Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Audiences for poetry in the UK are changing. A writer's perception and understanding of audience shapes that writer's creative production. If audiences are changing— because publishing and the way in which people consume poetry are changing— this suggests creative opportunities for writers as new audiences start to influence and change the work itself. The negative potential of this scenario is, of course, that in the new conditions of a superabundance of alternatives, rigid oppositional thinking reinforces itself with a vengeance.

For some time now I have been reflecting on the implications of the argument of Barrett Watten's Total Syntax (1985) for the poetics of my own work and that of others. Watten's key terms are method as 'the principle of construction that begins with the finished work, with the activity of the writer as a whole, the extension of the act of writing into the world and eventually into historical self-consciousness'; and technique as 'the principle of construction in the writing [...] how the writing is written, prior to the finished work' (Watten 1985: 32). Watten argues that technique is the most dynamic approach to writing, especially when it is strategically deployed against approaches in which writing takes its basic values from psychology or biography. He sees a problem, however, for writers who, by throwing themselves into technique with such force, make it a static value toward the production of one kind of text, which it is difficult to get beyond. For Watten methodological development is therefore as crucial as technical experimentation, to insure development in practice.

My own writing has at times risked over-emphasising radical technique at the expense of method. If the potential of methodological development is to remain open and fluid to change—constantly refiguring the writer's position in relation to changing socio-cultural conditions—then rigidly held positions, at least in terms of how they give rise to certain re-occurring manifestations of technique, can lead to a stale and repetitive poetics. Growing up as a writer in the context of Linguistically Innovative Poetry led to a long-term commitment to technical experimentation as social critique, underwritten by a methodological view of how social structures are constructed, reinforced and policed by discourse. Whilst the ideological commitments of Linguistically Innovative Poetry constitute an example of method functioning in tandem with technique, I began to feel later on that I was operating the techniques of innovative practice without concomitantly advancing a methodology apt for my own developing poetics and politics. Deep into a period of technical experimentation about eight years ago I found that my approach to technique was becoming an end in itself—that each new poem was trying out a technical innovation without much regard to what it meant to do so—and that the results were becoming thin, repetitive and monotonous. Coming fortuitously upon Watten's terms at this time was a revelation which enabled me to make a new assessment of where my intentions and commitments lay as a writer and to forge ahead with a greater awareness of method as a consciously developing part of my creative practice.

Watten defines style as

a determinate pattern of differences in the manner of statement—an autonomous, idiosyncratic set of values in opposition to the dominant forms of the medium. (Watten 1985: 32)

and points out that the fact of a poem's style, including values 'brought into the poem from its literary past', can be the means of locating the poem as ideology, which leads to tracing how poetry extends itself 'by its own means, in the act of writing, in public readings, and as a published text, into the political context'—in other words, leading to method (Watten 1985: 116). The fact that Watten is concerned with style as an oppositional quality reflects what he sees as the literary-critical use of the term as the 'right way of doing things, leading to normative grammar and The Chicago Manual of Style' (Watten 1985: 120). He elaborates that his sense of style includes a worldview in which

everything is in flux [...] there is only movement. Structures push their way into existence, alter their surroundings, rigidify, explode or are absorbed, and fade away. (Watten 1985: 120-21)

Such a view of style and its possibilities feels potentially liberating because of its emphasis on change and movement—if anything, my critical-aesthetic position emerges because I am always changing as a writer, and yet I think the position understood as a narrative might have application beyond my own poetics. For example, quite aside from the scenario in which technical experimentation becomes a fetish, it is also possible to imagine a situation in which an ideological commitment in poetry can become dogma, thus raising the question of how to maintain a consistent politics whilst still developing aesthetically.

Watten's early critical reading of Bruce Andrews's poetry in North Dakota Quarterly is a test case for the method-technique argument applied to a contemporary poet. Faced with the discontinuities of Andrews's work—i.e. the evidences of its technique—Watten asks questions about the methodology of the work. By linking Andrews's formalism with the idea of a social formalism, Watten asserts that Andrews's linguistic moves are the product of a position where 'someone's social life has withered to the extent that it has become a mere formalism [...] Language engages only the futility of it all' (Watten 1987: 370). However, against this untenable position, Watten posits another variety of social formalism where—instead of meaning and content being emptied out and everything remaining the same—the social exists in and through its forms.

Watten links this distinction with Bourdieu's thesis in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) which explores the difference between a social formalism identified with structuralist methodology which Bourdieu calls 'objectivist' and a social formalism which concerns the 'temporal forms by which societies regulate themselves [and] how social conceptual systems are regulated in time' (Watten 1987: 371). This use of Bourdieu allows Watten to propose two ways of thinking about the language of Andrews's poetry: either as cultural artifacts or as determinants of real processes that take place in time.

Reading Andrews's I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up, or, Social Romanticism (only published in extracts at the time of Watten's article, now in a 1992 edition) in the first way, Watten sees it as 'enacting deflected speech acts in commoditized frames—the motivations of writer and other voices in the text are rendered equivalent and a "monumental stasis" appears' (Watten 1987: 372). However, reading it in the second way, Watten argues for the text's 'continual reinvention of conditions in which there is no progress' (Watten 1987: 373). For Watten

The poet reifies his own development in the figure of many voices, but rather than just collecting evidence, he forces an outcome on the many exchanges that produced the text. Thus the collective becomes a figure for a resistance to individual intention, exactly to the extent that the intention senses its limits there. (Watten 1987: 373)

Thus, although Andrews may be read as acting out a social formalism in the first sense, he can also be read as making a larger argument about social development in the second sense: this 'broader mimesis of social forms' makes Andrews's work 'more than a simple catalogue of displaced effects' (Watten 1987: 374). Nevertheless, Watten is still ultimately reserved about Andrews's project when he concludes that the lack of explicit development in Social Romanticism, its evenness and similarity of verbal texture, although generating a tension in recognition of the 'nowhere to go' temporal limit, is not a premise for writing he finds tenable. For Watten, Andrews's work 'does not involve strategic displacements of its own internal order' (which Watten illustrates in his readings of Louis Zukofsky) but argues the world as the 'fate of prior assumptions' (Watten 1987: 381).

This notion of 'strategic displacements' of the internal order or structure of a poem or poem-sequence seems to be both a methodological and technical gesture at once: suggesting the interdependency of these terms, and a possible role for Watten's third term of style. It is highly suggestive as a means of keeping methodology as a live and circulating interest in the composition of work, whilst feeding back to technique to, in turn, prevent it becoming static and repetitive.

Allen Fisher, who has written one of the most developed public poetics in recent British poetry, reflected on Watten's terms in an interview:

It's difficult to quite grasp why method doesn't start until you've finished the work. Isn't the problem, or could it be a problem, that you might conceptualise some of what will happen to a work before you've finished it? Wouldn't that therefore be part of it? Particularly as quite often I'm likely to conceptualise the work with some of those views in mind before the writing takes place, or whilst during the process of, or both. (Fisher/Thurston 2002: 10)

Whilst Fisher's critique does not necessarily invalidate Watten's distinction, it is suggestive of Fisher's own poetics of 'process-showing'. Fisher's term derives from his interest in using certain technical procedures to write —e.g. mathematical forms or found texts—yet allowing himself to break with a procedure at the point that he tires of it, or finds it no longer effective. 'Process-showing' is the means whereby this break or change in procedure then becomes part of the text and part of its meaning: potentially a form for the strategic displacements that Watten finds lacking in Andrews's work.

Fisher developed his position in reading the highly proceduralised work of Jackson Mac Low thus mirroring the way in which Watten reads Andrews. Fisher argues that Mac Low's practice courts a risk that he has sensed in his own progression through various procedures for writing:

By using systematic selection he [Mac Low] is losing some (I don't think all) of his own invitation or imposition. Anyone concerned with politics must find this disturbing. It is easy to think that by making the initial choice of material the poet is leading the subject matter of his course. When he imposes a determinate system of selection (which he often does, e.g. Random Number Tables) where the system takes over the selection, then, because the generative is taken out of the word order, the new order might say what the poet/composer does not wish. Now it could be said that Mac Low uses a rigorous selection of material to use and publish after the composing and thus rejects works that come out as 'noise'—that is as unacceptable statement. [...] If this is the case, the poet is limited to using procedure and not using process. Because, if he used process within the procedure he could allow the final rejection/acceptance at the composition's completion to be shown and would not then be fully 'process-showing'. Now that might be a mere quibble, but when it really comes to it, if for instance I am saying I must incorporate both axes in the composing, both process and process-showing and systematic technique in a work I am involved in writing, then I must have ENOUGH control to make my own impositions or invitations. (Fisher 1975: 38)

In terms of my own recent practice I have begun to develop a process-showing poetics in poem-sequences written over long periods of time and presented in chronological order, which attempt to show strategic displacements of structure and meaning.

Methodologically, this practice is part of my on-going response to the increased visibility of my work in a number of contexts beyond the avant-garde. This is mainly due to my job as a tutor of creative writing in a university setting, with the greater public visibility in cultural life that this role fosters. This position raises some crucial questions for method: how my relationship to my students as writers and as audience alters my perspective on my work; what the appearance of my work in contexts more usually occupied by mainstream modes of writing means; how my authority as a poet-critic in the academy interacts with the tastes and interests of my students. At the heart of these issues lies the question of whether my relationships with new writing communities and audiences constitute an assimilation of my avant-garde practice by larger social logics or whether this is a sign of an evolving cultural willingness to engage with difference. In creative terms this is experienced as a tension between the desire to communicate more directly as a form of social address and the long-standing commitment to interrogate such an intention.

In Watten's use of Bourdieu to read Andrews's poetry for both its objective and temporal properties, the temporal is certainly the privileged value, especially as part of a larger poetics that favours flux, movement and change. In my ninety-poem sequence Momentum, I have tried to emphasise temporal, non-narrative movement rather than present the sequence as a succession of independent objects. This is a response to the desire to seek a form of writing which approximates a 'direct address' whilst critically exposing its constructed nature. The main way in which this tension is registered is by the use of a stepped or broken line:

this parallel
                   dance in a tradition
cages in
              parodic circles your self
circumscribing
                        encircles you encloses you
in a repetitive
                      orbit a puncture wound
into which
                 you ceaselessly pour
and recast
                 your dark materials
in your own
                     image

All but two of the poems in the book adopt this mode of presentation. The form is a loose measure: there is no set number of lines per poem (they vary from six to nine lines long, although most are seven lines long) nor a strict syllabic or rhythmic count, yet there is a basic visual decision to break each line into two unequal parts, with the shorter part predominately on the left, and to maintain a rough equality of overall line length throughout. The loose regularity of the form thus offers a concession towards the poem as a stable form of address, whilst also exploring the possibilities of variation. The brevity of each poem, presented one per page, suggests the objectified status of the sonnet (the seven lines broken into two (equals fourteen) also hint at this comparison), but the broken line patterning is designed to give the impression of a fractured or split stanza. The minimal use of punctuation coupled with the heavy use of enjambment creates opportunities for semantic ambiguity and invites a more active mode of vertical reading, if one treats the poem as two irregularly conjoined columns.

Although in many cases each poem may be found to explore and sustain a singular argument, idea or image, it is intended that the manner of presentation develops a tension with the recuperable content and indeed functions as a series of interruptions of the evolving time of the poem. Because the final form of the sequence reflects its composition in real time there were no large scale structural decisions made to shape or present the overall argument of the book other than the final number of poems (determined roughly halfway through composition) and their organisation into three titled sections of thirty poems each. Each individual poem was usually written a week apart as a response to immediate concerns, without any deliberate attempt to provide a continuity or development of what had gone before, nor referring to any overall guiding principle for the work's thematics. Despite this, continuities do emerge because of the proximity in time of composition and the fact of consistencies in the writer's own thinking. However, read end to end, the sequence shows a process of composition lasting two and a half years and therefore significant changes in the pattern of statement and thinking do start to become visible.

Watten's account of Andrews's reifying of his development in the figure of 'many voices' as a 'resistance to individual intention' is relevant here, particularly in the decision to title one of the sections of the sequence 'Separate Voices'. The intention of this title was to invite a consideration of the relationships between the poems: the tension between experiencing them as the consistent voice of a narrator and their discontinuities in form and argument. This tension in turn functions as a critique of the larger social logic of reading that constructs otherwise discrete utterances produced by an author as evidence of the continuous inner existence of the sovereign individual. This critique is brought to a crisis point late on in the sequence with the insertion of a found text in prose. This is then followed by a short lyric which also departs from the established broken line form, and which was collaged from the found text of a spam email. I shall present this interruption by including the poem immediately preceding the found text, to give a sense of the discontinuity achieved:

after 
          the dance in the middle
of the night 
                      I feel a hollow along
the length 
                   of my spine as if the bed
has rolled
                   into a tube beneath me
lifting me
                   up my face feels stretched
as if by
            gravity the sounds of birds
outside
              curiously amplified then I
fall
      back down

Experiments conducted with glass and perspex were unsuccessful. Finally, a purposebuilt 'collar' that sits around the text of the open book has served to alleviate a number of problems, not least that of the fingers encroaching upon the image. The collar serves as an extension to the hands, undetected by the scanner's software. Even pressure can now be applied to the book, preventing indentations that would previously be detected on the final image. The collar also reduces the risk of damage to delicate volumes and secures pages that would normally move without the use of the hands. In terms of aesthetics the collar has also improved the appearance of the image by masking unsightly blotches caused by extensive foxing or stains caused by careless readers. The resulting image is framed by a white border hiding the sides and edges of the book.

If you search for
something good for you
to be tilled,
get nailed.

She was close
to Bisesa. She
could not challenge,
you must call on
being honed over

generations

Such a decision, made at the time as a direct response to encountering Watten's more recent critical work, both utilises and works against the time of the sequence, enacting a strategic displacement of its internal order. The simple fact of binding poems together in sequence promises a version of linear time and progress towards a conclusion. However, whilst the sequence as a whole does undergo development, it is far from linear and resolved. The radical intervention above serves to remind the reader of the constructed-ness of the work. The prose found text, taken from the John Rylands library website, itself discusses the materiality of the book and the physical relationship it has with its readers, whilst the short lyric that follows enacts surrealistic discontinuities at the level of image and argument that is harder to recoup than the poem describing an out of body experience that precedes the prose. The function of the short lyric is to continue the process of interruption without reducing the prose to a more singular and isolated act of extreme discontinuity, which could then become too easily accepted and/or rejected as such.

Disruption and displacement are part of larger social and cultural logics in a profound way, as addressed in another poem from the sequence which recounts an experience of street violence:

if a brick
               hits the window behind
my head
               where am I? All a flow
til a sudden
                      sharp staccato shot catches
a tension.
                  If an eight year old
threw it
              through my head where
would I 
             be: in this chaos
what can
               I not see?

If violence can be felt as a sudden radical discontinuity in the social fabric, this can be represented in a direct political address (as here), but also enacted on the larger scale of the sequence whereby discontinuity functions critically to interrupt and place even the act of constructing the poem under question. Watten's sense of method is therefore crucial for reminding the writer to take larger social logics into account at the level of technique. In the case of my own practice, method takes the form of acknowledging the tension between a desire for direct address and a suspicion of the poetics of presence and opposition that underlines this, returning to technique as a way of keeping emerging relationships with new audiences immediate and flexible but critically engaged at the same time.