An excellent analysis, Peter.
Original Message:
Tim,
What I can't take is the use of a term like "centre". It's your geometry that's wrong. Those people are not at the centre of British poetry in any sense except the financial.
This is how it works. Ms Oswald has a slim first volume published by Faber. Immediately gold is showered upon her in enormous quantities, she is invited everywhere, articles and lectures on her sprout up everywhere, her picture is all over the tabloids, she is queen of British poetry. I contend that this is not actually because of what she writes, which as I said doesn't fit your categories. Probably the most significant factor is being published by Faber, which sets you up for the big prizes without it being exactly automatic. Once you've got one prize you get all the others because the judges can't judge poetry at all and so they take the easy course of following suit. You could look upon Oswald's triumph as a good sign if you wanted to, a sign of a move towards a more language-conscious, more subtle, and socially and ecologically aware poetry, as if the public created by this industry is getting tired of the facility it normally gets. The only thing I think is wrong about it is the disproportion, and the abandoning of the principle that the highest reward belongs, as Aristotle said, to a life's work, rather than a youthful spurt.
This isn't even an industry. It's a small market sector which can take advantage of automatic institutional endorsement for its products. It's on the fringe of British poetry. It only promotes about half a dozen poets, and pushes their sales up into the tens of thousands. It can't do more than this because claims of exceptional genius are essential to the publicity. Below this is a large body of experienced poets who cannot be called neglected -- their sales are good, their names are known, they get invitations, festschriften, academic articles, they judge competitions (if they want to). They just don't get the jackpot. This certainly includes Roy Fisher and many other poets good bad and indifferent. Lee Harwood's Collected Poems is Shearsman's best selling book. These quite successful poets don't all belong in the same market, are not necessarily in competition with each other, but can occupy self-created niches in which they have strong followings, as with J.H.Prynne.
I just saw your new list of neglected British poets and I think of the twenty or so:
5 are not neglected on any terms (Fisher etc)
3 or 4 are "doing well" (e.g. Corcoran)
Six or so are appreciated in niches
Six or so are neglected and deserve to be either because they write in a way which very few people will ever be able to read, or because they write very badly.
There are four including me (Oliver, James, Chaloner) who were perhaps sidelined because we were "Cambridge" but didn't enroll ourselves wholly in the Prynne brigade and so fell between stools. I think I'm the least neglected of these.
Some poets you don't mention who cannot be considered neglected: Alan Halsey, Keston Sutherland, Alec Finlay and his dad, Cris Cheek, Barry MacSweeney, Trevor Joyce, Tom Raworth, Thomas A. Clark, Denise Riley, Andrea Brady...
But Tim, you talk all the time as if you and they have had the door of the Grosvenor Hotel slammed in your face. Who wants to go in there and sit with a small group of very middle-class effetes drinking iguana soup?
This is a terrible topic, we should never have started on it.
Just keep on writing the stuff will you.
Peter
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