I've been reading an awful lot of poetry books lately as I'm supposed to be
co-judging a prestigious poetry award which has a lot of money attached to
it. (This doesn't reflect my personal opinion on such things and
correspondence on my hypocrisy will not be entered into. They are paying me,
though not enough for my trouble, and my public service gene kicks in every
now and then). This sort of thing always puts me in a foul mood. For
various reasons. But one is that I am supposed to be helping to choose the
"best" and shuffle all these books into some kind of qualitative order, like
judging cakes or jams at the Royal Melbourne Show, and there seems something
inherently inimical to the act of poetry in the assumptions behind all this.

In this way I probably agree that there is only "writing". On the other
hand, I value the idea or possibility of discriminating taste. I don't think
discriminating taste (and discrimination needn't be a dirty word) is as
crude as a horse race, with the prize going to the first past the post; it's
more like fifty horse races for fifty books, with the post located in all
sorts of dimensions and places and atmospheres. The better the books
"perform" in their particular "race", the more ridiculous crude comparisons
of "success" - ie, first past the post notions of the "best" - become. This
is why poetry competitions are a pernicious idea.

Now, there are some books I like more than others. There are some I like a
whole lot more. There are quite a number that I would not read at all if I
were not required to, there is a lot of perfectly competent writing that
bores me to tears or minor madness or worse. This seems a very bad way of
reading poetry and there have been moments of despair where I have wondered
why people write poems at all, what kind of virus it is that makes them do
it and waste all that paper. But fwiw, it's made me reflect on what it is
that, for me (if not for my co-judges) makes a "good" poem. A "good" poem
is a poem I like, and I am quite happy to like what I like and to admit in
advance any shortcomings and failures in personal taste, since I don't have
a problem with the idea of informed subjectivity. Like Geraldine, I think
what makes a literary culture is a whole lot of informed subjectivities
arguing. The better informed they are, the more interesting the culture...
Since Robert asks, this is what makes me value a poem:

I want a poem to be intelligent. I want it to be formally intelligent,
sensuously intelligent, emotionally intelligent, politically intelligent,
linguistically intelligent, metrically intelligent. I want it to be well
read. I want the language to be self aware and not to assume that writing is
a transparent transferral of meaning or experience from one pearly ear to
another. I want the poem to be dynamic, and to understand the dramatic
principle of contrast. I want it to be unafraid of feeling and at the same
time to be intelligent enough to avoid commodified sentiment.

I think that's basically it: I'm not sure there's anything else in my little
wordworld. But stuff that doesn't do that seems to affect my immune system.
Blake and Shakespeare and Milton do it for me, and some hundreds of
others...

Cheers

A





Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com