It’s a great film, which leaves no doubt about the serious motives behind the West Indies players’ determination to prove themselves not only equal to, but better than, the other Test nations and most especially England, the ‘former masters’, as several of the players put it. (Bunny Wailer, with relish, describes West Indies’ trouncings of England as ‘like the slaves whipping the asses of the masters’.) It’s also a fabulous opportunity to catch glimpses of the team in its pomp – Michael Holding’s beautiful glide to the wicket, Viv Richards’ imperious thrashing of the ball into the boundary ropes, and nonchalant, unwavering stare back at the bowler who’s just tried to bounce him out.

But there are a couple of issues raised by the film that are genuinely disconcerting, in somewhat different ways. The first is simply the scale of the decline of West Indies as a Test-playing nation: from undisputed world champions over a period of fifteen years (a record Michael Holding points proudly to over the closing credits) to abject losers who seem barely able to find eleven players who look as though they want to be on the field. It’s a very sad state of affairs for cricket and has been for a long time, but it’s thrown into very sharp relief by this film, which shows exactly what was at stake in West Indies’ fight to get to the top – why it mattered so much that a team of black men could become, and remain, winners.

The second issue is one that I’m still struggling to get my head round: the invitation extended to the West Indies team by the apartheid regime in South Africa to go and play cricket there – and the fact that several of the players, including Colin Croft, accepted this invitation. Croft features, alongside Richards, Holding, Andy Roberts and Gordon Greenidge, as one of the main ‘talking heads’ in the film, and it came as a shock to me – having watched him speak of the team’s pride and the racism they had to overcome – to discover that he had taken the money and gone to South Africa. It’s quite painful to watch him justifying his decision to go (he attempts to equate it with going to Australia, along with the rest of the Test team, to play in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket), especially set alongside Richards’ and Holding’s vehement responses. Richards’s voice is menacingly quiet as he recalls the regime’s offer to him of the status of ‘honorary white’, and dismisses any idea that he could have accepted; but there are visible tears in his eyes as he recalls Desmond Tutu’s telling him how much Nelson Mandela, then still imprisoned, had appreciated the refusal of most of the West Indians to play in South Africa. Holding, for his part, simply says, ‘What is wrong with the colour of my skin, or my ethnicity? Why should I be an honorary anything other than what I am?’ Croft admits that, after the trip to South Africa, knowing the likely reception he would face at home, he didn’t go back to the West Indies, but went instead to Florida. He never played for West Indies again. It seems a sad end for one of a group of extraordinary cricketers, whose achievements surely stand for matters of great importance far beyond the game of cricket.

Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,
den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen
unendlich aufgehn

[We never, even for a single day,
have before us that pure space in which flowers
endlessly grow]

We are never ‘in’ the world as the rest of nature is in it; rather, we stand ‘over against’ it: ‘Dieses heisst Schicksal: gegenüber sein / und nichts als das und immer gegenüber’ [This is what we call fate: to be opposed [the German word ‘gegenüber’ has the stronger, more spatial sense of ‘against-over’] / and nothing but that, and always opposed]. In this Elegy, it seems to be our continual and necessary conceptualising (seeing ‘form’) that sets us over-against the world. Jeff Wainwright expresses the same thought in his poem ‘by categories do we maister [master] the world’ when he writes ‘we are made lonely by our categories / for nothing else owns them’ (Clarity or Death!, Carcanet, 2008, p. 27).

In this context it strikes us all the more powerfully, even joyfully, when we find in the Ninth Elegy what can only, I think, be read as a passionate statement of the value, the necessity even, of poetry, and by extension of human being and language. Rilke begins the elegy by posing the question: why the need to be human? He suggests that it is

…weil Hiersein viel ist, und weil uns scheinbar
alles das Hiesige braucht, dieses Schwindende, das
seltsam uns angeht. …

[because being-here is much, and because it seems that
everything fleetingly here needs us,
addresses itself strangely to us]

Why does the world need us?

… Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,
Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, –
höchstens: Säule, Turm… aber zu sagen, verstehs,
oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals
innig meinten zu sein. …

[Perhaps we are here in order to say ‘house’,
‘bridge’, ‘fountain’, ‘gate’, ‘jug’, ‘fruit tree’, ‘window’ –
at most ‘column’, ‘tower’... but to speak them, [you] understand,
oh to speak them thus, as things themselves never
intended to be [or perhaps ‘never thought they could be’]]

This ‘speaking things into being’, then, is the answer to the question ‘why the need to be human?’, and Rilke gives it emphatic summation in what can only be read as a moment of revelation, both a credo and an imperative for any poet:

Hier ist des Säglichen Zeit, hier seine Heimat.
Sprich und bekenn.

[Here is the time of the sayable, here is its home.
Speak and make known.]

The sense here of having reached the centre of things, the important and vital and true thing, is so palpable and so solid that it almost seems like a stone you could hold in your hand. There is a huge sense of relief, it seems to me, at having reached down through all the unhappiness and sense of lostness and unbelonging and found at last this genuine reason why we, as human beings, do belong in the world.

More than belonging, in fact: it could be said that we are required by the world; even that we in some sense make the world. Rilke’s statement that ‘here’ (in the world) is both the time and the place, the homeland, of the ‘säglich’, the speakable, the sayable, that-which-can-be-said, seems to me to have Kantian resonances. Kant’s argument in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the world has the shape and form it has because we necessarily experience it in accordance with the fundamental conceptual structures of our thinking and perceiving, fundamental structuring ‘rules’ (such as the concepts of number, causality, and especially time and space) which he terms ‘categories’. Certainly the world exists; it is not a figment of our minds, nor (as in Berkeley’s version of idealism) of God’s mind; but we shape it, we conceptualise and, therefore, speak it into its specificity.

Rilke’s emphasis on the sayable seems to me to ascribe a similarly constitutive role to human, which is to say conceptual and linguistic, being. Despite our seeming so often and so fundamentally at odds with, over-against, the world, in fact the world needs us to bring it into form, to mean, as it were, on its behalf. This is a triumphant reversal of the despairing thought in the Eighth Elegy, that it is our relentless arranging and forming and shaping and reflecting that sets us forever opposed to, unable to live within, the ‘open’, the imagined ‘pure space’ in which the flower blooms. On the contrary, the Ninth Elegy asserts: the flower (like the house, bridge, fountain) can only be brought into its specific, formed being within the time and space of the sayable.

What then is the role of the poet? It is, surely, to ‘make known’; to say how things are. And this is all the more vital because of the essentially ephemeral nature of all things, including of course each one of us, which Rilke sums up in a passage of stunning intensity (following the lines quoted above in which he states that all fleeting things need us):

… Uns, die Schwindendsten. Ein Mal
jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nichtmehr. Und wir auch
ein Mal. Nie wieder. Aber dieses
ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal :
irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrüfbar.

[Us, the most fleeting of all. Once only,
just once. Once and no more. And us too,
once. Never again. But to have existed
this once, even if only once: to
have been earthly; this cannot be gainsaid.]

The lines are a kind of crying-out, the poet not merely describing but enacting, through the painful and emphatic repetition of ‘ein Mal’ (‘once’, literally ‘one time’), the devastating Angst (existential anguish) that accompanies our realisation of our own mortality, and the necessarily accompanying sense of responsibility – not just to ourselves but to the world, which needs us, turns (angeht) to us in order that we may give it expression. It is, finally, our role to bear witness to the nature of earthly (irdisch) being:

Preise dem Engel die Welt…
… zeig
ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern gestaltet,
als ein Unsriges lebt, neben der Hand und im Blick.
Sag ihm die Dinge. Er wird staunender stehn; wie du standest
bei dem Seiler in Rom, oder beim Töpfer am Nil.

[Praise the world to the angel...
...show
him a simple thing, something that, formed from one age to another,
lives as something that is ours, near to hand and within sight.
Speak to him of things. He will stand astonished, as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter by the Nile.]

The emphasis here on the ‘simple’ thing, the thing that is ‘near to hand’ and ‘in sight’, a solid and physical thing, surely echoes back to the time Rilke spent watching Rodin at work in his studio, and to the transformative (and characteristically modernist) emphasis in the New Poems on the ‘thing’ – both the object that is the subject of the poem, and the poem itself, as a made thing. It is also of course paradoxical: the apparently simplest of earthly ‘things’ is always at the same time marvellously complex, just as rope-making and pot-making (and sculpting and writing poetry) require skill and thought and painstaking attentiveness. Earthly being, in its infinite variety, is extraordinary, and the Elegy ends on a note of joyful praise:

… Überzahliges Dasein
entspringt mir im Herzen.

[Incalculable Being
springs up in my heart]

‘Sprich und bekenn’: speak, make known. This, this ‘ein Mal’, this once-only earthly life, is the time and the place of the sayable.

Here are a few short lines I wrote this morning, thinking of Linda.

Magnolia
for Linda

But so soon, this first
drifting of bravura pink
back to the earth.
Leaves April still
so young. Still
so green.

I won this book in a Carcanet be-the-first-person-to-answer-this-simple-question competition. Not really knowing anything much about John Ashbery (to my shame), except that he writes ‘difficult’ and ‘obscure’ poetry, I didn’t actually look at the book for quite a while. Then at some point, mooching around looking for something to read, I happened to pick it up and start reading one of the pieces at random. I was immediately hooked. Ashbery writes with enormous verve, enthusiasm, erudition and generosity on a wide range of writers and their work. It was on his urging, as it were, that I went off to find Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems; his review of the book begins, engagingly, ‘One hopes that the title of Elizabeth Bishop’s new book is an error and that there will be more poems and at least another Complete Poems’ (p. 120).

This small example highlights two of the most enjoyable features of this book: Ashbery’s generosity towards other writers and artists, and the wry elegance of his prose style. Both of these contribute largely to the sheer joy of reading the pieces collected in the book. Here is Ashbery on Marianne Moore:

“And there are other cases in which I become aware before the end of a poem that Miss Moore and I have parted company somewhat further back. Sometimes, as in ‘The Jerboa’, the author has her say and retires, leaving you in the company of some curious little rodent. And her mode of direct address can be misleading: toward the end of ‘To Statecraft Embalmed’ you become aware that she is no longer addressing an ibis, or even you, the reader; for the last minute she has been gazing absently at something terribly important just over your left ear.” (p. 111)

The first sentence here is simply wonderful, conjuring (in my mind at least) an image of Ashbery and ‘Miss Moore’ (or her poem) sitting on little rafts, regarding each other with a kind of friendly bafflement as they float off in opposite directions. (It is also a very good example of the subtle generosity Ashbery shows towards the potential readers of the poets he writes about: well, you feel, if John Ashbery is struggling to understand what’s going on in this poem, then it’s surely OK for me to be struggling as well; and worth persisting despite the struggle.)

Ashbery also has some intriguing and thought-provoking things to say on the subject of poetry in general, what it might be and what we might do with it. At one point (you’ll have to buy the book to find out where, because I didn’t make a note of the page number) he memorably describes poetry as ‘three parts shimmer, one part shriek’. And in his Robert Frost Medal Address he talks about the way in which most questions put to poets in Q&A sessions are really versions of ‘Please explain your poetry to me’; a hopeless task, he says, because ‘the act of writing the poem was an explanation of something that had occurred to the poet, and demanded to be put into words which in turn formed a poem’ (p. 244). This is surely true, at least to some extent; and yet, with characteristic politeness and (again) generosity, Ashbery goes on to say that he will nonetheless go on making ‘repeated stabs’ at this ‘impossible feat’, ‘if only because people expect it, and it is normal and proper to give people what they expect’ (p. 244). He goes on to give a fascinating and in places very funny account of the development of his writing, beginning with his earliest tour-de-force (written when he was eight), ‘The Battle’ (‘about a battle between the snowflakes and the bunnies. I can remember only two lines of it, which I will inflict on you to show that my poetry did too rhyme once upon a time’ [p. 245]).

This book contains insightful and entertaining writing on Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Jane Bowles, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Mark Ford, and other people, some of whom I had never heard of. Even if you know nothing whatsoever of the person or subject Ashbery is writing about, you are guaranteed to enjoy the company.

John Ashbery, Selected Prose, edited by Eugene Richie (Carcanet, 2004)

I can only suppose that England’s crushing victory at the MCG has gone to my head, or at least to my unconscious. Happy new year to all you cricket-lovers out there.