Editorial
The Making of the Lumpen Poetariat
Nonism, in fact, was what I, personally, didn't do,
or say, at a certain period.
Dr. Charles Mintern, Little Piddlehinton, September 2004
1. Real metaphorical numbers & trickle down poetry
People with an interest in linguistically accessible or politically committed poetry sometimes express frustration with the works of those we have come to call 'innovative'. They might point out that the audience are excluded from such innovative poetries by their hermeticism, experimentalism or elitism.
The move toward accessible poetry, presented as a virtuous manoeuvre, was always a marketing ploy. Inclusivity is the moral sop to justify the development of a market that, ironically, excludes many poets and their audiences. The development of an associated poetic, that could be described as a corporate poetic, has been accompanied by persistent talk of a poetry boom.1 The discourses of accessibility and poetry boom are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing. The inevitability implied is defensive; it is the third, unstated, discourse of an ideology that appears natural, wholesome and good.
Within this ideology, potential poetry consumers became an economic value. Emphasise their vulnerability and teach them to turn to poetry in their hour of need - like morning after Prozac, a quick bit of Wendy Cope will sort you out - and you'll have Waterstones begging on its knees for more poetry books. The step from arts ethics to market aesthetics was a small one. It could happen over lunch and you wouldn't notice.
For professional poetry producers and arts administrators the public-private split of the grant managed market provided an easy way out of an ethical and social dilemma. Those involved weren't stitching up a market, or applying the discipline of a managed economy to one that could happily regulate itself, they were spreading a virtue they had come upon in the pursuit of their craft or in the service of that craft. In this sense poetry, capitalism and government are the same thing. Poetry is a civilising influence and if it spreads its virtues under a brand name then it will be more efficient. So, poetry got a job.
2. Cultural diversity & the office aesthetic
In the rush of marketing that passed for a revolt against modernism, inclusive individualism - the post-modern equal opportunities aesthetic - began to underpin a New Poetry. It went with everything else, because everything else was 'new' too. All of this seemed natural. If you felt excluded because of your hermetic, experimental or elitist poetry - or because your social category wasn't fashionable - well you shouldn't. Natural selection just is.
We all make generalisations and if they are often contradictory we might say that is natural too. I like to make a feature of my aesthetic, political and social contradictions, but generally people attempt synthesis where only absurdity is possible. In an individualistic age, generalisations about poetry - and the categories created from them - tend toward the synthetic and absurd.2
When poetry is discussed it often seems that the commodity is the poet not their work. Representations of poets are easier to accept and pass on than ideas about a poem, let alone a body of work. Representations are erected, like scarecrows in a field, because it's easier than scaring the crows away yourself. However we learn about poetry, we experience poets according to the narratives associated with them. Shelley is a winsome boy-revolutionary in the midst of a tumult of elements, beauties, ideas and pure feelings. Byron is a lame goat who slept with his sister and shocked Europe with his awesome creativity. In contemporary parlance, each of these commodities has a brand identity. We don't so much buy into a poem of theirs as an identity of our own.
The narratives associated with contemporary poets are more obscure. Some people think they know that Larkin was a racist or that Hughes was a misogynist. Beyond a vague awareness of the Liverpool Poets, the majority of people in Britain don't know anything about recent poetry at all. So we need arts administrators - those who shell out the grants, prizes and awards - to make press release opportunities with which to generate public narratives about poets.3 Theses personnel selections - which have to be done in a business-like and practical manner - occur within a contemporary context. Given they are selecting people with which to create a public narrative, the decisions must be made in relation to contemporary public values and mores rather than poetry.
If the dominant values are based on a corporate model then it is also natural that these personnel selections should be made according to a corporate template. The professional manager is the personification of added value. It shouldn't really surprise us then that the official figurehead of UK poetry is Andrew Motion. He may or may not be a good poet, but he looks like a manager. The Virtuous - his metaphorical sales force - were pre-identified because they were already included, so you have your manager and his team. It just happened like that, naturally. Poetry is just another day at the office.
3. Official poetry: the single unified plural
To get ahead in poetry you need to know how to write a press release, but not a poem. Providing the figures come good - units sold, attendance at events, residencies arranged - it doesn't matter if the audience becomes an unwitting focus group. When the poem that doesn't get a laugh gets left out next time, the poet and the audience programme each other into idiocy.4 The audiences may get bigger - blandness sells well because it offends fewer consumers - but the experience is as rewarding as a trip to McDonalds. Also, there is only room in the High Street for so many McDonalds type products.
You hit your targets and therefore you succeed. Never has the poetry world been so successful, at least in the UK. In the light of these huge social and economic advances, it seems odd that overall the poetry book market is in recession. There may be many reasons for this decline, a truly objective assessment would involve a more complex narrative than this, but it could be that people don't want poetry to be useful.5
If those who are repositioning poetry as if it were an economy burger with antidepressant qualities were to defend their long act of vandalism, they might say 'the public should get what it wants. If the public wants blandness, then so be it'. This would be the social elite deploying the 'popular art' versus 'elitist art' argument. Odd, that in other art forms elitism is defended. No-one argues for accessible opera or ballet, except in terms of cheap seats. Poetry has little value as symbolic capital so, on the whole, the wealthy aren't interested in it.
The poet is a ventriloquist's dummy and the ventriloquist is the audience. The poetry that ensues is defined by the extent to which the audience are ignorant of poetry and its potential. Poetry isn't so much 'dumbed down' as made into a cultural dummy. If poetry exists, it is rarely to be found at a subsidised reading. The odd thing is that the audience aren't the people who decide what they want and they have no idea they are used to define what is presented to them.6 These decisions are made by arts administrators, sometimes on the back of research and sometimes out of what they might call their knowledge.7
Attendees at a poetry event are more likely to be there because it is poetry than because they think the particular poet is any good. People go hoping to encounter something more than what they know, but usually find less. Once a poet is hooked into the administrative/performance process they develop skills in public speaking, they get laughs, they get offered more work by the regional poetry Duke and so the closed loop gets ever more hermetically sealed.8
Corporate culture demands a certain register and in the poetry world it does help to be middle class. You might think of the audience as children - avoid touching them and don't frighten them. Also, be bland and appeal to their social prejudices and their vanity - that's how to get on in the corporate poetry world. But these are people and they respond to cynicism. Eventually, this poetry audience will itself become cynical - which is understandable - and stop buying poetry books altogether. This is how the poetry boom works.
4. A tour of the ruins: lets play poets & administrators!
Making narratives is a form of play. It is a game with rules and I have indicated how I think some of the rules apply in terms of promoting poetry. The daft thing is that these rules themselves come out of the narratives created and enacted by all of the people who make a living off the back of poetry. These people might work for the Arts Council, the Poetry Society, the Poetry Book Society, a local authority or any other organisation that takes part in the fiasco.
Their world is self contained. If they look out of the window at the poetry landscape they are seeing something they have created. It is like a 1970s pedestrian precinct on a Sunday afternoon. They cannot see beyond it and they assume that everyone else shares their 'vision for the arts'. The only people I have met who share this vision are people who are paid to.
I am not saying the administrators conspire - lets face it, a conspiracy would at least be interesting - but when they agree to co-operate over strategies relating to the promotion of poetry they are creating such narratives. We might be glad to think that the public knows anything about contemporary poetry at all, but it seems a shame if all they know is bullshit.
People may not be intimidated by poetry that is promoted as accessible, but that doesn't mean that accessibility is what they want. Accessible poetry is not necessarily social or sociable. The notion of accessibility is absurd when applied to poetry. It is as if the poem is a building that might exclude visitors with disabilities - this 'object' or image fails as a correlative of the idea it purports to support - a poem is not a building.9 If a poem were a building you could say this: the more difficult the poem, the more doors it has. Anyone who can make up a story can deal with difficult art.
The producer and consumer split is also a nonsense. Producers of poetry are also consumers of poetry. Some of the other people - the public, etc. - might even be a bit like us? Some of them might want the experience of reading a contemporary poem to be a unique or exotic or captivating or difficult or disturbing one. In a rigged market people cannot freely chose what they read. It is disturbing that the market has been mostly rigged by government employees.
In all other art forms diversity is - more or less - a fact of the market place. Only because the poetry market is so small do the administrators hold so much power. The smaller the poetry market gets, the more power they have. That is why they are destroying the poetry market. They are maintaining the ruins, because that is what suites them. Things are kept in this state of 'almost nothing left' because this is the best circumstance for the literature officers, and those like them, whose agenda is centred on providing opportunities for their mates.10 Change works like this: Things will be as they have always been, only more so.
5. The opportunities equation & asymmetrical even- handedness
You might say that mainstream poetry was virtuous on the basis of the inherent rightness of anything made in the mould of equal opportunities ideology. But even that perception is made within a contemporary context. In this context it has been made clear to us that we need to be in favour of equal opportunities or be socially unclean. Such a context is overwhelming and it includes elements of duress. To get another perspective on equal opportunities ideology, look at where it came from, the USA. The weak and the sick and the poor are brutalised, but it all happens in a proper manner. Equal Opportunities ideology is a fig leaf for power. Like the head of department's over-exposed thong, it reveals more than it conceals In a meritocracy you get what you deserve.
It would appear that the application of equal opportunities ideology is a good thing in terms of protecting the advantages of the rich and a less good thing in terms of asserting the rights of the poor. If you are still poor, despite Equal Opps., then you are undeserving. So this moral mechanism is an ideal tool for those who wish to manage the UK poetry economy. The poetry market, having benefited from the hard work of so many selfless administrators, may be going ever further down the pan, but it is failing for the right reasons. Social exclusion rules, aesthetically speaking.
6. Selling to themselves: lyrical poverty & the lumpen poetariat
Of all the activities associated with the arts at the moment, the 'workshop' has to be one of the most dubious. There is some good practice, but often people are manipulated into being active consumers under cover of a pretence that they are being empowered as producers. A sales force trained to sell to themselves. The problem is that in the wider contemporary market place we decide what we are according to the rules of identity politics. One of the rules of identity politics is that there can be no losers (unless you wish to define yourself as a loser, in which case you access the services marketed at losers). The market is inclusive, it will take anyone's money!
If you feel that you are a poet then, according to the rules of the identity politics game, you are a poet. However, that does not mean that you are a poet in terms of the texts that you produce. In the identity politics game you are a poet because you say you are a poet. But identity politics just gives you a free pass into a market. To put it another way, it gives you the 'right' to say 'rip me off' to companies that provide 'services' to the poetry market. The free pass is worthless. If you feel that makes you a poet, well that's up to you. We could say, 'congratulations, you have just acquired the right to be ripped off.' 11
Get involved in this kind of thing and you will discover that you are a part of your local poetry scene. A local poetry scene is a network of people who are there to help other people justify their enormous salaries. The individual flows of money through a local poetry scene are usually small, but these tributaries all flow symbolically into the salaries of the administrators who decide who is middle class enough to be a professional poet. These 'professionals' are the people who win the poetry competitions and receive grants and awards. In this way aristocratic social structures are maintained within an equal opportunities context. Neat huh? Get involved in your local poetry scene, but only if you want to be a part of the scenery behind which the poetry fraud takes place.
7. The least existent of the arts
I recently had cause to reject some poems submitted by someone who defined their work as being part of a romantic revival called postromanticism. They positioned themselves and their work in opposition to conceptual art. I include the contents of my rejection email below, both to indicate some of my objections and to show that, despite the best efforts of all those who try to limit the development of a socially inclusive poetry market, an active involvement in contemporary poetry can be good fun.12
Perhaps annoyingly, I think your poems are very conceptual. This is because your idea of postromanticism is centred on sensuality. Sensuality presented in a generalised context is an abstraction. It only has meaning within a particular relationship and the people in your poems are presented as types rather than particularities. Deep flirting as a thing in itself seems to be as devoid of meaning as any other abstraction.
For me, the attraction of abstraction is that the viewer/reader is able to project their own identity/meaning/whatever into the artwork. Your poems and, as far as I can tell from your website, your notion of postromanticism, reverses this polarity, treating the viewer/reader as an abstraction and projecting your personality (that is, the persona adopted by the artist) into them. Thus on the one hand your poetry is a form of psychic imperialism and on the other hand it is no less conceptual than Tracey Emin's knickers.
Emin is a more romantic figure than yourself because she valorises her life story in her work. Thus, although her soiled pants are seen as potentially revolting or worthless, her work is personal - and I think emblematic and intimate - her concepts ritualise previous humiliations. That has much in common with the romanticism of, say, Friedrich Holderlin or Novalis. I would say a conceptual artist such as Emin is an inheritor of the romantic tradition. Her bed is an altar, it generates meaning when you look at it. I found your poems a bit sad in that they made me feel commodified, as if I too were a type rather than a person with a real and particular narrative.
In the unofficial world we do what we can with the officially rigged market. The internet offers opportunities for idiots and the erudite alike. It is, if nothing else, a place from which criticisms of the social elite/arts world can be made. But by participating at all we are also helping to keep the rigged market going, for it needs to twitch occasionally for it to be of service to those who exploit it. It is tempting to put forward the notion of a poetry strike. We could picket the Bloodaxe factory or occupy the offices of Faber & Faber. A friend of mine insists there should be a poetry cull, with poetry set-aside schemes in which poets would be paid not to write poetry. This would have obvious benefits.
The pulping in 2002 of the unclaimed stock previously held in a warehouse by the suddenly defunct distributor Signature Books shows what can be done. Perhaps Waterstones and the Arts Council were inspired by Rupert Murdoch, who adjusted relative values in the poetry market by pulping Iain Sinclair's Paladin Poetry list in 1991? As far as poetry is concerned, the Arts Council is like ASDA - when they open a store, or invest in a poet or poetry project, everything around it closes down. The administration of poetry is easy; you create scarcity in one sector to create boom in another and you waste capital on poetry promotions that ruin the market for almost everyone. It keeps things socially concise, which is a virtue in poetry, apparently.
______________________________________
1 This poetic does not exist. It is - or the term 'poetic' represents - a social or economic class, rather than a literary phenomenon. It might also be described as 'a discourse used to market the products of the poetry boom'.
2 This form of individualism - in which people are consumers - has nothing to do with pluralism. Here, the units are all the same. They are encountered within a limited set of variables. They are not people with a unique narrative.
3 This function used to be fulfilled by criticism but that machinery was broken up and sold off in the 1980s. Criticism allowed mavericks to upset the natural order. Now we have arts administrators working to a Darwinian agenda and they do very well at maintaining the natural order. The rich write poems and the poor read them for sentimental reasons at weddings and funerals. You don't need to know any more than that.
4 Using the audience to determine what you give them has nothing to do with poetry. When an audience is used as a focus group they are, apart from anything else, being treated with contempt.
5 It has been pointed out to me by a nonist colleague that the utility of uselessness has yet to be fully explored.
6 The idea of accessible poetry is making poetry increasingly inaccessible to its potential audience. To say 'most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people' is to forget that innovation is the poetic tradition.
7 I was once invited to join a focus group for Gallery Go! (a scheme to get more people into art galleries). Yes, I said, I'll come. Then, the researcher asked me what I thought of art galleries and how socially open and accessible I found them. I said I thought art galleries were socially exclusive and that they were that way because that's how the people who run them like them to be. Later, the researcher phoned me again. I'm sorry she said, there has been a mistake and I have invited too many people to the group. There wasn't room for me, she said, but if someone dropped out I'd be invited back in. I didn't hear from her again. She had carefully selected the members of the focus group to reflect the required point of view and her research told those who commissioned it what exactly they wanted to hear. How typical is that?
8 The ways in which poet-administrators - such as Michael Longley in Northern Ireland - have dealt these contradictions is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps there is some research on it somewhere?
9 Even a building is not a building when it appears in a poem
10 This is not an argument for a 'free market' - markets are always rigged - but a request that people in positions of power over the poetry economy stop adding to the rigging to further disadvantage the poor. I want an arts LETS scheme. I write the poetry, the Literature Officer cleans my house and gives me bags of apples. It's time they gave something back to the community.
11 There is no mechanism for deciding who is a poet and who is not, nor do we need one. The nearest thing to it is Posterity, which is an abstraction. We can attempt to rig Posterity, to treat it as an extension of the market place, but we must bear in mind that Posterity, when enacted, has a sense of humour.
12 The poet was Claudia Moscovici. The fascinating postromantics can be found at www.postromanticism.com
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