Writing Poetry

Another quote from the experiences of Zakalwe, the career mercenary for the Culture.

Once [...] he had taken some leave, and for a while had entertained the idea of giving up his work for the Culture, and doing something else instead. It had always seeemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those - to him - polar opposites, he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.

He lived in a small village, in a small, rural country on a small, undeveloped, unhurried planet. He stayed with an old couple in a cottage in the trees in the dales beneath the high tors. He rose early and went for long walks.

The countryside looked new and green and fresh; it was summer, and the fields and woods, the path sides and river banks were full of unnameable flowers of every colour. The tall trees flexed in the warm summer winds, leaves bright and fluttering like flags, and water ran off the moors and hills and across the bunched stones of sparkling streams like some clarified concentrate of the air itself. He sweated to the crests of the gnarled hills, climbed the outcrop rocks at their summits, and ran whooping and laughing across the broader tops, under the brief shadows of the small high clouds.

On the moors, in the hills, he saw animals. Tiny ones that darted invisibly into thickets from almost under-foot, larger ones that leapt and stopped, looked back, then leapt away again, disappearing into burrows or between rocks; larger ones still that ran flowing off across the ground in herds, watching him, and then became almost invisible when they stopped to graze. Birds mobbed him when he walked too near their nests; others called out from nearby, one wing fluttering, trying to distract him, when he approached theirs. He was careful not to step on their nests.

He always took a small notebook with him on his walks, and made a point of writing down anything interesting. He tried to describe the feel of the grasses in his fingers, the way the trees sounded, the visual diversity of the flowers, the way the animals and birds moved and reacted, the colour of the rocks and the sky. He kept a proper journal in a larger book, back in his room at the old couple's cottage. He wrote his notes up in that each evening, as though filling out a report for some higher authority.

In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.

(I promise I will quote a snippet that’s not from Iain M. Banks soon…)

Obviously, for me, the big punchline of this piece is Zakalwe’s mechanistic, procedural attitude to poetry. Not only does he believe that poetry is simple “prose, but with words removed”, but he also (I now notice) at no point considers or attempts to describe how these natural wonders make him feel.

In fact, the only time this omniscient narrator gives us any indication of Zakalwe’s mental or emotional state is in when he runs “whooping and laughing” across the mountain-tops. Note also that there is no description of the couple or his relationship with them, and that all the animals are described as fleeing from him or warding him off, even though he is “careful not to step on their nests”. It seems that, no matter how he tries to abandon his violent ways, the world still treats Zakalwe as a danger, and he is only relaxed and happy when alone.

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