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Sport 39: 2011
PUNCTUATION
PUNCTUATION
Since the Rachel Barrowman biography, the power of R.A.K. Mason’s early work can be explained by the thing plenty of people knew but lacked the language or social nerve to declare: Mason was bi-polar. Hence the intense, over-excited poems of the young man, the verbal highs and lows, where passion and rage swirl around inside the tough, rigid, containing form. Maybe those steady Georgian models imposed themselves on feeling and experience in ways that made all the difference. They held the mania yet also intensified it.
Mason would probably have been a very bad poet if he had had socalled open form available to him: just one more Allen Ginsberg on a bad day. As it is, there are the great early poems: ‘On the Swag’, ‘Footnote to John II, iv’, ‘Old Memories of Earth’, ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’.
Sometimes I think you could just about reduce Mason’s poems down to a sort of punctuation
[!] or [?!] or [!!!]
depending perhaps on the time of day, or the phases of the moon.