Yesterday I mentioned the first kind of nonsense – the kind that, like much satire, actually makes perfect sense when you look at it in a certain way.
The second kind of nonsense I’m interested in is explored in my poems ‘With unction down the purple lane‘ and ‘Down, Down and Down‘.
You might say that these poems make no sense at all, which is why I used to call them “utter nonsense” to distinguish them from the first kind.
But when I look back at those poems, which still satisfy me in a way, I see that they are not “utter nonsense” at all. The semantic meaning may elude us, but there is another kind of sense in the regular rhyme scheme and metre. The form of the poems conveys meaning.
Moreover, the words themselves still mean something, even if they are being put together in unfamiliar combinations. The words “duck”, “spasm”, and even “rug-swept friends”, evoke images and feelings and, in that sense, still tell a kind of story.
Finally, you’ll notice that I struggled to finish these poems off. How can you make the ending seem final, when there is no coherent narrative? In both poems, I artificially created a sense of ending by telling how it “ended”, or talking of the “answer”. This was a way of making those endings seem final.
I wanted to explore other poetic forms, to see if it was still possible to write this so-called “utter nonsense” and still convey a certain kind of sense.
So I wrote a sonnet:
I tried a nugget in the fold today;
It didn’t take the pleasing listless trek.
Believing hurried fortunes on the wreck,
But nothing re-appeared upon my tray.
A hundred pleasures fluttered in the clay,
Galumphing penguins wrestled on the deck;
A hungry dolphin wriggled down my neck,
But all the ladies folded up the hay.
And yet, there is a leigh-way for the ride:
A much-ignited whistle lies around;
The beacon with the thistle steps aside,
And slowly all the angels run aground.
I never give a comprehensive lie,
But all the same, these dentists tell you why.
To give this poem direction, I still relied on those ‘direction’ phrases: “And yet”; “But all the same”. Equally, one might argue that the form of a sonnet is as coherent as that of my earlier two poems – perhaps even more so. The form of a sonnet does tell a story, intrinsically: the rhyme scheme breaks the poem into segments, with the final rhyming couplet signalling an obvious conclusion of some kind.
So there is a certain kind of sense to these poems, too, because even without semantic meaning, the form of our writing conveys meaning, tells us a story.
These are very early experiments in the art of nonsense. I hope I will have a chance to explore it more.