Drew’s summary of the various conflicts between the mainstream and the avantgarde is a useful reminder of the various reasons as to why we are where we are today regarding the conflict between the avantgarde and the mainstream. I cover some of it in my PhD thesis, although from the perspective of the development of empiricism as it runs through poetry in the twentieth century. At the time of writing the thesis (the mid-2000s) there was no sign of any withdrawal or regrouping by the mainstream as can be discerned from what Drew says in the following:

‘It seems to me that we are at the latter end of the collapse of what once presented itself as a confident "mainstream" poetic, a poetic that sought to continue an ideological and unnecessarily exclusionary line of British poetry coming out of what was construed as an anti-modernist lineage from Hardy to Larkin.’

At the time, the only semblance of a hint of this was something I read in an article by Sean O’Brien called ‘Rilke and the Contemporary Reader’, which I blogged about in 2006:

http://jeffrey-side.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/sean-obrien-and-seamus-heaney.html

Although this blog post limits itself to O’Brien and Heaney, there was a sense that the “dominance of the mainstream” did not have long to go.

With the advent of the Internet, a situation has come about, whereby young people enthusiastic about poetry have been able to see a range of poetic styles, and apologias for each of these styles, and so are far more informed about the various “schools” of poetry than I was at their age. Because of this, many have been drawn to a poetry that could still be considered “mainstream”, but mainstream without the excessive descriptiveness (a hallmark of mainstream poetry in the past) that was championed in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.

Perhaps examples of this are McNish and Tempest, where I notice a welcome move away from excessive descriptiveness, and more towards a more generalised use of language. It is still poor poetry, and fails to be effective in a range of ways (not much imagery in McNish for instance) but the general direction this sort of poetry is going in is welcome. To some extent it validates what I wrote years ago in my thesis and elsewhere online: that poetry can sell well and gain a popular audience if excessive descriptiveness is jettisoned. 

As far as the conflict between avantgarde and mainstream poetry is concerned, I like both sorts of poetry to the extent that they avoid excessive descriptiveness, and are open to generalisation and ambiguity. Other than that I am not partisan.





From: Drew Milne <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 23:46:31 +0000


It seems to me that we are at the latter end of the collapse of what once presented itself as a confident "mainstream" poetic, a poetic that sought to continue an ideological and unnecessarily exclusionary line of British poetry coming out of what was construed as an anti-modernist lineage from Hardy to Larkin. You could take Motion and Morrison's Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) as the symptomatic Titanic of that ideological project, now run aground on the iceberg of indifference. I don't sense that even those who like that kind of work can point to recent British poetry in that mode that matters enough to seem genuinely vital. That version of the British mainstream has run out of steam and is struggling to come up with new work to bolster up its claims. When I ask people who read poetry but don't like modernist poetry, what new work they would recommend, there doesn't seem to be much confidence in much after Geoffrey Hill with a few exceptions, such as Alice Oswald or Kathleen Jamie, both writers who have ecopoetic tendencies that are not so foreign to a range of post-avant tendencies. This partly explains why attempts to account for what was once a more recognisable kind of Larkin/Hughes/Plath/Heaney taste formation now seem both clumsy and old news. I'd be more interested in hearing what of Faber's output over the last ten years or so excites the people who read that stuff. 

My suspicion, however, is that no amount of critical effort of the kind initiated intelligently by Andrew Crozier will be able to describe the associated loosely neo-Georgian tastes and conventions, since it was viscerally motivated by a dislike of anything vaguely resembling Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and so on. The neo-Georgian poetic wasn't indifferent to avant-garde and post-avant work, it was seething with hostility to such work, and determined to use institutional means to kill it off, starve it of publicity, funds, prizes, every last niche was fought in the battle for the commanding heights of literary prestige. The fact that Frank O'Hara's poetry is so little known in English literary culture is a symptom of the desire to exclude anything that might have learnt anything from surrealism. W.S. Graham seems to be one of the few knowingly modern British poets who was grudgingly considered readable by the neo-Georgians and there's a comparable respect for Denise Riley's poetry across party lines. But the polemics against Dylan Thomas were brutal, poets such as Nicholas Moore were knowingly overlooked, and it was all motivated by a kind of energetic disgust for the merest hints of avant-garde and post-avant poetics. Even Wallace Stevens was a bit much. It must have taken substantial amounts of anger management to calm down all that seething froth of neo-Georgian spleen so as to be able to write pleasing ditties rather than rabid polemics. There's work to be done to understand the damage that all that anti-modernist wrath inflicted on itself and on other types of poetry, but it's old history now. As exemplification of this, Vahni Capildeo wrote a rather amusing poem called 'Mainstream English Lyric' that appeared in the last issue of Cambridge Literary Review, and it is available online here: <https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2017/8/an-excerpt-from-persephone-in-oulipo-by-vahni-capildeo>. You have to scroll down a few lines to get to it.

Heaney wisely indicated that he wasn't raising a toast to the Morrison/Motion attempt to colonise him among the British. My suspicion, however, is that there is still a viable Heaneyesque Irish verse culture that claims affinities in Yeats and Hardy, without being quite so tediously anti-intellectual and anti-modern, perhaps most symptomatically and with some vitality in Paul Muldoon's many modes. There are still politically determined and poetically conservative forces in Irish poetry that look set on ignoring the post-avant and with a greater sense of confidence in the work of poets such as Eavan Boland or Medbh McGuckian. I'm not at all up to date on the schools of the Heaneyesque, but I have the impression they are going strong and not about to give up their ghosts to start reading Tom Raworth for fun any time soon. 

My own sense is that the prominence of McNish and kindred work is more in line with a range of poets who have been surprisingly popular, such as Pam Ayres and John Hegley, but whose skill and talents are not so much those of the school of quietude as the music hall, stand up line of comic McGonagallisms that crosses over with the verse modes and lyric materials associated with dub reggae and rap culture. Lyrics like: "so maybe I'm blind/ But I'm only human after all / ... / Don't put your blame on me" etc have a cultural vitality associated with the way such lines are performed that is evidently popular. Enjoying the plurality of lyric moments across the ideological barricades is surely what poets tuning into the whole language world find themselves doing? It's also genuinely tricky to say why McGonagall is so entertaining and so dire, and it isn't even clear whether McGonagall knew quite what he was doing, but the world of poetry would be a poorer place without McGonagall, or indeed without the wonders of Ivor Cutler. 

Let a thousand lichens flourish!

Drew