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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[Skip to the latest comment]Tim
Hi David, just wanted to say again that it was good to see you on Monday. Thanks for posting the speech up, it’s very interesting and acutely observed. I’ve got my own thoughts on the debate, some positive, some negative, and I’m going to try and blog them up in the next few days…hope to see you again soon, at Pencilfest I hope!
Regards,
Tim
29 Apr 2008, 20:01
Rachel Fox
Hello
I came to you via Jane Holland’s Raw Light. I am very interested in these two sentences – “I never felt at home in British poetry. I still don’t feel at home”. Does anybody do you think? The poets who you or I may think feel at home – would they answer ‘yes’ if you asked them? I am English but live in Scotland and that makes it even more complicated (but I am not particularly thinking about that part of the question…that’s just another layer of confusion!).
16 May 2008, 13:52
Steven Waling
In among the long poems you mentioned, you failed to mention Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a consequence of shape and Robert Shepherd’s Twentieth Century Blues (just published in a newly complete version by Salt.
But I’m really astonished by the way the mainstream and the innovative are gradually looking up from thier baricades and looking around them at last.
19 May 2008, 10:41
Malcolm Phillips
Hi David,
Steven Waling’s optimism, and your own, are both really encouraging – and I really enjoyed your contributions to the Troubadour event. I’d love to send you Robin Purves’ essay on Andrea Brady in Edinburgh Review a couple of years ago on the subject of poetry and money but that will have to wait.
However, I have to say that the main thrust of the discussion, and Anne-Marie Fyffe’s subsequent report on it in Saturday’s Guardian Review, seemed to me quite wrong. It is easy to manufacture consensus when you simply ignore anything that might constitute dissent from the line you’re peddling, and Naomi Jaffa and Fiona Sampson both peddled a very particular line on current poetry in their contributions to the discussion. Consensus is not always achievable or desirable: certainly, the arguments put at the event revealed a set of values that the contributors ought surely to have been aware would be contested by many now writing. I say “surely” – but I don’t have any confidence, on the basis either of the discussion or Fyffe’s list of poets to watch over the next few years, that Jaffa, Sampson or Brownjohn have the remotest idea of the range of writing now being produced in this country. Sampson has the least excuse not to know and no excuse at all for saying the same divides no longer exist, since she must be aware of the hate mail her predecessors received for including experimental writing in the pages of Poetry Review.
More productive exchange and more honest disagreement will take place elsewhere, predominantly online I suspect. It’s a shame they have to take place despite, rather than aided by, Fyffe’s article.
27 May 2008, 18:12
Steven Walinf
I think I’m probably more ambivalent than my post suggests, Malcolm. I mean, that anyone can talk of contemporary long poems without mentioning Allen Fisher and Robert Shepherd (not to mention Micheal Haslam, Caroline Bergvall and Geraldine Monk!) shows that we’ve a long way to go before we get a real sense of the different poetries out there. And that’s just the “old guard.” So maybe, David, you’ve got some more reading to do?
But I suspect that for a younger reader/writer, the old antagonisms aren’t as important, and they probably find it a silly argument anyway. Luke Kennard and Chris MacCabe are both innovative writers who seem to move beyond the old divides. I wonder how young or old most of the writers of hate mail to the Poetry Review were? I doubt they were young people, somehow.
Personally, I find myself increasingly unable to read the poetry of the mainstream: even Simon Armitage is boring to me now.
29 May 2008, 14:49
Malcolm
Hi Steven,
to be fair, David made much the same point upstairs at the Troubadour before we went in for the discussion. I don’t know Luke Kennard’s work, but from the readings I’ve seen him do, I’d agree that Chris McCabe’s work seems to draw on a set of influences we might not have thought likely ten or fifteen years ago. However, I suspect it’s still easy to exaggerate the extent to which experimental work is visible to a wider audience.
To be clearer about what I was reacting to in the Troubadour discussion, I think my two main problems (apart from the unbearably self-congratulatory air of the discussion, David excepted!) were: firstly, that it was felt there was no longer any “divide” because mainstream poets now occasionally create what Fyffe calls “fractured narratives” – in other words, it’s safe to ignore experimental writing now because a few techniques have been absorbed and made safe for use by cultural conservatives. Which doesn’t at all address the question of a divide – it’s an excuse not to think about it or read further. Which brings me to the second problem: we might not like the nature of the divide that has been in place since Andrew Motion and then Fiona Sampson made Poetry Review safe from successive incursions by experimental writing: we might find the bitterness, bigotry and insularity of it dispiriting and absurd. But even if all the nastiness falls away magically and younger writers drift out of hearing of the ravings of Don Paterson or Edna Longley or whomever, there remain constitutive differences between contemporary forms of writing. We’re not just talking about a range of techniques in undifferentiated array, available for download by the poet as happy shopper. Forms of writing relate (to varying degrees), dialectically or not, to an ethos, a politics, a set of convictions about language: and since those are likely to continue to form points of divergence and disagreement, it seems to me at the least unhelpful to pretend that some big happy family consensus has developed.
A long post! Followed by some long poem recommendations: Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy, Andrea Brady’s Tracking Wildfire, and Peter Manson’s long prose poem Adjunct.
Cheers,
Malcolm
29 May 2008, 16:09
David Morley
Those are good recommendations. I shall order them for our library, but I expect Peter Larkin’s on the job.
On which note, can I add Peter Larkin’s work to this list of long-poem poets from the leftfield?
David.
29 May 2008, 16:14
George Ttoouli
Very interesting discussion! Wish I’d been able to go to the event, though I’ll take this as a satisfying secondary event.
I’m particularly interested in the idea that Salt, etc. are able to produce hardbacks as print on demand – a fact I only learned a few weeks ago at Pencilfest. I was shocked! The other thing which shocked me was finding out that two of the Leeds students at the festival were producing their magazine, using p.o.d. technologies, to the same standards of quality as magazines like Poetry Review. The same is true of Succour magazine, coming out of Essex University and, as far as I can tell, also edited by people in their mid-twenties.
If Salt is capable of competing with established houses, blow for blow, in terms of quality, and students are capable of doing the same with established magazines, then undoubtedly we’re going to see a levelling of the field. Retailers will see the potential gift sales in small press publications – frankly, Shepard’s 20thC Blues is a beautiful book, very pick-uppable and very catchy when you flick the pages. And readers will feel more inclined to pick up the magazines. Sure, there might be some homogeneity in formatting, but photocopying, folding and stapling A4 or A3 sheets is the norm for most poetry magazines anyway.
And Malcolm – I don’t see the need to treat Poetry Review like it’s some kind of important bastion that needs to be reclaimed by the wookies/avants. I’m more bothered by the fact that Tears in the Fence is still ugly compared to the students’ outputs, or that Shearsman Mag hasn’t moved over to Biddles from Lightning Source to get rid of that hideous branding on the inside back cover and the fingerprint-catching glossy surfaces. And no, I don’t agree that poetry is the opposite of business, but it probably does have an inverse relationship to profit/capitalism.
And for people thinking about starting magazines, knowing that Poetry Review has a circulation on par with magazines like the British Pensioner, i.e. 3-4k, makes them realise they don’t have to shoot the moon in order to hold some cultural clout with poetry lovers.
Which makes me happy. Because the divide, as I see it, is regional. I.e. there were poets on the Troubadour line-up who were only there because of their importance to the London scene. Why wasn’t Chris or Jen Hamilton-Emery on stage? Or Peter Finch? Or Mimi Khalvati? Or John Siddique? Or Jacob Sam-la Rose? People who would have brought some more range to the discussion and maybe even stretched David’s ideas further, if that’s possible…
And finally after this blather, more long poem recommendations: Carol Watts’ Wrack, from Reality Street. It’s a booklength sequence, absolutely stunning, well worth ordering. And Rupert Loydell pointed me at Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts series, a kind of successor to HD’s Trilogy, perhaps. And Chris Torrance’s Magic Door series, the latest installment of which is hopefully due to appear next year with Heaventree.
GT
30 May 2008, 23:16
Steven Waling
The regional question is interesting, isn’t it? Not everything that happens, happens south of the Watford Gap. Manchester has got some interesting innovative poets, as has Liverpool and Shefflield. In fact I sometimes wonder if London will ever catch on… :)
03 Jun 2008, 14:34
Malcolm
Hi George, nice to hear from you. Points taken – and I don’t mean to exaggerate the importance of PR, it just crept in there because the incumbent editor was there and as she admitted at the time, PR has a remit to be inclusive off the back of its funding, so it may be judged differently from other mags.
You’re blinding me with science on the print front but I’m sure you could put the question directly to Tony Frazer and he wouldn’t mind considering it.
I don’t think poetry has much of a rational relationship to anything. It’s not the opposite of business, or war, as Sampson so sentimentally argued at the Troubadour with plenty of inarticulate noises of agreement from the floor (Q: how many of the founding texts of the Western poetic tradition are about war? Qthe2nd: Sampson “explained” further that poetry is the opposite of war because it involves “care” and “attention” – name three successful military campaigns that lacked these qualities). Brownjohn also seemed at one stage to be making culture the opposite of sport – or at least something that ought to be kept in a separate government department (!) – but presumably as a defender of tradition he had reconciled himself with Pindar privately in some way that made sense to him. God, that event was excruciating.
I’m not sure that we should be relocating “the divide”: I agree that the debate was disappointingly London- or at least South England-centric (umpteenth nod to David as exception here), but divides in poetic thinking extend up and down the island however they’re locally expressed, as I know from the various points along a north-south line that I’ve inhabited in the last ten years, from St Andrews through Manchester down to here (in London, boo!). In fact, the situation of experimental writing in Scotland is worse than it is down here: Peter Manson and Robin Purves have been operating out of an almost total vacuum for nearly 20 years. Look at the Poetry House in St Andrews, home of Kathleen Jamie, a poet so rabidly reactionary that when the Guardian had the temerity to review Stu Calton’s Sheep Walk Cut she wrote in to complain.
These tips for long poems all sound good – sounds like I could do with some magazine tips too though. Anyone?
03 Jun 2008, 14:52
Steven Waling
Yes, I read that letter by Kathleen Jamie, and pretty mean-spirited it was too. Though I’m always a bit wary of the term “reactionary” – there’s an argument (wrong, IMO) that “difficult” poetry is exclusive and elitist, and therefore reactionary. It’s wrong on so many levels, of course; but you can be pretty left-wing and still think poetry should “communicate” in that mainstream way of little epiphanies.
All we can do is to keep pushing the boundaries ourselves, and keep talking about what we’re doing too. There’s sometimes a kind of arrogance among the non-mainstream crowd that thinks that everyone not like them is semi-intellectual and bourgois (somebody correct my spelling!) – and they sometimes remind me of the prog-rock crowd from the ‘70’s! Me, I was glam and then punk… now I’m a jazz hound (ummmm… nice)
04 Jun 2008, 14:19
Rachel Fox
Sometimes I think the word ‘experimental’ does not help matters. One person’s ‘experimental’ is another’s ‘old hat’ (cue poem in shape of hat). I look at some of the stuff that might be called ‘experimental’ and just see….the same experiments that have been going on for what…100 years? Then I look at some poems that would probably be calledby some ‘mainstream’ and they seem almost…ground-breaking in contrast…
Plus no one answered my earlier question. Was it too hard? Too easy?
05 Jun 2008, 07:36
David Morley
Rachel’s point is well made. Can we steer the debate towards exploring what we mean here by experiment? Can I also add a plea to keep this forum as a debate and that a generous spirit be brought to it? Using it to insult poets (from a distance) is not what these blogs are about. I think highly of the work of Paterson, Jamie and Sampson (I am supervising Fiona’s music/poetry project here at Warwick – it is highly experimental). And, as I hope you know, I think highly of many poets who are less visible. Critique the poetry not the poet. Because a poet writes a review or makes a statement you do not agree with does not mean their poetry or their person deserves the kind pf personal roastings we see here and elsewhere. Thanks, folks.
05 Jun 2008, 11:52
Malcolm
Fair enough! Writers are not critiqued solely on their poetry however, but all their writing. Stu’s a friend of mine and that letter angered me. But I didn’t mean to start any trouble, so sorry about that.
And yes, I don’t much like the word experimental either. I use it out of an even greater distaste for the term “avant-garde”, which I find self-aggrandising, militaristic and in any case more properly reserved for a period now long gone (Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant Garde is really good on it). I don’t necessarily agree that there is any (good) writing around now that so closely resembles that of 100 years ago: I think sometimes if work employs disjunct syntax that can seem, on the face of it, generic, when in fact different writers break syntax in very different ways. The kind of montage effect of the syntax in Tom Raworth’s long poems, for example, is a long way from the technique Prynne uses in a poem like To Pollen, where sub-clauses are shifted around in indeterminate relation to one another, impelling you to a kind of back-and-forth reading technique. What ground-breaking work have you been looking at? We were making recommendations earlier.
Rachel, I missed your earlier question. Does anyone feel at home in British poetry? Dunno. I don’t. I think it’s probably best not to. I don’t know what it would mean to feel at home anyway to be honest, but being out on the move I would imagine to be more productive. I imagine David’s not-being-at-home might be roughly equivalent to the way poets of a previous generation like Charles Tomlinson were not at home with, say, the poets of the New Lines anthologies and the kind of culture that work seemed to feed into. David?
05 Jun 2008, 12:20
Susie
Hi David,
I’ve lost your email address during many my many moves.
Would you mind emailing me if you still have my email address.
If not I will write to you.
Many thanks
Susie Jones
06 Jun 2008, 20:27
George Ttoouli
I suppose partly because asking what is ‘experimental’ poetry is not the same as asking what is ‘good’ poetry (or poetry one likes), I find it easier to relocate the divide of experimental vs. traditional away to other locations. But perhaps I view experimental poetry as language employed (not just in poetry) to try and invent new modes of expression for their experiences, which would make its opposite traditional poetry. So the pentameter has to be broken when one’s experience can’t be sufficiently met by traditional poetics.
Both traditional and experimental writers, to quote Steve Waling’s recent post, “listen to the voice(s) of the world around you and attempt to write down, as clearly as possible, what it is saying.” (http://stevenwaling.blogspot.com/). So I would say it’s a matter of how they define ‘as clearly as possible’.
Then again, a more efficient definition, or even a counter example, is probably on that same blog, else mere nano-seconds away…
Malcolm: as for magazine recommendations, mostly I turn online these days, but Tears in the Fence, Shearsman Magazine are the few I know that surprise me. Horizons might also be interesting, looking forward, not sure when it is due though. You sound like you’ve been on a southerly migration; the South-West is very exciting right now, from my perspective. The others I’m aware of seem to have retreated from print – Stride Magazine is going strong; terrible work is simply hideous online and looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2006… Online: Intercapillary Space; Drunken Boat; dusie; Great Works; liminal pleasures… More print recommendations welcome from this corner too.
Old Hat Poem
...............I’m never
................at home
.............wherever I sit
one man’s bald is another man’s wit
08 Jun 2008, 15:14
Simon Turner
I think Robert Sheppard’s core argument in ‘The Poetry of Saying’ might be useful here, George: basically, there are two kinds of poetry – the poetry of the said, where the poem operates like a little machine with all its arguments settled before the first line begins; and the poetry of saying, which is open to chance, mutation, quotation and disruption, that is made in process. The difference, I guess, between a string quartet and Anthony Braxton. I think I favour Sheppard’s reading because it chimes with my own tendencies – which is towards mess and openness and away from neatness and brevity – but also because it allows for the possibility that the clash between the experimental and the traditional might give way to a more reasoned aesthetic consideration of poetic values. There are plenty of lesser known poets who have fallen through the cracks as it were of the binary myth – poets like Harry Guest and Jeremy Hooker – who are by no means experimentalists, but who are nonetheless producing fantastic poetry, much of it leaning, interesting enoughly, to longer, more open forms. I would place Guest’s ‘Elegies’ as among the best post-war poems produced in British poetry.
Also, and this is a subsidiary question, but I wonder what the significance is that many longer ‘open field’ poems take their starting point to be nature and / landscape? Olson’s Maximus is the obvious progenitor here, but Torrance’s Magic Door sequence, Allen Fisher’s Place, Peter Riley’s Alstonefield, Tim Atkins’ Folklore, Alice Oswald’s Dart… By no means an exhaustive list, but it does seem to point to something like a trend. Is it something to do with openness in poetic leading to openness in subject matter, leading to recognition and incorporation of the non-human into the space of the poem?
08 Jun 2008, 22:15
Steven Waling
Simon – I think Shepherd’s distinction is a good one, as far as it goes, as long as we remember that even poets of the “made” – if they’re any good at least – are also open to the unexpected and not always aware of how the poem will turn out when they started. In other words, while a lot of poets may know some or a lot of what they’re going to say before they’ve said it, there will be room for the unexpected. Not as much room as in a poem of “saying”; or one of those messy things that non-mainstreamers are found of; but there will be room. Just as there’s room for some improvisation/re-interpretation in any piece of classical music.
Also, I suspect that there are limits to the amount of freedom and mess that different open poets allow themselves.
09 Jun 2008, 11:59
Julia
Hi David
Hope that your health has improved and just to let you know that the patrin continue to make their way around the globe – last stop Moscow.
Kind Regards
Julia
19 Jun 2008, 19:18
Emily
Thanks for directing me to this debate George. I’ve never read much in the way of long poems, but recently I read ‘Trilogy’ and Sebastian Barker’s ‘The Dream of Intelligence’. I like the idea of poets sticking to poetry and adopting longer and/or narrative forms instead of defecting to the novel camp.
I find the term ‘experimental’ almost entirely redundant. From one side it is the badge of honour and from the other it suggests work that is not finished in some sense – an experiment is one thing, an innovation that works is another.
26 Jun 2008, 19:07
Christopher Hamilton-Emery
Hi David,
I thought the whale/krill comparison might be a comment on my enormous bloody girth rather than our publishing appetites. I hope my writers aren’t krill though. I don’t think there’s anything like a merger of contemporary practice within my list, I see these commissions as coming fundamentally separate places, there are more places appearing for sure, I’m certainly interested, passionate perhaps, about diversity and plurality. I’m not advocating a fusion of poetry and poetics, and I think there are fundamentally opposed poetries in my list; my job isn’t to resolve those collisions, my job is to sell them. The interesting matter for me, is the audience, (who in my view create the actual literature). I’m not sure that the audience, or audiences for poetry share the concerns of the writer, they’re not worried about the location of the writing, they seem, in the main to want good books. If you think about it we’re all entirely capable of digesting wildly disparate forms of culture, so no surprises there.
To correct one error in the notes, we don’t produce our books POD, everything is printed for stock in the UK. Though we do use a printer who uses digital presses to do that, but there’s a technical distinction to be made, in that POD is about printing to customer order, not printing for publisher’s stocks. I don’t know anyone these days who doesn’t have a POD programme though, and we’re considering switching some back list titles to POD. All the hardbacks are held in stock, we print anything from 250 to 1,000 copies.
I was invited by Anne-Marie to the event but declined for personal reasons. It’s a great idea and I was very pleased to see such an interesting debate emerge. I think that debate could well be extended.
On the long poem, I’d throw in two further additions, Rachel Blau DuPlessis whose Drafts are a magisterial addition to the form, and Richard Burns, whose work with long poems is far reaching and quite wonderful.
Love to all from me
Chris
09 Jul 2008, 18:45
Peter Larkin
I don’t think ‘Hot White Andy’ ‘Adjunct’ or ‘Tracking Wildfire’ (see 29 May) are separately available as yet. Some of the first is in Chicago Review 53:1, pp.231-32, the second in Edinburgh review (2004) [both available in Warwick U Library] and the third is on a website at
http://www.dispatx.com/show/item.php?item=2062
Best
Peter
29 Aug 2008, 12:01
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