 |
 |
On Jan 24, 2018, at 8:30 AM, Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Michael thanks you and Paul have cheered me up -
[log in to unmask]" class="">Too late for me to join in now, but I must say I was extremely surprised that so many people seemed enthusiastic about the drift of the PN Review essay. That essay, with its clarion-call for standards in poetry, was itself based on the values of Don Paterson's 2004 essay "The Dark Art of Poetry", which was a strident attempt to differentiate a small inner ring of establishment craftspersons (such as himself) from the many-headed Other in the various forms of slam poetry and theory driven poetry by Marxist dons and hippie ramblings and aleatory poetry and in fact any kind of poetry at all that deviated from an extremely narrow conception of skilful verse-making using picked language. An essay that, I'm sure I remember, was rightly attacked on this very list. (Remember him dismissing Prynne fans as reading the phonebook, or dismissing most alternative poets as "fundamentally talentless poet-commentators"?) Watts chides Paterson for so far deviating from this erstwhile hard line as to debase himself by making vaguely complimentary references to the popular poetry that Picador are now promoting. And maybe his change of heart was purely commercial. But whether it was or not, I applaud it. I have a profound dislike for standards in poetry because they're always inadequate to encompass the variety of the world and, more often than not, they're applied in totally inappropriate contexts. And Watts certainly shows us how to do that. Applying traditional values and judgments of high-art verse to the avowedly unliterary and popular poetry with which she's dealing in this essay is such a pointless exercise, it just reveals the critic's thick-lensed lack of perspective; it's like someone maundering on about rap music having no tune, or complaining that Ginsberg's poems don't scan. That kind of category mistake should be met with tolerance and good humour but it doesn't merit a response and it certainly doesn't merit praise. I should have thought we would know here that poetry is a various art. It has always existed on a vast substrate of popular, personal, family, lovelorn and adolescent poetry. 99% of the time we ignore the substrate, but it can be sampled in tumultuous quantities on a thousand international websites. I don't pretend I'll settling down to read McNish and Kaur any time soon, their poetry has a new audience and by definition isn't going to appeal to long-engaged poetry fans like me. I'm not going to pretend I like their poetry more than I do because they happen to be young and female (a slimy male practice that historically has killed off many a woman poet's career, as Germaine Greer has pointed out). But the success of their books is much more a matter of celebration than dismay. And if it leads to some self-questioning of traditional critical behaviours (for example, those stultifying reproofs about emotion and sentiment in poetry, those indefensible attempts to dictate the poet's material and behaviour) then that'll be a pretty good thing. A lot of this was debated in the US a few years back, around the time of Gurlesque poetry, -- and it turned into a pretty serious and valid critique of both trad US mainstream and Language Poetry. Of course McNish and Kaur don't interest me in the same way as Arielle Greenberg or Cathy Park Hong but their books and their expressed indifference to traditional literary standards do raise some comparable questions. I feel it's a welcome incursion.