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The Argotist Online (www.argotistonline.co.uk) is online again after an unexpected and inconvenient hiatus.
I would like to thank Ami Kaye of Pirene’s Fountain (www.pirenesfountain.com) for her support and assistance in my getting the site up and running again.
I came across an interesting interview with Seamus Heaney (a recent recipient of the David Cohen prize for literature, being awarded £40,000) by Dennis O'Driscoll (‘Beyond All This Fiddle’ ) where Heaney says about the avant-garde:
‘It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice. The work of the “Language Poets” and of the alternative poetries in Britain—associated with people in Cambridge University like J. H. Prynne—is not the charlatan work some perceive it to be; however, these poets form a kind of cult that shuns general engagement, regarding it as a vulgarity and a decadence. There’s a phrase I heard as a criticism of W. H. Auden and I like the sound of it: somebody said that he didn’t have the rooted normality of the major talent. I’m not sure the criticism applies to Auden, but the gist of it is generally worth considering. Even in T. S. Eliot, the big, normal world comes flowing around you. Robert Lowell went head-on at the times—there was no more literary poet around, but at the same time he was like a great cement mixer: he just shovelled the world in and it delivered. Now that’s what I yearn for—the cement mixer rather than the chopstick.’
Several things about this statement need to be addressed, so I will go through it step-by-step to do so. When Heaney says that the term “avant-garde” is old-fashioned, what does this really say regarding the term’s significance in relation to his own poetic ideals? Indeed, many critics have accused Heaney’s poetic, itself, as being distinctly old fashioned, a sort of neo-Georgian retrogressive “poetic” utterance. It is as if Heaney recognises the accuracy of this criticism, and in an effort to deflect its force feels the need to reflect it back at his detractors. That he is sensitive on this point is suggested by his saying (as if an afterthought) that ‘in literature, nobody can cause bother any more’. This is a curious thing for a man of letters to say in the absence of a defensive posture. What does he mean by “bother”, anyway? Is he referring to poetic innovation as being troublesome, or simply referring to personal “bother” caused by negative views of his poetry by observant critics? Whatever the case, to say that the term “avant-garde” is old-fashioned is beside the point, as Heaney, practised in casuistry and dissembling, knows all too well.
His citing of Ashbery as a belated mainstream voice also makes little sense outside of Ashbery being published in the UK by Carcanet. Certainly, he can’t be referring to Ashbery’s poetic which has yet to receive unreserved approbation by mainstream criticism, at least in Britain. Regardless of the truth of the matter, even if Ashbery was now part of the mainstream this does not demonstrate the emasculation of avant-garde concerns, which is the stated thrust of Heaney’s argument. Interestingly, if Ashbery is a mainstream voice this would imply that he and Heaney are both writing poetry. To re-position Ashbery within the boundaries of mainstream verse, all Heaney seems to be doing is to flatter his own poetic practice by association.
When he says of the alternative poetries in Britain that it ‘is not the charlatan work some perceive it to be’, who are the “some” he is referring to? No doubt, the main body of the mainstream, but I think, also, Heaney himself. His acknowledgment of Prynne, here, seems to be little more than an attempt to distance himself momentarily from the “some” he alludes to. If it were not this, then his saying that, ‘these poets form a kind of cult that shuns general engagement, regarding it as a vulgarity and a decadence’ recoups the generosity he grants Prynne. It seems not to have occurred to Heaney that any “cult” status these poets have acquired was, perhaps, the consequence of being marginalised by the mainstream. It is certainly not true that they shun “general engagement”, if he suggests by that term an aspiration for their work to be read and for it to communicate with a significant readership. In this respect, there is very little dissimilarity between mainstream and avant-garde poets.
Heaney’s appropriation of the criticism he sees as inappropriate regarding Auden (‘that he didn’t have the rooted normality of the major talent’) and conferring it upon the avant-garde, implies that major talent can only be an outpouring of an unadventurous character. If the history of art tells us anything, it is that this is categorically not the case. That Heaney uses Eliot, of all poets, to argue his point is another instance of his use of misdirection and redefinition, similar instances of which can be seen littered throughout his The Redress of Poetry. Whilst it is certainly true that Eliot was a conservative figure in both temperament and ideology, and that his later work was not as effervescent as that of his major period, Heaney’s suggestion that Eliot’s poetry evinces the ‘normal world’ is only accurate regarding content, the treatment of phenomena in Eliot, however, is seldom “normal” and usually problematical.
An expanded version of this blog has been commissioned by Jacket magazine and can be found here:
http://jacketmagazine.com/37/heaney-side.shtml
Responses to it, both positive and negative, can be found on the right of the page.
There is also a response to it by Todd Swift and a discussion at Eyewear:
http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/no-bother-at-all.html#comments
Looking at the barrage of overrated and over-produced contemporary films it is easy to forget that film once aspired to be an art form. One such film is William Wyler’s 1939 underrated version of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights which is, for me, the best film adaptation of that novel. Whilst the film deals with only the first 16 chapters of the novel’s 34, it compensates by capturing perfectly the emotional essence of the book, which for me resides in the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. When read in light of having seen this film, the rest of the novel’s 18 chapters seem almost like an afterthought or padding.
Wyler’s use of camera, lighting and mise-en-scene take much from the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, which is to be expected since many of this school’s filmmakers and technicians had, by the early 1930s, relocated to Hollywood and become part of mainstream film production there. This expressionist style is well suited to the film, as it provides a visual equivalent to the novel’s gothic atmosphere.
The film quite deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Original Score, by Alfred Newman. Indeed, it is difficult to separate film and score, so entwined and essential are they that they become almost dyadic. To listen to Newman’s score alone is a deeply emotional experience.
However, Wuthering Heights did not win the Academy Award for Best Picture, which went to the unfortunately titled Gone With the Wind. In my view, this was an oversight because Wuthering Heights is the far superior film. One cannot help but suspect that Gone with the Wind won because it was an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which dealt with a “big” subject. However, for me, the really timeless and universal themes are dealt with in Wuthering Heights.
I have an essay in Jacket Magazine called 'Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers':
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/side-j-essay.shtml
This essay looks at certain effects of language that I call Empirical Identifiers because of the ways in which they encourage exegetical closure through their functioning as referents to phenomena. It also looks at their opposites, which I call Non-Empirical Identifiers because of the ways in which they invite readers to participate in the creation of individual meaning and significance from language that is autonomous and non-referential. These identifiers, by enabling a ready recognition of empirical and non-empirical writing procedures in poetry, may prove useful as diagnostic devices for literary and stylistic criticism. The essay examines a range of poetic works from the last century and assesses the extent to which they exhibit a reliance on either Empirical Identifiers or Non-Empirical Identifiers.
I came across this site on the risks the Hadron Collider may pose to the planet:
Here are some extracts:
"Citizens Against The Large Hadron Collider is a non-profit organization established for the purpose of using legal action to prevent the operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) until further safety tests are conducted. The LHC is a particle accelerator located on the France/Switzerland border; it has been dubbed the largest, most expensive, most powerful experiment ever attempted, certainly dwarfing all particle colliders ever built before, both in terms of size and power.
Some experts fear that the risk of operating the LHC disproportionately outweighs anything science might gain from this experiment. It is not possible to know what the outcome of the experiment will be, but even CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists concede that there is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet".
And:
"Authoritative astrophysicist Dr Rainer Plaga finds significant gaps in the CERN in-house LSAG safety study. His detailed quantitative analysis published August 10, 2008 comes to the conclusion that "at the present stage of knowledge there is a definite risk from Micro Black Hole production at colliders".
And:
"In a nationwide broadcast, Dr. Wagner explains the dangers of the LHC and his mission to require CERN to undergo further safety analysis before the machine is turned on".
We won't know if any of these concerns are valid until the actual Big Bang experiment occurs in one year's time -- around September 2009.
The following quote is from an article found here:
http://cultofthedeadfish.blogspot.com/2008/06/secret-plan-to-kill-internet-leaked.html
"ISP’s have resolved to restrict the Internet to a TV-like subscription model where users will be forced to pay to visit selected corporate websites by 2012, while others will be blocked, according to a leaked report. Despite some people dismissing the story as a hoax, the wider plan to kill the traditional Internet and replace it with a regulated and controlled Internet 2 is manifestly provable."
TV news broadcasts on this matter:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=G5RQrxkGgCM&feature=related
and:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6ctfGSdlSPw&feature=related
and:
http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?16677S
Also, Virgin Media CEO supports restricted access to the Internet:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/a93556/virgin-media-ceo-attacks-net-neutrality.html
Fortunately Barack Obama is against this. Hear his statement on his site:
http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060608-network_neutral/
and:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=g-mW1qccn8k&feature=related
Google is also against it:
http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html
See also Save the Internet:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Quote from their site:
"Big phone and cable companies are trying to eliminate Net Neutrality, the principle that protects our ability go where we want and do what we choose online.More than 1.5 million SavetheInternet.com supporters are fighting to keep the Internet free and open for everyone."
Go there and show your support.
Here is their FAQ:
What is this about?
When we log onto the Internet, we take a lot for granted. We assume we'll be able to access any Web site we want, whenever we want, at the fastest speed, whether it's a corporate or mom-and-pop site. We assume that we can use any service we like -- watching online video, listening to podcasts, sending instant messages -- anytime we choose.
What makes all these assumptions possible is Network Neutrality.
What is Network Neutrality?
Network Neutrality -- or "Net Neutrality" for short -- is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet.
Put simply, Net Neutrality means no discrimination. Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination.
Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. With Net Neutrality, the network's only job is to move data -- not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.
Learn more in Net Neutrality 101.
Who wants to get rid of Net Neutrality?
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies -- including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner -- want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all.
They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video -- while slowing down or blocking their competitors.
These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services -- or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls -- and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.
The big phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk.
Is Net Neutrality a new regulation?
Absolutely not. Net Neutrality has been part of the Internet since its inception. Pioneers like Vinton Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, always intended the Internet to be a neutral network. And "non-discrimination" provisions like Net Neutrality have governed the nation's communications networks since the 1930s.
But as a consequence of a 2005 decision by the Federal Communications Commission, Net Neutrality -- the foundation of the free and open Internet -- was put in jeopardy. Now cable and phone company lobbyists are pushing to block legislation that would reinstate Net Neutrality.
Writing Net Neutrality into law would preserve the freedoms we currently enjoy on the Internet. For all their talk about "deregulation," the cable and telephone giants don't want real competition. They want special rules written in their favor.
Isn't the threat to Net Neutrality just hypothetical?
No. By far the most significant evidence regarding the network owners' plans to discriminate is their stated intent to do so.
The CEOs of all the largest telecom companies have made clear their intent to build a tiered Internet with faster service for the select few companies willing or able to pay the exorbitant tolls. Network Neutrality advocates are not imagining a doomsday scenario. We are taking the telecom execs at their word.
So far, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. But numerous examples show that without network neutrality requirements, Internet service providers will discriminate against content and competing services they don't like. This type of censorship will become the norm unless we act now. Given the chance, these gatekeepers will consistently put their own interests before the public good.
The cable and telephone companies already dominate 98 percent of the broadband access market. And when the network owners start abusing their control of the pipes, there will be nowhere else for consumers to turn.
Isn't this just a battle between giant corporations?
No. Our opponents would like to paint this debate as a clash of corporate titans. But the real story is the millions of everday people fighting for their Internet freedom.
Small business owners benefit from an Internet that allows them to compete directly -- not one where they can't afford the price of entry. Net Neutrality ensures that innovators can start small and dream big about being the next EBay or Google without facing insurmountable hurdles. Without Net Neutrality, startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay for a top spot on the Web.
If Congress turns the Internet over to the telephone and cable giants, everyone who uses the Internet will be affected. Connecting to your office could take longer if you don't purchase your carrier's preferred applications. Sending family photos and videos could slow to a crawl. Web pages you always use for online banking, access to health care information, planning a trip, or communicating with friends and family could fall victim to pay-for-speed schemes.
Independent voices and political groups are especially vulnerable. Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips, silencing bloggers and amplifying the big media companies. Political organizing could be slowed by the handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups or candidates to pay a fee to join the "fast lane."
What else are the phone and cable companies not telling the truth about?
AT&T and others have funded a massive misinformation campaign, filled with deceptive advertising and "Astroturf" groups like Hands Off the Internet and NetCompetition.org.
Learn how to tell apart the myths from the realities in our report, Network Neutrality: Fact vs. Fiction.
What's at stake if we lose Net Neutrality?
The consequences of a world without Net Neutrality would be devastating. Innovation would be stifled, competition limited, and access to information restricted. Consumer choice and the free market would be sacrificed to the interests of a few corporate executives.
On the Internet, consumers are in ultimate control -- deciding between content, applications and services available anywhere, no matter who owns the network. There's no middleman. But without Net Neutrality, the Internet will look more like cable TV. Network owners will decide which channels, content and applications are available; consumers will have to choose from their menu.
The free and open Internet brings with it the revolutionary possibility that any Internet site could have the reach of a TV or radio station. The loss of Net Neutrality would end this unparalleled opportunity for freedom of expression.
The Internet has always been driven by innovation. Web sites and services succeeded or failed on their own merit. Without Net Neutrality, decisions now made collectively by millions of users will be made in corporate boardrooms. The choice we face now is whether we can choose the content and services we want, or whether the broadband barons will choose for us.
What's happening in Congress?
The SavetheInternet.com Coalition applauds the recent introduction of the bipartisan “Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008” (HR 5353). Introduced on Feb. 12, 2008 by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.), this landmark bill would protect Net Neutrality and spark a much-needed public conversation about the future of the Internet.
The new bill would enshrine Net Neutrality -- the longstanding principle that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against Web sites or services based on their source, ownership or destination -- into the Communications Act. It also requires the Federal Communications Commission to convene at least eight “broadband summits” to collect public input on policies to “promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.”
Big phone and cable companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner have been lobbying furiously to kill Net Neutrality. They want to exploit their gatekeeper power to decide what you can do on the Web.
But Markey and Pickering’s bill deals a blow to the gatekeepers by ensuring that the public -- not phone or cable companies -- control the fate of the Internet.
Contact Congress today. Tell your representative to support the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008” (HR 5353) to make Net Neutrality the law of the land.
Who's part of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition?
The SavetheInternet.com coalition is made up of hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that are concerned about maintaining a free and open Internet. No corporation or political party funds our efforts. We simply agree to a statement of principles in support of Internet freedom.
The coalition is being coordinated by Free Press, a national, nonpartisan organization focused on media reform and Internet policy issues. Please complete this brief survey if your group would like to join this broad, bipartisan effort to save the Internet.
Who else supports Net Neutrality?
The supporters of Net Neutrality include leading high-tech companies such as Amazon.com, Earthlink, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype and Yahoo. Prominent national figures such as Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, every major Democratic presidential candidate, and FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have called for stronger Net Neutrality protections.
Editorial boards at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Seattle Times, St. Petersburg Times and Christian Science Monitor all have urged congress to save the Internet.
What can I do to help?
Sign the SavetheInternet.com petition.
Call your members of Congress today and demand that Net Neutrality be protected.
Encourage groups you're part of to sign the "Internet Freedom Declaration of 2007".
Show your support for Internet freedom on your Web site or blog.
Tell your friends about this crucial issue before it's too late.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=faq
After more than a year in the "making", I'm pleased to announce a series of interviews with singer/songwriters on the differences between poetry and song. These interviews are both insightful and entertaining, as well as revealing a rare glimpse into how songwriters view poetry. My gratitude goes to the following artists who took part in the interviews.
In alphabetical order:
Nancy Ames - Perla Batalla - Jake Berry - Neil Campbell - Julie Christensen - Phillip Henry Christopher - Kyla Clay-Fox - Chris Difford - Carol Decker - Van Eaton - Kate Fagan - Julie Felix - Adam Fieled - Jack Foley - Kate Garner - Andy Gricevich - Heather Haley - Steve Harley - Hayley Hutchinson - Jennifer John - Ralph McTell - Brendan Quinn - Ragz - Grace Read - Eddi Reader -Keith Reid - Michael Rothenberg - Bariane Louise Rowlands - Kate Rusby - Max Russell - Gerald Schwartz - Helen Seymour - Beck Siàn - Chris Stroffolino - Alison Sudol - Linda Thompson - Richard Thompson - Martha Tilston - Stuart Todd - Eric Unger - Pietra Wexstun - Rachael Wright
You can read the interviews here:
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Interviews%20with%20Songwriters.htm
An interview I did with literary critic Marjorie Perloff for the journal Poetry Salzburg Review in 2006 can now be read at The Argotist Online:
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Perloff%20interview%202.htm
I have a short collection of poems out with cPress called Slimvol:
The ebook version is free.
My poem Carrier of the Seed is now out as a free ebook with Blazevox. You can download it at:
http://www.blazevox.org/ebook.htm
The following people have been kind enough to allow me to quote their impressions of it:
Jake Berry
'Excellent, mythopoeic, my kind of stuff.'
Marjorie Perloff
'It’s very striking. The reader is propelled forward, thematically and mythologically. The result is extremely interesting.'
Hank Lazer
'An engaging avalanche of a poem, and I like the collision of various registers of language throughout the poem. Overall, a feel of contemporary myth-dream propelled narrative to it. A truly contemporary quest.'
John M. Bennett
'Say, this is an excellent piece.'
Michael Rothenberg
'I like it a lot.'
John Couth
'All the way through to the poem's conclusion, with its implied continuation, the reader will have embarked down an extraordinary route of languages, registers and vocabularies, which function to arrest, surprise and disrupt, languages that flow together, collide and cut across each other's current like a plaited waterway. In turn, this flow has been enriched by the assimilation of artefacts from different generations of writers; these deepen the work interlacing it with echoes and experiences from different times and cultures. The integration of so many disparate elements into one cogent construct is the poem's triumph.'
Reviews of it can be found at the following sites:
The haunting cover photo was done by my friend Rachel Lisi whose other photograpghy, artworks and writings can be found at:
I have an essay called 'Ezra Pound and the Romantic Ideal' at:
www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/JSideEPoundRomanticIdeal.htm
The essay examines the poetic ideas of Ezra Pound and shows that they have similarities to the poetic ideas of William Wordsworth, especially with regard to Wordsworth's advocating a naturalistic and descriptive mode of poetic writing that became the principal style of poetry for the rest of the nineteenth century and the greater part of the twentieth.
The essay also argues that the received opinion that Pound's poetical radicalism was largely motivated by his antipathy to Romantic poetry is exaggerated. Rather his radicalism was the result of his reaction to the stylistic excesses of late Victorian poetry, and as such can be paralleled with Wordsworth's reaction to the stylistic excesses of late seventeenth-century poetry.
To this extent, Pound's poetic ideas can be seen as a continuation of certain Romantic ideals in poetry; ideals primarily articulated by Wordsworth, having been developed from seventeenth-century empiricist philosophy.
I have an article on the poet Veronica Forrest-Thompson at Shadow Train called:
'Multiple Registers, Intertextuality and Boundaries of Intepretation in Veronica Forrest-Thompson'
http://shadowtrain.com/id201.html
It is not often that I’m quoted, so when I came across George Szirtes 2007 Stanza Lecture and saw that he’d quoted the following statement (which I’d made on an online poetry forum last year) I was quite flattered until I continued reading and saw his response to it. The quote from me is:
‘I don’t think there is such a thing as difficult poetry, only poetry that connotes or denotes. The former is always considered difficult by opponents of it. The Waste Land is more connotative than a Simon Armitage poem, for instance, that is why The Waste Land is seen as difficult.’
His response to it is:
‘I am not sure how this writer can draw a sharp distinction between connotation and denotation in any speech, let alone poetry. Connoting and denoting are simultaneous processes.’
Semantically and cognitively, connoting and denoting may be simultaneous processes but their creative usage in poetry necessarily modifies to some extent the balance Szirtes observes. If this were not the case then literary criticism would not be as problematic as it is.
Besides, most readers would, I’m sure, agree that The Waste Land is more connotative than an Armitage poem. This is not to say that Armitage’s poems do not connote; the difference is in the extent that they do when compared with The Waste Land.
Rupert Loydell of Stride Books alerted me to an article in New Statesman by Bloodaxe Books editor Neil Astley called (rather clumsily) ‘Give Poetry Back to People’. In it, Astley laments what he mistakenly sees as the lack of interest poetry publishers display in the sort of poetry he champions: namely that which is populist, descriptive and prose-like. He says, ‘When poetry publishers and reviewers ignore their readership, this is called “maintaining critical standards”’. He argues that this indifference is inappropriate given that ‘more people write poetry than go to football matches, and poetry is popular in schools, at festivals and at the hundreds of readings staged every week in pubs, theatres, arts centres and even people’s homes’.
Moreover, ‘Poetry has reached a wider audience through films, radio, television and the internet, as well as through initiatives such as London’s Poems on the Underground, which has been imitated around the world’. That is not all:
‘Big names in world poetry read to full houses at Scotland’s poetry festival, Stanza in St Andrews, every March, and at Ledbury in July. This month, hundreds of poetry enthusiasts will flock to the biennial Poetry International at the South Bank Centre in London (24-29 October), where the international line-up includes Elizabeth Alexander, Martin Espada and Jane Hirshfield (US), Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon (Ireland), Tua Forsström (Finland), Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden), Arundhathi Subramaniam (India) and Gabeba Baderoon (South Africa). The following weekend (3-5 November), Aldeburgh Poetry Festival will fill the town’s Jubilee Hall with readings by writers from Kurdistan and Catalonia to the US’.
He adds that despite the extensive promotion by major bookshop chains of poetry that is ‘aimed at a broader readership’; nevertheless, ‘all the talk in poetry publishing is of crisis’. He says that,
‘The producers of poetry aren’t in tune with the lovers of poetry. Many poets and publishers are actually hostile to the promotion of poetry […]. They see marketing as a dirty word instead of simply the means by which their books are made available to more readers’.
Because of this state of affairs, ‘Bookshops stock less and less poetry, concentrating on safe bets such as anthologies and selected poems by big-name authors’. The solution to this problem is, he says, to publish ‘a range of books and authors that people actually want to read’. Furthermore, ‘Continuing to package their books to appeal only to an intellectual elite has severely disadvantaged’ poetry publishers. He says, rather patronisingly, that if ‘readers find a book visually unappealing, they won’t pick it up. And if the back-cover blurb is a piece of turgid literary criticism, new readers will be scared off’.
For Astley, ‘Too often, poetry editors think of themselves and their poet friends as the arbiters of taste, selecting only writers they think people ought to read. […] Ignoring the readership would be commercial suicide in any other field, but this malpractice in poetry publishing and reviewing has survived into the 21st century thanks to “academic protectionism”.
He continues: ‘Editors’ “personal taste” is too often an excuse or disguise for elitism and arrogance. In my view, my responsibility as an editor is to be responsive to writers and readers, and to give readers access to a wide range of world poetry’. As long as it is populist, descriptive and prose-like, one presumes.
He says that ‘Contemporary poetry has never been more varied, but what the public gets to hear about are the new post-Larkin “mainstream” and the “postmodern avant-gardists” (with their academic strongholds in Oxford and Cambridge respectively)’. I would have thought Astley’s own poetic preferences have now replaced the post-Larkin “mainstream”. Moreover, as for the postmodern avant-gardists; surely they are somewhat marginalized.
He concludes with echoes of a liberal humanist aesthetic: ‘The establishment must be responsive not to literary and academic cliques, but to readers, especially at a time when public interest in poetry is growing so rapidly. Poetry’s dinosaurs have to realise that our country, culture and economic climate have changed, and so have their responsibilities’.
In his article, Astley seems to be in something of an unnecessary dilemma. On the one hand, he laments the failure of establishment poetry publishing houses to churn out even more populist, descriptive and prose-like poetry, while on the other hand he boasts about such poetry already being the dominant strain in contemporary British and international culture. Hasn’t he the slightest notion that poetry should be an art form and not a sort of social realism to be blindly marketed like reality TV?
In Sean O' Brien's piece (‘Rilke and the Contemporary Reader’) in Poetry Review (issue 95-3) he rightly acknowledges that much contemporary poetry in Britain is 'indulgently anecdotal'. He sees this anecdotalism as traceable to Philip Larkin (for older exponents) and Frank O'Hara (for younger ones). He says that these influences,
'trade on an attachment to authenticity which is felt to outbid both technical reach and thematic scale. Both serve a misconceived 'democratic' notion of poetry as entertainment, in which equality (a notion misplaced in this context) emerges not in diversity but as sameness'.
This seems strange coming from a poet whose career could be said to have embraced and championed realist tendencies in poetry. Indeed, he seems to have won every mainstream poetry prize going (including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham award, the E.M. Forster Award, and the Forward Prize). And Poetry Review (with typical hyperbole) describes him as 'the poet-editor-critic of his generation'. Peter Forbes in issue 91-1 of that publication reasserts O’Brien’s mainstream credentials:
'The members of this group of mainstream-poets-who-are-currently-making-the-running (they need a handy name but we'll come to that later) have been winning the prizes in the last few years: Carol Ann Duffy (virtually everything); Sean O'Brien (Forward), Don Paterson (Eliot and Forward First), Michael Donaghy (Forward), John Burnside (Whitbread), Jamie McKendrick (Forward), Jo Shapcott (Forward), Ruth Padel (National Poetry Competition), Ian Duhig (National Poetry Competition), Paul Farley (Forward First Collection). Prizes may not sell many extra copies of books but they play an important role in the consolidation of poetic reputations'.
Peter Porter in his review for Poetry Review (issue 91-1) of O’Brien’s Downriver includes O’Brien with, among others, Don Paterson, Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage as poets who 'bring back intellectualism and populism to British Poetry'. Porter sees these poets as 'delivering us' from 'the hermetically sealed Old Experimenters in J. H. Prynne's Cambridge'. Of these "saviours" of British poetry, Porter says that they 'cared enormously about versification' and that their material was 'sharply observed' and (echoes of the anecdotal?) 'wittily presented'.
Porter notes that O’Brien 'writes with the ease and assurance of a poet so at home with the real world'. This need/desire for realism is further expressed in O’Brien’s entry under the academic staff biographies list of Sheffield Hallam University:
'His poetry often combines demotic and more literary language and is strongly aware of its northern location - a poem such as 'Cousin Coat' creates an angry presence of historical injustice, closed mines and cenotaphs, by enhancing the rhythms and rhymes of ordinary speech. This means that when a more extravagant word is used, it feels necessary'.
Thus, we see realism (as geographical location and linguistic functionality) emphasised and esteemed. For Porter, such realism is preferable to what he sees as O’Brien’s former less-functional language, which 'sometimes tended to be strangled Laocoon-wise by their ramifications, their lineation and syntax tangling like roots in a pot'.
David Wheatley, in his Guardian (October 5, 2002) review of the mainstream poet John Fuller’s Now and for a Time, notes that O’Brien, in The Deregulated Muse, sees Fuller as a postmodernist poet. This is a designation which, says Wheatley, 'must have left readers of Jeremy Prynne and the Conductors of Chaos poets scratching their heads in disbelief'.
Given all this, I fail to understand why, in recent years, mainstream poets such as O’Brien have been willing to bite the hand that feeds them. Could it be that they sense the Hand’s "imminent" demise, and are preparing for the time when they will have to jump ship and adequately explain themselves to their new crew in terms of a redefinition of their poetic lineage?
Something of this can be glimpsed with Seamus Heaney in his The Redress of Poetry where he appears to want his cake and eat it. He says:
'Poetry cannot afford to lose its […], joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world'.
His empiricism is unavoidably evident in this statement. However his about-face on the nature of poetic language is puzzling. Could this turnaround perhaps indicate that Heaney realizes that his poetic modus operandi is beginning to lose currency in the more progressive circles of academic poetic discourse, and that to fully safeguard his posthumous poetic reputation he has to enable future critics of his work to capably defend his reputation against charges that he is a merely descriptive poet?
Yet, his continual wariness of the linguistic and formal properties of a poem is still very much evident. This can be seen in his cautious praise (also in The Redress of Poetry)of the descriptive poet Edward Thomas:
'Thomas came through with a poem in a single, unfumbled movement, one with all the confidence of a necessary thing, one in which again at last the fantasy and extravagance of the imagery and diction did not dissipate themselves or his theme'.
Here, Heaney can be seen elevating poetic content over poetic language. This would seem to bring in to question his sincerity in saying that poetry cannot afford to lose its 'joy in being a process of language'.
I've been reading a Boston Globe article called 'Heaney Ponders the Powers of Poetry' by Robert Taylor, which praises Seamus Heaney's 1995 apologia for descriptive poetry, The Redress of Poetry.
In the article Taylor writes:
'Seamus Heaney's recent Nobel Prize coincides with the publication of The Redress of Poetry, the lectures he gave over five years as professor of poetry at Oxford, ranging from the Elizabethan audacities of Christopher Marlowe to the bleak void of Philip Larkin, and illuminates a point of view of poetry as a force capable of transforming culture and the self'.
Yet from reading The Redress of Poetry, what I find is that far from advocating 'poetry as a force capable of transforming culture and the self', Heaney argues for a neo-Georgian descriptive poetic aesthetic that, if anything, can only inhibit supposed cultural transformations.
In The Redress of Poetry, Heaney's aversion to experiment and formal innovation, and his bias for a poetry consisting of obvious subject matter is evident in his criticism of Dylan Thomas. For Heaney Thomas has a 'too unenlightened trust in the plasticity of language'.
Heaney also has reservations about poetic artifice. Of Thomas’s use of it, he says that 'the demand for more matter, less art, does inevitably arise'. Elizabeth Bishop, however, has his approval because 'she never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of her subjects'.
In Seamus Heaney: From Major to Minor, R. Caldwell rightly criticises Heaney by saying:
'There is too often the feel with his poetry that the paraphrase is the end of the matter: there is little of the multifaceted richness of suggestion that invites one to probe further'.
Heaney, of course, was a protege of Philip Hobsbaum who made it possible for Heaney to get a publishing contract with Faber & Faber. Hobsbaum was also a founder of the 1960s British poetry clique, The Group. Originally based in London, The Group founded a wing in Belfast when Hobsbaum had to relocate there to take up a teaching post at Queen's University. Heaney met Hobsbaum while studying at Queens, and was invited to take part in Group meetings.
Hobsbaum was an anti-modernist - especially of the American variety. In his Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry he writes:
'Whitman’s abstractions and random collocations have a raw life of their own, a form even through their formlessness; and this has remained highly characteristic of American poetry ever since. The Waste Land is, indeed, a heap of broken images: this is its meaning, and, to some extent, its distinction. But that kind of writing has never worked well in England'.
His criticism of Eliot extends to what Hobsbaum sees as the negative influence on English poetry of Eliot’s use of the American idiom:
'Some damage was done to English verse by too close an imitation in the 1930s of the American idiom as evidenced in such poets as Eliot and Pound'.
Hobsbaum also sees a disparity between Eliot’s American writing style and traditional English poetic writing practice. Although Hobsbaum does not see this in itself as necessarily negative, the implication is that American modernism is largely a geographical and cultural entity, unable to successfully function within an English milieu:
'Again, Eliot’s work exhibits the characteristic American qualities of free association or phanopoeia and autobiographical content. English verse, however, has been at its best as fiction: an arrangement of what is external to the poet to convey the tension or release within'.
The approbation of Heaney is truly a retrograde step in the historical development of international poetry.
I just read a very interesting analysis of Gregory Corso's work by Dan Schneider. What was most interesting was Schneider's rating of Corso above Kerouac and Burroughs in the Beat pantheon. Only Ginsberg came out ahead of Corso. Schneider says:
'the Beat Generation, i.e. - the Beatniks - really just consisted of 2 real poetic talents & a lot of hangers-on. The 2 being Allen Ginsberg & Gregory Corso. Kerouac & Burroughs were really prosists - & mediocre, at best, LeRoi Jones a token, & Anne Waldman & Diane Di Prima bedwarmers'.
While I understand Burroughs's placement, I think Kerouac should be awarded more credit. Yes, much of his prose is prosaic but his poetry by far makes up for this. His use of novel word juxtapositions in '211th Chorus': 'quivering meat / conception', and in 'The Thrashing Doves': 'all the balloon of the shroud on the floor' are, like Ginsberg's use of them in Howl ('hydrogen dukebox, starry / dynamo in the machinery of night'), truly inspired. It is difficult to imagine what early Bob Dylan would have been like had these lines not been written.
I think that Corso's placement in the pantheon (given that Kerouac was primarily a novelist) is about right. His poetry, despite a tendency towards the prosaic, does generalize sufficiently for connotation to operate. And Schneider is right in citing Corso's 'Last Night I Drove a Car' and 'The Mad Yak' as being particularly inane.
It is becoming all too clear that mainstream poetry will never learn the lessons of early Modernism. Mainstream advice handed out to writers at poetry workshops boils down to the "Show, Don't Tell" theory of poetry. An example of this in practice is the poem 'Night Shift' by the U.K. poet Simon Armitage:
Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,
water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs
of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork
contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken
in acres of empty bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror
and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.
Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses:
the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.
It is difficult to see how such verse can be differentiated completely from Georgian poetry. It certainly has no relationship to the following passage from The Waste Land:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The Armitage poem is too precise and particular in its descriptions of the perceived world. The Eliot, on the other hand, would be regarded by most contemporary poetasters as too vague. Given that Eliot uses concrete nouns in this passage, their resultant affect is connotative rather than denotative. Their inclusion within generalized statements framed around a questioning stance allows readers some leeway in interpretation - hence the many different readings of this poem by literary scholars.
What he has achieved by mixing concrete and abstract words is to enable the concrete to signify more than what they would literally denote. In other words, the poem (unlike Armitage’s) is poetry. And as such is not meant to faithfully represent a world seen through the eyes of one person – the poet. The poem is not Eliot declaring: "This is what I see and you’d better see it too, or you are infringing on my right to be called a poet". He is less dictatorial than that.
Indeed, he strived for a poetry where the poet’s personality and presence was non-existent in the work. This was why he, and the other Modernists, were considered revolutionary. The point of their existence as writers was to free-up poetry from its novelistic restraints. We have forgotten this today. The irony in all of this, of course, is that it was Eliot who devised the "Show, Don't Tell" approach to poetry: he called it The Objective Correlative. Fortunately, he seldom followed his own advice.
I was at a poetry workshop (for "workshop" read "indoctrination") recently and the tutor kept stressing that the more precise the language of the poem the more it would find a market. I would suggest the opposite: that the less precise the language of the poem the more it would find a market. But only (and this is a big only) if publishers would recognise the natural tendency of humans to generalise. I find that modern poetry fails to recognise the ability of language to be ambiguous and, therefore, more suggestive to individual readers.
In fact I would go so far as to suggest that to block the ambiguity inherent in language is to go against the natural instincts of human beings to make sense of themselves and their experiences. The constant indoctrination of students in poetry workshops towards the ideal of a language that is precise and images that are concrete seems to me to be going against nature. For if one looks at the poetry of children and the so-called “bad” poetry of adults (ignorant of poetry workshop specifications) one finds it replete with imprecision. If it could be understood by all mainstream poetry publishers that the natural inclination of the brain is to generalise then they would (for the sake of increasing sales if nothing else) take the initiative.
As it is, however, mainstream poetry does not sell in large quantities (despite mainstream publishers' hype and marketing) because its prose-like quality is too like prose fiction. The public then are faced with a choice: to read poems, or to read the real thing. They generally go for the real thing because it has more depth and better characterisation. The only people left, then, to buy poetry are other poets researching markets for their work; libraries fulfilling a quota; and schools and colleges.
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