express what is here.’ She jabbed my heart. It hurt.
X-rays make me queasy.
Once a poem’s left home it doesn’t care about you.
‘“Back Gardens”.’ Madame Crommelynck held up the June edition.
I was sure she thought the title was a killer.
‘But why is this title so atrocious?’
‘Uh…it wasn’t my first choice.’
‘So why you christen your creation with an inferior name?’
‘I was going to call it “Spooks”. But there’s this actual gang who’re called that. They go nightcreeping round the village. If I called the poem that they might suspect who’d written it and sort of…get me.’
Madame Crommelynck sniffed, under-impressed. Her mouth chanted my lines at quarter-volume. I hoped at least she’d say something about the poem’s descriptions of dusk and moonlight and darkness.
‘There are many beautiful words in here…’
‘Thanks,’ I agreed.
‘Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Your “sort of” is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification, please. “Sort of” is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. “Sort of” says, “I am ashamed by clarity and precision.” So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it is not a poem. I am right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes. Idiots labour in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. Here—’ She read from the fifth verse. ‘“Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon”. The poem has a terminal deflation. Ffffffffft! Dead tyre. Automobile accident. It says, “Am I not a pretty pretty?” I answer, “Go to the hell!” If you have a magnolia in a courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No. You do not.’
What she said sounded true, but…
‘You think,’ Madame Crommelynck snorted smoke, ‘“This old witch is crazy! A magnolia tree exists already. Magnolias do not need poets to exist. In the case of a poem, a poem, I must create it.”’
I nodded. (I would’ve thought that if I’d had a few minutes.)
‘You must say what you think, or else spend your Saturday with your head in a bucket and not in conversation with me. You understand?’
‘Okay,’ I said, nervous that ‘okay’ wasn’t okay.
‘Good. I reply, verse is “made”. But the word “make” is unsufficient for a true poem. “Create” is unsufficient. All words are unsufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.’
That, I didn’t get. ‘Where?’
‘T. S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art,’ she put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?’
Madame Crommelynck tapped cigarette ash into a ruby blobby ashtray.
‘Beauty’s…’
She relished my stumpedness. I wanted to impress her with a clever definition, but I kept crashing into beauty’s something that’s beautiful.
Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Ridout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize ‘I Must Go Down to the Seas Again’ by John Masefield. We don’t have to actually think about stuff.
I admitted, ‘It’s difficult.’
‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’
‘But…’ I hesitated, wondering if I should say this.
‘My one demand,’ she said, ‘is you say what you think!’
‘You just chose natural things. How about paintings, or music. We say, “The potter makes a beautiful vase.” Don’t we?’
‘We say, we say. Be careful of say. Words say, “You have labelled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it.” No. They lie.