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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?

THOMAS BLACKBURN

     There are as many ‘Issues of our time’ as there are people alive in it. As opposed to ‘academic’ versifiers who are making verses for the sake of verse, the contemporary poets who interest me are writing about the complexity of our present age, and so they are concerned with these issues.

     What seems important to me is whether we can gain some lucidity and self-knowledge and stop wishing away our own negative emotions on to other people. On this depends whether or not we will blow ourselves to blazes, and this planet.

     I believe that the international situation is only the individual predicament writ large and so coarsened and simplified. In both the personal scheme and the general there are human beings behaving more or less insanely, and so the same psychological principles apply to both. It’s a question of ugly scenes and temper tantrums, and whether we can gain enough sanity to straighten them out and make our behaviour reasonably lucid.

     In the thirties poets often wrote about the human situation writ large in politics. Perhaps there was something particularly glaring about the evil of that time which made such an approach inevitable. On the Continent it was the SS Men and Concentration Camps; at home it was the hunger marchers and the unemployed at their street corners. Now we have some social justice at home, and it’s difficult to think of countries in terms of black and white; neither wholly good or bad they all appear a rather shabby grey. That is our own colour as well, and a realization of this means that evil should return to its true habitat, ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.

     It seems to me that the most interesting contemporary poets are writing about just that, and attempting to explore and clarify in their work some confusion or turmoil of man as it expresses itself in a particular situation. This seems a most important activity, since on our waking up to the fact that we have psychological conflict, and that it conditions our behaviour, may depend whether or not we have a future. Of course on another plane this clarification of motive is a question of what Catholics call ‘making our souls’ and has a religious significance. As regards the ‘Poeticization’ of language you mention, I do think there is a tendency for some poets with academic training to indulge in a kind of literary incest. All their energy seems to be ploughed home into the mother tongue as an end in herself. The result is some very nice mating of noun and adjective and pretty verse movement, but the merest nail paring of significant statement. It is my belief that poems should say something about man and his environment; so I deplore verse about writing or not writing verses, about haircuts, or what it would feel like to be a poem if one had not been written.

     As to whether this is a good period for writing poetry, it’s all we have got either to live or write in, and I strongly suspect that in some curious way we are the situation into which we are born. One remembers Under Milk Wood, how Folly Garter remarks to her baby, ‘Isn’t life a terrible thing; thank God.’