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

According to Peter Finch, there is a “poetry war” being fought out. The combatants are the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’. The insiders, he says, “are the ones who write what new readers often imagine real poetry to be. They are clear, crisp and immediately comprehensible”. Ranged against them are the outsiders. They are “the experimenters, the chancers, those of the innovative texts. They are the ones who embraced the difficult modernism of Eliot and Pound and then took poetry off to those rarefied places where, apparently, the public never bother to go. They make it new”(1).

   I’m not sure I’d have put it quite like that. After all, the majority of readers, for whom ‘real poetry’ is “If ” and “Daffodils”, are no more likely to regard Andrew Motion as a ‘real poet’ than John Ashbery. Nonetheless, he’s right. Where you stand depends upon your response to questions like: ‘should poetry seek a mass audience? Is it essential that a poem, to be successful, should ‘communicate’ something? Is it important that poems be accessible?’

   One perfectly respectable answer is that the poem is essentially personal: a private struggle between the poet and the raw material of language in which the audience plays no part. Alex Smith, in a thoughtful recent essay, comes close to saying this. During the creative process “the poet begins to discover the secret or hidden properties of the poem to be written... The ‘clay’ of the poem’s ‘sculpture’ is beginning to show how it should be moulded as it takes shape”. As for the audience, it’s welcome to watch so long as it doesn’t rustle its crisp wrappers: “we are privileged eavesdroppers, sneaking in to hear, see or listen, but we are uninvited or, more accurately, unspecified.”(2).

   This view might seem very modern, but it actually has a long pedigree. As the critic Ian Jack notes, “it is still sometimes supposed that lyrics are spontaneous utterances created without thought of an audience”, except perhaps the audience of one demanded by a love poem. ‘Critics used to praise Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” for its sincerity, and I remember one distinguished old scholar assuring me that it could only have been written by a man deeply in love. I wonder. Those of us who are interested in the rhetorical background of seventeenth-century literature may be forgiven for arguing that Marvell’s poem tells us more about its audience than about his lady.’ (3)

   So, struggling in splendid isolation with the raw stuff of language, without casting a glance over your shoulder at the cheap seats, is easier said than done. But there is a deeper problem here. It’s a problem which, I think, raises intense difficulties for certain sections of what we might call the avant garde, but which has received little attention in poetry circles.

   Here is a famous passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations.

“I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign ‘S’ and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation... I speak, or write the sign down, and at some time I concentrate my attention on the sensation and so, as it were, point to it inwardly... In this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. But ‘I impress it on myself ’ can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means here that we can’t talk about right.”(4)

This introduces something known as the ‘private language argument’. When Wittgenstein devised it he had in his sights a specific theory of meaning, with which we needn’t concern ourselves here. But note the general point. Wittgenstein observes that words don’t refer to things by luck or some innate quality they possess. They refer because of established practice: a tradition or rule if you like. But rules have to be administered. There has to be some sort of authority to say what counts as a correct application of a rule and what doesn’t. And, in the case of language, the judge and jury is the wider community of language users.

   That is to say, if I want an apple but what I say is ‘please bring me a banana’ then, no matter how appley my thoughts, I have asked for a banana. Similarly, if I say ‘please furiously brick hyperactivity metal’ then I have broken so many rules that even my status as a speaker of English could be questioned.

   This is what Wittgenstein means when he says, ‘in the present case I have no criterion of correctness’. Unlike ‘apple’ or ‘banana’, the community of language users can’t tell whether `S’ is being correctly applied or not. If there’s no way of telling whether a rule is being followed, there is in effect no rule. Hence Wittgenstein’s conclusion that there can be no such thing as a private language.

   Now, consider a poem like this, from a collection I reviewed a few years ago.

Storytelling

                           (introduce pavement)
Old-fashioned people in clothes.

Passage to friendship                  (details,momentum.firefly)
wave “bye bye,”

idly unfolds.

                  (dark, light, etc.)

                  (separately, form,)

indifferent combinations. (jest, tears.)


(Rhythm upswing) ( collision with serpent),

                         repeat and repeat moonlight
                                  as suspense,moonlight.(5)

   What is meant here by ‘friendship’ or ‘separately’ or ‘light’? True, these words all have conventional meanings, but how can we be sure that the poet is using them correctly? There are normally two ways of telling. In spoken language we can often assess someone’s words both for their internal consistency and for their ‘fit’ with the speaker’s actions. If they ask for a banana but, when you bring one, they refuse it saying that bananas are roundish and green, then you have some idea of the trouble. Written language is trickier. But there we typically judge the use of words by how well they fit into some form of order. Grammar imposes one framework on them. So too does the requirement that they be internally coherent and make sense to us given what we know, or assume, about the narrator.(6)

   Are any of these cues available in “Storytelling”? Quite obviously not. Not only does it provide no contextual information, it won’t even allow itself to be restricted by grammar. But then we’ve no way of knowing that the poet is using the words according to established precedents. Now remember Wittgenstein - it’s no good taking the author’s word that they know what they mean. The final court is the wider community of language users. But in that case, this is analogous to a private language - that is to say no language at all.(7)

   This is, of course, deliciously ironic. The wilder extremes of the avant garde are fond of reminding us that they are the only people who really care about language. In these days of interminable corporate hype and marketing doublespeak, they alone are shouldering the burden of ‘making it new’. Now it transpires that, all too often, they are not actually using language at all. Far from assisting language to evolve and remain fresh, the best you can say is that they are putting marks on a page that, in a different context, would have meant something.

   No less ironically, the Bufton Tufton wing of the poetry world has been right all along, but for entirely the wrong reasons. True ‘Storytelling’ isn’t a ‘real poem’. But that is because it fails as an example of language use. ‘Poem’, however, is a word like any other and its meaning is determined by the use to which it is put. Hence, since people are now happy to accept free verse as poetry, poetry it is, as ‘real’ as any other.

0000   But surely poets do have a duty to experiment with language, to develop new ways of speaking about the world and so expand our ways of perceiving it? After all, if they don’t, who will? Well, I agree. In fact, it might surprise you given what I’ve said so far, but my sympathies, in some ways, lie with the outsiders. I don’t want to see poetry reverentially stuffed in a glass case, I want to see poets experimenting with form and content, and I’m more than willing to engage with the ‘difficult modernism of Eliot and Pound’.

   The problem is that language is more fragile than people realise. Sure, if you leave it in the hands of journalists and advertising execs then it will wither and stagnate. But, equally, you can’t ‘make it new’ by lining it up in rows and shouting at it like some demented Victorian evangelist.

   Languages, like oil tankers, have wide turning circles. Of course they adapt: they are adapting constantly. If they don’t evolve they will ossify and die. But they change slowly and organically. If poems are to work, they need to respect this organic pace of change. As poets, we need to concentrate more on subtly extending and modifying the reach of words, and perhaps enticing in the odd casual reader with poems they think they understand - but are not quite sure. Let me put this another way. If poets are really unacknowledged legislators then what poetry needs is fewer revolutionaries and more fabians.


(1) From his introduction to the section on poetry in the most recent Writer’s Handbook.

(2) Alex Smith, ‘The Problems of Accessibility and Communication in Poetry’, Acumen 45, January 2003 p.16.

(3) Ian Jack, The Poet and his Audience, (Cambridge University Press 1984) p.1 .

(4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1958) pt.I, s.258. NB: It is sometimes forgotten that Wittgenstein had his roots in logical positivism. He could be a surprisingly hard-edged thinker. Much of his philosophical endeavours were focused on cutting through various longstanding problems by demonstrating that they were pseudo-problems caused by sloppy or misleading use of language. I very much doubt that he would have approved of the efforts of some postmodernists to claim him as one of theirs.

(5) Barbara Guest, If so, tell me. (London: Reality Street Editions 1999) p.9

(6) Yes, I know about ‘narrator fallibility’. But look at how it works in practice and you’ll see that the ‘mistakes’ that we are prepared to attribute to narrators are ones that ‘make sense’ to us. That is, mistakes similar to those we’ve made ourselves or can imagine others making.

(7) I say ‘analogous to’ advisedly, because, of course, this example is not identical to Wittgenstein’s. The difference is that, in the case of ‘S’, no one but the user could even theoretically say whether the symbol was being used consistently. However, it’s conceivable that the words in ‘Storytelling’ could be being used consistently and that the poet could provide a key that satisfied other users of the language. Codes, after all, are not private languages. My point is rather that on the surface this might as well be a private language and that it is down to the poet to prove otherwise.