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Dear Tim Kendall,

     Carol Rumens (Thumbscrew 14) shows no lack of confidence in her own judgement when she dismisses Geoffrey Hill’s poem ‘Genesis’ as “that galvanised corpse”, an “adolescent” piece full of “second-hand imagery and rhetorical swagger”. Of course, confidence can be something which, in criticism as in poetry, issues as readily from failure as from success; while Rumens does not explain exactly how she has arrived at these opinions about Hill’s poem, it is not, I hope, impertinent to observe that her weight and reputation as a critic are not such as to make ex cathedra judgements like these immediately impressive. Edna Longley’s positive reference to ‘Genesis’, also made in passing, has behind it a critical authority to which – by any possible reckoning – Ms Rumens cannot lay claim; an impartial reader might think that Professor Longley has earned the benefit of even Ms Rumens’s doubt, but such impartiality would be, of necessity, naive.

     Edna Longley is not known to me as an especially warm admirer of Hill – and certainly not of the later Hill; all the more reason, then, to take seriously her praise of a poem like ‘Genesis’. Rumens’s “rhetorical swagger” and “galvanised corpse” are, I suggest, revealingly infelicitous in the context of Hill’s work, which so acutely addresses poetry’s intimacy with rhetoric, and which knows with such extraordinary detail the ways in which life is rhetorical, “swaggering” or no. Any reader of Hill knows that corpses need not be galvanised in order to stir – something which ‘Genesis’ broods over, and which the poem converts into a romantic/apocalyptic voice, itself exposed to the kinds of rhetorical distancing that are anything but “adolescent” in nature. Unfortunately, Rumens’s observations smack of nothing so much as the careless and offhand – What has this awful young man got to be so confident about? There’s more to life than just reading the books! Alas, it is not the quality of Hill’s poetry which is “cruelly exposed” in such remarks.

     Ms Rumens continues (though by what logical connection I am at a loss to explain) to lament the lack of self-belief in post-Muldoon Northern Irish poets, “who as well as believing in Paul Muldoon et al., should actually believe in themselves”. It is doubtless an excess of sensitivity (or self-importance) on my part to detect an allusion to an interview which I gave to Ms Rumens’s magazine Brangle a couple of years ago, in which I spoke of “believing” in Muldoon. Perhaps, by way of making things clearer, I could use Geoffrey Hill’s lines on the reasons why “confidence” is a complicated business:

And yes – bugger you, MacSikker et al., – I do
mourn and resent your desolation of learning:
Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure,
forms of understanding, far from despicable,
and furthest now, as they are most despised.
By understanding I understand diligence
and attention, appropriately understood
as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement
of what is owed the dead.
                                          (The Triumph of Love CXIX)

I believe this, too, though I couldn’t have written it in a dozen lifetimes: and this, just like “recent and local achievements”, is the necessary background to any well-founded “confidence” in writing. It’s a sombre background, and it knows that it can’t affect to be somehow above or apart from “rhetoric”, but its final confidence is answerable and secure. The ill-founded “confidence”, like glibly proclaimed self-knowledge, can be left to its own devices.

     It is unusual to remark on the amount of unearned self-confidence presently in circulation in English poetry. Perhaps the profusion of self-belief amongst poets could be seen as an essentially adolescent trait? (I am not, of course, referring to anybody’s age.)

Yours sincerely,
Peter McDonald

Dear Tim

     You have established in Thumbscrew one of the best literary journals in the United Kingdom. Every writer who is not taken in by the age’s stereotypes ought to read it. Yet Thumbscrew publishes good sense under an embarrassing name. However amusing as a parody of Scrutiny it may have sounded ten years ago, the joke has by now worn thin. Why not celebrate Thumbscrew’s entry into the new millennium by changing its name? Perhaps you could ask readers to submit ideas? Let me, anyway, set the ball rolling by suggesting that you reach back to the combative days of Hazlitt and Coleridge and rename your magazine The Examiner, or The New Examiner. Or does that suggest to the modern mind nothing but the agony of school examinations?

Yours sincerely,
Anne Stevenson

Editor’s Note: We are always happy to publish praise masquerading as criticism.

Dear Tim,

     I was intrigued by Caitriona O’Reilly’s recent review, ‘Hitting the High Notes’, in Thumbscrew 14. O’Reilly borrows the authority of some Big Names (Stevens, Moore). She’ll know, then, that it was another Big American who suggested that poetry should “Tell all the truth but tell it slant –”.

     Though written, apparently, in an “era of hyper-ironised simulacra”, O’Reilly’s piece presents a subjectivity I thought we’d unmasked some decades ago. One way it does this is through inconsistency. Tim Liardet’s “curiously old-fashioned symbolic investment” is placed alongside Paul Henry’s work in which “the image is simple and moving”. “Curiously old-fashioned” – I’d settle for “moving”, but not “simple”.

     Irony, self-deprecation, the inflected flexible line, seem to go unobserved in O’Reilly’s review. Though the Academy may favour such reductive reading – with the diminished place for poetry in literary studies that entails – it is indeed “an amusing but weirdly tuneless exercise”.

     It would be disingenuous not to admit that I knew and admired both these collections before reading O’Reilly’s review. How lucky for me that I did. Otherwise I might never have witnessed Liardet’s luminous shape-shifting, Henry’s radical formal ambition.

Yours ever,
Fiona Sampson

Dear Mr Kendall
 
     Now that you have started the verse/prose debate with Anne Carson’s letter in Thumbscrew 14, why not pursue it further? Someone should publish as a component block of prose some sizeable poem – 300+ words – not conventionally metrical or rhyming, the author to be anonymous but previously published. Then invite published poets to mark the line breaks. It might be instructive (or amusing) to publish the results...

Yours sincerely,
Keith Francis

Dear Mr. Kendall,

     In Thumbscrew 14, Stephen Knight asks “why read the imitation when you can read the real thing?”, and “must we make room on the shelf for ‘Mr Cooper’ when Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ is already there”?

     ‘Mr Cooper’ was published in The Owl in the Tree in 1963, the year before The Whitsun Weddings in which ‘Mr Bleaney’ appeared. Mr. Knight clearly owes Mr. Thwaite an apology. In any case, ‘Mr Cooper’ is a worthwhile poem and, along with all Thwaite’s work, merits room on anyone’s shelf.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Hill

Dear Tim Kendall

     It is curious to note that two recently published anthologies of twentieth-century poetry – Simon Rae’s News that Stays News: The Twentieth Century in Poems and Michael Schmidt’s The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English – both begin with what is perhaps the last great poem of the nineteenth century: Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’. On one level, the decision to start here is understandable; after all, the poem clearly has the twentieth century in its sights, culminating as it does in a description of the eponymous, ageing bird daring its still-bright voice against “the growing gloom” of the age to come:

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Nevertheless, the poem is clearly and primarily a backward-looking piece. It is a “goodnight air” to the century that was, when Hardy wrote it, about to end – a point which both its original title and the context in which it was first published reinforce. Hardy’s lyric appeared under the heading ‘By the Century’s Deathbed’ in the weekly newspaper The Graphic on 29 December 1900 and was surrounded by short articles offering journalists’ retrospective views on the shifts in the political and cultural life of Britain during the nineteenth century. It seems reasonable to presume, then, that the original audience for Hardy’s poem understood that a century ends at the close of its one hundredth year, not at the close of its ninety-ninth.

     Of course, there is nothing exceptional about the calendrical confusion of the two aforementioned poetry anthologies; in similar fashion, Peter Forbes’s Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry takes the last year of the nineteenth century as the date at which to begin its scanning exercise and ends – inevitably – more than a year before the close of the present one. Nor, indeed, do the poetry anthologies stand out from the many comparable century-scanning publications which have recently come into print; all would appear to be products of the pervasive contemporary confusion as to when centuries start and finish. If this basic error is itself largely unremarkable, what Hardy’s example does indicate about the chronological span of such collections is the possibility that they have been compiled before some of the last great poems of the twentieth century have even been conceived. But perhaps these as-yet-notional achievements will eventually be acknowledged in the anthologies of the twenty-first century?

     As for the current hype about poetry marking the shift between (supposed) millennia – I am thinking, for example, of the media attention accorded to Simon Armitage’s ambitious poem for the Dome – one can only hope that some of our contemporary practitioners will heed the still-bright voice of Hardy and refrain from disseminating happy or unhappy goodnight airs to the twentieth century until the century is on its deathbed – in other words, until the end of December 2000. But perhaps Hardy’s thrush has already voiced the answer to this plea: “Some blessèd hope”!

Yours sincerely,
Stephen James