But what of the walls?
Rebecca Watts has issued a tremendous clarion call that the barbarians are at the gates (‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’, PN Review, Jan-Feb, 2018). Unfortunately she has not looked around her and realised that the gates stand amidst the ruins of the walls. The standing of poetry is not threatened by the likes of Rupi Kaur or Hollie McNish, their editors, publishers or publicists – it has fallen already at the hands of those who appear to have believed they were defending and promoting poetry.
I have routinely seen advertisements for poetry courses for ‘those just starting and those who are already published’. The absurdity of this must escape those who run the courses simply because they have too little experience themselves. In no other context would beginners and those with professional experience be taught in the same course. Imagine a plumber’s or electrician’s course being advertised as suitable for practising tradespeople and beginners, or, looking at another art-form, such a course for singers or musicians – nobody with any real experience would go anywhere near it.
During a programme presenting the winning poems of the 2017 BBC Proms Poetry Competition, Ian McMillan (poet and The Verb presenter) said that when judging competitions he found that ‘I think – and perhaps wrongly – I have to be excited by the first two or three lines ...’. This is not an uncommon view, as other poetry competition judges have said the same thing, but there is no ‘perhaps’ about it, it is wrong. Any number of great poems are remembered not for their opening lines, but later ones. In the last year Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy has been given renewed prominence for lines buried deep within it and then repeated at the end. In fact, a good poem is likely to have its real substance captured only by a later line which is freighted by what has gone before. If individual poems are to be judged chiefly by their gates, it is no wonder that no attention is paid to poetry’s walls.
The year before, as part of the 2016 BBC Proms Poetry Competition, Jacob Polley (winner of the 2016 TS Eliot poetry prize) remarked of a winning poem that ‘I wouldn’t hazard to guess what it’s about’. What signal does this send out about poetry and competition judges? It clearly indicates that a poem which is unable to communicate anything coherent to a judge (and prize-winning poet) can still win a poetry competition. It indicates that how you write matters matters more than what you might be saying, and that the lines of the poem matter more than their sum. It indicates that those selected as winners or judges may well be no more poetically competent than anyone else. In short, when Watts rightly worries about the reduction of poetry to the state of “anyone can do it”, she needs to spread the blame far farther than Naur and McNish, since this ethos is widely rooted in the poetry establishment.
A third example drawn from competition judges picks up on McNish’s publication of poems written when she was eight years old. The judges of the Slipstream Poetry Competition (2014) commented that
‘Normally we do not publish the Commended entries, we simply publish the names and titles. However, this year we have awarded a special Certificate of Commendation and a book token to Donal O'Brien when it came to our subsequent attention that Donal, from Belfast, is in fact only 10 years of age.’
I intend no disrespect to Donal, but the poem contains obvious and inherent weaknesses indicative of how young the writer was, so how could the competition judges fail to recognise these? Any attempt to answer this leads inevitably to the idea that they had no basis on which to assess the skill or maturity of a poetry writer, and that they could be grabbed just as easily by the superficialities of a ten-year-old as by those of someone older. In this context, it is clear that McNish is not exceptional, but is simply making the most of a widespread attitude that the quality of the poetry is not related to a writer’s age, experience and skill. More worryingly, judges like these are setting the benchmark for success, since winning competitions is widely regarded as a measure of a poet’s quality, and there is no serious critical appraisal of judges’ decisions.
This situation is not confined to poetry competitions, but extends to poetry magazines as well. I have known magazines accept work written by someone at the age of thirteen when much more competent work by the same author had been ignored. On another occasion, a reputable magazine published ‘poems’ which had been written purely to demonstrate how easy it is to write publishable work, and the editors then cited them in their defence against criticism of their editorial competence. Since getting published per se can be addictive, and is again a measure of success, it is tempting for a writer to not bother writing real poems, but to just churn out what the market will take, rather than accept the challenge of trying to get genuine poetry recognised and published. Real poems jar in the context of the mediocre and are a threat to the comfort zone of the easy read. As the editor of one reputable poetry magazine put it, with remarkable honesty, ‘We are in a world of weekend poets and the onus is upon us to tread lightly upon their dreams’.
If magazine editors are reluctant to trample on the dreams of the weak writers, who is there to challenge the idea that it is not necessary to work at writing poetry, and that expressing banal ideas in some (slightly) startling way is enough? Certainly not critics: a serious negative review of a poetry collection is almost unheard of, since those who review poetry do not want to risk offending the editors, the editors do not want to offend their subscribers, and one of those subscribers may well be the reviewer of the reviewer’s own collection in the future. In this context, it is hardly surprising that standards in the last twenty years have plummeted to the extent that the likes of Kaur and McNish have been able to become representatives of poetic success. I refer specifically to the last twenty years with good reason, since this decline appears to have accelerated in that time as a result of the activity of a third strand of the poetry field: the teaching of poetry writing.
In the early 90s I developed a technique for analysing poetry magazines by which I could establish the unconscious principles underlying an editor’s choice of poems for a magazine. I wanted to find the common ground that would mean that an editor would accept a poem because it resonated at some deep level, even though it jarred at a superficial level with others selected for publication. This technique was remarkably successful, but took a lot of hard work to apply, and with other pressures on my time, I was forced to take a break, only to return to submitting poems in the last five years. When I applied this technique again, bearing in mind that many editors had changed, and so forth, I noticed two very interesting facts about contemporary poetry. The first was that the new analysis of many magazines turned out to be identical to the one of twenty years earlier, despite changes of editor, and even when the magazine advertised itself as having no specific editorial policy. The second was that the poetry being published now seemed to be dominated by clearly identifiable ‘types’ of poem – a sort of contemporary equivalent to the sonnet, the villanelle or the haiku. However, these types were not metrical forms, but much cruder genres, such as the ‘list’ poem, or the ‘travel’ poem, or the ‘painting/film/piece of music’ poem, or the ‘imagining the past’ poem, and so on.
More worryingly, the writing seemed to be oriented on producing the type of poem, rather than the type being a particularly appropriate vehicle for the full expression of what the writer wanted to say. I was led to the conclusion that writers were being actively taught or encouraged to write formulaically, so I started investigating contemporary books on writing poetry. What I found was that this is in fact the case, even down to the categories I had identified. For example, Alison Chisholm’s A Practical Poetry Course (originally published in 1994) [1] is a book teaching its readers how to write poems of different types, but it does not address the profound question of what constitutes a poem in the first place, other than to ask: ‘How does the poem fit in with your personal definition of poetry?’ (p. 24). If every poet has a ‘personal’ definition, then poetry as an art-form does not exist. It reminds me of John Carey’s claim in What Good are the Arts? that “A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person”. [2] Amazingly, having eliminated any basis for comparison between two works of art, Carey then goes on to try ‘to show why literature is superior to the other arts, and can do things they cannot do’. [3]
As far as the readers go, Chisholm is teaching them in the same vacuum as Carey creates. It’s as though she were teaching someone to sweep with a broom without explaining the purpose of the sweeping, so that no matter how excellent the sweeping may be, it is often futile, with some making pretty patterns, some trying to evenly distribute the dirt, and a few others trying to collect the dirt together so that it can be removed. Even as a teenager, I realised that it is impossible to write better poems if you do not know what a poem is, and I was so worried about the way even brilliant poets had become trapped because they did not know how to move forward, that I made it a priority to develop a definition of poetry. Ironically, reading between the lines of Chisholm’s book I suspect that she herself not only has an unstated definition of what poetry is, but that it closely resembles the one I published in Orbis in 1984, and which I will come to later.
When Watts notes that
Even McNish has deduced that her ‘poetic memoir’ Nobody Told Me won the Ted Hughes Award ‘because of where the poetry has gone, not for the quality of the writing’
she is confirming the trend I have outlined above. Kaur and McNish have not dumbed down poetry, but have merely seized the opportunity created by those more interested in the business or career of poetry than in the value of it as an art-form. Watts’s problem is that she has nothing to counterpose to this dumbing down other than the claim that
It is the job of poets to safeguard language: to strive, through innovation and engagement with tradition, to find new ways of making language meaningful and memorable.
I emphatically disagree with this. Poetry is not there to serve language, and it never has been and never will be. Language, in all its constant shifts and changes, is there to serve poetry, and it is the role of poets to use the language of their time to make poetry. It is a relatively recent phenomenon to see the role of poetry defined in this way, and it emerged as part of the postmodern philosophical idea that there are no ‘grand narratives’, but only equally valid individual narratives; no overarching theories, but only points of view. The development of this view has led to language being given greater significance than what it is used to say. The irony for poetry (and Watts) is that this philosophical view validates Kaur and McNish rather than condemns them. To be as condemnatory as Watts is about writers lauded as ‘honest and accessible’, something more concrete is needed around which to organise a counter-argument.
My plan to develop a definition took ten years to bear fruit. It was first published as part of an article in Orbis in 1984 (as I have said), and was published again as part of another article in Acumen in 2015. It runs as follows:
A poem is a verbal form in which the words interact more than syntactically to produce a memorable and coherent statement. The more ways the words interact and the more memorable and coherent the statement, so the better the poem.
I subsequently found that this has resemblances to both Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ideas in A Defence of Poetry and Sir Philip Sydney’s in An Apologie for Poetrie, but it did not come from them. In fact, before discussing the implications of this definition, both for Watts’s argument and for poetry as a whole, it might be useful to look at how this formulation was arrived at.
I had been inspired to write poetry at the age of 9 by William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, but when I was 13, I was introduced to Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’. What puzzled me was the question of what these two poems had in common – apart from the fact that they are both called poems and are both about animals, of course. Greater reading of Blake and Hughes did not give any answer, and reading other contemporary poets and those of the past helped only in making clear the diversity of poetry, without helping to determine its core. It was only when studying ancient Greek that Sappho and the tragedies finally put me onto the right track. Sappho showed me that poets in another language and another time did the same things that contemporary poets did, and the tragedies provided the opportunity of what scientists call a ‘controlled’ study.
The lifetimes of the tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides overlapped, and all three of them wrote acclaimed and still extant plays based on the story of Orestes and Electra’s revenge. In effect I had works of poetry in which a whole range of variations were neutralised: they used the same basic story; they used the same poetic form; they were written for the same audience; they were performed in the same environment, and they were all considered by their contemporaries to be of a high standard. They are not identical, however, so clearly the way in which they differ must be crucial to understanding what makes them great poetry, and indicate what lies at the heart of something being poetry. What I found was that they differ in how they use all the elements of plot, verse form and common knowledge and experience to create a different perspective on their times, which is not a direct consequence of the story but exists in the way in which it is re-presented. The aim of poetry, as an art, is not the production of the work itself, but the communication of a pattern of ideas by a poet to an audience through that work. This is the statement which the work makes.
Kurt Vonnegut, in the Prologue to Jailbird, remarked that a high school student wrote to him to say that the single idea which lay at the core of all his work to that point was ‘Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail’. He comments: ‘This seems true to me – and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my fifty-sixth birthday, of realising that I needn’t have bothered to write several books. A seven-word telegram would have done the job.’[4] The statement of a work of art, whether a poem, a novel, a painting or piece of music may appear to be as simple as this, but it is the ramifications and connections within the work which should give its statement an organic link to the times and provide a multiplicity of linked perspectives, rather than just one. The richer the texture of this statement, the more profoundly informative it is for an audience, and the more valued for the new insights it enables. At the same time, the work is better the more coherent it is, in two senses of the word: that the statement is comprehensible, and that the various elements reinforce the statement rather than conflict with each other.
We can now see a secure way to challenge the poetry of Kaur and McNish and those who support it. Accessibility is important in poetry, but it must come with an awareness that there is more, that the first encounter is the starting point of a process of discovery of a rich texture of nuances and connections. It is the absence of any depth and richness to their work which makes it poor poetry. It is accessible, but opens only on what its audience already knows, without offering any opportunity to enlarge their understanding of their world. Its statements are, in some cases almost literally, seven-word telegrams, and like greetings cards, with their banal mottos, they may sell in huge numbers, but they do not satisfy an appetite for growth. By setting their aspirations so low, in fact, they stunt the potential growth of their audience by encouraging and even celebrating an acceptance of their current state of being.
In the same way, honesty is important in poetry, but only because dishonesty or lying jars with reality. A poem cannot aid a growth in understanding if it is partly or wholly centred on a lie as this creates a conflict between those aspects which conform to the real world and those which conform to the lie. The statement of the poem will necessarily be self-contradictory and lack the coherence of a clear voice or line of thought. On the other hand, honesty is not in itself the purpose of poetry because there is no need to write poetry to be honest; it is only a factor in the process of creating a poem. If honesty and accessibility are taken as ends in themselves when writing, the result will not be a poem, because the means to an end have been substituted for the end itself. Neither attribute is a poetic virtue in itself, but becomes so only as part of increasing the coherence of a rich statement produced by the poem, and the ability of the audience to grow through it.
In the absence of a definition, a compass to guide writers to the poetic north, publishers, editors and teachers alike recommend that aspiring poets read their contemporaries to get a feeling for how poetry is currently written and should be written. They seem to have forgotten about the normal distribution curve (the bell curve), and that in any age the majority of poetry produced will be mediocre, with only a little of high quality, and so they are actually encouraging new poets to sink to the level of the mass, rather than to rise to the heights of great writing. They have also forgotten that market research can only tell you about what exists, and the essence of creative work is that it brings into being something which has never existed before. What is new and revolutionary is outside the usual experience, and is a threat to the status quo and to the status of the majority of poets, particularly if it exposes the insecure foundations of established norms. As I said at the beginning, those foundations are exposed because the walls of poetry have collapsed; the barbarians are actually inside the gates; it is time to pick up a compass, leave the ruins behind us and head north.
References
1. Alison Chisholm, A Practical Poetry Course (London: Allison & Busby, 1994). I am using the 1997 edition.
2. John Carey, What Good are the Arts?, (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 29.
3. John Carey, What Good Are The Arts? (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 173.
4. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (London, Toronto, Sydney, New York: Granada, 1982), p. 7
