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The following questions were sent to a number of poets, for them to answer individually or to use as a basis for a general statement about the writing of poetry today.

(a) Would poetry be more effective, i.e. interest more people more profoundly, if it were concerned with the issues of our time?

(b) Do you feel your views on politics or religion influence the kind of poetry you write? Alternatively, do you think poetry has uses as well as pleasure?

(c) Do you feel any dissatisfaction with the short lyric as a poetic medium? If so, are there any poems of a longer or non-lyric kind that you visualize yourself writing?

(d) What living poets continue to influence you, English or American?

(e) Are you conscious of any current ‘poeticization’ of language which requires to be broken up in favour of a more ‘natural’ diction? Alternatively, do you feel any undue impoverishment in poetic diction at the moment?

(f) Do you see this as a good or bad period for writing poetry?

JULIAN MITCHELL

     Poetry is one of a number of possible literary forms: most things can be done better in prose: most of the poetry that is written at any given period is simply awful.

     Given the first of these axioms, it follows that for me there is nothing wrong with the short lyric. It is, in fact, the medium most suitable for the kind of personal statement that I need, from time to time, to make, and which will not go into prose. But being, in my own estimation, a better prose writer than poet, prose usually serves, and I don’t imagine that I shall write a long non-lyric poem in the forseeable future. If I did suddenly want to write such a poem, the problem of form would be fascinatingly difficult — it might, in fact, be insoluble. What I do see myself doing, however, is a certain amount of experiment on the border between verse and prose — though this would be for essentially prosaic rather than poetic purposes. I don’t mean anything linguistic, but rather a means of obtaining certain effects through stylistic variation.

     There is, I feel, a real question lurking beneath your concern with the ‘poetic’ versus the ‘natural’, which is, simply: Why is so much poetry so deadeningly dull? Well, apart from axiom three above, there is, I believe, a current ‘poeticization’ which needs to have the guts knocked out of it. Pound once said that poetry should ‘have nothing, nothing, that you couldn’t in some circumstances, under stress of some emotion, actually say.’ You can say most poetry today, but when you read it aloud you notice to your horror that it isn’t in anyone’s voice. It’s this conformity of voicelessness that needs denouncing rather than any verbal tricksiness, I think. I know several poets whose conversation is far livelier than their verse, largely because they daren’t use the rhythmic variety of their natural speech. It’s part of the accepted rhetoric of dullness, if you’ll forgive the phrase, which is just as phoney, just as hollow, as the razzamatazz and the woof and the warp stuff it’s alleged to be reacting against. God save us from a return to the Wind Cannot Read School, of course, but their anonymous nonsense was not really any more boring than most of the sober-sided solemnities of current fashion.

     But really one shouldn’t bother about the ebb and flow of fashion, one should keep one’s ear tuned to the ground-bass of the iambic pentameter and acknowledge the masters of one’s language, then see what one can do. If I felt more confidence in myself as a poet I would be experimenting with complex regular stanzas, with and without rhyme, trying to combine rhythmical variety with the satisfaction of rigid technical demands. As it is I’ve been writing prose for months and months and the poems don’t get much further than first drafts which are so far from the sort of thing I want to do that they end up in the waste-paper basket.

     Thus right now is a bad period for writing poetry for me. I don’t think ‘the times’ are ever bad for writing poetry, nor are they ever good. I think prose is almost always better than poetry at dealing with public issues, but one’s politics and religion, or lack of them, will always affect one’s writing. It is probably better that this should happen unconsciously.

     I am influenced by everyone and everything, especially when in love.