Naturism | Poetry | A Coat

"Everybody knows that the naked man and woman are just a shining artefact of the past."

- Leonard Cohen

We’re going to begin today’s discussion of ‘naturism’ and poetry with this famous short poem by W. B. Yeats:

A Coat

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it,

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

It is often tempting with poetry to pinpoint a single word or phrase as being the ‘lynchpin’ of the poem; the idea upon which every other word is leaning. One instinctively points at that word ‘naked’ in Yeats’ poem as being the keystone, for it is the final word, being leant on heavily by the half-rhyme of ‘take it’, and it is the word with the widest obvious semantic field.

Nudity in writing is often seen as a symbol of honesty (as in ‘the naked truth’) and this is certainly part of what Yeats is aiming at. He is miffed at the way that his ornate verse has been misinterpreted and mimicked by those who have no comprehension of what they are mimicking – like a British hip-hop enthusiast shouting ‘Westside!’ with no idea of where this tradition comes from.

Yeats laments how ‘fools’ have taken the superficial forms of his poems on board, without every truly understanding their essence; the vehicle of this metaphor being ‘coat and wearer’ and the tenor being  ‘poetic form and content’.

But what then, of this idea of ‘enterprise’? We have the obvious link here with boldness and adventurousness in an endeavour (eg. Starship Enterprise) but, do we not also take from this poem the idea of enterprise as meaning ‘business initiative’? Yeats’ ‘enterprise in walking naked’ can certainly be paraphrased with the idea that ‘there’s more money in nudity’.

In this sense, I do not think that we can equate Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ with ‘honesty’ – I get the sense that he is being a little more bitchy. If he were implying that ‘naked’ verse is better than this ‘coat’-wearing kind that everyone’s been copying, then he is more or less implying that all of his old work is not worth bothering with. This is not the sort of thing that Yeats would ever suggest.

So we have the possibility that he is using ‘naked’ in its most literal sense of ‘not dressed’, or to take it even further, ‘not bothered to get dressed’. We know that Yeats was very much of the opinion that poets should be ‘lamps’ rather than ‘mirrors’ to the world, and so the idea of blurting out language designed to merely reflect reality is something that would seem lazy to him.

If we are to modify our metaphor in this poem to take ‘naked’ for ‘undressed’ then what Yeats is perhaps referring to is the idea that ‘there is more money or business potential in writing poems that do not seem to have gone through the poetic process but rather appear as fragments of the familiar’. More ‘enterprise’ then, because ‘naked poetry’ is the sort of poetry that has a wider audience, and this is the sort of poetry that doesn’t take as much effort to write.

To fully understand Yeats’ use of the word ‘naked’ however, we must take some notice of the fact that it is preceded by the word ‘walking’. This choice of verb is an interesting one when we know that it is being done in the nude. ‘Being’ naked would be no point of interest, but ‘walking’? Are we to think of the emperor’s new clothes here? I am more reminded of this iconic line from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:

“who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts.”

Whilst some read this as an ultimate depiction of crassness, I read it (and I feel that Yeats would read it) as the requisite lack of inhibition needed to write anything of value. By having his disorderly beatniks dragged off a roof holding their writing in one hand and their naked form in the other, he is forcing us to compare the two in terms of offensiveness. Ginsberg urges the conclusion that nothing he could ever write could shock or offend the status quo as much as the naked human body – and for what? As a species that require genitals for our continuation, why then such taboos over disrobing?

Which brings us to our final (at least for tonight) inference to be made from Yeats’ use of ‘naked’ -  nudity as symbol of vulnerability.

If you get nervous, just imagine everyone in the room naked, the age-old useless piece of advice goes.

It was so weird seeing my ex-girlfriend the other day, knowing we’d seen each other naked, we type into our instant messaging boxes.

Underneath your clothes, there’s a different story, that’s the man I chose, that’s my territory sings Shakira, one of the finest poets ever to have disguised herself as a pop star.

If we look back at what Yeats describes of his ‘Coat’ in the beginning of the poem; covered with ornate embroideries, full body-length in size; we get the definite image of what Neil Strauss would describe as ‘peacocking’, do we not? The idea of masking your insecurities by wearing the sort of flamboyant thing that only a very confident, secure and socially uninhibited person might wear.

So with the nudity comes that level of vulnerability and emotional earnestness that is at the heart of much of the literary heritage. I am reminded of a scene in one of the Bridget Jones films where our protagonist is trying to cover up her ‘lumpy bits’ with a duvet and Colin Firth in his loveable British way saying ‘don’t be ridiculous, I love your lumpy bits’.

For an interesting rebuke to Yeats’ ‘Coat’ however, one need look no further than ‘The Mask’, a poem in which he suggests that it is our lovers’ illusions and personas that we fall for rather than the naked self:

“It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what’s behind.”

As with any great poetry, Yeats is clearly forcing every word to pull its weight and then some. In this particular case, ‘naked’ is being used to tie together ideas of honesty, lack of inhibition, vulnerability, laziness and intimacy all in two sexy little syllables. Nice work W.B., now put the kettle on.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor

Machine | Poetry | Collapsing Ambiguity

“A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop”

-Robert Hughes

As the etymological dictionary on your bedside table will tell you, the verb ‘to impress’ come from the Latin impressus, meaning ‘press into or upon, stamp’ and was taken into English parlance in the 14^th Century as meaning ‘to apply with pressure, making a permanent image in’. Now of course, we use it to describe things that we think are kinda cool.

So, you know how sometimes you’re just really impressed by people? Not by any one action or attribute, but by something about them fundamentally. I feel that about the poet, Ross Sutherland. In both senses.

For those of you who have not read Sutherland’s work, I strongly recommend you pick up his profound and incredibly amusing debut collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town and let yourself be carried away by writing which is idiosyncratic and fresh in a way which (as is so rarely the case in poetry) does not leave the reader feeling shut out or like they somehow ‘don’t get it’.

Whilst I find Sutherland’s work incredibly entertaining and enjoyable on the page, I also highly recommend that you go see one of his live performances to really get the full breadth of his talents. In today’s article, I will be discussing his article which is perhaps best supplemented by this video here, if you’re the sort of person who likes having lots of windows open at the same time while you pay a modicum of attention to all and none of them.

What I want to talk about, with regards to Sutherland, is a poetic trick of his that I first read about in his essay in the anthology, Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry. In Sutherland’s essay, ‘Every Rendition on a Broken Machine’, he extols the virtues of using online text translators as an aid in poetry’s redrafting process. To be more specific, he sees the translators as less of an aid than a “collaborator” in the process.

“I began to feed famous poems into the translator, bouncing them back and forth between the different languages, then back into English. With every translation, the program was forced to collapse the ambiguity of the original.”

The essay continues down fascinating avenues of unpacking what the machine’s ‘bias’ is in the ways that it pulls apart poetry when bouncing it across languages on a sea of zeroes and ones (on one particular machine translation ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ becomes ‘Of Reduced Principle Scale’), Sutherland points out that ‘the most notable thing here is that the program has removed all human elements from the poem’.

When we think about this, it is quite terrifying that the ultimate way to ‘collapse ambiguity’, as Sutherland puts it, is to eradicate the human element. Which is, I suppose, why machines will never be poets (if we take the term ‘machine’ and the term ‘poet’ to mean what we currently take them for). I mean, unless you count that crazy David Link bag of weirdness.

Poets, not all of them, but almost all of them, thrive on duality of meaning and saying things which are only tenuously analogous to what they are actually attempting to communicate. This is entirely at odds with the inner working of the machine. This is part of the reason why I love Ross Sutherland’s eTranslation poetry – it entirely rests on making poets and machines behave in ways that they are not expected to.

It is not within a poet’s instinct to ‘draft’ by entering someone else’s text into a digital box. It is not in a machine’s instinct to deal with the delicate nuance of poetic diction. But here they are, with Sutherland’s method, forced to compromise for the greater good. Which is another reason why I like this; neither the poet, nor the machine can take full credit for the outcome. They are working together toward something that neither of them could have done alone, which is a very healthy collaborative balance to have when thinking of poets’ egos.

Of course, the whole thing looks too much fun not to have a go with, so I had a stab at eTranslating Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods. Here’s what came out for the title and opening quatrain after a while…

I live in the forest as an individual

I guess I do not know the two forests,

It’s his home town,

but he’s still too good

to see the snow that covers me.

I say this now for anybody reading this who thinks that Sutherland’s machine-translations are a lazy approach to creativity… those five lines just took me forty minutes. And you can still just about recognise the original poem in them. Think how long it must have taken old Ross, translating away long into the night, bouncing the English Literary Heritage from language to language, chopping up syntax and sense along the way.

Maybe when the holidays come up, I’ll donate more time to sitting at home remoulding some literary classics with an electronic procrustean bed. It seems every bit as intellectually valid as smoking too much weed and blurting out Howl.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor