Happy to have let this run without my interfering, but
just a few points.
Tim claims in an earlier post:
“In the past I've put forward the idea that it is the modern
UK mainstream poem that is the real anomaly within poetry as a whole, both with
regard to the past and to poetry internationally, not the linguistically
innovative. I've never been picked up on it or challenged...”
It’s more than slightly disheartening to me that over several
years on this list I have frequently challenged (at least aspects of) this view
and we’ve had a number of arguments about it, not always, I’d like to think,
entirely futile ones...though I’ve got more and more fed up as they’ve tended to
end in personal abuse, either of particular poets or subsequently from others on
the list, since I’ve been seen as defending them, of me.
Just one small example of a less acrimonious dispute from way
back, Tim, is when you accused the supposed mainstream of parochialism with
respect to “poetry internationally” – I furnished you with a score of
translations, derived from a brief scan of my bookshelf, which should have
challenged your view that there was no engagement from that camp with
international currents. I could add a lot of significant work in translation
that’s been published since then.
There’s no point arguing with your tastes nor with your
“experience of reading” – though when you write:
“The sense I got from the late mainstream poetry were of an essential
reactionary meanness, infused with poetic bad-faith, stunted and claustrophobic
yet also smugly pleased with itself in a way which still makes my hackles rise.
I could go on. It possessed certain qualities in such an extreme way and yet was
presenting itself as the very opposite, as this highly naturalised craft”
- it seems to me both pugnacious and vague: “reactionary meanness”, “poetic
bad-faith” “stunted”, “claustrophobic” “smugly pleased with itself” etc. These
are obviously ghastly people but I don’t know who they are, what poems you’re
referring to, even why they should all be bundled together into a chimerical
tangle. The only person you’ve named is Duffy who, I take it, is representative
for you. Personally I don’t think these epithets give a useful or truthful
account of what her poetry does and is, but anyway I don’t even see why she
should have to represent a whole tendency and probably hundreds of writers,
good, bad and indifferent. From well before the laureateship she was one of the
very few (2, 3, 4?) popular poets in mainland Britain so that would already make
her utterly exceptional and unrepresentative. The reasons for her popularity
could be explored but I don’t think your account would get us any nearer.
Leaving aside the dismissive terms – do you really think Duffy’s contemporaries
and by now the next two generations of poets have been aspiring to write poems
in her style and idiom? Or was the past tense you framed your remark in
meant to indicate this stylistic model has been dumped?
I’ve argued often enough here why I think Crozier’s
terminology about ‘empiricism’, which has since become a kind of dull orthodoxy,
is of little use, and I’ve also questioned the premises behind the dismissal of
personal experience in poems as ‘anecdote’, so there’s little point in me
re-iterating my arguments, especially as they seem to have left no trace at
all.
I have a decided reaction against Michael’s two tribes/two art-forms
approach with which you seem in accord, though his initial example of Gustafsson
was helpful. Silliman’s ‘new sentence’ takes me no further. An essay of
his on this topic begins with a very illuminating account of the way
theoreticians of language have avoided focusing on the sentence as a unit of
meaning, and then bathetically slumps into a few restrictive examples of what he
deems a new creature. So far it’s only been sighted on the U.S. west coast, but
there are some glimmering signs of its emergence also to the east. Talk about
parochial. You’d learn far more useful stuff for poetry from medieval
grammarians or certainly from Dante on rhetoric.
It would take too long to explain my aversion to this way of splitting the
art. But briefly, I think it’s too crude a way of reading, and one which sets up
unnecessary and barbed wire barriers. A couple of years ago I was surprised that
you, Michael, confidently drew a fortified line between the practice of two
Swedish poets - Bengt Emil Johnson and Gunnar Hansson. You know this material
far better than me, but as I said what I observed in their presence, with regard
to each other’s work, was unreserved warmth and admiration.
Returning to poetry translation, I prefer to read, say, Manson’s impressive
Mallarme’ translations as continuous with, and not at all a different thing
than, translation from what I think you would both be calling mainstream. You
could argue that translation is a different thing entirely but I think that
would be wrong – it’s a parallel activity which is revealing and, if I can use
the word, ‘exploratory’.
A final question – the exceptions that have been conceded by both of you
interest me. They are exceptions why? Because of what stylistic features? On the
level of world view, of language, of the line?
Jamie
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2016 11:51 AM
Subject: Re: names
Hi
Michael - My idea that it is Brit mainstream poetry that is the anomaly came at
first from my own experience of reading. I could not understand why I had no
problem with the poetry of the past (though obviously I had likes and dislikes,
huge preferences and some indifference) that was comparable to my instinctive
negativity to the poetry that began to flood the mainstream channels, both high
and low, from the 80's onwards - culminating in Duffy etc. Even Movement poetry
and even bloody Larkin did not produce the same bad feeling in me, even though I
could see that they had much to do with the direction this poetry had taken. For
example even though Hardy is often cited as being a model for that type of
poetry I actually quite like Hardy and there are many other examples. The sense
I got from the late mainstream poetry were of an essential reactionary meanness,
infused with poetic bad-faith, stunted and claustrophobic yet also smugly
pleased with itself in a way which still makes my hackles rise. I could go on.
It possessed certain qualities in such an extreme way and yet was presenting
itself as the very opposite, as this highly naturalised craft. This is taking me
back to the Terrible Work days when I was trying to talk about
this.
I found theoretical clues to this 'anomaly' in things said by
Forrest-Thomson and Andrew Crozier but I can't now remember what they were. In
the more general criticism coming from the innovative lot about 'anecdotal
poetry etc and A. Duncan's comments about 'telling us what we already know' and
his classification of 'Pop Poetry' I could still not find anything that was
delving deep enough into the poetry's idiosyncrasy - it went a lot further than
stuff about anecdote. And I'm not a scholar, and I get bored even by my own
obsessions (rather write poetry, listen to music and take the dog out), so I've
never really pursued it.
And no, the 'anomaly' does not apply to the three mentioned below, Bletsoe
Shuttle and Jamie. The indifference shown by the mainstream to Elisabeth's
brilliant poetry is symptomatic of what I'm talking about - another fine example
is my very own sparring partner Peter Riley. There are many poets I would
exclude from the anomaly, some of them obvious like Hughes and Redgrove etc. And
there is one who I think tried to escape the anomaly without even knowing what
he was trying to escape from, so therefore failed anyway.... umm Don, Don
somebody.
In the past I've put forward the idea that it is the
modern UK mainstream poem that is the real anomaly within poetry as a whole,
both with regard to the past and to poetry internationally, not the
linguistically innovative.
I kind of have
an inkling of what you mean, but it's a pity you haven't been challenged on it
so I'll play devil's advocate. In all the nations whose modern poetry I
have some faint acquaintance with (US, Aus, Sweden, Spain), the
poetry that is most publicized, most studied in schools and most sold in
bookshops is traditional poetry -. In Finland maybe the norm is more towards
experimentalism but even in Finland there is plenty of what I see as
mainstream traditional poetry. Is UK mainstream poetry so different in kind
from what's marketed as poetry in other nations, or is their traditional
poetry an anomaly too? UK Mainstream poetry appears to derive from an
unbroken, respectable, well-anthologised tradition going back through the
centuries (Anne Stevenson - Hardy - Keats - Milton - Sidney ....
that sort of lineage). ....Horace, Catullus.... Also, does the anomaly
idea apply not just to poets whose work we dislike and don't read but also to
poets who I suspect you might agree with me in admiring: Elisabeth
Bletsoe? Penelope Shuttle? Kathleen Jamie even... ?
I'm
writing this not to be argumentative but because I'm eager to hear the other
side of it. Maybe you've already elaborated on the idea somewhere.
