The Poetry Review Essay
Recognition
It started as good quests should, with an invitation that was also a
challenge. The editors of a new history of twentieth-century English
literature wanted an article on British poetry since 1970 to fit alongside forty-odd other reference articles on the past century. Did I feel able to write an informed essay that would introduce readers to all aspects of recent British poetry and offer challenging opinions at the same time? I knew the correct answer to their request was no, and as my mind ran through all the many reasons why this was the only possible response (such essays count for little as research, the requirements of reference book house styles make for drab writing, my other projects have pressing deadlines, and the Olympian detachment needed to adjudicate contemporary poetry is beyond me, beyond anyone), I heard myself say yes. Enthusiastic thoughts assailed me: this would be a chance to give equal weight to the claims of the modernists and antimodernists, to acknowledge the contribution of other languages and cultures, and above all to satisfy my curiosity about this history.Why, for instance, do we need to know the mountains of personal detail that pile up in the poetry of voice? Why does the avant-garde trust parataxis and other forms of
disjunction to be more reliable than the ordinary forms of continuity in writing? And why has there been such a deep rift between avant-garde poets and others, to the extent that supposedly representative anthologies regularly leave out some of the finest poets of the past few decades?
And after all I was there. I remember the excitement of reading new
copies of Mercian Hymns, North, Ace, V, Brixton Fractals, Standing Female Nude, Coolie Odyssey, Black Torch, In the House of the Shaman, Marconi’s Cottage, The Annals of Chile, and many others; or celebrity poets, Ted Hughes striding along in a leather coat looking like a mutant crow ready to read his poetic bestiary, Tom Raworth appearing like a lost Victorian traveller between foreign jaunts, or Jean Binta Breeze seizing the air with astonishing virtuosity;and all the poetry readings, in pub rooms, large halls, cathedrals, the Poetry Society in Earls Court and the Voice Box at Royal Festival Hall; the pleasure of reading little magazines printed in every format known to the printing trade and then the computer; and always the satisfactions of reading the works themselves, puzzling out one of J. H. Prynne’s dazzlingly clever poems from The White Stones, speaking Maggie O’Sullivan aloud, laughing at the stand-up comedy of poetry from Craig Raine’s Martian perspectives or Wendy Cope’s judgements of men to Patience Agbabi’s redefining wit, and recognising some shared experience or new emotional insight in one of the many autobiographical lyrics that helped define the age. Poets, readings, magazines, books, anthologies, critical surveys, funding bodies, and all the gossip, scandals, controversies. There should be enough memories for several narratives.
This very abundance soon began to be a problem. There were too many memories and too many autonomous histories, and many of them did not connect with one another.What counts as British and what counts as poetry, indeed what counts as language in poetry? British poets write in Gaelic, Irish, Punjabi, Urdu,Welsh, as well as Yorkshire, Lallans, and East London dialects, and some use geometric lines, stone, or air as part of their lexis. Poetry is an element in pop music and in many forms of religion, and, most surprisingly, its metadiscourse, poetics, is enlisted in a wide range of intellectual disciplines. Outside the circles of commercial publication are many others where selfpublication, performance, the writing group, the classroom, the vanity press, or a public event are the public space of reception. The elegy, for instance, is still an important social function for poetry; people with no other aspirations to write poetry will produce them if they are deeply touched by loss. The Sun published a substantial anthology of elegies for the children shot at Dunblane, written by those who shared with “V.G. (aged 14)”, the author of “Picture Them”, the wish to write poems because “It distresses me so, / To think of them as dead, / So I picture them as angels, / The clouds as their beds.”Angel poetry, the writing of poems that are self-evidently poem-like and appear to turn distress into consoling images, is everywhere in local newspapers, campus newsletters, and parish magazines. Is there any one historical narrative, or poetics, or aesthetic value that could encompass such a diversity of poetry writing in the UK over the past thirty years?
The disconnection of histories and memories is symptomatic. A history of the poetry of the past three decades would require some considerable degree of shared experience and reflection upon its meaning. This collective work has not been done because of the rift. The local histories don’t add up to one generalised narrative, and there are no literary critical principles that one can employ to distinguish significant poetry from poetry that simply goes through the motions, because the literary criticism that we have had has developed from partisan schools of poetry. Somehow we have to invent our own new concepts, and remake the dogmatic concepts of literary and cultural theory, if we are to be able to have an overview of recent poetry. No one knows how to do this.
It is tempting to be ethnographic, and play the stranger to the poetry
scene, in an attempt to gain some objectivity. I found myself setting aside the clamor of personal memory to examine the influence of popular song on poetry, and the shaping force of education, as I tried to think about our tacit knowledge of poetry, the assumptions that are mostly below the horizon of awareness. Song remains one of the great sources of poetry, as well as a shadowy borderland for it. The heroine of Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, Anna Wulf, often first becomes aware of what she thinks about a situation when she realises that a line from a popular song running in her head has a message for her. Nick Hornby’s recent 31 Songs worries away at the tension between music and language (“words will always let you down”) even as he confesses that song lyrics are a form of life for him. For the past thirty years, popular music has produced a large body of lyric poetry whose value as poetry remains almost unexplored. If you were a young woman or man in the early seventies, and felt you had a talent for writing verse what would you do? For many such future poets the emergence of rock music in the sixties exerted an enormous pull towards the amplification of poetry’s emotional power by music. The British Empire may have proved mortal, but British and Irish bands, singers and songwriters achieved their own cultural recolonisation of much of the world’s youth during the past four decades. Has this success also been achieved at the expense of a continuing sense of the relevance of poetry? Should we imagine another version of The Buggles’s song, “Video Killed the Radio Star” in which it is rock’n’roll that has killed poetry’s star? Rock music certainly made the love lyric its own, as well as manufacturing lyrics of passionate political protest from punk to the Manic Street Preachers, and developing the extravagant verbal dance of rap. The sung lyric reaches a very high level of skill at narrative compression, vocal delivery, and emotional amplification in this period, and many poets have recognised and some have learned from the arts of the pop musician.
Much popular song is not secular. The Anglican Church remains the
poetry party at prayer and song, as John Betjeman, who was Poet Laureate until 1984, recognised: “I think everyone is a poet when young and that hearing and reading so much prose drives the poetry in most people underground. It then wells up again in the vast public memory for the words of popular songs.Much of my own verse has been written to the tunes of the English Hymnal and Hymns Ancient and Modern which are part of my heritage.” Rhyme, short, end-stopped phrasing, and above all the demonstration of the religious poem’s power of calling forth divinity (“Immortal, invisible, God only wise/…/almighty, victorious”) reached momentarily only through the act of performance (“thy great name we praise”): such demonstrations of the power of the poetic voice to invoke sacred powers remain deep in the poetry unconscious. As the resonant adjectives of the hymn indicate, the Church is very much of England, and the hymns reconfirm connections between poetry, unity, nation.
Poetry’s importance as cultural capital also depends on its childhood
associations. Education plays an important role in shaping the aesthetic economy of poetry. Look through The Nation’s Favourite Poems (1991) compiled from a BBC series and you will see very few contemporary poems, and those mostly by Hughes and Philip Larkin. Most choices are poems taught decades ago at school. Then consider the explanations given by children for recommending specific poems for an anthology, I Like This Poem (1979), edited by Kaye Webb (the highly influential long-serving editor of Puffin Books). One girl of fourteen likes Michael Rosen’s poem, “My Brother is Making a Protest About Bread” because “I can easily identify with it. I am a long sufferer of wholemeal bread . . . I’m glad someone else shares my point of view”. A recurrent observation made by the children also points us to one way in which empathy and identification give the reader an emotional pay-off. The girl who chose Richard Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window” says that “it makes me feel sad and yet happy as well”.When Shelter Cymru asked well-known Welsh figures to choose a favourite poem and explain why, the resulting anthology, Voices at the Door (1995), was a work of poetic anthropology. Glenys Kinnock chooses a poem that was her favourite at the age of fourteen,Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” because, she says, it “still moves me, and it ensured that when I first read it, at the age of fourteen, I would never have any illusions about the nature of war”, a point similar to that made by another politician, Peter Hain. John Puzey chooses a poem by John Hegley, “Eddie Don’t Like Furniture”, saying, “I cannot divorce writing from the writer. I need to have some empathy with the outlook and the ‘persuasion’ of the poet in order really to enjoy the poetry”. The degree to which a poem makes possible both emotional empathy (“this poem still moves me”) and conscious identification, is a measure of its value, as Sheenagh Pugh explains in relation to her choice: “It makes me feel like crying my eyes out, which is part of what I want from a poem. I’ve no time for what Gillian Clarke calls ‘clever young man poems’, which make you think ‘how clever that poet is’, rather than ‘how profound’, or ‘how moving’.” Here is one deep root of the divide in British poetry. Emotional identification, catharsis and above all, emotionally intelligent insight, as well as some recognition of national identity, are what adult readers learn to seek in poetry, and too much cognitive action will be rejected as elitist intellectualising. Poetry is caught up in another form of that cultural populism which remains one of our most prevalent strategies for dealing with the inequalities of class, gender, regional culture, and ethnicity.
Poetry in the broadest sense therefore remains a very popular art, possibly the most widely practised of all the arts, even though passive audiences for other media are much larger. Poetry book sales may be low, and university courses on poetry less popular than those on fiction or film, but writing groups exist across the country, poetry competitions are extremely popular, and most children are encouraged to try writing a poem or two. Almost everyone under thirty listens to song lyrics, and many try to compose them. Poetry is also deeply inwoven with the maintenance of national languages, especially Welsh, and with immigrant cultures (think of the masheira). Arts Funding bodies have invested in poetry’s populism to the point where poetry’s public life is deeply dependent on the policies of a few national organisations. Yet instead of a field of activity in which the various forms of poetry exist in some degree of mutual relation, the field is deeply divided. For most of us who read and value published poetry, this one central rift is as deep as any schism or scientific revolution. It is easiest to see this by looking at key anthologies. Compare the Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 and Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 and you see at once that something odd is going on. Four black poets and one woman appear in both. Otherwise silence. This contrast can be made over and over with other anthologies. Only Edward Lucie-Smith’s anthology British Poetry Since 1945 (1970) from the beginning of this time, and Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001) from the end of it, manage to indicate the full range of poetry being written.
Representing this selective amnesia is difficult. The avant-garde and the voice-based poets don’t share values, poetics or literary theories. What they understand by metrics, by performance, by knowledge, by language, by reading – these seem sharply at variance. The very difficulty of naming either tendency is a symptom of this – neither thinks of itself as having such boundaries. The subtleties of the mainstream personal lyric’s handling of self-consciousness, or the many ways in which structuring devices are used as part of the generation of meaning in avant-garde poetry, both require for their full understanding extended immersion in the poetry networks where these modes of writing are dominant. Neither movement has hitherto been very effective at offering ways into the poetry for those outside, either believing no introduction is necessary or mistrusting any interpretation that might stand in for the experience of the work itself. It is not that certain individuals have not tried, either as editors or critics and reviewers, to bring some insight to the parallel universes of poetry. Each poetry community tends to accept as a norm what it ought at least to treat with greater self-consciousness, and many questions remain largely unaddressed.
At this point I really did wish I did not have to write the reference essay. My ethnography, my description of attitudes amongst the critics and publishers, the few examples I could squeeze in, still left out the sheer depth of the mutual incomprehension. At this stage I felt that the dismissiveness of William Scammell or Sean O’Brien towards the avant-garde for instance, or the indifference towards what more than one poet calls the “diaristic” tendency of the personal lyric, needed much more inquiry. Why is the only mention of Gilbert Adair, Thomas A. Clarke, Allen Fisher and J. H. Prynne, in the in many ways excellent Blackwell’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, a brief reference in an essay on poetry and science? The last three have major international reputations. My own sense of partisanship didn’t help either I realised. I had to check my own tendency to think that the poetry community which has enjoyed such a large proportion of the necessary state funding could have been more willing to admit variety, innovation, new genres, and to try and read thoughtfully poems written in unfamiliar modes. The difficulty of Prynne, Fisher or O’Sullivan has been greatly exaggerated, I said to myself; most of it is the difficulty of understanding our contemporary condition. A car, a computer or a politician, are all much more baffling.
When cultures are isolated from one another for substantial periods of time it can be very difficult for members of one to understand the significance of the arts of another. Anthropology was based on this premise, and committed to the long immersion in another culture that would lead to an understanding of the matrices of its beliefs and meanings. But anthropology began to seem beside the point. As I finished the essay I reached two tentative conclusions. Reports on the effects of this history of mutual suspicion, the way this ncommensurability has reached deep into the poetry itself, as well as into our literary critical methods, are long overdue. Just wishing it all away, or trying to deny the psychic damage it has done, is as helpful as saying that we are now an open multicultural society, a laudable ambition pretending to be fact. But I suspect as well that a fuller picture of these divisions, their hold over the imagination of two generations of poets, and the various practices and events that sustained the conflict, would also begin to show points of convergence, potential growth towards some productive reconciliations and to clarification of differences that we need to maintain. This is as likely to involve making poetry more mysterious in some ways as making it more intelligible. One feature of the division has been to caricature the poetry of the main commercial presses as “accessible” and the avant-garde as incomprehensible, yet this polarisation hides much of what is most valuable about the poetry. A poem by Fred D’Aguiar, Sarah Maguire, Polly Clark, or
Andrew Motion may seem to offer direct authorial self-representation, but the very openness of admission diverts attention from questions about the use of details of personal history and memory, the handling of the time of the consciousness that speaks the poem, or the claim to representativeness of a wider community. As long as we don’t ask these questions we are missing much of what is most powerful in the writing. The surfaces of a poem by Maggie O’Sullivan, Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, can be puzzling because they use unfamiliar formal and verbal techniques. Failing to notice them altogether, as appears to happen quite often, or to have little sense of how they can be heard so that they produce the equivalent of several different instruments of meaning playing together, leads to incomprehension and the deadly prejudice that the work has no literary merit. It is as if a reader were listening for violins only, and the orchestra was relying on woodwind and percussion to carry the depth of the music.
When I finished the essay I imagined new “lonely reader” guides to poetry which would tactfully point newcomers to O’Sullivan’s scoring of the poem, Raworth’s use of the phrases of mass culture, or Wilkinson’s rainbow of different uses of the line-break.And would offer commentaries on some of the well-known “mainstream” poems showing how densely layered the emotional and historical references can be for readers who share cultural experiences with the authors. But all this is too prospective. I didn’t complete my essay with a sense that I had solved anything, intellectually, poetically or practically. What I was left with was a mixture of sadness and awe. Sadness that so much energy has been wasted keeping poets and poems apart, and shows only a few signs of abating; awe at the sheer range and volume of poetry produced over the past thirty years, exceeding all our existing critical formulae and attempts to label or appraise it, and gratitude for the achievements whose scale we still don’t recognise. When we can accept that poems like David Dabydeen’s “Coolie Odyssey”, Carol Ann Duffy’s “Foreign”, Allen Fisher’s “Banda”, Tony Harrison’s V., Geoffrey Hill’s “Ovid in the Third Reich”, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Inglan is a Bitch”, Andrew Motion’s “Anne Frank Huis”, Maggie O’Sullivan’s “Birth Palette”, Douglas Oliver’s “The Infant and the Perle”, J. H. Prynne’s “A New Tax on the Counter-Earth”, or Denise Riley’s “Affections Must Not” (a list whose point, like most such lists, is to invite debate rather than instant canonization) are representative of these past three decades of rapid aesthetic, economic and political change, we will be closer to such understanding.
Page(s) 48-56
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