Making art is like setting a trap

Philip Larkin on constructing “the device”

“It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated.” So begins a 1957 essay by the English poet and librarian Philip Larkin, titled “The Pleasure Principle,” in which Larkin breaks down the writing of a poem into three stages. Since this newsletter often seems to be focused on complicating the creative process—what can I say, I like making things difficult—today I thought it might be fun to join Larkin in taking a stab at simplicity.

So here are Larkin’s three stages of writing a poem, which I think you could apply pretty easily to any kind of artistic practice:

Stage one: Get obsessed with a feeling

Specifically, Larkin writes that you must become “obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that [you are] compelled to do something about it.”

OK, simple enough—though I think it’s worth noting that this first stage is where a lot of creative projects falter! If your initial impulse is to, say, show off how brilliant and sensitive you are, or to compete with what your fellow artists are doing, or to win money and fame, then—according to Larkin—you’ve failed before you’ve even started. As he writes, “If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device [i.e., the poem] has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing.”

Stage two: Try to replicate this feeling in others

Stage two, Larkin writes, is “to construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time.” Easy, right?

I’m kidding, of course. Trying to arrange language in such a way that it makes a complete stranger feel a particular feeling is a trick that poets work at their entire lives. If it’s not done properly, Larkin writes, “the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while.”

Note that Larkin keeps calling the poem “the device.” I like this. It backs up his assertion that it’s not the poem that’s the important thing; rather, it’s the feeling that it triggers. It’s almost like setting a trap.

Stage three: Let the work do its thing

The third stage doesn’t even involve the poet! Larkin describes it as “the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.” This is a stage that the poet can’t control—but Larkin says that the poem cannot succeed without it. Absent this “successful reading,” he writes, “the poem can hardly be said to exist at all.”

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OK, so what do we think? My honest reaction to all this is . . . you skipped the actual creation part? I mean, I certainly can’t argue with Larkin’s three-stage formulation. It’s true: The whole game really can be reduced to becoming obsessed with a feeling, trying to re-create that feeling in others, and then hoping the connection occurs. But there is a lot of mystery and complication between stages one and two!

Larkin knew this, of course, as does every artist. The actual creation part—that’s not so easy to explain, nor to replicate in any kind of predictable way. In Larkin’s case it happened very slowly. His poetry books came out at intervals of almost a decade. Individual poems could take years. Larkin wrote the first three stanzas of his late masterpiece “Aubade” in 1974, then let the poem sit for three years, finally adding the concluding two stanzas in the fall of 1977.

Philip Larkin via the New Yorker

What finally made a poem work? In a different essay, from 1964, Larkin gives an important hint. He says, “there must be among the ingredients that go towards the writing of a poem a streak of curious self-gratification.” Aha! In other words, in stage two, when you’re trying to replicate the original feeling in others, you actually do it by satisfying yourself? I think that’s right.

(Larkin also says, in another essay, “one of the reasons one writes is that all existing books are somehow unsatisfactory,” which—yes.)

One thing I wish Larkin had addressed in “The Pleasure Principle” is whether the original feeling in stage one ought to be different from work to work, or if the poet/artist can spend his or her entire career trying to replicate one feeling, over and over. I suspect the latter is true. I keep coming back to a Vivian Gornick book review from last year, which begins:

Most writers of books have only one story to tell; it is the one wrapped around a piece of emotional wisdom the author has made his or her own. If the writers are any good at what they do, the story deepens with each book that is written. If they are less than good, the story will simply repeat itself at the same level at which it originally took shape. In time, the work of the better writer will come to feel enriched by the clear renewal of lived experience, while the work of the lesser one will come to seem ever more reduced. I hold this truth to be self-evident for the writers of fiction and nonfiction alike.

Larkin writes of “an emotional concept” that must be replicated in the reader. Gornick bests him, I think, by calling it “a piece of emotional wisdom the author has made his or her own.” Maybe that’s the real trick, to possess that wisdom. Then you can spend your whole life—a good life—trying to articulate it.

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LARKIN’S IDEAL WRITING ROUTINE

He told the Paris Review in 1982:

The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there. . . . I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the University bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two. The first part of the evening had the second part to look forward to, and I could enjoy the second part with a clear conscience because I’d done my two hours.

Larkin only wrote for two hours because he worked as a librarian all day, an arrangement that he mostly found congenial—”I don’t think you can write a poem for more than two hours,” he told the Paris Review—though he sometimes wondered if he shouldn’t have tried harder to make a living as a writer. But you also get the sense that, at some level, Larkin enjoyed being constrained by circumstances. As he said in a 1979 interview, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

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MORE POETS’ PROCESSES

From the archive:

Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas

Alice Notley on getting things to come easily

Mary Ruefle does not own a computer

Byron composed on horseback, Shelley gnawed a hunch of dry bread

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