Frances Leviston and the Magnificent Seven

North American poetry cannot imagine how conservative and traditional most mainstream English poets are - though perhaps this makes sense, given the fact that the English poetic tradition is both long and unusually impressive, solid grounding on which to stake commonsense claims. To try to get a sense of how stolid most poetic thinking in the UK is now, read the opinion piece in today's Guardian by UK poet Frances Leviston, a new Picador poet, whose work is affiliated with that of Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, and others of that serious group. It is worth noting (and I think, for instance, a poet-critic like Ron Silliman wouldn't bother) that the above-mentioned are good, intelligent poets, who know a lot about verse, and craft.

Some of their work is very fine, and contributes to a genuine line of English poetry, that extends from Thomas Hardy, through Ted Hughes down to the present. Since there has never really been post-modern poetry in Britain (they had pop music instead to do that for them), the two camps that often bicker are either modernists or anti-modernists - and both are solidly based (ironically) in sober tenets that look nicked from Eliot's notebooks - impersonality, complexity, irony. What British poetry prefers is tone. It is very nuanced, this British ear, and it responds poorly to what it feels is a too-disordered shifting in levels of tone and diction in much contemporary North American poetry. Traditional English poetry knows its place. It is about place, and placing the voice in a location. This is what marks its strength, its focus - and Seamus Heaney is the king of this lyric realm, where much impressive work is done. Fine and dandy - but it makes for an often incurious time.

Perhaps North American poetry searches too much, and misses out on the beauty of knowing where to root one's language - usually in forms that come from a tradition. Still, I find that some of Leviston's claims in her piece (which seems to have been written in order to generate interest in the current 7-part pamphlet series to which she refers) are ones that I must disagree with, respectfully. Chiefly, I must question what it is she means when she writes that she believes in "putting the considerations of the poem before personal feelings, politics, religion or gender."

This is precisely the sort of empiricist thinking that avoids "Theory" like it was the Bubonic Plague. It is also very old school Eliot, if even that. What are "the considerations of the poem"? I imagine they would be ones that would be hermetically-sealed, in New Critical fashion, from history, ideology, language, sexuality, or other influences. Leviston supplies us with a list of things that come second, after the "poem" (as a Utopian, idealised object): personal feelings, politics, religion, gender.

This is frankly preposterous, and I am not sure even Frances Leviston could write a poem that resisted the influences she lists - and who would want to? Naturally, poets wish to avoid sentimentality, political rhetoric, fundamentalist dogma, and sexism - but let us not conflate those evils with sentiment, commitment, faith, or an awareness of one's self and body. I do not think it is possible to keep "personal feelings, politics, religion or gender" out of a poem - and few great poets do, or did. When one thinks of Donne, or Hopkins, or, indeed, T.S. Eliot, one thinks, also, of their faith. Whitman and Lawrence are aware of their body, both sexual and politic. Belief is part of poetry. Of course poets must place their poetry first - that is, after all, their duty and their job - but the debate is as to what, exactly, defines their sense of what "their poetry" can fit into its web, its space. One doesn't have to be Foucault or Lacan or Cicoux or Kristeva or Marx to suspect that the pleasures and problems of generating texts (poems) will involve feeling, and politics.

However, in Britain, today, there is deep suspicion of poetry that is too "political" - witness the critiques (often savage) of my anthology, 100 Poets Against The War. Though most of the poems in it were well-written, the very taint of an "agenda" marked them as suspect. Well, I happen to think that all poets, and poems, have agendas, and what's wrong with that? Only politicians and judges claim to be neutral and objective, and they tend not to be, either. I know poets - thousands of them over decades - and I have never met one who wasn't, in some way, interestingly skewed in some original or eccentric direction, and likely opinionated, especially about poetics; and, of course, to say poetry should not have politics in it is a political statement. But not in Britain, where a very naturalistic, organic myth still stands (drawn from Wordsworth) that suggests a poem is a pure thing, almost a Lockean contract, signed between an individual mind and Nature. It is a pure, perfect, and reasonable relationship, and the poem flows naturally from that.

The problem is, no one writes like that, least of all the brilliantly polluted sensibility of Sylvia Plath, whose work is so powerful precisely because it never had to choose between Tradition and Talent - or between form and content, or craft and what she needed to express. Feeling and thought fused seamlessly in her work, as it does in the work of all geniuses, not so that either is supplanted or obscured. A true poet can balance the demands of the poem with any and all other pressures on them - indeed, it is these other pressures (sex, God, love, etc.) that, as they impinge exert the force that drives the creative act of composition forward. Leviston writes as if it was as easy as pie to set aside all the things that might ruffle a poem's feathers - far from it - it is art's full struggle, and out of it is born great beauty. Now, I may have misread her, in which case I hope she will let me know.

As for the idea that the canon is formed of the best poets, regardless of gender - well, no. Canon formation is too big a topic for today, but it is well-known that many forces combine to determine who is (variously, in time) included and excluded, and nothing as simple as "the best" can be the deciding factor - if only because (as Plath's reception suggests) the idea of taste and thus the "best" changes. In Britain, perhaps, too slowly.

Sean O'Brien Is Right

Eyewear sometimes questions the serious masters of contemporary British poetry because they care about poetry as do I, and so some poetic and aesthetic differences emerge. But make no mistake, reader - any and all poets seriously committed to poetry are, ultimately, allies, no matter how challenging this might feel, or seem. Allies against societal indifference to the poetic. Too often, poetic coteries, schools, and clubs wrestle among themselves, without looking up at the audience (to see there is no audience). Poets are bloodied sad gladiators in a vacated arena. So, thumbs up for Sean O'Brien, who, in today's Guardian, argues for a poetic canon, and for poetry to be regarded as important in the 21st century - not despite its challenges, but because of them. I could quibble with aspects of this article (and in future, might) - for instance, I feel much more could be done to encourage younger writers and readers by trying harder to incorporate their experiences of music, image, and diction (their lives directly intersecting with a digital 24/7 field of entertainment) - so that mass and high culture could find common ground, in poetic speech that resonates, without losing its sense of Tradition (as Eliot himself sought, and achieved, in "Prufrock"). However, I'll stop here, because the main point is, O'Brien is, at least here and today, the champion of all poets, who deserve to be recognised and read for the difficult, testing work they do, against so many odds. Eyewear therefore salutes him.

Love, Poetry

What place does "Love Poetry" have in the 21st century, especially, shall we say, in the romantic quarrels between various suitors for Poetry's austere attentions - the post-avanters, the courteous, the discourteous, the mainstream, the innovative (all mere labels, just words, but with some force, one supposes, for all that)? I tend to want to think about poetry, these days, as something to do with artifice and emotionality - and feel the marriage of these two aspects, or elements, within poetry, is vital, and generates good things. I say emotionality, also, because while I agree with Charles Berstein that multiple (heterodox) styles and even voices within a poetic work can be admirable, it is not the case this invalidates the significance, or use, of the individual "voice" (though its primacy, in a polyphonic composition cannot be guaranteed, of course). Love poetry is usually lyric poetry - emanating from some "megaphone" - be that the idea, or reality, or semblance - of a self. Selves may have voices. But more interestingly, I think, regardless of what theory of self a poet holds to - how does the poetic text "express" (or is it inscribe, or produce?) feeling?

Or display feeling. Operatic, rhetorical, subtle, or repressed. Too much worry goes in to establishing conflict between categories that need not be arrayed against each other (form and craft, versus the eclectic, the open) - a work can be a work of complex, shifting variation, and be formed (that paradox we all know) - for poetry is an artifice. The question, it seems, to me, is, where do poets place love within the artifice? Rough or smooth, the texture of love runs along many types of fingertips and tongues. Auden's "lay your sleeping head, my love" or Bernstein's "once you came to me in a shadow" both appear in works of high artifice - and yet both, potentially, allow for emotionality, for reader, for writer. I say this because there is, in some ways, a contemporary disdain for sentiment in poetry: the cool, the ironic, the rational, the academic - seem all the rage. Poets love poetry or are not poets. I simply wonder, then, what to do with how one wants to feel and form, cerebral maybe, guided by voices, or a poetic. Love is all you need?

Flim-Flam World

The BBC radio morning show, Today, broadcast a story (this morning) about Barack Obama's visit to an English town, years ago, for a family wedding, which resulted in him fleeing from a stripper in a pub dressed like (apparently) a posh schoolgirl. He did the right thing.

Not sure why this was reported today, except it's Super Tuesday, and also Shrove Tuesday, and also Pancake Tuesday, and also, dear me, Mardi Gras. Lent is coming. What will you give up? The Republicans look set to set aside Mitt, in favour of John. Hillary still has miles to go before she weeps. I suspect she'll ultimately overcome and take the Democratic nomination, and then JM will be the next President.

Obama wrote poetry (such bloody awful poetry one is tempted to say) and the BBC also had some of that read out too - something about a "flim-flam world" and his grand-father. Reminds me of exactly the sort of poetry Charles Bernstein, in A Poetics, mocks (all poets got grandparents, all poets got memories). Still, Obama is something of a Language Politician.

It's Broke, Fix It

The international money markets, and the world capitalist system, were thrown into turmoil this week, and it now seems an eccentric lone young French man, like someone out of an existential novel, had much to do with the problem. His $7 billion losses may have done more financial damage than any terrorist - or anarchist - could have dreamed of. This raises questions, some of which may not put the banking system in a good light - and one of the questions is, surely, what connection to reality does some of this "trading" bear? If it is possible for one person to concoct a virtual, imagined alter-ego, or series of identities, and therefore conduct business in this post-modern, post-identity fashion, has the economy become a cyborg, or cyber-untrustworthy? I imagine a poetics of money - or economics of poetry - can be derived from this - he was, after all, into derivatives. What is the difference between imagining one is a billionaire, and being one? No difference - all the difference. It depends on whether you are the trader, or the bank.

World and Earth

Poet-critic Adam Kirsch has an interesting, if arguably somewhat simplistic, essay on the relationship between Heidegger and contemporary mainstream English-language poetry, in the January 2008 issue of Poetry. One of the essay's problems is that Kirsch tries to suggest that the early High Moderns (Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, for example) were "world" oriented, trying to impose a vision of mastery, remaking the order of things, while the "earth" poets, like "post-Catholic" Heaney (and I think the post may be a little overdetermined here) modestly, and ethically listen to things, and show the ordinary in an extraordinary light, unforcing nature's hand, but being midwife to its exposure and celebration.

The problem with this is that the so-called "metaphysical" approach of poets like Heaney, with its strong, neo-classical emphasis on an austere diction, and an ethos of silence and epiphanic apprehension, is deeply moral in precisely the ordering way of late Eliot - and the critical demands made by those poets who argue for such an earth-based (pace Kirsch) credo are not nearly as unassuming or modest as might be assumed. I also don't feel that all contemporary poetry can be easily subsumed into this dialectic. As Alain Badiou argues in his recent The Century, it was precisely the argument of Two Into One, that is, the refusal to agree as to the nature of dialectical synthesis, which leads to a celebration of power, reality, war and violence, in the 20th century. Kirsch's attempt to synthesise the various poetries into a neatly-defined twosome is admirable, perhaps, but perhaps incorrect. I think the quarrel that various poetics have with each other, language, decorum, tradition, and the world - let alone possibilities of enchantment in a disenchanted time (see Charles Taylor's new A Secular Age) is more complex, and unresolved.

But Kirsch is correct, I think, in noting that metaphysical issues are at stake. However, is it enough to want to notice (as Thomas Hardy did) such things, the small felicities of nature and the world, and inscribe them in words for others? Does poetry - does visionary writing - not have, potentially, more to do than that? The decline of the idea of the role of poet as visionary (after Dylan Thomas) - a tale of two Thomases - is part of this story, though Hughes and Heaney obviously are seeing things, too.

I am enjoying, and reading, his new book of criticism, The Modern Element. While Kirsch is an apologist for one dominant style of poetics, he is also a very insightful critic, and hugely enjoyable to read. Some of the essays in the new book have the wit, verve and apt quotations one associated with the great Poetry and the Age, by Jarrell - someone Kirsch has clearly closely attended to.

The Failure of Interest In Poetry In Our Time

Poetry - a literary genre - cannot be said to fail, whether it be conservative (in places) or innovative. I have often wondered how intelligent poets, who espouse an interest in science and medicine, could understand science to pertain to the whole of the world (indeed, to all existence) with its laws, but still accept that "Poetry" could be one thing in, say, America, and another in Scotland, or India. Languages separate poems, even poets, but poetry is an indivisible and complex whole, a concept that contains many different possible options, perspectives, and approaches. Otherwise, how to explain Ashbery and Heaney - both significant figures - writing poems of very different kinds, and orders? Too often, criticism has sought to position various "poetics" or "poetries" at odds (official verse culture, say, or the avant-garde) - when a larger, and more positive, similarity accrued, across the globe, with relation to poetry. So, poetry has not failed in our time.

But there has been a massive falling off of interest in poetry, on the part of everyone - that is, the public at large, the average reader, even the intelligent, informed student, and so on. To deny this is impossible, I think, if one quickly reflects on what actual interest looks like. A "star" of film or music is followed by dozens of photographers, and is known to many, if not all; their products sell in the millions of units, enriching them in the process. Their work is widely enjoyed, discussed, owned, and reviewed.

This is not an ideal, but it is a definition of interest. I am avoiding the word "popularity" for any number of reasons - one of which is that mass interest even attaches to the despised, in some instances. What is sure is that no poet - not one - currently writing or alive - has raised that interest. Too often, schools of thought or taste are blamed for this downfall of recognition. Or even, teaching.

But no one is taught to love a screen star, or a song. Desire brings people freely to other artifacts of our world culture. It is true, marketing is cunningly employed to assist this process - but then again, books are also marketed - and the result is, storytellers, like Ken Follett or Pullman - become loved, or at least famous.

No, the fact is, poetry is no longer of any interest to most people. None.

I read somewhere that Daljit Nagra's amazing debut collection, from Faber, this year sold 35,000 copies. In poetry terms, that is impressive. In world terms, that is nothing.

There have never been such engaging, accessible poets (Billy Collins, Wendy Cope, Derek Mahon, Margaret Atwood) or such difficult ones (Prynne, Bernstein, Muldoon, Kinsella). Neither set outwits or erases the other - both work to enjoy, explore, and engage with, language - in terms of form and content. 21st century English-language poetry is as rich as at the time of Kipling, Yeats and Hardy.

So, the genre of poetry cannot have failed. It is no failure on the part of the poets, maybe not even their publishers and promoters.

So, what is the cause of the major lack of interest in poems?

I am afraid the answer is, it is our humanity that has failed. It is not the poems that have got smaller, but the audience - in more ways than one. Readers (and by extension I mean Western society) no longer seeks a quest, or a journey, that may be truly transformative, in art. The major effect of art was always transformation - metamorphosis. It might render one immortal, or blind, or wise. Today's readers seek comfort, conformity, and assurance. If they believe in God, they do not want to truly shaken to the core of their faith. If they are determined atheists, they do not want to thoroughly consider the possible riches that await a believer. Story is desired. Story, and escape.

Since the advertising-media complex sells Escape as its principle commodity, it cannot interest its readers in Poetry. Poetry intensifies within us precisely those parts of being which resist the world that can be bought and sold. Poetry reminds us of language as something other than that can be manipulated to deceive. Poetry - neither mere magic, or craft - is the art and science of language utterly speaking out all possible engagements with the world. its astounding diversity topples preconceptions, dogmas, and hierarchies. The greatest poem is always yet to be written.

Poetry, therefore, remains, to me, exactly exciting, in the deepest sense. But is an excitement predicated on a strong willingness to recognise the need for change - even radical change. Poetry may require a non-believer to love a god, or a god to love a man.

The fact that poetry does not interest most people suggests most people are no longer interesting. Their absorption in extremely violent parallel worlds, games, and so on, masks a declining ability to empathise with that was once called the human condition. I fear, quite seriously, that we are everyday rendered less human. Welcome to the inhuman condition of the new age.

"Masters of all they survey"

There is a nice irony in the fact that the Observer has chosen to start its poetry page in its Review section with a headline that resonates with tropes of conquest - observation eliding into possession - that is, "Masters of all they survey". This page seems a wrong start, even as I am glad to see the paper taking on the responsibility for giving poetry more space in its pages.

My problem is with the trope of "mastery" itself, in relation to poetry. As Craig Raine wrote recently, in his controversial essay about Don Paterson's poetry, "The two great, natural enemies of poetry are exaggeration and euphemism." I am not sure this is always so - hyperbole is a poetic option - but exaggeration in the criticism and publication of poetry is rampant in Britain, and has lead to runaway critical inflation. It has also lead to a small, select group of mostly male poets dominating the conversation that the media is having with poetry. Sean O'Brien's recent Forward-winning collection, The Drowned Book, has on its back cover the following phrase: "The Drowned Book again shows O'Brien a master of the authortitative line ...." That seems like a lot of emphasis on mastery and control - and authority - and it is a somewhat male way of reading things, I think.

The media often says poetry is dead or dying. The media is often the one who killed Cock Robin, though. The new Observer poetry page, to return, has begun inauspiciously, if it is intending to present, to the readers of its pages - who, one would imagine, from the emphasis elsewhere, on trendy films and pop music, are otherwise geared to intelligent people in the 25-50 range - the actually-exciting truth about contemporary poetry - that it is vibrant, heterogenous, multicultural, and appeals to young and old. What, precisely, possessed the editor to allow the first page, then, to focus its observant eye on three white, male poets - one dead, one middle-aged, and one slightly older than that - Henry Reed, John Burnside and Hugo Williams?

Reed is a fine Forties poets, and I am glad to see his book is out. I very much like the work of John Burnside, especially - and spent several days with him in Montreal this spring, when we both read together at a major Canadian literary festival - so this isn't about their work, or anything personal. But how about a little balance? It might have been fun to have a poem by one of the younger, rising stars of British poetry - Luke Kennard, Daljit Nagra, Katy Evans-Bush, say - or mention of one of the many fine established women poets currently working in the UK. Instead, the page rather solemnly establishes an establishment feel (Hugo Williams is on record as actively mocking J.H. Prynne) and a feel that experimental, different, edgy, or more radical poetic efforts will not be looked at.

I could be wrong, of course, and we shall have to see how Adam Phillips navigates his way through the various channels of British poetry and poetics, now. You might think I am carping, but first impressions do count. This is why, whenever I present poetry events, or anthologies, I do seek a careful and nuanced balance of styles, and options - because I believe that the single most important fact about poetry currently is that it is not just one kind of thing - but many ways of being poetry. It is precisely this unmasterable, destablising flow and pulse that disturbs the smooth-running of the central London publisher-editors, who seek to keep a lid on things. But you cannot master poetry, anymore than you can conquer the sea with a sword.

Horizontal Position In An Age of Anxiety

Eyewear was flipping through an issue of Horizon the other day - Vol. XIX from May 1949 - and came across a review by one Mr. Patrick Dickinson. The shameful notice by Dickinson of Auden's The Age of Anxiety was not seemingly sympathetic to his kind of writing.

He writes that "a general kind of obscurity suits best the superficially oracular as it also suits best any literary period dominated by homosexual taste which causes the expression of the emotions to be obscure, or symbolic, or dishonest, Such taste prefers a precocious adolescent kind of literature and criticism - it is a taste which has perforce certain gaps in experience, violent prejudices, and whose critical judgements are formed for other than literary reasons."

This example of its own kind of violent prejudice would be startling, if not sadly quite a common position, then (and now) with regards to certain tendencies in Modern British (and American) poetry of the 1940s (and beyond). It's curious that the obvious bias of some evaluative criticism is not more clearly recognised by those doing the critical judging.

Mr. Dickinson, of course, tries to conflate the terms "obscure", "symbolic" and "dishonest" - and can just about get away with this, given that, from Wordsworth on (and surely via F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny) a kind of honesty was earned by a lack of complex, rich, or overtly oracular diction. What is interesting is how this so-called "homosexual taste" - basically, the opposite of the coming Movement's austerity - is still active in American poetry, via, say O'Hara and John Ashbery - and happily so.

In the UK, though no longer publicly expressed in the crude way of this Horizon notice, many similar prejudices of taste occur among some reviewers who desire a robust, clear, and vocally mainstream (less ornate, less oracular) approach in poetry. Several major contemporary British poet-anthologists have lamented the "hysterical" and "florid operatics" of Dylan Thomas, for instance. According to one critical perspective, the kind of rhetorical exuberance that Auden - and also Thomas, in his own way - expressed - was not what poetry was meant to be. I think, and often write, otherwise.

American Poets In The 21st Century: The New Poetics

According to the editors of this new book (Wesleyan, 2007), Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, there are new poetries emerging from the "turf wars" between mainstream and avant-garde, of the 90s - between, say, the new formalism and the Language positions. I hope so.

This book just arrived on my doorstep the other day, and I look forward to seeing how its thirteen poets look at poetry and poetics. Now, I'm a well-read kinda guy, and what took me aback, pleasantly, was how few of these names were known to me - yet they are representative American figures, which began to get me worried. Not about them, about me. I must be slipping. A few names I knew - Karen Volkman, D.A. Powell, Kevin Young and Tracie Morris, especially. It looks very promising, indeed. I'd welcome such a British or Canadian book of post-division-era poets.

I'm working on a PhD that looks at the way second-generation modernism may be the way forward. More about all of this, hopefully, much later.