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.

Kane enabled

There's a new blog, A Year In The Dark, all about film from 1941. As Eyewear knows, and you do too, that's one of the very best years for cinema, ever. Worth a look. Not only was Citizen Kane released then, but other major classics, such as Dumbo, Meet John Doe, The Wolf Man and Suspicion.

Poem by Angela Hibbs

Eyewear is delighted to welcome Angela Hibbs this Friday, and not just because, as you can see, she is wearing glasses. Her first collection of poetry, Passport, came out in 2006, from Montreal's DC Books New Writers Series. It's an impressive debut. As major Canadian poet David McGimpsey said, she writes "with tender insight and passionate care."

Hibbs has been published in good magazines: Exile, Matrix, Fireweed, and Antigonish Review. She is a graduate of Concordia University's Creative Writing Master of Arts Degree. Born in Newfoundland, she has lived in most Canadian provinces and now in Quebec. Aware both of Sexton's wry confessional urgency, and De Lillo's ordered, pop-savvy postmodernity, she is one of the best emerging Canadian poets, tossing the salad of the style of what's said. Look out for her next collection.

Steve's Monologue

slip and snivel
spine & knees; scabs
abound like knots
in wood. Sydney nibbled
her scabs. Smooth,
even on feet & elbows.
Smell her skin.
Drying between her toes
after a bath, her milk teeth
standing at attention all along
her laughter. Her teeth,
eyes, eyebrows and hair
white, her body blue black, a negative
of herself.

Quick heart
scurries, her small
feet strike the stairs.

Felled; a pencil tip
stabbed into her palm, right angles & bisections;
her hand fills the frame.
I popped it out, patted her hair
‘til her sniffling stopped. A decimal of lead remained.

The sap of her,
spills, sticky,
wets the yellow hair on her legs.
Young trees bend before breaking.

poem by Angela Hibbs

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.

The Separate Ways

In an exchange of comments yesterday, at Eyewear, David Wheatley and I discussed the nature of poetry and reviewing. It wasn't a comprehensive discussion, of course, but it did yield a very significant statement from Wheatley, who is, after all, one of the best of this generation of Irish poets. He wrote: " [....] I don’t see poetry as a community of ‘shared goals’, because I don’t have your goals or anyone else’s, I only have my own. The only ways in poetry are separate ways."

I think this is, and fair play to him, one of the most lucid expressions yet, of this kind of perspective, or opinion, about the nature of poetry. It's revealing, and also useful.

And I don't think he's entirely wrong, either. But, there's a confusion of terms here, which I'd like to help clear up.

"The only ways in poetry are separate ways" may be a credo, or ars poetica, or some kind of lone-wolf private self-description, and is, for many poets - simply because poetry is an isolated and isolating craft, in so many ways, and, also, because, unlike, say, film, or theatre, it does not comfortably or impressively lend itself to successful collaboration, at the level of the work-process itself. When I write poetry alone I prefer to be by myself might be another way of putting it. And that's true, up to a point. Very few poets have composed lines of worth, on bridges or elsewhere, while having a busy conversation with someone else.

Still, I think Eliot was probably, more or less, correct in observing the way each poet's writing is linked to that of the overall tradition that has come before. Some would demarcate that tradition, so that it ends at the ungrateful dead, others at the far more crowded mackerel seas of the ungrateful living throng of fellow poets (some poets have admitted they don't much like reading much contemporary verse), but in either case, one hardly writes alone, or separated from, the voices of Dickinson, ot Yeats, or Larkin, or Bernstein in one's head. How the poet shakes those voices off, or transforms them, within, their head, is the private work, but it has a complicity with the public, historic canon that she knows so well.

But that isn't the point I really want to make.

I don't care what kind of poems David Wheatley writes. Or any poet writes. The critic's job is also to suggest that there may be other ways, sure, but surely not to guide-dog poets to some inevitable spot on the map. So, in that sense, let him go his separate way.

What isn't the case is that poetry - as a community of fellow practitioners - need be so isolated, or atomised. Though the act of composition is a singular one, that need not mean that poets cannot gather together, in common cause, or even in a union, to establish some common goals, interests, even practices - not least of which might be an ethics (poets have long resisted a Hippocratic-like oath, which may be why doctors are more universally respected as a group). All I am saying is (not give peace a chance, but that too) poetry is needlessly divided and even divisive in Britain, and some form of commonality could be established, to bridge wider disparities, and work to establishing practical goals, relating to reviews, funding, and even, down the road, pensions and health issues. Actors - hardly at one time seen as practical or even ego-free agents - banded together in Hollywood, and Canada, and created fraternities, such as Actra, which protect aging and weaker members of the trade. Canada has its League of Canadian Poets which - before you mock the name, consider - disburses hundreds of thousands of dollars to poets annually. These are not Stalinist groups that mandate the how or what to write, but can assist.

I am sometimes very sad these days - the death of many friends and family members in 2005 and 2006 knocked me for a loop, and I also badly miss home - and so perhaps I am more sensitive to how isolated and challenging the role of the poet can be, in today's Western, capitalist society. I think having communities that support and encourage would be a welcome model for the British poetry (publishing) establishment - currently, it seems more based on a Darwinian model, where poets are seen as competing against each other, for prizes, funding, readings and book deals.

This has come about because, since the New Generation project, poetry has been projected to the media as being part of a marketplace - so that certain "star" poets are treated as if their work was somehow actually better than others, because it was better known. I still meet many otherwise intelligent poetry readers who believe that if a book is published by, for example, Faber, it means the poet is actually a better poet. Was Wallace Stevens a better poet before or after Faber published him, I ask? Harmonium was just as magnificent in manuscript. But, in the UK, as elsewhere, publishing confers a distinction that is also a fiction: poetry is not what is "published" - it is what is created by - the poet. This is why, in a nutshell, there is a marked bias against orally performed (non-transcribed) and digitally inscribed poetry - because the system here has yet to decide how to confer distinction to non-published work.

So long as the Poetry Publisher - and not The Poet - is in the ascendant in Britain, there will be a need for poets to guard their own interests. Further, there is much need for a new generation of fair, balanced, scrupulous younger poet-critics, who will fearlessly review books by even major figures. Too many of the major mainstream figures are untouched because either their friends review them, or "smaller" poets fear incurring their wrath. At any rate, as I mentioned in my earlier post, too many poetry reviews in the UK are either of the friend-on-friend kind, or the pit bull kind. Surely, there is room for a distanced, nuanced approach, which is neither too friendly, or vicious for viciousnesses sake.

War, poetry

While doing research yesterday, I came across the recently-published The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford, 2007), edited by scholar-poet Tim Kendall. It is a hefty tome - likely to stop a bullet on the front if held close to the heart - and one that presents itself like an academic survey of the field.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I came across the essay by David Wheatley (UK-based younger Irish poet-critic), which basically takes a sten gun to an anthology I edited in 2003, and mows it down with the frenzied precision of Violette Szabo. But Wheatley does not merit a medal, nor does this particular critical effort on his part mean his name will be carved with pride.

Mr. Wheatley says this about 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, 2003) - perhaps the most infamous UK poetry book to come out of the post-9/11 landscape (to be current), one of the most widely discussed and read, and surely the most derided - and he says it with the same definitive, indeed, authorial, belittling voice of certitude as one might expect from Leavis (FR or QD): "Swift's memorably dire collection". He then goes on to quote three or so poems from the anthology, and dismiss the work as sub-Marxist agit-prop ranting of the lowest kind. He then goes on to suggest that Charles Bernstein had a better collection, and mentions it. And he praises David Harsent's fine book, Legion.

Okay, you might ask, what's wrong with that? Well, several things are wrong with this, not least of which is the fact this rather serious-sounding book will be around when we're all dust under the feet of some latter-day Tiberius. So, if this is down on one's permanent record, as it were, it would have been nice to see some sort of objective description of the anthology (which was, after all, worthy of half a page of DW's time).

What might a fair, objective (as opposed to polemical and satirical) description of the same book have revealed? Well, it might have informed readers that the anthology has excellent poems from, among others, Charles Bernstein (who Wheatley elsewhere, hypocritically I think, praises, as an alternative to my anthology, as opposed to being a presence in my poetic and editorial vision as well), David Harsent (ditto), Sean O'Brien, Michael Donaghy, Marilyn Hacker, Mahmoud Darwish, and many other major poets, from America, Ireland, Australia, Canada, the UK, and beyond.

So, rather than Wheatley pointing out that both Bernstein and Harsent were early supporters of, and participants in, the 100 Poets Against The War project spearheaded by Nthposition, he sets them up as what the 100 Poets anthology wasn't - a truly false dichotomy. He also fails to mention it was edited in a week, under immense time pressure, used the e-book form in a new way to reach tens of thousands of readers, and was an openly activist, polemical survey of the pulse of the moment. He doesn't bother to locate one - even one - good poem in the anthology, though there are dozens, among the many that are, obviously, relatively weak in the eyes of commanding posterity.

But who is Wheatley, from his lofty prominence, to belittle, so shabbily, this work, that tried to do good, and was, of its time, of some interest?

His example of nasty, dismissive, and yes, cruel, criticism, not bothering to contextualize or empathize, with the practices, aims, or even genre, of such works, is what is chiefly wrong with the UK and Irish poetry community today. Poetry is not just a schoolboy prank.

I am entirely opposed to this kind of unkind, arrogant, and savage prose criticism, and think that, while it has a place in the history of letters, and can be very funny to read from an armchair's distance, and removed in time, it is not any way to help build a future where poetry is read and appreciated by the many, instead of merely the few.

On that note, I read a comment from Don Paterson, the other day, in an interview collection published in 2004, saying he thought more than "30 books of poetry" published in the UK every year was too many - because there aren't that many good poets out there.

That's wrong, as far as I am concerned.

That approach means that publishers became the gate-keepers to consensus, keeping a lid on the poetic ferment beneath. Better, I feel, to let the poems out there, to circulate, so that readers and reviewers can make their decisions (of course, with some attempt at fairness).

There are more than 30 good books of poetry or typescripts currently circulating among editors in the UK. The lack of openness to receiving and publishing them merely controls and limits what appears to be the "mainstream". It allows for marketed successes from major-press-published poets, who seem to rise from nowhere, like Venus on a shell. Ironically, in the name of a new democratic openness, publishers often continue to enact rituals of elitist discrimination that have nothing to do with the actual quality of poetry to hand. New presses, like Salt, and Tall-Lighthouse, don't do that. This suppression of the poetic actual is divisive and damaging, and, more importantly, unnecessary, and it plays into the hands of those who fund the arts, and think less funding is better.

Poetics have consequences - when will we begin to question, seriously, the decisions and opinions of the gate-keepers - to change how things are done?

Seam No Evil, Tonight!

Seam 27
will be launched tonight at 6.30 pm
at Foyles 113-119 Charing Cross Road
London

Their special guest reader is Sheenagh Pugh
and there will be short readings from other contributors, including moi.

So far confirmed: Gill Andrews, Mike Barlow, Pat Borthwick, Ken Champion, John Clegg, Chrissie Gittins, Allison McVety, Caroline Natzler, Sue Rose, Julian Stannard, Todd Swift and Kearan Williams

Entry is free.