Mapping Value: Geography, Truth and the Construction of Value in Recent
British Poetry
My intention in presenting this paper is to identify some of the tropes that
have
characterised debates about and constructions of value in recent British
poetry i.e. the
1980s and 1990s. The first part of the paper looks at how discussions of
value in
recent British poetry appear to be complicated by a number of anxieties,
beliefs and
perceptions about the gap between what gets published and reviewed and what
people
actually read and enjoy. The second part discusses how value in recent
British poetry
has increasingly come to be seen in terms repairing the breach between the
two to the
extent that, paradoxically, what Linda Hutcheon terms in A Poetics of
Postmodernism
‘ex-centricity’1 and a consequent pluralism seem to have resulted in a
reconstructed
mainstream and a new populism.'
    To be able to talk about the value of a thing, we first have to be able
to describe it
as a commodity. I don’t mean by this that we need to be able to say how much
a thing
is worth but that we should be able to ask and answer such questions as ‘who
is asking
for it?’, ‘who is doing it?’ and ‘who is it for?’ There seem to be
particular difficulties
involved in asking these questions about poetry. Sooner or later someone
will wonder
if there any useful connections between the poetry written every day by
ordinary
people - and probably never intended for publication - and the poetry
published and
reviewed in the pages of, say, Poetry Review or The Times Literary
Supplement. In
this context, poetry is perceived both inside the poetry scene and beyond as
having
two levels of value and, as a consequence, a unique identity as a cultural
genre. But, if
this relation between two types of poetry makes poetry unique as a cultural
genre, it
does so in a peculiar way. As the poet and critic Sean O’Brien notes:

Of course, the universality of language and the relative brevity of most
poetry give poetry an obvious appeal as a means of self-expression, but,
[...]
the prospect of many thousands of composers clamouring for publication
and performance of their symphonies would be absurd.2

The Scottish poet W. N. Herbert makes a similar point when he asserts that
‘Everyone
has written. [...] It’s extremely common - everybody does write.’3 At first
sight this
might sound as if poetry should be celebrated as the last place where what
Raymond
Williams once termed the ordinariness of culture is being positively
enacted. However,
as Sean O’Brien’s picture of Sunday composers clamouring to have their
symphonies
performed make clear, the relation between people and poetry is a defining
anxiety in
discussions of poetry in Britain.
    The anxiety about people and poetry might be summarised as follows. Once
upon a
time, at least up until the Second World War, there was a large popular
audience for
poetry. Poets were often important public intellectual figures. Poetry was a
part of the
general culture, published and reviewed in daily newspapers. Now, however,
poetry is
not only no longer at the centre of cultural life, it is no longer at the
centre of literary
life. People mutter darkly about modernist obscurities, academics and poets
writing
only for themselves and each other. In this analysis, poetry is rather like
an inner city
public park: a disused, almost vestigial public space. This anxiety is also
one that can
appear ridiculous when viewed in terms of other cultural genres. If we look
at the
world of classical music, for example, there seems to be a general
acceptance that a
large audience will listen to the diet of popular classical music that
Classic FM
provides while a smaller audience will listen to contemporary composers.
Indeed, it is
not thought odd that different parts of the audience for classical music
will listen
exclusively to opera or to baroque music. Similarly, if we turn to the novel
there seems
to be no hand wringing amongst practitioners about the fact that there are
large and
quite distinct readerships for, say, romances or thrillers and smaller
readerships for
contemporary fiction. The type of anxiety I have been analysing in poetry
may be
traced to the idea that it is intimately connected to people’s lives and to
life itself in
ways that other cultural forms are not. It is this idea that appears in the
William Carlos
Williams poem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’: ‘It is difficult / to get the
news from
poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.
’ A recent
editorial in the small press magazine Blade gives another version, asserting
that
‘poetry is not a commercial product and must never be allowed to become one’
;
rather, poetry is something that embodies ‘inherent truth’.4 Peter Sansom
also makes
this point in his book Writing Poems when he comments that ‘We tend to feel
that
poems are true.’5 Another poet and critic argues that ‘the health of poetry
resides’ not
‘in large notions of what culture is, and poetry’s pecking order within it’
but in
‘non-establishment practitioners of poetry’. They ‘are reaching for poetry
to define
small truths about themselves’ and ‘bringing voices in from the margin and
making
visible what official structures obliterate’.6
    In terms of the poetry world this all sounds reasonable enough but it
would be
unusual, to say the least, to find someone arguing that amateur dramatics in
church
halls were the health of contemporary theatre. What the kind of views I have
been
sketching point to, I think, is a conception of poetry as a cultural genre
that embodies
universals but which remains in an important sense subcultural. Indeed, in
this
conception universality and subculturality seem inextricably linked and it
this linkage
that largely explains, I believe, the difficulties involved in describing
what sort of
cultural product poetry is. This, in its turn, gives rise to the peculiar
way that poetry
gets valued. If poetry is primarily subcultural, something that anyone and
everyone can
and apparently does write, then it becomes difficult to take it seriously as
a cultural
genre. Similarly, if poetry is primarily a place where ‘non-professional
practitioners’ go
‘to define small truths about themselves’ then it also gets conceived as a
species of
democracy where everyone’s personal product becomes equally deserving of
attention.
Because the poem is the personal thing that might somehow give access to the
universal, people become embarrassed about valuation to the extent that
valuation
becomes subjective. I was present at a public discussion about poetry at the
University
of Wales in Bangor where precisely this argument was made. ‘Who decides if a
poem
is good?’ asked a member of the audience. ‘Well, the reader does’ was the
answer
from one of the panel. If this suggests a defensiveness about value then it’
s worth
noting, in this context, another peculiarity of valuation within the poetry
world: almost
without exception poets review poets. Again we only have to turn to other
cultural
forms to see how odd this is. Novels, films and plays are regularly and one
might even
say traditionally reviewed by non-practitioners; indeed, a guest review by a
practitioner is felt to be a rare treat.
    It might seem from all this that discussions of value in poetry are
always going to
founder on such questions as ‘How can you value truth?’ or ‘How can you
value
individuals’ definitions and expressions of small truths about themselves?’
and
assertions such as ‘She’s not a poet so she doesn’t know what she’s talking
about’.
However, what began to define discussions of British poetry in the 1980s and
early
1990s was a recognition that poetry’s ‘inherent truth’ is, in fact,
relative. What you
write depends not only on who you are but where you write from.
Consequently,
cartographical and geographical images have come to dominate the discussion
and
presentation of poetry in recent times. Here are some brief examples. A
Times Literary
Supplement review welcoming the relaunch of the Penguin Modern Poets series
in
1995 drew attention to ‘the diversity, in terms of style, subject-matter and
geography’
and noted approvingly in an odd but telling conjunction that
Within the first four volumes, more women will have been
published than in all the twenty-seven of the previous series, and
the selections so far also cover, geographically, Shropshire,
Oxford, Yorkshire, Ireland, Hull, Scotland and Welwyn Garden
City.7
A cartographic trope also appeared to define The Oxford Companion to
Twentieth-Century Poetry. Finally, when the Poetry Society went on the
Internet at
the end of 1995, their web page was in the form of a map of a region of an
imaginary
country.
    There are a number of ways of reading this. One way is to note the
prevalence of
cartographic tropes throughout contemporary cultural commentary. Here are a
few
titles, noted at random from the University of Sheffield Library catalogue:
Mapping
men and empire, Mapping the women’s movement, Mapping desire, subtitled
geographies of sexualities. In these contexts, maps and mapping are
seductive because
they imply representation without the anxiety and difficulty of evaluation.
Maps are
non-hierarchical. Making a map appears to be an uncontentious activity. Maps
present
an area and offer greater access to that area and to the relationship of all
its parts.
Maps suggest an active relation between different and distinct things but
they leave the
nature of that relationship unfixed and provisional, open to change and
reformulation.
In this sense, to speak of maps and mapping is to be projective, to go into
an area that
is new or emergent or unfinished. A map is not a definitive catalogue but
something
that is almost fluid. Most importantly in critical terms, a map is something
we all think
we know how to use and yet using it effectively, map-reading, is a special
skill. To be
the critic who maps is therefore to be someone who makes a transformative
reading,
who takes an area we think we know well and subjects it to a refiguring.
    A map also invites us to find ourselves on it. To be the reader of a map
is to enact
the desire of finding or indeed the desire of writing out the tag that says
‘You are
here’. And to make this positioning of the self implies a thinking through
of one’s
relationships. A map requires that we orient ourselves. We start to look at
a map and
we are already asking ‘Where do I exist in this space?’ and ‘Can I exist in
this space?’
And to ask these questions is also, of course, to ask ‘Where and how do I
exist now?’
Maps therefore become places of identity. Finally, a map is a place where
multiple
perspectives are possible. To draw a map becomes, then, an ambiguous if not
ambivalent process: it resists an absolute set of values but at the same
time it suggests
or even enacts a process of revaluation.
    It is this double mapping that is at work in ‘Mappamundi’ by the
Scottish poet W.
N. Herbert. The poem is, I would argue, emblematic of the self-conscious
decentering
that has occurred in British poetry after 1980. The poem was originally
written in
1982 but not published in book form until 1991.8 It is written in Synthetic
or
dictionary Scots after the style of McDiarmid :
I’ve worked out a poetic map of the world.
Vast tracts of land are painted red to show
England knows nothing about ‘em. Ireland’s
been shifted to London, where
offices of the Poetry Soc occupy five
square mile. Seamus Heaney occupies three
of them. The only other bits in Britain
are Oxford and Hull. Scotland, The Pool,
and Huddersfield, are cut to cuttlebones in
America, which is a great big birdcage with
a tartan rug over it, to show
Robert Lowell. Chile doesn’t exist.
Argentina’s been beaten. Hungary and Russia
haven’t got visas. Africa’s edited down to
a column in Poetry Verruca,
where Okigbo’s got the ghost
of Roy Campbell hanging over him. The Far East’s
fallen off - all but China: that’s renamed
Ezra Pound and put in the concrete cage.
France doesn’t get a look in:
according to Geoffrey Hill, plucky wee
Charles Peguy is wrestling with
this big dead parrot called ‘Surrealism’ for
the throne of Absinthe Sorbet.
In this scenario I’m a little storm off Ulm.
    At first sight, the poem satirises English internal cultural imperialism
and English
ideas about the world at large and rebuts them by being written in Scots.9
The first and
last lines of the poem are set apart from the main body of the text and a
direct relation
is therefore implied between them. The last line seems to enact a resigned
acceptance
of cultural marginalisation. But I would argue that something more complex
is
happening here. After all, to have worked out the poetic map of the world
described in
the poem is no great feat; such a map, it might be argued, is obvious to
anyone within
the British Isles and particularly to those in the supposed cultural and
political
hinterlands. What the poem engages with is the ludicrously arbitrary nature
of English
cultural constructions and, by extension, the unlikelihood of cultural or
indeed any
other consensus. How, the poem seems to asking, can the supposed Anglo-Saxon
centre be satisfying to anyone? In this sense, Herbert’s poem makes a
similar point to
that made by Douglas Dunn in an interview with Bernard O’Donoghue. In
response to
the question ‘Isn’t there some irresponsibility in dismissing British
Society as “rubbish”
or “boring” [...] ?’ Dunn replies
The greater irresponsibility would be to accept ‘British society’ -
for a start, I don’t believe it exists, except as a notion of the
ruling class and the military. How can a society exist when it’s
not supported by a culture?10
The last line of ‘Mappamundi’ makes clear that what Herbert’s map reveals is
only one
way of looking at the world of poetry. It is a ‘scenario’, that is an
outline, a synopsis
or an imagined sequence of events or set of circumstances. By using the
term, the
poem questions the apparently monolithic authority of English culture and
English
views. To use the words of the poem, ‘in this scenario’ Herbert’s
marginalisation
becomes as fictional, as imaginary as English culture and other scenarios
become just
as likely.
    However, I think we can also describe Herbert’s scenario in a particular
way
because what ‘Mappamundi’ parodies and questions is not only the forming of
a
mainstream view of poetry but the forming of the cultural mainstream in the
widest
sense. As I have already noted, it is easy to mock the apparent ignorance of
English
cultural attitudes: it is much more difficult to analyse and understand. It
is a question
Jacqueline Rose asks explicitly, albeit in the context of translation, in
her recent book
States of Fantasy: ‘So, who passes into English? Who decides? And at whose
expense? [...] that ‘into English’ is already, again, becoming part of a
myth-making
process, framing and binding our access to what we like to think of today as
a wider,
more inclusive literary and cultural world.’ In this sense, Herbert’s map
shows what
Rose goes on to describe as ‘English literary culture and the worlds its
partially and
irregularly acknowledges as its own.’11 This is what lies behind the line
‘Ireland’s bin
shuftit tae London’ and behind ‘Mappamundi’s’ concluding image of the poet
as a
small but distinct storm. To remain ‘off Ulm’ is to resist the processes of
either
domestication or neutralisation that are inherent in the mainstream’s
interest in the
periphery. Herbert has glossed this further in an essay published in 1992:
A common misconception of the prominent place granted
to Irish poetry within ‘English’ literature is that this is
justified by the urgency of a poetic driven by the
‘Troubles’. Without underestimating for a moment the
important role played by middle-class guilt in all cultural
decisions, the point should perhaps be made that the
traditional prosody of a great deal of modern Irish writing
permits the English to domesticate it without too much
violence to their own post-Movement definition of verse.
The polite bafflement with which recent manifestations of
experimentalism in the work of Paul Muldoon and Seamus
Heaney have been greeted would tend to support this
thesis.12
    In the light of these remarks, I think we can also read a resistance of
domestication
or neutralisation to involve the fact that poets originating from or based
in the areas
that ‘England knows nothing about’ are not going to waste time opening an
argument
with that nation and its ignorance. This makes the type of writing implied
by Herbert’s
poem very different from the rise of writing from the provinces which
occurred in the
1960s. New poets writing after 1980 can be said to lack what Neil Corcoran
calls ‘the
insistent regionalism’ of writers from the earlier decade who grouped
themselves
around such magazines as the re-launched Stand or The Honest Ulsterman which
first
appeared in May 1968.13 Within England itself, the diversity of poetry after
1980 has
rarely been accompanied by a dialectic of ‘primariness’ and ‘secondariness’.
Rather,
the emphasis has been on ‘places of writing’, like Hull or Huddersfield, in
which poets
simply get on with the job.14 In this sense, Sean O’Brien’s comment about
Simon
Armitage could be applied to large areas of recent writing. O’Brien argues
that his
work
proceeds very confidently from the assumption that there is no
battle to be won about where he comes from - he is a generation
on from Tony Harrison - this battle has been fought and won and
it’s not something he has to concern himself with15
Nevertheless, something else has been happening with place which is
intimately
concerned with the valuation of poetry. Place, in the sense of both origin
and location,
has become highly marketable. I discuss this process at greater length in my
book New
Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994 and will restrict
myself one
example here.16 The blurb of Simon Armitage’s best-selling first collection
ZOOM!
quotes one reviewer noting that Armitage’s voice ‘really is his own voice -
his
language and rhythms drawn from the Pennine village where he lives: robust,
no-nonsense and (above all) honest’.17 Here authenticity, geography and
value appear
to have become virtually synonymous. More importantly, perhaps, poets seem
to have
become synonymous with their audience. Neil Astley, founder of Britain’s
largest
independent poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books, remarked in an interview that
‘the
provinces are after all where everyone lives’.18 Once again, a particular
way of reading
a map results in a species of poetic democracy.
    If large areas of British poetry have been involved in ‘writing back to
the centre’ or
in simply ignoring it, the imagined London-Oxford centre - where,
presumably, in
poetic terms most people don’t live - has not been inactive either. W. N.
Herbert’s
witty portrayal of Ireland being shifted to London symbolises the way in
which the
mainstream reinvents itself by assimilating or overtly annexing activity at
the periphery.
Terry Eagleton, surveying British poetry of the 1980s for Poetry Review,
observed
that ‘The poets who seem to me to matter most are those ‘skewed’ to the
dominant
social wisdom’ and characterised the period ‘as (very broadly) polarized
between [...]
writing, where the marginal becomes somehow central, and a self-absorbed,
knowing,
postmodernist ironizing’.19 An editorial in a Poetry Review from the early
1990s made
the same point with a very different emphasis, lamenting that in Britain
‘canon-making
has collapsed into hectic pluralism and specialist interest serving’. This,
the editorial
went on to argue, was to the detriment of ‘an audience, beyond the insiders,
who
would like to know what is happening in poetry’.20 What has been happening
from the
mid-1990s onwards is a process whereby the ‘poetry establishment’ has sought
to
make skewed perspectives, marginality and ironising part of itself in the
service of a
so-called new populism. Recent activity by the Poetry Society and recent
editorials in
Poetry Review show this process at its most obvious. The event which did the
most to
promote assimilation in the service of populism was the New Generation Poets
promotion of Summer 1994, a kind of poetic ‘Best of Young British Novelists’
. The
promotion was the brain child of the then poetry editors at Harvill, Faber
and Secker
who, reported Poetry Review, ‘felt that the strength of the new generation
of poets
justified a major celebration’. Twenty poets were chosen who were notable
for their
‘ex-centricity’: there were, for example, seven Scots, one Irish-American,
one
Anglo-German, one Guyanese Indian and one Pakistani. Poetry Review’s editor
Peter
Forbes noted that ‘These poets are the true fruits of postmodernism’,
celebrated their
‘isolation and intensity’ and in the same article mocked The Oxford
Companion to
20th Century Poetry as ‘a map of a lost empire, that famous hegemony’.21
Nevertheless, a year later a new hegemony seemed to be emerging. In an
article
entitled ‘Why The New Popular Poetry Makes More Sense’ Forbes wrote of
poetry’s
‘resurgent popularity’ evidenced in such things as ‘Poems on the
Underground, the
Forward Prizes, National Poetry day, promotions like New Generation Poets
and
Poetry for Christmas’. Poetry’s ‘resurgent popularity’, Forbes argued, was
founded on
what he termed ‘the New Plain Style’ and its ‘grab-you-by the lapels
directness’ which
was a much needed and overdue ‘antidote’ to the excesses of postmodernism.22
He
used three of the most accessible of the New Generation Poets, Simon
Armitage, Glyn
Maxwell and Carol Ann Duffy, to support his argument. In a more recent issue
devoted to ‘New Women Poets’ Forbes observes that while, collectively, their
work
exhibits ‘no dominant style, [...] the rise of formalism is noteworthy’.23
    It has, then, been an apparently short journey from ‘the fruits of
postmodernism’ to
its antidote. However, while postmodernism has certainly influenced British
poets who
began to write and publish in the 1980s and 1990s, it has never reached the
status of a
full-blown counter-tradition as it has in America.24 What is really being
celebrated in
Forbes’s talk of ‘resurgent popularity’ and ‘the new plain style’ is the end
of what
Poetry Review lamented at the start of the 1990s as ‘hectic pluralism and
specialist
interest serving’.25 The New Generation Poets promotion showed that with the
use of
marketing and public relations poetry can be made into an identifiable
commodity that
had nothing to do with the factions and tribes of the poetry scene. ‘The new
popular
poetry’, Forbes asserted, is something that ‘becomes part of your emergency
emotional repair kit’26. It can be sold direct to a newly identified
audience for
accessible poetry. It was this audience who, for example, bought 100,000
copies of
Poems on the Underground within its first six months of publication and
have, to date,
bought well in excess of 200,000 copies of the pamphlet edition of Auden’s
‘Funeral
Blues’, popularised by its appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral.27
    British poetry, in its late 1990s manifestation, has started to look and
behave like
other cultural genres. It has something to sell and someone to sell it to.
Value can now
be easily defined in terms of the number of books sold and the size of the
audience
reached. The public space is no longer disused or vestigial. British poetry’
s reinvented
mainstream also seems to parallel what the sociologist Krishan Kumar terms
‘the
standardized principles of global marketing, and the differentiated products
of global
consumption’.28 According to these principles, the heterogeneity of the
‘ex-centric’,
the marginal and the peripheral is raided in order to revitalise and
refurbish the
homogeneity of the centre. Diversity is used to underwrite a new uniformity.

1.(New York and London: Routledge, 1988), passim but particularly pp.57-73.
2.Sean O’Brien, ‘Who’s In Charge Here?’, Sunk Island Review, Issue 10, 1995,
pp.47-58: p.50.
3.Interview in Verse, Vol 7, No. 3, pp.89-95: p.92.
4.Holland, Jane, ‘New Clothes, Same Emperor’, Blade, Issue 6, Summer 1997,
2-8: 5.
5.Sansom, Peter, Writing Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994),
p.8.
Original emphasis.
6.Markham, E. A., untitled response to Gioia, Dana, ‘Can Poetry Matter?’,
Poetry
Review, Volume 81 Number 4, Winter 1991/2, 50-1: 51.
7.Potts, Robert, ‘An adaptable gathering: The revival of the Penguin Modern
Poets
series’, Times Literary Supplement, July 7 1995, p.31.
8.Herbert, W. N., Anither Music (London: Vennel Press, 1991), p.1. I quote
the version
that is printed in Forked Tongue (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,
1994).
9.The following argument draws on but reworks material in my book New
Relations:
The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994 (Bridgend: Seren: 1996),
pp.19-20.
10.Oxford Poetry, Vol.II No.2, Spring 1985, pp.44-50: 45.
11.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.22.
12.‘Post-Neo-Futurism, Or, The Progress Of The Pugilistic Pseud’, Gairfish
Special
Issue, ‘The MacAvantgarde’, pp.5-12: p.7.
13.English Poetry since 1940 (Harlow: Longman: 1993), p.137.
14.I borrow the idea of ‘places of writing’ from Douglas Dunn’s
‘Introduction’ to his
anthology A Rumoured City: New Poets From Hull (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Bloodaxe
Books, 1982), p.16.
15.Interview in Verse, Vol 9, No 2 (Summer 1992), pp.50-63: 62.
16.(Bridgend: Seren, 1996). See Chapter 8, ‘“Everyone Agrees” or How British
Poetry
Joined The Culture Club’, pp.236-252.
17.(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1989).
18.Quoted in the Editorial to P. N. Review 94 (November-December 1993)
Volume 20
Number 2.
19.Untitled comment in Poetry Review Vol 79 No 4 Winter 1989/90, ‘Poetry in
the ‘80s’,
p.46.
20.Unsigned editorial, Poetry Review Vol 81 No 2 Summer 1991, p.3.
21.‘Talking About the New Generation’, Poetry Review Vol 84 No 1 (Spring
1994),
‘New Generation Poets Special Issue’, pp.5 and 6 respectively.
22.Poetry Review Vol 85 No 3 (Autumn 1995), pp.46-7: p.46
23.‘Beyond The Bell Jar’, Poetry Review Vol 86 No 4 (Winter 1996/7), p.3.
24.A book such as the massive Norton Anthology Postmodern American Poetry,
ed., by
Paul Hoover (New York and London: 1994) would be unthinkable in Britain.
25.As Note 20 above.
26.As Note 21 above, p.47.
27.Poetry Review Vol 86 No 1 (Spring 1996), p.6.
28.From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the
Contemporary
World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p.190.





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