and misused in recent times, but in White’s case its usage is helpful as the poet manifests his trickster games and wry humour, but you never catch him off his guard. He transports and communes, but remember the extent of his powers – as Mircea Eliade reminded us, often the shaman’s only gift is that he has travelled to those places before us.

Archetypes for this kind of writer are few and far between in Scotland, or elsewhere in Europe. If one surveys the landscape of British, American or Continental thinkers, the affinities are not obviously with the philosophers. The starting point is further back and more remote. Think of Basho, the wandering poet monk who walked the pathways of Japan, think of Brandan and the monk mariners who journeyed on the western seaboard spreading the word, think of Taoism and Zen.

That first reading of The Bird Path was indeed a revelation and next came the discovery that the poet was also a major international intellectual whose poetry sat in his work as part of a broader schema that included some of the most original contemporary philosophy, alongside meditational auto-biographies and travel books. But, the reader is also sometimes unsettled. In his intellectual career White has elucidated a hybrid, wide-ranging cultural, philosophical theory that has roundly become known as ‘geopoetics’. His work in its originality ranks alongside other great continental poetical dissenters such as Gaston Bachelard.

Like the poems, the essays and narrative books too seem to wander through regions of thought and encounter until, suddenly, the journey stops and the writing erupts in a diamond moment of lucidity and clarity, cut with astonishing original insight and wisdom. And then you move on, from Greenland, Labrador, Brittany, the Outer Hebrides, the Pyrenees to Japan. The range and scope is truly global.

And that is what is so timely about the publication of White’s collected poems. At over 600 pages, Open World – The Collected Poems 1960-2000, emerges as a testimony to the writer’s prolific output and provides a resting point, a place in which to take stock, assess and reassess the work as a single stream, enabling the full arc of the journey or trajectory to be experienced.

Readers of White’s work in the UK have for many years been hampered in their pursuit of his intentions and perspectives by the fact that much of his work has only been published in France and in French, and from there in other languages. It’s only recently that the original English-language manuscripts have begun to appear — and disappear, since the editions are rapidly sold out. Getting it all in the same place at the same time has been as hard as herding gulls.

Open World comes at a time when White’s work is emerging, massively and luminously, from years of relative obscurity in his homeland. One reason for this obscurity is, perhaps, that his poetry resists assimilation into any of the predominant post-war factions in Scottish poetry or intellectualism; it is mercifully free of any obvious local inheritance. It confronts the very idea of nationalism, and it pays no lip service to left or right, Highlander or Lowlander. Instead, it seems to serve the Earth but has no master.

It is all the more surprising to find out that Kenneth White was born in the Gorbals in 1936, the son of a railway signalman. But it was not until the family had moved out of the city that, at the age of 15, he discovered the ‘back country’ – the high moors and hills around his home village, Fairlie, near Largs.

That wilderness, crucial in his development as a writer became a kind of ‘other space’, or as White would say, ‘mindscape’, in which his first awe-struck encounters with the natural world grew into an intellectual and creative journey that not only lead to a Professorship at The Sorbonne in Paris and the Chair of 20th Century Poetics but also opened the ground of his poetics and his own poetic language.

White now states that he is ‘perfectly lucid and cool’ about the reasons for the relative obscurity of his work as a poet and intellectual throughout the late 60s, 70s and 80s in Britain. It was because, as he puts it, he ‘had dropped the British context as a bad job’. There was, he says, ‘no intellectual energy in the air, prose literature was ‘humdrum’ and poetry went on in ‘very restricted contexts’.

His London publisher suggested to White that his work was more ‘Continental’ than the usual British fare, belonging alongside Joyce, Beckett and their kind.

And so, having given up lecturing at the University of Glasgow, White moved to Europe and was teaching in France during the student disruptions of May 1968. There he worked alongside French avant-garde thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, who was on the jury of his doctoral thesis on ‘intellectual nomadism’, before moving out further on his own distinctive way. His work centered on a far-reaching analysis of the ‘impoverishment’ he sees in Western culture and society, that resulted in the development of that cross-cultural, transdisciplinary theory: ‘geopoetics’.

“Geopoetics is based on a whole re-reading of European cultural history”, he says, “I like these big vistas of things, seeing things really from the depths and re-emerging. Geopoetics reads cultural history and says we’ve got a problem. We’ve got a cultural problem. There’s something missing, there’s something badly missing.

“Now, what is culture? What does it really mean? If you look at the big cultures of the world, those which have really made people live more – because that is what culture is really about, living deeper and living more – at their centre was a ‘poetics’- that word that has been so badly misused.

“In those big cultures you have a strong poetics, whether it be Homer in Greek culture, or the Shaman in primitive tribes, you always have a strong poetics and I’ve been trying to work at such a poetics.

“You also need in a culture a centre of interest for everybody, not just some elite, but everybody and I ask myself, what can be the central interest for everybody in the world today? At this point I suggest it is the very earth on which we try to live. That’s the ‘geo’ in that term geopoetics. With that in mind, I started looking around and began to see that there were all kinds of things happening in science and philosophy that had not yet entered normal consciousness. I try to bring all of that together. So, geopoetics is a trans-disciplinary movement trying to open a new cultural space.”

It is tempting to say that at the heart of his work beats an ecological spirit that operates in stark contrast to the harshly urban thought of his one-time contemporaries in the Paris universities. But, that assessment would divert attention from the fact that White’s central subject is the ‘self’, and a kind of self-awareness, or awareness of ‘Self’ in relation to the world:

“This is not about subjectivity. This is not about the writer reflecting him or herself in nature. That’s Romanticism and I’m not a Romantic. There’s a lot of work in my writing going on ‘on me’. I’ve worked on myself at the same time as I’m trying to look outside. That’s why I went into Zen Buddhism. That’s why I went into all kinds of different ways of working on ‘me’. In biology these days they speak of the human being as being an‘open system’. So, let’s say, I’m trying to live ‘open being’.

“This ‘open being’ feels itself in concordance with and in consonance with, and in deep contact with, the wind blowing in the trees, the waves breaking on the shore, the plankton swimming in the sea. For me, when you’re open you’re living a complete world, and that is a desperate need of all of us. A desperate need for many of us that is so deep, a need that sometimes we don’t or can’t think about it. When we do experience it, we forget it, and get back the hell into the ‘real world’. But what we call the real world is in fact a small, narrow caricature of a world.”

White lives now on the coast of Brittany and works in a space he created when he converted the house into a ‘hermitage’, and developed the Atlantic Studio.

“I consider myself here on this north coast of Brittany, here on this promontory jutting into the Atlantic, as being in the centre of the Atlantic arc – an arc which goes from Portugal to Scotland. Here in Brittany I’m right in the middle of it, with the whole of Europe and Asia behind me and my original home island, Britain, in front of me. And I think – from this promontory – I like that kind of geography – that all cultures need an outpost, so the mind can feel on the edge, and feel ways out, otherwise things get very interned and eventually suffocate.

“This place, I think of as being such an outpost, and the place is hotching with trans-channel migrants. Those monk-navigators of the fifth and sixth centuries were great guys, talking three languages, maybe four – Latin, Greek, Gaelic and Hebrew – wonderful fellows going about founding monasteries, schools, libraries. That’s the kind of line I follow, the open world line.”

“When I write”, White continues, “it’s like a Highland river that just comes rushing down. I let it all come. I don’t sit staring at the paper for hours waiting for the perfect phrase, I just let it all come and let it flow. After that I cut it down. I like physicality in writing. I like writing that has energy and light to it.

“I’ve worked a lot at writing itself – I’ve spilled a lot of ink and sharpened a lot of pencils. I know what kind of writing I want to do and know what kind of style I want. Very often, English style is a bit flabby and repetitive. I learned from the French a more concise, less repetitious style, and I learned a lot from Japanese poetry. I learned to say the most with the least. Then there’s rhythm. With regard to that, I can say that I learnt a lot simply by looking at waves and at the clouds in the sky.”

Open World – The Collected Poems 1960-2000 by Kenneth White is published by Polygon, Edinburgh, priced £20.