Editorial: Electric Nougat
“According to the nature of diverse ears, diverse judgements straight followed: some praising his voice; others the words . . . others the strangeness of the tale, scanning what he should mean by it”.
Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia
Peter Middleton’s essay in this issue of Poetry Review sets out,with clarity and honesty, the extraordinary and fractious variety of contemporary poetries in Britain: all offering different pleasures, responsive to different styles of reading, arising from different cultural, historical and political contexts, appealing to different (if sometimes overlapping) audiences.While he acknowledges that some of these poetries are ultimately irreconcilable in their premises and approaches, Middleton expresses a sadness that there has been so little conversation between them.He points out, rightly, that in this often tribalised and sectarian landscape, many people do not wish to grant any legitimacy at all to their strange neighbours.
Listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme may have caught a broadcast in February in which John Sutherland and Iain Sinclair were invited to debate the respective merits of two poet-librarians, Philip Larkin and J. H. Prynne. This was not a news story, but the fall-out from a Sunday Times piece a week earlier. The author of a book of literary history had had the temerity to praise Prynne above Larkin, and a swift vox pop had established that some people were outraged by the very notion. Others passed genial comment on work
with which they had only a hazy acquaintance. Only Frank Kermode offered a nugget of sanity, saying “Why can’t people like them both?”
On Today, Iain Sinclair declined the battle-lines set up by the presenter, Ed Sturton.Audio-clips of Larkin and Betjeman had been played; Sinclair was invited to respond with some Prynne, and read a passage from Oval Window:
The clouds are white in a pale autumn sky.
Looking at the misty paths I see this stooping
figure seeming to falter
[. . . ]
A light wind crosses the fragrant waters;
deaf to reason I cup my hands, to
dew-drenched apricot flowers and their
livid tranquility…
Sturton, denied the violent contrast he had been expecting, said “well, that’s probably an easy bit”; though it isn’t, of course, certainly not in the context of the whole poem – a poem concerned with empathy, violence, economics, perception, among many other things.
It could be argued that Sinclair should have played the game, and
delivered one of the many pieces of Prynne which could not be so easily taken or mistaken on a Friday morning in a three-minute radio slot; though to do so would have enabled the usual line, which was provided anyway, that Prynne’s work is “incomprehensible” or “only understood by four people”. Neither of those statements is true, of course; though it must be said that one doesn’t “understand” Prynne in the same way one “understands” Larkin.
Sinclair, not unlike Kermode, questioned whether such comparisons – Larkin v. Prynne – served any purpose beyond a journalistic desire to polarise every issue into a two-party fight.He said “you might as well compare nougat to electricity”. The phrase is a good one; neither is fairly judged on the other’s terms. Poetry can be very simple, very direct, and memorably rhetorical; it can also be properly difficult, in the senses of complex, intricate, uncoercive, abundant. To pretend it has to be one or the other is to fall into the increasingly unproductive adversarial approach of journalism, with its need for swift reductive judgments and the macho frisson of combat and
domination. Poetry, above all the arts, should be beyond that.
Page(s) 118-119
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