Mountain

The author’s introduction in 2000

It’s difficult to dismiss the view that there must be something wrong with the poetry when a writer has to resort to explaining it to readers. In this case, though, the more glaring defect is perhaps that there are too few readers to worry about such subtleties. This Introduction is not intended to offer a full interpretation of the Mountain, but to provide a few signposts to invite you in and help you find your way around.

The first point is that the writing of Mountain spanned 25 years (nearly half my life so far) and getting round to publishing it has already taken another two and a half years. The idea for the poem started to form soon after I came to Wales to live in a valley under a mountain in 1971. I’ve abandoned many of the features of the life which gripped me then – the institutions of journalism and marriage immediately come to mind. But one thread of continuity has been the containing hills (which qualify as a “mountain” more because of their engaging expansiveness than their modest height) that have shadowed me with their gentle power and beauty ever since.

My old friend Pete Rowlands, who suffers more than most with the burden of receiving copies of what I write, and has a greater influence on it that he will accept credit for, once asked how it was possible to hang together a poem over such a long time when the life events, ideas and feelings which go into it are moving faster than the writing. Fortunately, one of the more obvious themes of Mountain is change itself, in the natural, human and personal worlds. But he has a point.

The format for Mountain follows the approach I used in Weekend, another long poem written at comparatively breakneck speed between 1969 and about 1980. They are both basically strings of short poems, joined by explanatory linking lines, or welded together with varying degrees of discomfort. This time I have bowed to the advice that readers need guidance about what is going on. So I have provided titles to individual poem sections and groups.

But there is a serious point to this general method of construction. Poetry is irrelevant to most people’s lives these days not only because they have so many other things to do with their time and minds; it is also irrelevant because, in short packages of ten, twenty or fifty lines, anyone could be forgiven for the feeling that it really might not actually add up to much. A poem may aspire to say more than a four-minute rock music video or the thirty-second TV ad. But in most cases, the creative energy, the emotional impact and even, sometimes, the intellectual challenge of these various forms of snappy communications media are much less distinct than purists would like us to believe. So what is the point of poetry?

This scepticism about poetry itself does explain why I spent much of the last 25 years not writing it. But the alternative approach of attempting to say more than the average TV advert by making my poems longer is a far more exciting challenge, particularly when people are reluctant to read even a few lines at a time. What Mountain, and Weekend before it, are chasing after is perhaps the writing-with-wide-margins equivalent of combining a string of accessible pop music videos to produce a complex and engaging movie. Then it is the juxtapositions, the contrasts, the verbal, metaphorical and thematic resonances which should help the individual poem segments to add up to something more than the sum of the parts. You will have to judge whether this is in fact what you get, and whether this 25-year mission was really worth attempting.

And so to what the poem is about. I’m afraid I have not helped the readability of Mountain by minimising its narrative elements. It was always going to be partly and loosely about a person, or perhaps two people, growing older. The passing of the seasons in the poem fairly obviously represents stages in the lives of these people. Mountain is not especially autobiographical (except for the philosophical journey and unrequited teenage lusts described in the Autumn section). But I can’t deny that, as I grew older myself, my views about what should happen next were changing ahead of the poem, so it’s always been hard to foresee where the story would end.

Here then, in retrospect, is what seems to me to be going on. In the introductory Winter arrival section two people move home to live beneath the mountain, bringing with them a van-load of domestic detail which rebels against them later in Summer. Spring opportunities fixes the co-ordinates – literally for the house, and also by setting the “I” of the poem in the context of a landscape and the natural world. Nothing much happens in Spring except for the curious Visit to a friend which feels right as the centrepiece of this section, but which hardly advances any plot. Spring, then, is really about nature, not people.

Summer, the Great War is a sweaty account of madness unleashed by a relationship and the weather both going wrong. It is about intense and claustrophobic feelings and a breakdown of reason. A friend who read an earlier draft of Summer complained that it was too intensely personal. He was right, and I later hacked away at the more indulgent elements, losing nearly a quarter of the lines. I hope now that the description of the 1976 heatwave is closer to my personal experience than the blistering personal relationship described here.

Autumn complexes is an only slightly more mature reflection on life. At least it is viewed from the perspective of an older person. I’m not sure whether it parallels philosophical development with sexual activity, or suggests intellectual activity as a form of safe sex. It ends with the proposition in the fourth part Complexes that any meaning to be gleaned from experience is likely to be found in the points of contact between different and perhaps contradictory moral views, rather than in the uncompromising either/or position of conventional ideologies. Finally the real world of adultery and warfare intervene, presumably to put vapid philosophising to the test.

What happens in Winter Borders is intended to be an antidote to everything which has preceded it. After the single day of the Winter Arrival section, the elapse of time has been accelerating. The “Day we came” which opens the poem resurfaces as “the year you came” and later switches to the “age they came”. The voice and perspective of the poem changes from “I” to “you” and then to “he and she”. (I think they are the same two who had the tough time earlier on, though I originally planned a change in domestic alignments too). A harsher, more uncertain outside world intrudes – through nature, events in the news and other nightmares – into lives which have become more settled. In the end the couple become pinpricks and vanish from the poem as the scene suddenly leaps to a new character beneath another mountain in another continent, with faint echoes of Summer’s drought. You may not like the ending. But that’s life..

Beyond the decidedly low-key plotline, there’s all the other stuff you’d expect from poetry – symbols and metaphors, feelings, arguments, iambic pentameters, a few rhymes and jokes. If you can’t be bothered to read it all, then why not home in on the shorter internal poems? (These are mostly the bits in normal non-italicised type with titles in lower case.) However you read it, though, I hope you find something in Mountain to interest and amuse you. But what I’d like more than anything is to hear what you think about it. Please let me know.

Finally, many thanks to those people who encouraged me to finish Mountain by diplomatically refraining from telling me to give up years ago, and Sue in particular who has handled more drafts over the years than the US military.

Mel Witherden
December 2000

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