The British Disease?

So it isn't just me, wee Canadian in Britain that I am, who has finally recognised, then recoiled from, the toxic bite of the endless, sinister snake that is the British media. Now the Vancouver Olympics chief has hit out at what Eyewear has been noting all week - a brutal and cynical news cycle of attacks, bent on downgrading a superb event, due to one tragic accident, and unseasonably warm weather (as if the English can keep their own weather under control either!). People in glass houses indeed - and what does this warn about the coming media storm in 2012? This sort of media approach has often sidelined and diminished poetry in the UK, too - because any thing based on love, enthusiasm and good news tends to ask to be kicked and trampled, apparently, by the kitten-bashing talking heads and journalists of these isles.

Papal bull?

Secular Britain is up in arms today as the Pope has spoken out about an "equality bill" that would require (among other things) Catholic orphanages to give equal consideration to gay parents. Now, Eyewear has always been an outspoken defender of gay and queer rights; and has often chided the Anglican communion for being intolerant. I believe Christ would not have unwelcomed homosexuals.

That being said, the Pope has, surely, the right - the right of freedom of religious practice, if not expression - to defend the non-secular (that is, religious) convictions that he believes underpin the faith he is leader of. We (or you) may not agree with him - but he has the right to say and believe - or religious freedom has been abandoned for some sort of vague secular notion. But secularism masks an aggressive rationalist attack on faith, and one man's secular equality might be another person's sin.

Meanwhile, Wole Soyinka, the nobel prize winner, has recently called Britain a cesspit of "Islamism", due to its history of arrogant colonial tolerance. So it seems Britain offends some for being too open to religion, and others for not being open enough. Between Peter and a hard place then.

Hand + Star

Tom Chivers - poet and unstoppable force for poetic good in the UK - has started up a new magazine - literary and for the digital age, called Hand + Star. It is already looking to be one of the places readers wanting to keep up with the increasingly exciting New Decade of British Poetry will turn.

Foulds Up, Fry Out

Adam Foulds was a poet. Now he is a Booker nominated novelist who writes about poets - and a poet. Foulds is on a meteoric trajectory. Good luck to him. I think all poets should write novels. They pay better and get more attention. Do more people read them? How many poetry books get optioned? What is writing for in the 21st century of celebrity?

Poor Mr. S. Fry has begun to discover too much occasional tweeting is damaging his rep. A Sunday Times article lambasted him for being so obnoxiously omnipresent. Fry has the Welles status - media type with big brains - but sadly, looks more like Wilde than contains that man's genius. Good luck to him.

Wuthering Bites

The dumbing down of Britain and America continues, with ITV's broadcast, over the last two nights, of a new version of Wuthering Heights, destined to be aired in America, too, and then let loose on the world in the form of a DVD. That this latest heap of rubbish was masterminded by the creator of Desperate Romantics - a bodice-ripping series that lays waste to the Pre-Raphealites - should surprise no one. The media has discovered - again - that high culture and emotionality and poetry can sell - if commodified and repackaged to be all about sex and violence - which, as Frankie said a while back, were "the new gods". Though Tom Hardy is rather good at being handsome and menacing as Heathcliff, everything else about this adaptation is beyond poor. I don't want to flog a dead horse, but le me briefly explain.

The novel, on which this TV two-parter was based, is, as we know, one of the greatest books in the English language. Its passionate exploration of the psychology of intense, obsessive and transgressive love is exemplary, and comparable in darkness and power to the works of Dostoyevsky, and, in terms of insight, Freud. Nothing about this new version expresses this inner power. Instead, by divorcing the teleplay too often from the actual original text (not in terms of plot incident, but in terms of language) and displaying the fevers and bad behaviour too literally, almost all consequence and symbolic power is lost. Instead, one wishes to call the police and get Heathcliff slapped with an Asbo. He is just a moody good-looking stalker guy now, isn't he? Cathy is just someone who's "perfect guy is torn".

I understand the impulse to make this masterwork of romantic extremism relevant to "kids today" - but in the process, the love and depths have gone. I suppose the problem is, in Britain today, everyone is Heathcliff on a Saturday night, and everyone wakes with a Swinburne-sized headache on Monday mornings. The UK - secular, sexed-up and sentimentalised - is now about as Romantic as Byron could have hoped for - without much of the saving subtlety, pathos and vision of Keats. It will be fascinating to see what Bright Star is like when it opens this autumn. It will hopefully dumb up.

Meanwhile, the just-closed BBC poll to find out "the nation's favourite poet" left me cold. The longlist seemed rigged (no Elizabeth Barret Browning?!) from the start, with a certain slant of lightness. Five women, out of 30 poets? That seems barely acceptable, doesn't it, after the long struggle that feminism has endured in the 20th century.

Or: What does it matter what the masses think about poetry? Look around us, citizens: is this a landscape inwardly-shaped by a deep relationship with poetry and poets? No. Nor is it likely to get better soon. Figures in the arts like Carol Ann Duffy have begun to support the latest in what seems a never-ending series of initiatives to stop global warming - 10:10. It demands one cuts 10% of one's emissions during 2010. A good idea. Let's hope it works.

However, will the 10s of this century not, in some ways, mitigate against the sort of mindset that embraces poetry for the pleasures it instills, and the depths it helps trace and plumb? Myself an activist in the past, I have seen the dangers of letting good-willed people converge on poetry for their own purposes.

Poetry, maybe, should never be second fiddle to any cause, though it can join the party as it wishes, to help urge along a dance or march. Poetry is either blessedly above the fray, capable of swooping down like an angel or eagle, as it wishes, or it is nothing. If the world turns very committed and serious and austere, it may be hard to justify the luxury (of time, of learning, even of attitude) that poetry often requires. An odd irony is emerging - even as the popular image in capitalism of the poet-as-lover becomes founded ever more solidly - the swing against capitalism will require a different kind of poet - more radical, and less poetic. What percentage of themselves can poets trim off before they cease to be poets, and are civil servants, or campaigners?

The New Andrew Duncan Book: Preaching to the unconverted

I received a review copy of the new Andrew Duncan book of polemical criticism, The Council of Heresy: A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain, on Friday, and read it through over the weekend, as gripped as if by a thriller. Duncan is perplexing and exasperating and compelling in equal measures: he's arguably one of the most significant poet-critics now writing seriously in Britain (if not the most), because of his passion, wide experience, eccentric insights, and unexpected juxtapositions and references (often to obscure German or medieval or theological texts). He never writes as an academic, per se, but uses footnotes. He is definitely not of the "mainstream" yet he retains an open mind. And, unlike almost everyone else, he knows who Terence Tiller is (the best joke in this book is when he claims that the 40s poets failed because of their moderation, a paradox worthy of Wilde).

He also has here rescued Anthony Thwaite from semi-obscurity (and let's face it, undeserved and general disinterest)by championing his work, an unexpected apologia from someone on the margins that I am sure Thwaite (as a Larkin ally) might be wary of if it wasn't so comprehensive and erudite a championing. Duncan can also be obtuse, naive, funny, and odd, in the same paragraph. Reading him is like reading something by Blake, if Blake read about neuroscience and was an idiot savant. You never know what you are going to get in a Duncan book - they are almost like Gysin cut-ups, with throw-away lines and observations of sometimes near-genius. I think I disagree with 80% of him, but treasure what I don't agree with, when he says it, anyway. He's the informative, engaging and punk edge of experimental UK poetry, in his new role as Greil Marcus to the Prynne Era.

There are too many important elements in this book to explore, or ignore. If you are a British poet, or critic, or want to know about the "poetry wars" and poetics, then you have to read this. It's about as unmissable as Avatar will be for sci-fi film buffs this winter. It's the Future. It's also the Past. Duncan in this book sets out to explore ways of imagining how we might go about solving the differences between the Cambridge avant-garde, the conservative postmoderns (Muldoon, Fenton, his designation), the mainstream, and the British Poetry Revival types. He has many important things to say and suggest, not least that there are maybe "eight or eleven factions" not two. He is the first critic to really bluntly state the fantasy aspect to all poets' imaginary positions, and his comparison of Raine's and Mottram's is useful and striking.

Duncan also offers correctives and explanations, to help understand the emptying out of the speedier, more abstract style of experimental British verse, and suggests - heretically I think - that the best way to read it is not to try too hard to understand it. It's meant to wash over one. He also wryly observes that maybe the reason so many people objected to the Mottram-era Poetry Review is because most people don't "like" experimental poetry. Duncan is good on remembering that poetry has or needs readers, and that they have wishes and needs too.

His main point is that there needs to be some sort of truth commission, where poets, and cultural managers and editors on all sides of the battle from 1960 to the present, the battle over the limited resources and assetts that poetry has to offer (and he notes these are real, often editorships for commercial presses where "seedy businessmen" hold sway), can meet and express their differences, truthfully. This is a Utopian dream and he admits it. Duncan's thinking through of why and how there are different poetries and receptions for poetry is confused, at times, I believe. Sometimes he is lucid and accurate, as when he notes that most poetry opinions are formed without reading the books of our enemies; and that since most poetry decisions are made in private there is no historical record of the injustices. However, he seems to want to say that readers may legitimately find modernist work as off-putting as ugly tower blocks, but that also it is ultimately the truer path for poetry.

Duncan is charmingly honest - he never pretends to like most "mainstream poetry" - though he lists some of the books by mainstreamers he does like, like Oswald's Dart. He believes that private mythology passionately expressed is important, so he approves, for instance, of Hughes. If Duncan does want to effect a rapprochement, he might have tried harder to edit out some of the cheap shots that mar this important and smart book. Jibes like we might need to decommission the poetry wars by having a controlled explosion of Don Paterson, or claims that all mainstream poets lead boring lives, seem jarring (especially since most experimental British poets are hardly models of thrilling lifestyles, either; indeed, a lot of poetry's Dad's Army-Shamanism seems pathetic, a bit like the pseudo-Satanist sent up in Polanski's The Ninth Gate). His claim that Auden is a chief problem with mainstream Anglican poetry and its light-verse conservatism also apparently ignores Auden's support for Ashbery, hardly a mainstream-Christian poet.

Duncan traces many problems to Anglicanism and Englishness, and Nonconformism, and the class struggle - yet praises Rowan Williams. Other confusions and errors appear - he claims there needs to be some work on narcissism and the artist, as if the work of the London Freudian school had never explored such things. He calls Ed Wood the Ed Wood Story. He also cites an anthology by the wrong title at some stage. He also claims to have never read critics on how diction claims can be related to suppression of alternate political positions and movements in history - well, he hasn't read Donald Davie then. These seem more like eccentric errors of the fast-thinking math whiz, mere untidiness amid the brilliant clutter. Perhaps his biggest error is to claim that the test case historical moment of observable conflict and suppression of the experimental wing in the UK was the Poetry Review Mottram episode.

Duncan, in general, doesn't think much has happened since 1980 of interest, and that the revolution was essayed in the 70s (and failed). He might have read his comrade, Ian Brinton, and his recent Cambridge guide to contemporary poetry, to see that the best test case was in fact the experimental poems about the Iraq war, and the attempt to suppress them (see Kendall, Tim). Duncan also seems to have missed the fact that the Internet has been effecting a depolarisation since 2002 at least, when Nthposition began publishing global poetry from all known schools and styles; nor does Duncan mention the "fusion poetry" movement, nor the recent Norton anthology of "Hybrid" poetry. There are attempts to reconcile styles and concerns.

What ultimately impresses me is Duncan's claim that such differences between schools and styles have "meaning" - and in fact, in a market, offer the greatest choice for readers. What remains insufficiently explored, for me, is why poems that explore domestic arrangements, and the personal voice, are necessarily poorer or duller than poems that empty out grammar and syntax, and present sped-up, verbally hyperliterate texts. I personally feel that much poetry of all kinds is dull and poor, but enough is worthwhile, across the spectrum. My own work attempts to explore some aspects that Duncan respects - the riotous, the artificial, the rhetorical, the passionate, the mythic - but also wants to be able to speak of the personal, and my experiences. After all, in a capitalist world, perhaps the only thing we almost possess is our self, and even that, of course, is not true; but trying to explore speaking through the almost-self is a valid "procedure" too.

Eric Gregory Award Reading 2009

Eyewear attended the Eric Gregory readings last night at the cool Farringdon-area pub Betsy Trotwood - Ms. Baroque was also there. This annual event was created 9 years ago by a former Gregory winner, Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, an indispensable force on the UK scene (few do more for young emerging poets). Lumsden hosted with an informal, informative style, and the readings were in three sets, spaced by 15 minute breaks, that seemed to go on forever; they were needed though, the venue became stifling at times, and a no open-windows rule was enforced. There was a good crowd - maybe sixty or so, mainly younger people, with a few parents and older types like me. The little stage is ideally placed, and the sound system was crisp and clear.

It was an immensely positive vibe - everyone seemed glad to be there, and generally happy for the winners. It felt like an ideal situation - new poets being welcomed to the pack - not with envy, but admiration and support. This sort of event should be the model of how poets engage with each other at each stage of their careers. I felt blithely free of ego, since I had brought a poet I mentor along (22-year-old Kavita Joshi, a fine emerging poet) to see another of my Poetry School students, Alex McRae, read.

I'm very pleased that McRae's work was given the nod this year, especially as I had included her in the recent round-up of younger poets I put together for the Manhattan Review. I'm sorry another very good younger poet, Nathan Hamilton, wasn't a winner - but the five who read did themselves proud. I would think they all have a more than good shot, in a few years or less, at a debut collection from a good press.

McRae read well, selecting poems that showcase the imaginative clarity of her poems that often express a potent and deep central image as the formal governor of the text, and, since I have already included her work in that section, I will move on to the others in this post. Sam Riviere, who I mentioned in the Intro to the MR, but did not include, is now doing a PhD at UEA, and is someone to watch. He seems intelligent, down-to-earth, effortless, and free-wheeling, with the lanky slim energy of a rumpled rock star, but without the immodesty. He's funny, and his work has range and brains, a little like a Muldoon who'd spent time with O'Hara. Faber is publishing his pamphlet soon, so he's on his way. He read last, and was slightly tipsy, it seemed, or maybe just adrenaline-powered. To some, he was the best of the night.

I actually think that nod might go to James Brookes, by a hair. I didn't really know Brookes work. I do now. He is only 22, so his win on his first try was most impressive. His poems commanded immediate respect from the assembled - they were both supple and traditional, richly informed by classical images. He came across as brilliant, inspired, good-natured, decent, and in formal control of his aims. I think his debut has some of the immediate gravitas of Geoffrey Hill's in the early 60s. Someone should snap his first collection up, he feels like the genuine article.

Everyone was good, though, so let's not split hairs. Liz Berry (another Berry wins a Gregory!) read first of the poets, and was glamorous, poised, very sure of her self as a performer, and her poems, unknown to me previously, were well-made, often very funny, and sometimes startlingly moving. Again, a poet I could imagine becoming one of the best of of the next decade.

The most unusual of the bunch was the one with the most delightful name: Swithun Cooper. Cooper is handsome in a camp way that he cultivates by wearing Buddy Holly glasses, and his hair in a conservative science teacher style. Tall and confident, he delivered poems at once the most hip of the night, and perhaps the most ethical (one was about the feminist approach to slasher films). As a performer, it was hard to keep one's eyes off of him, but to my ears, while he is very promising, a few of the poems, in their complexity, still felt unfinished. It may be his style and themes are the closest to my own, in some ways (pop culture and authentic feeling) so I might be too close to see his work whole. He's one I want to come back to, and see more work from, before I make a more certain claim. I hope he emails me work for Eyewear (that goes for all the five) so I can feature them in the autumn.

The Eric Gregory Awards turn 50 next year. No other nation has such an impressive example of an award that has almost single-handedly supported and announced so much talent. Reading the list of former winners is a blueprint to mainstream British (and Irish) poetry of the last half-century. These five join that august tradition. Time will tell. but the odds are at least a few of those young poets we saw last night will be respected older poets one day.

i before e except in UK?

Curious news. Schools in England have been told to no longer teach the catchy mnemonic "i before e except after c" because it is "irrelevant". I may be thick, but I still use the rule several times a day - it's one of the only things I do remember from school, along with "seven eights are fifty-six" (sung to a particular tune). Hope they reconsider.

Brown's Whitewash

It wouldn't be Eyewear if it didn't mention the illegal Iraq war from time to time - and it wouldn't be Britain if there wasn't an establishment urge to cover the whole thing up. It seems almost absurd that, at a time when even in Iran the supreme authorities are having to rethink their anti-democratic shenanigans, so strong is the democratic pressure from the people, Gordon Brown - Prime Minister in name only - continues to try and pull the hood over our eyes about the mess he and Tony got us into (with a little help from George). I won't wax polemical here - you can imagine the rest. Only one thing though - how did Brown think this anti-transparent whitewash would get past us, so soon after he promised a brand new listening-and-improving self? He's the same-old-Brown, alas. Willing to learn lessons - but only if some other anonymous person's results are graded for him, in secret, in a dark room, under the seabed, where everybody is truthful and intelligence never fails.

Ambler Into Fear

Good news. One of Eyewear's favourite authors - British spy-book Thirties genius Eric Ambler - is back in print, after a decade in the wilderness. 28 June marks the start of his centenary birth year, and Penguin's done a good job on five of the books. Pity they haven't reprinted his first - the spy spoof The Dark Frontier, which I think is one of his best.

I loved Ambler almost more than Greene. His books made great noir films, too - The Mask of Dimitrios, with Peter Lorre, was one of my boyhood faves, and inspired one my earliest poems (in an Audenesque style).

We often think of the Thirties landscape as ambiguous amoral territory, with debates between fascists and socialists, in a crumbling Europe, as mapped by Auden or Greene, but Ambler is the third part of that imaginary triumvirate, I think (well, one might want to add Orwell). Speaking of which, Orson Welles (there is a weird name echo there) quasi-directed the Ambler classic Journey Into Fear, and made it a madcap farce, with the infamous assassination scene in the rain (with the grossly obese killer, and the Victrola).

Gordon Brown's Meltdown

It was a strange night for politics in Britain, and a sad one. The EU election results are Labour's poorest since 1918 (beaten in Wales and Scotland, with far-right parties getting a toehold), with less than 16% of the popular vote. Eyewear feels the only way forward for Labour is radical and dramatic renewal, instigated by drastic change at the top. That this likely won't happen only redoubles the Labour tragedy - and the potential destruction of the party for a generation is a tragedy - and it likely won't because a) Brown is stubborn enough to cling to power until next May and b) his peers and MPs seem so demoralised and/or craven as to resist the bold steps necessary. This means Labour is dead on its feet - like someone stuck at the edge of a diving board, shivering, unable and unwilling to climb down or make the leap. It seems obvious that any leader would be better, since Brown cannot communicate with human warmth and will never win voters around now. Someone else just might find a bit of that Obama spark. Meanwhile, the right is gaining ground in Britain, and looks set - in more or less acceptable forms - to be driving the agenda for the next decade (much as they have this decade, anyway). What a mess Blair and Brown - that unfunny duo - have got us into this time. But then, since at least 2003, they've been abandoning all of Labour's core values simply to curry favour, anyway.

Sleepwalking With The Enemy

Yesterday night, the cabinet member James Purnell, made a brave move. He opened the way for those in cabinet, and backbench Labour MPs, to voice their discontent with Gordon Brown. It all seemed to play for. Incredibly, though, instead of rallying to the young visionary's letter today, the fearful Labour cabinet has rallied around their embunkered leader as he accomplishes a semi-shuffle. It's a terrible day for Labour. They seem incapable of not bottling things. Whenever a strong clear decision to lead and make hard choices is called for, they retreat. This was the chance. Now Alan Johnson has been co-opted - a cowardly act on his part, revealing him as venal and small. Britain will likely have another year of this gang - unable to lead, unwilling to move on.

Voting Intentions

The Guardian today calls for Gordon Brown - that hapless Scot - to go. I wish he would. It seems that voting for Labour is currently a bad idea - if only because of Iraq; the failure to address the poverty divide; and due to current incompetence and cowardice. The Tories are worse - anti-EU (and aligned with fanatical homophobes in Europe) and still too Thatcherite for our own good. The Greens are angelic in the abstract, but too left of the centre to be a valid mainstream option - for now. Therefore, it seems the Lib Dems have a window of credibility we need to open for them. I don't much like atheistic babe-magnet Clegg, but Vince Cable is a great leader-in-waiting. If I were to vote tomorrow, it would be for the Lib Dems, then.

Speaker! Speaker!

For anyone interested in parliamentary debate - or democracy - today is truly historic. For the first time in 300 years a Speaker of the House of Commons (UK) has had to step down, basically because of near-total MP disdain. Of course, he is being scapegoated - most of them are, it turns out, greedy and corrupt, or maybe just unethical and inept - but we can't ditch every last rotten bum out, can we? The danger is - who do we replace them with? At a time when Obama is making American democracy seem invigorated by decency, intelligence, energy, culture, and high purpose, the lack of any potential British figure to step forward is a little astonishing. What has become so rotten in this state? And why?

I suspect a cultural rot: the media, and other elites, in business and politics, along with many in the upper class, have connived for years, or rather, simply let things happen with an invisible hand - to allow British culture to degenerate into a medley of celebrity, shagging, uneducation, aimlessness and booze, with some trendy and repulsive Britart and bad pop music tossed in too. Mostly misplaced is the essential decency of the English, and their sense of fairness - or rather, it is there, but paved over by crass and angry TV ("you're fired!") and a lazy atheism bolstered by obesity and indifference.

What needs to happen is that Britain reclaims its sense of purpose, and becomes a leading force for the coming Green Age. We need a new sort of political landscape, one less divisive and no longer about Labour or Tory. Greed is not good. God exists. Poetry, if trusted, might almost save us. In short, we need a 21st century Arnoldian vision.

Ian Hamilton's Collected Poems

I've been reading the slim handsome new Faber Ian Hamilton Collected, recently published. It's a corrective reading, because no one else, really, writes in his style now, as Alan Jenkins observes in his intelligent, honest, and compassionate Introduction. This is impressive, because it means that Hamilton's terse, controlled, famously minimal manner seems almost unique, and as remote as from another century. Most influential and respected as a poet in the 1970s, it may be hard to believe, now, but Hamilton was, along with Larkin, and Hughes, arguably one of the three best-known and respected English poets of that decade (Heaney was of course the major Irish figure). Before the Motion and Morrison 80s, and, setting aside for a moment the other tradition being pioneered by Prynne, Riley, Crozier, Raworth, Hamilton was a major figure. Is he still?

The new edition of his work is austere in its claims and offerings. There are not many more than the famous 60 poems. What is new does not radically shift one's reading. However, what is impressive is precisely the often-mentioned austerity, and modesty, of delivery. Hamilton did not believe in poetry as research. He waited for poems to come, out of extreme moments. These he then shaped - and they feel agonisingly pared back. I can think of no other 20th century poet, writing in English, with anything like such a reputation, with such a small body of work. It is perhaps a dubious critical approach to praise a poet for extra-poetic values, such as morality, or workmanship, or modesty - but British criticism is often weighted, with such unspoken, and spoken, claims. What is often admired is precisely how character and/or values are invested in work (craft, skill, form, mastery, discipline, rigour, seriousness and so on) - so that excessive, or indeed, prolific, poets, sometimes appear unruly and can be censored as such.

The big paradox is Dylan Thomas, who was personally amoral and disordered, but apparently disciplined in his poetic craft. The Movement, of course, was all about an alternative moral or personal austerity, a controlling, that fed into the poetic style. I wonder if enough work has really been done to examine the relative meaningfulness of such a position, as ancient as Seneca, that a writer's ethics are their writing. What is intriguing about Hamilton's poems is that they read, seen again now, powerfully. Without rebuking anyone, they are artifacts of an impressive other way of writing poems, worth reconsidering. Reading them is a tonic, is bracing.

For, Hamilton, despite his attack on the Forties (he preferred the severest of the war poets, especially Keith Douglas), was no mere Movement type. He read and admired Lowell. He knew and respected Al Alvarez (whose own late poetry reads much like Hamilton's). Hamilton wanted to pack extreme, confessed emotion in to the poems, but, in a more impersonal, if not Eliotic way. As such, the form of each of his poems is an extremely striking microcosmic version of the whole; in genetic terms, each poem is a gene; the whole is the Collected.

I find myself persuaded that, for all the pathos of the tiny achievement, in terms of finished, published poems, Hamilton was a tremendously serious, gifted, and dedicated poet. He was scrupulous to the extreme. His work warrants such a new publication, and is no mere vanity project. It will last - perhaps not because he is central to what the British 80s to the present actually became, in poetry (Hamilton surely would not have enjoyed the emphasis on comedy and 'democratic voice') - but despite what happened. Hamilton has become a very intriguing road not quite taken. Never too late. I know his nephew, the fine young poet Nathan Hamilton, has been thinking along similar lines.

A Parliament Fouled

We've had parliaments of fowls, now we have one fouled. The "mother of all parliaments" - that in London - the seat of British democracy - is now it appears the floundering seat of entitlement, hypocrisy, and pitiful corruption (expenses claimed for moats, helipads and manure). British pundits are suggesting this might be a collapse in the public acceptance of politics as we know it - a sort of latter-day let-them-eat-cake moment. Will there be an English Revolution, at last? This is the worst of times, and the worst of times, but I don't see too many heads rolling yet - though the red-faced, blustering Speaker of the House should go, and soon. European elections are coming, and, should this utter fiasco, which leaves few moral compasses left unsmashed and pointing due North, swing to the right, Britain might get darker, before it gets a proper dawn.

Brinton On Prynne

Good news, Ian Brinton's book on the major British poet, J.H. Prynne, has been published by Shearsman, that important poetry press. I should add, my (mixed) review of the recent Shearsman book, Avia, by Nathaniel Tarn, is out in the latest Wolf.

Observers of the British scene - from afar - might be puzzled at the excitement in the media, this last week, surrounding Carol Ann Duffy - a formidable and intelligent poet to be sure - and the absence of any mention of Geoffrey Hill, or Prynne, as alternate potential laureates.

While they may not have been interested, these, and other significant British poets are of equal stature and seriousness, and the British media does the nation no favours with their simplistic equation of popularity/clarity and poetic quality. Blame Orwell. Orwell, the guru of the British journalist, was on guard against all complex and opaque language, suspecting what wasn't plainly spoken as being cant or worse.

However, what he argued on behalf of prose does not necessarily make sense for poetic utterance. The project of British late modernism is ongoing, is viable, and even exciting. Just don't expect to hear about it, much, on the BBC, even during their dedicated poetry weeks ahead. In Britain, it seems, the Establishment cannot bear too much variousness - which is reality.

Motion Unbound

Andrew Motion has been a poet laureate that Eyewear could deal with - in the way that Pound had commerce with Whitman.

Motion has been good - more or less - for poetry in Britain, 1999-2009. His most important work may have been his poetry about bullying, and the Iraq War (related themes), but for most people, the Poetry Archive will seem the lasting monument. I personally regret never having been asked to record for that Archive, but then again, nothing about the poetry establishment in the UK will ever surprise me - I have lived here for over 6 years, and am still treated like an arriviste every day.

Anyway, back to Motion, whose support of my work with Oxfam and those poetry CDs was instrumental. His agreement to read at the first-ever Oxfam event way back in 2004 (five years ago now) meant that Wendy Cope also came onboard, as well as Agbabi and Dark. After that event, all the other great and talented poets were more willing to appear. I think Motion is a very fine, serious poet, and a complex, deeply intelligent, and sensitive man. I also think he is somewhat old-fashioned, but in a flexible and open-eyed way; he tried to more than cope with the rapid changes of our times - and embraced new poetics, and media, more often than not.

This post is occasioned by his article in The Guardian, today, marking his coming retirement. It's refreshingly honest, though perhaps still guarded (more will come later I assume). For one thing, he suggests that Hughes' "great poet" status may be a disservice to the man and work (which is ironic, since no one has done more in these isles to establish Heaney's great poet status than Motion, with, I think similar results there).

Another thing he points out is how negatively journalists, even the top editors, approach poetry, and poems - they are not news, and to be news, they need to be mocked or undermined. I have a similar thought. Recently, after launching The Manhattan Review Young British Poets anthology in London - and the night was a resounding success - a journalist approached me, to say he had wanted to write an article for The Sunday Times about the new generation of young poets, but his editor "didn't like poetry and thought it was dead" so had killed the story.

Too many UK journalists are sour on poetry, and infect the good news with their own toxins. In this way, the lively and burgeoning poetry communities of the UK, in all their variety and passion are daily diminished.

I agree with Motion that poetry, as he writes today, is an essential aspect of being human - or can be. Religion, poetry, myth, dance, music, drawing - all such "primitive" aspects of our imaginative existence tend to be shunted aside in a world devoted to management-speak, consumption and commerce, and science on the march - which is tragic, especially now, at a time when it is becoming evident that industry and science has gifted the world with an unpayable bill, and global warming may - Heaven forbid! - destroy us.

One thing nags at me, though, about Motion's complaint that writing engaged lyric poems about the Royals was taxing (for him, nearly impossible apparently) - it seems hard to fathom. I don't understand it, myself. Obviously, Motion believes poems must be occasioned by organically-sympathetic experiences, in much the same way as Wordsworth. If he followed the more mechanistic line of Larkin, let alone someone more ludic, or artifice-interested, like VF-T, he could well have created fascinating texts about the Royal Family - unmoored from any personal connection, true, but no less poetic in their exploration of language. The connection between spontaneous inspiration and poetic achievement that Motion inscribes in this essay will, in a small way, limit how poetry is understood in Britain - or, rather, reinforce 200-year-old beliefs.

The Commonwealth at 60

The Queen today marks the 60th anniversary of The Commonwealth - an affiliation of nations once part of the British Empire, still nominally ruled by Her Majesty. However, as the BBC report notes, most people in the UK could care less about it. As a Canadian, who grew up singing "God Save The Queen", and learning all about British culture, history, and tradition, as a boy, The Commonwealth was a significant link to the mother country, and to a great (and heroic) past. Obviously my childhood education was not informed by post-colonial discourse - and as an Anglophone in a mainly Francophone province (Quebec) all ties to the English Tradition were welcome, and encouraged. Still, despite all I now recognise about the Empire's many faults and crimes, I do respect some of what British Rule bequeathed to Canada - not least a direct link (if one wants it) to some of the greatest poetry and drama ever written. So it is, I have long felt affection for The Commonwealth, its Games - and the sense that it connects various cultures through the original sin of having been conquered, or settled, by the same major power. Through time, the smaller nations that form this body have divested themselves of much of their "Englishness" and moved on, but by retaining their links, also acknowledged a continuity worth considering - a very Eliotic solution. The fact that most British people don't see the value of this Commonwealth is not surprising. Britain is a victim of its media, which has a stranglehold on the hopes and desires of most of its people, and the current media messages tend to downplay any relationships that Britain may have beyond those between America and Australia. Canada, an extraordinarily rich, beautiful and culturally complex nation, rarely gets mentioned in the British press, nor do most of the other smaller Commonwealth countries, except during disasters, test matches, or elections. Something great if sometimes terrible has been lost in the process.

Michael Donaghy

It is five years since Bronx-born British-based poet Michael Donaghy died, suddenly, at the age of 50. As I've written elsewhere (on several occasions) Donaghy is the fourth most influential American poet to come and live and work in Britain, in the 20th century, in the same group of four as Eliot, Pound, Plath.

This is not to say he revolutionised poetry like the first two, or emotionalised it like the third, just listed - but his immense stylistic influence on an entire generation of mainstream lyric British (and particularly English and Scottish) poets is ongoing, and can be clearly traced in the work of poets like Don Paterson and John Stammers. Donaghy was unusually charismatic, funny, and talkative, and also smart. He loved musicality in verse, and he loved ideas in tune with that music.

His work is no surprise to anyone who knows the work of James Merrill, or John Hollander, or Daryl Hine - it is Yankee Wit writ large, and guided by Donne and Auden. What makes Donaghy perhaps distinct is that he seems to be the least known major poet of the last 30 years - at least in America. Picador has just published two handsome and incredibly useful, welcome volumes, Collected Poems, and The Shape of the Dance.

They will firmly place Michael Donaghy in the canon in the UK for the next 50 years, or more. He has been well and honourably served by his friends and admirers. It is an unfortunate aspect of the excitement around his work that it is sometimes read as a slap at anything experimental. However, the battle, in Britain, over discursive lyricism and Olsonesque intertextuality needs to be somewhat leavened by tolerance. This is not the post to review these works, but I do recommed them here.