Editorial
Poetry, prostitution & the pimps
…a more creative and combative culture would emerge if all arts subsidies were cut and the money that presently funds a bloated bureaucracy was pumped into a comprehensive welfare system… It is repugnant that vast sectors of the population are excluded from access to arts money…
Stewart Home, Jean Baudrillard & the Psychogeography of Nudism
1 Inclusion & disappearance: curb crawling in poesy
"We are in the middle of a large-scale renaissance of poetry in Britain today. It began in the late seventies and is still going strong." So says Ruth Padel, as she overviews contemporary poetry.(1) Her vantage point provides her with a rare perspective, she surveys poetry as a 18th century English farmer might have surveyed his land. She sees her liberties and impossibly meaty sheep, these things - to her - are self-evident. Life is good. Of course, 'liberty' was a loaded word, and to receive English Liberties in those days you had to be male, and a landowner. A liberty was a benefit, available only to those who were entitled.
This poetry renaissance is a very English thing, for only certain kinds of poets are entitled to it. It occurs within an enclosure, albeit a disputed one. The politics of this pseudo literary situation have something in common with the spectacular conflict between 'old' and 'new' money (now in the form of a play called Nomenclature, it is currently running at the House of Lords, a good old fashioned London theatre). There are those who think they are born to control actual or symbolic capital and there are those who think they have sold enough of themselves or others to take this liberty for themselves. For those of us who were born and remain poor it makes very little difference who wins, though the viscous etiquette of the relatively privileged can sometimes be entertaining.
In terms of logos and brand names, Bloodaxe champion the new money. Quite who the ancien regime are is a matter of opinion, but Neil Astley has Picador and Cape firmly in his sights. Whilst lamenting the corruption of contemporary poetry reviewing, Astley makes his feelings plain: "Picador gets plenty of coverage for editor Don Paterson's clique of not-so-young turks reviewed by fellow Picador poet Sean O'Brien…" And again, "More poets from the same clique are published by Robin Robertson at Cape…" This perceived cartel (2) processes value and directs it into its own centre, "Last year, as has been well documented, the judging panel [of the Forward Prize], including two Picador poets, gave all three Forward Prizes to Picador poets. This year another panel including two Picador poets has shortlisted three Picador poets for two of the prizes…" (3)
Neil Astley seems to feel excluded by a London clique. He is out on a commercial limb and - with falling sales and Waterstones to cope with - it seems that those he wants to share review column inches with are happily going to cut him out. Personally, I doubt that Astley's prescription for an improved poetry market would work, but if Bloodaxe falls then his rhetorical question will be answered; poetry will be in crisis and denial won't be an option, even for a possibly smug, exclusively male and middle class London elite.
2 Marketing necessity: 'all of our girls are clean'
For Astley, redemption comes in female form. However, he is no worshipper of the Great Goddess - his interest isn't religious - nor is he sexually predatory. Like a self-made 'stupid man' advert, Neil Astley puts women on a pedestal for commercial reasons. Women have a marketable image, the public like women and women are modern. Well, I liked women before they were fashionable, but if we're talking poetry, then for me the poetry matters more than who writes it. (4)
There is a hint of desperation about Neil Astley's article in the Bookseller. He's right about the need for an inclusive poetry scene, cliques destroy what they covet, cliques are offensive and they hurt those who they exclude and they can edit good poetry out of the canon altogether, they destroy what we are and what we need to be. Having been excluded by cliques myself, I'd stand shoulder to shoulder with Neil Astley on that. Astley loses it though, going off into the realm of an extreme, biologically-based right wing politics. In his desperation he quotes, with approval, sexist bigot Debbie Taylor's 'definition' of "the masculine literary aesthetic". She creates, from her idea of men, a sexy demon - oh no Mrs - in an act absurdly reminiscent of the Nazi definition of 'degenerate art'.(5)
Debbie Taylor divides herself as she formulates her prejudice into a supposedly literary category, then attacks what she despises or fears in herself. She says, "Male writers are not into communication and empathy with their readers. Male writers want to impress." She may or may not believe that black men have huge penises and natural rhythm, but that is the ideological territory she occupies. Basing aesthetic or literary judgements on the skin colour, race or other biological coincidences of the author has nothing to do with literature, it has everything to do with hatred and desire. That she is fascinated by men is apparent, but it is common for bigots to envy what they fear. With male writers she says, "there is a sense of the stag pawing the ground, the peacock fanning his tail…" With these metaphors, she tries so hard to impress, but the lady protests too much. Neil Astley degrades himself by quoting this psychopathology. That he offers it as proof of his plan to save the poetry market is scary.(6)
3 Speak when you're spoken to: the administration of silence
But poetry is booming, remember? It’s a veritable Weimar Republic of fun! In her own corner of Never-Never Land, Ruth Padel's view, the perspective of a consummate insider, is equally symptomatic of the moment. This is Blair's Britain - we have a Labour government, thus things have got better - it's a fairer, more inclusive society, there's less prejudice around. You can't keep a good man - or, bless my soul, a good woman - down. It is a pleasure to be able to proclaim the wonder of how things are done these days in the arts, especially poetry.
She might be in denial, or it might be the case that Ruth Padel really doesn't know what she's talking about. Perhaps she doesn't know that the poor are getting poorer, that social exclusion is on the increase, that social mobility is in decline. The underclass have never been so far below the surface, so completely out of sight. It is now expedient for even the bourgeois left (as if such a thing could exist) to say that the poor are no longer with us. There may be increased spending on health and education, but these days services buy middle English votes, they do not meet needs. Labour do not fear a withdrawal of support from the poor - poorer voters are hard to motivate - they fear middle class rebellions. Services are targeted to where there is the greatest need - and labour needs the middle classes. As hate objects perhaps, but at least to Thatcher the poor existed. Appearances are everything. Poetry is booming (just keep saying it).
"Compared to what goes on all the time in some countries, injustice in Britain was no big deal." (8) Underclass, what underclass? The biggest insult to the excluded is that Padel places injustice in the past. It is easy to see how the sanguine view of British poetry develops in the morally relative world of the 'modernised' middle classes. Social hierarchy and its effects are buried under a terminology, a narrative superstructure, in which comfortable people tell themselves they are good. Meanwhile, the dissolution of the poor goes on; it is happening within discourse or 'the stories we are told of the world'. The poor still exist, but as unlabelled objects they are invisible. This has happened alongside the development of equal opportunities policies and notional human rights. We live in a world where nice people like nice things, and they don't like nasty things, and they are clear on that. No-one will shift them. Beyond the discourse(s) of middle class self affirmation, there is an exterior world, a social realm peopled by those who have no right of access to dignity, rights, services and - err, poetry - let alone democracy, respect, self-esteem, education or health.
A poetry that is, essentially, a discourse of bourgeois self-affirmation is, essentially, no different to any of the culturally valorised poetries of the past. Britain has an extreme and exaggerated class system and it is getting more extreme and exaggerated, not less. The mainstream, which Padel places herself within, is an interior construct. It is exclusive, and inclusion has nothing to do with literary ability. It might appear liberal in terms of race and sex, but the main discriminatory constructs are - as they have always been - focussed on class and nothing has changed since Wat Tyler received a knife wound to the throat.
The fetish - which Padel calls 'clarity' - for 'accessible' poetry is ironic, but often only in the sense that the sense may be obvious. The social-poetic enclosure has never been less accessible, it has never been so conservative, either in its stylistic narrowness or its social exclusivity. The poor, those who don't get to enjoy the experience and benefits of middle class life, can come to a workshop and be condescended to, but will not be admitted as an equal, no matter how good their writing is. Indeed, for a person of the underclass, ability - in that it threatens the mediocre perpetrators of the mainstream - is a disadvantage. The more ability there is in such a person, the more important it is that they be silenced. In Britain our silence is booming - it has been since the seventies.
4 An official calendar: how to make that red light work for you
In publishing 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, Padel places the calendar and the symbolism of the calendar at her disposal. A calendar governs our experience of the movement of time - it is a form of mediation - it is placed between the subject of time and the sun. In placing it there, Padel places us in its shadow. The whole point of calendars is to create discreet spaces in time - it encloses our days like boundaries enclose our land. It tells us were we cannot go. It invalidates us. It delineates time as it relates to work. Since prehistory the control of calendars provided the self appointed rulers of space and time with a means to discipline those who are subordinate. As the sun rules the seasons so the calendar rules the poor. Impoverished, you need to be told when you can go home. Your rest is both authorised and denied by the mechanism that delineates it. In offering us a complete year of poems Padel offers us a totality. She speaks a language of inclusion, but her book is exclusive and totalitarian. Ruth Padel talks of change whilst her calendar - monumental and yet modern - tries to halt time. What is this? If the category of persons who rule this or that aspect of society, of culture, put up a woman to conduct the survey, then the survey must be inclusive? So much for open society. The calendar rules, okay? It's a status quo in a New Labour style. Its an act of denial. It's a set of paving slabs over the poetry garden that still exists in the dark. There's more than one cartel.
5 A ruinous mutuality: the pimp that always makes me pay
Whilst the "large-scale renaissance of poetry in Britain" was going on, poetry got mislaid. It came to be about presentation, about style not content. By style, I don't mean 'poetic' style (wash your mouth out), I mean presentational style. The Poetry Society took the lead - the last time they were to do this - when they went glossy and 'professional'. The Regional Arts Boards, with their mission to stitch up markets and humanise the telly watching masses by talking down to them through nice simple art, found - in the already select enclosure of 'renascent' poetry - willing agents. The rich and the middle class, the suburban 'stakeholders', gained (through 'carefully targeted' arts grants). The supposedly benighted masses paid, through general taxation, to be patronised. Along the way a whole lot of poetry was disappeared. An ideologically modified poetry, a sickly changeling, was promoted in place of the real thing. Public arts funding, a medieval system of patronage, maintains the status quo. Like a New Labour MP, the set-up became suburban, pretentious and nasty. The system is designed to create an appearance of inclusion. There's no conspiracy, but too many people do well out of the current situation for them to allow it to change. Literature belongs to the middle classes, even if keeping it that way destroys it. With a system like this, poetry is always booming!
Waterstones bans poetry book reps from their stores. Signature - the poetry book distributors - collapse so fast that the staff don't know its coming a week before they are unemployed. Oxford, Hutchinson, Sinclair-Stevenson, Secker, etc. close their poetry lists. Some of the remaining poetry publishers are devoted to self-publishing the editor and one or two of their friends, some are slowly shrinking their lists, few are outward looking. There is widespread corruption in poetry book reviewing, mutual backscratching - an ineffectual and self-destructive form of advertising - is common. Editors publish each other's books, regardless of how bad their poetry is. This is a ruinous mutuality. As poetry collapses in broad daylight before her, Ruth Padel talks of "large-scale renaissance". With such a high profile act of denial before us, it is easy to see why the poetry world is more exclusive, more corrupt and more aesthetically, morally and critically redundant than it has been for many decades. Public policy and the implementation of public policy has combined with the effects of high street take-overs, the end of the Net Book Agreement and the social exclusivity and dishonesty of many in the poetry scene in the UK - men and women - to bring poetry publishing to its knees. But as Ruth Padel might put it, today is a very good day to bury poetry.
1. Ruth Padel, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (Chatto & Windus,2002, £12.99), 'Introduction', page 1.
2. Which may or may not exist, I'm so far outside of the enclosure - the one that includes both Don Paterson and Neil Astley - that I can't tell.
3. All three quotes are from 'Waving or Drowning? Is poetry booming or in a crisis?' The Bookseller, 9 August 2002
4. Of course, in this issue of 10th Muse there is only one woman poet amongst several. I'd happily reverse those proportions, but women aren't sending me their poems. Women are the more masculine sex these days - I think that 10th Muse is too sissy girly-girl feminine to withstand the female gaze.
5. Debbie Taylor is editor of Mslexia magazine.
6. To be fair, he does attempt rehabilitation with the comment, "...women - the bulk of poetry's readership - want emotional penetration as well as intellectual foreplay." For Neil, 'penetration' and 'empathy' are synonymous.
7. "The best way to help the poor within the welfare state is not to target programmes more carefully on the poor..." Paul Spicker, professor of public policy at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and member of the 'leftwing thinktank', Catalyst. Quoted from The Guardian, August 28th 2002.
8. Ruth padel, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (Chatto & Windus, 2002), from 'Reading Poetry Today' (editorial essay), page 22.
Page(s) 2-6
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The