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
 

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.
 

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