Poem of the week: WCW by Lachlan Mackinnon

WCW

Saxifrage, said William Carlos Williams, was his flower
because it split stone. Yesterday, in a pot, a clump of it,
weedy red petals, stems robust as peasant legs.

It would survive a summer’s rage for decking,
frost memory, meltwater gush, black August.
It wouldn’t last a weekend in the jungle,

being a flower of the far north, temperate at best.
Williams was a doctor, and he could listen to his language
for the slightest sign, like a stethoscope.

Saxum is stone, frag the root of frangere, to break.
Latin names for northern things. Ghosts of empire.
Williams had time for the patient ones, men, women, children

who hang on, who pull through, saxifrage splitting stone.

The Scottish (Aberdonian) poet and critic Lachlan Mackinnon is not often linked with American modernism. Commentators on his poetry have been more likely to discern the presences of WH Auden and Robert Lowell. William Carlos Williams exerts little stylistic pressure on MacKinnon’s new collection, Doves, but his presence in this week’s poem is central. He does more than provide the title: he lends ideas and an idea of humanity. His presence extends Mackinnon’s poetic conversation.

As explained (the poem is alert to the importance of explanation), the plant name “saxifrage” derives from two Latin words that, fused together, mean “stone-splitter”. The reference famously occurs in the last stanza of A Sort of a Song, the energetic memo-to-self and ars poetica in which William Carlos Williams utters that most obeyed of modernist maxims: “No ideas but in things.” The tiny rock-splitting plant is more than an apt symbol for the power of the word-as-thing: it represents sheer creative drive: “Compose. (No ideas / but in things) Invent! / Saxifrage is my flower that splits / the rocks.”

Mackinnon’s poem is rich in ideas-laden “things”. Perhaps, too, the form notices the American poet’s characteristic tercet structure. But Mackinnon’s stanzas make a smoother, more leisurely music than the Williams stepped triplet. With their seven and sometimes eight, un-insistent beats, the lines are orderly and patient, although the syntax may be consciously casual, in the manner of a notebook jotting. Without any fuss about a main verb, for example, the plant is almost dumped in front of us in lines two and three, an un-beautifully sturdy “clump”, complete with pot.

There are many different kinds of saxifrage. For Williams, the plant’s vigour is what matters and the name itself suggestive enough. Mackinnon adds visual clues as to what the plant in his own poem might look like. Some possibilities can be seen here, but perhaps the exact, rather frowsty image of “weedy red petals” and “stems robust as peasant legs” is best left to the private imagination. Both descriptions may indirectly recall Williams: there’s the red wheelbarrow, obviously, and, possibly, a suggestion of those stout-legged Breughel peasants.

Does the seemingly comic notion of the “rage for decking” imply that even in suburban nature-taming, the ways of decorum are environmentally violent? Is the “rage for decking” a self-satirising, debased version of Wallace Stevens’s “rage for order”? The word “rage” can suggest a mere fashion, swiftly over: it might also imply a more devastating fury. Human ills hover; bad times for plants are anthropomorphised in an interesting coinage, “frost memory”. The climate of “meltwater gush” and “black August” suggests floods of tears followed by burnt-out despair, with “temperate” an adjective caught in transit from geography to personality. This “flower of the far north” is resilient (like the stereotypical Aberdonian?) but it’s particular, too. There are conditions it couldn’t survive, metaphorical rocks that would defeat it.

Unobtrusively, in the middle line of the third tercet, the emphasis moves to Williams himself. His two professions are explicitly connected. He is able to “listen to his language / for the slightest sign, like a stethoscope”. It’s a striking analogy, bizarre but acute.

The allusion to “northern things” in line 11 possibly recalls the “no ideas / but in things” aphorism, and it echoes the earlier description of the saxifrage as “a flower of the far north”. “Latin names” are themselves witness to earlier stone-splitting and empire-building. They may be among the “ghosts of empire” haunting the Scottish and American independence of both poets, and their differently English languages.

At the end of the fourth stanza, Mackinnon’s list of “the patient ones” almost conjures up the surgery waiting room, a row of chairs continuously, variously occupied. And these patients, for whom Williams did indeed have time, are themselves symbolised by the saxifrage. It returns in the poem’s final image to become their emblem.

This is one of those rare poems that could be happily read by people uninterested in the nuts and bolts of poetry, I think; people not concerned to analyse the elegant precision underlying the deceptively everyday diction, nor even feeling they must go off and read WCW (though they should) but in need of a prophylactic kindness.

Messages remain unpopular in poems, but if you pack them in cleverly among sufficiently solid “things”, you can smuggle them past baggage control. WCW is a poem about “hang (ing) on” and “pull (ing) through”, its ultimate focus on unheroic, quotidian human endurance. It celebrates unselfishly the recuperative tenacity of nature, in plants and people, reminding us that concerned attentiveness was integral to Williams’s whole achievement. Thus aided, the flower power of the patient, beleaguered but recovering, splits the stone of illness to emerge healthy. WCW is Williams the doctor quite as much as he is Williams the poet.