All entries for Tuesday 29 April 2008
April 29, 2008
The Great Troubador Poetry Debate
Writing about web page http://www.troubadour.co.uk/
As the Polish writer Tadeusz Rozewicz once said, we are only poets when we are writing a poem. He also said to me once that a poet did not need to be present even at their own poetry reading so long as the poems were there and being read by somebody. He said this to me over the telephone when he couldn’t make it to Warwick University for his own reading. I can’t and won’t serve some judgement about poetry because I’d feel dishonest doing that in such a short space; and I only feel I know about poetry when I am writing a poem. What I will say is I feel poetry creates possibility. To quote Mimi Khalvati, it creates a room, time and space for everything. I value poems that are living structures, living machines that sing in the palm of your hand; poems that evoke life, that approach the condition of life, however dark. For me poetic forms are like living forms, the forms of life I studied as an ecologist; and recent serious illness has reminded me that life itself is a form to which we write our own poetry, even if that poetry takes the form of family and friendship as well as words.
However, the world around poetry is something we can and shall probably end up talking about. The world around our art form is a series of small worlds, alternative universes that are largely unseen by those outside poetry; that are sometimes - amazingly - unseen to each other; and by and large these small worlds are undetected, and undetectable, by commercial worlds. Within small worlds passions run high. Passions run high because the stakes are so low.
I think poetry is the opposite of money, but money is something we might end up talking about – and since this is England - we shall probably discuss it sideways in terms of grants and awards. If I hold up a ten pound note and a poem and I burn one then the other, how do we feel? Do we feel more about one of them because we recognise its value? If we were to increase the so-called stakes in the world around poetry I wonder what would happen? Is this the reason so many poets are choosing to become fiction-makers?
I really enjoy reviewing. Reviewing is where I get to write fiction. Reading always helps writing – and the best effect is that plentiful reading helps you to avoid or subvert fashion. The subversion of fashion seems to me an essential quality for finding out something new through writing, and there’s a good deal of fashion-subversion taking place right now particularly in the growth of the long poem and experimental sequence. Not long ago there were various ruling rhetorics by which we wrote and if you didn’t write in those rhetorics or about certain subjects then you were out - and you were not published. I never felt at home in British poetry. I still don’t feel at home. There’s no point in being idealistic about this; there are still ruling rhetorics but there is also more generosity – better readers. For example, I have noticed a definite increase in quality of reading on writing courses: people signing up are much better read – and not only in contemporary poetry. So although there may be fewer readers of poetry, maybe they are better readers of poetry and since you cannot become a good poet without being a great reader then I feel a lot more people have got the message that reading poetry is a necessary part of the discipline of becoming a poet.
What other positive forces could we name, forces that subvert fashion? They would include the rise of literary translation; a step-change in the quality of reviewing and reception; the rise of new forms of publishing and ways of publishing too; the growth of poetry that is composed for the ear and eye, for performance and page – I think the rise of good literary festivals and the poetry archive on the web has done a lot of good here; and renewed interest in the long poem and sequence which to my mind raises the game – in terms of prosody, sound, weaving of subject and scene - while at the same raising the attention span.
Let’s look at publishing. As my novel-writing friends will tell you, literary fiction is suffering, and the knock-on effect is that poetry’s shelf-space is also under pressure. They used to say that ‘When America sneezes, Britain catches a cold’. Well, when fiction sneezes, poetry crawls to bed with pneumonia and we all start writing creative nonfiction! At the same time, many poets are jumping ship to literary fiction - out of the fire into the frying pan as it were.
Are sales everything though? When I was typing the phrase ‘poetry’s shelf space’ I mistyped it as ‘poetry’s self space’. The late Richard Hugo suggested that how we feel about ourselves may colour how we write poems, and even account for poetry being part of our lives. Like the burning ten pound note and the burning poem, it’s a question of value.
Here is another meaning to value. I think the production values of the new hardback poetry books from Salt and Arc and Shoestring and Arrowhead are very pleasing, not least because they are using recycled products but also because they return the poetry book to the condition of the art book and, wilier still, they produce books using print on demand technology which lowers the carbon footprint but also makes poetry publishing a feasible ‘business’. Business is not the right word when poetry is the opposite of money. So poetry publishing is the opposite of commercial publishing, and that’s where it thrives best – outside money, outside power and outside fashion. I think literary fiction publishing could learn a lesson or two from the small and specialist presses of poetry rather than simply stealing their poets.
Outside is now becoming the new inside. One example: the gently whale-like appetite of Salt Publications – whose work and enterprise I think is totally welcome and good fun – has torn the nets between what we used to call the avant-grade, what we used to call the middle of the road, and what we used to call the mainstream. I think this blending of species is probably a good thing. Now we are different types of krill mixing about in the same space. Now we are all inside the whale, as Orwell would have it. Now we are all calling from the inside hoping to be heard on the outside. A new slightly enlarged small world, a convergence of alternative universes, but at least we have all become more visible and audible to each other.
All is not entirely well in the state of reviewing but it is clearly better than it used to be. The standard has undeniably improved from a low point in the 90s – it is more international, more work in translation is reviewed, reviewers seem better read and are able to offer context and analysis rather than guesswork and opinion. People seem a lot more willing to engage with poetry’s difficulty. How has this come about? Better editors? I think so – editors such as Fiona Sampson. The Guardian’s poetry coverage every week, with a poem from a book under review and an online poetry workshop, has been a great development, and Sarah Crown, Giles Foden, Nicholas Wroe and Claire Armistead have done considerable work to get this sorted on our behalf and for their readers. It’s vulnerable space though. Yet the length of the review allowed, at around 800 to a thousand words allows us to say something about poetry rather speak in sound bites. The Guardian as well as Poetry Review and the TLS shows a fresh openness to small and specialist presses, to poetry in translation. Again, let’s not be wide-eyed about this: the reviewing in most other major papers is invisible or short weight.
Yet the pressure on review spaces forces our attention back on to where the energy of poetry thrives – when it is less in sight in small new magazines; in blogs; in internet forums. Where it is less in the public eye, great poetry magazines such as Magma, the Cadaverine and The Wolf, and blogs and internet forums, encourage healthy dissidence among new poets, who are unsatisfied with what is on offer and what is reviewed. ‘Less in sight’ breeds dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is fine. Dissatisfaction is even necessary. The glad, good energy required for setting up small presses and magazines such as Heaventree, DoNut Press and The Wolf depends partly on being annoyed, so annoyance can be good but - you cannot legislate for annoyance; nor apply for an Arts Council grant using annoyance as an argument. Frustrated poetic energy can turn dark and bitter, or change track entirely and jump some gap into politics or academia. But frustration can also lead to possibility: new ventures and new energies.
There is however frustration about the prize-giving system in the world of poetry. I think the major prizes, The TS Eliot Award and The Forward Prize are still troubled, still too close to certain publishers and the pressure of the marketing departments of major publishers, and a not very beguiling sense – I would call it a prejudice - among some selectors of what is poetry and what is not. I don’t think this holds for The Poetry Book Society which seems more open, and I applaud the fact they also make a splash about pamphlets and works in translation.
I’m very interested in the long poem and sequence, and the two books I’ve recently published - The Invisible Kings and Scientific Papers are parts of a longer poem, a trilogy, the final book of which I’ve just got my first ideas for – but I’m not telling! The era of the 40-line competition-winning poem was a bane of my youth and I always liked the fact that the Arvon competition allowed one to spread wings beyond forty lines. The long poem is not a British speciality but an international trade in lines and forms. It’s very good for us through; along with some of the other ventures I’ve described it has shown us new possibility. The last twenty years have shown how we have begun to establish a renewed tradition for the creation of a longer poetry that assimilates and melds both sound and scene. We have seen longer poems and sequences thrive under the hands, notably, of Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red), Les Murray (Fredy Neptune), Derek Walcott (Omeros), John Fuller (The Space of Joy), Gwyneth Lewis (Parables and Faxes), Alice Oswald (Dart) and Geoffrey Hill (almost everything since The Triumph of Love). Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’ showed us the prosodic possibilities of the long poem at top speed and full formal stretch; while recently Deryn Rees Jones’s fantastical noir long poem Quiver, Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water and Fiona Sampson’s The Distance Between Us tested the way voicing and voices can be given life across the distance of a sequence and refracted through that notion of continuously shifting melodic fragments. All these immaculate examples show us how narrative can be carried, looped, and fractured within the stretchable mesh-like force-field of longer poems. We might say the longer poem is back. In fact they never went away. We have simply begun to take more notice of their challenges, exactions and soundscapes and, since most readers of poetry are poets or aspiring poets, we are possibly less insecure about performing as readers over such a distance. Maybe instead of deserting poetry for the novel, poets should try long narrative poetry?
David Morley
29 Apr 2008 16:57
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Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry
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