Tim,
Could we bring this down a notch from barking at your heels and jumping on your posts to just disagreeing? Maybe not even disagreeing! Sounds like you've followed these magazines 'flooded' with such poems and the mainstream critics raving about them far more assiduously than I have. A thankless task perhaps, for which you may well deserve credit. I'm still not quite sure how, for example, your 'reactionary meanness' serves as an aesthetic description rather than an ethical or political one and I'm seriously none the wiser about this added account of 'chopped down cramped homilies'. Either we've been reading very different poems or we've been reading the same poems very differently. Hard to tell.
   I wouldn't be surprised though if we shared a visceral dislike of certain poems, even of certain critics. Though I like and admire the commitment of quite a few poetry magazines, there are some whose aesthetic I find dull or even repellant. 
  As for different readings, Peter's dislike of Armitage's The Hitcher which he sees as condoning gratuitous violence looks odd to me. Irrespective of their relative merits, the poem shares the dramatic monologue's conventions with My Last Duchess. I'd find a reading of that poem that thought Browning was condoning the Duke of Ferrara's probable uxoricide equally odd.
Jamie




> On 26 May 2016, at 12:29, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Fascinating Michael. And yes, you did understand me right with "the thing that offends is mostly not something said or meant personally by the poet in question, but something as it were encoded in his medium of expression." And I agree that it must be "an unconscious stylistic, a manner", which yes is "why  it only takes three or four lines to identify". And I know the clue to it lies in the use of such innocent looking markers as you've focused on, but only the clue, not the answer, if you see what I mean.
> 
> My Brit mainstream as anomaly idea doesn't stand up, I admit that now, but I know when I used to think it I was originally making a broad judgement based on the huge span of world poetry with all its colours and variousness compared to the chopped down cramped homilies that were being raved about by mainstream reviewers and critics (there Jamie - you can jump on my phrase 'chopped down cramped homilies', let it join my earlier descriptive list) and that swathes of poets all around the country were starting to copy and flood the magazines with, leaving anything with any brains or guts way out on the margins. Andrew Duncan bracketed it as Pop Poetry, but for me it was a lot more subtle than that, encompassing a whole range of attitudes that turned me off. The question for me is can we, within the body of the poem, identify the vehicle that carries those attitudes when they are not part of the surface? So of course you are right to search out such things as the 'he'd' etc - but maybe the vehicles are different in different people and different poems.
> 
> I know Peter thinks this is all bollocks.  I used to have to teach that Armitage poem you've quoted, so I think I've earned the right to ask such questions.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Tim
> 
>> On 24 May 2016, at 15:29, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> 
>> Sorry for the delayed response - I feel like an owl in daylight.  I left the discussion at Tim's interesting and honest response to my questioning of his suggestion that UK mainstream poetry was in some way an anomaly. 
>> 
>> My response has become rambling and I’m having to throw it ashore before another long interruption. I haven’t had time to tidy it.  I apologise in advance for repetitions, slipshod expression, incoherence, tedium, and any inadvertent annoyance it may cause. 
>> 
>> And Geraldine's suggestion of the term "exploratory" for the kind of writing that I've been calling experimental. "Exploratory" seems entirely accurate as description of the praxis of such an author as Lisa Samuels (my exemplar earlier in the conversation). My only hesitation is because "exploring" has become such a cliche of reviewers and critics to account in the vaguest possible way for what some or other artist is doing.  “both books explore the relationship between public and private…”, “[Ang Lee] explored the relationships and conflicts between tradition and modernity, Eastern and Western..” Or, to come down a bit more to brass tacks, “Their poetry often has a neo-romantic character and trajectory that thrives on the natural world in order to explore human nature, especially concepts of social order, love and relationships.”,  …   (I sometimes  think the term must have originated with educationalists talking about the developing child. And maybe in a larger sphere it exemplifies the neoteny that is said to typify advanced human cultures. Maybe the issues that Tim and I have with some contemporary poetry is a debate about problematic meaning of adulthood.... anyway, I'm going way off track here... )
>> 
>> But back to the anomaly idea.  Most of what I might have had to say about this has been subsequently voiced by Tim himself, by Jamie and by Peter.  The only thing I can really add is autobiography. I came to contemporary UK poetry very late, after many years delving in the past, as a mediavalist and enthusiast of everything  up to about…. Say,  1870!. Something in the first year of uni had given me a thorough distaste and contempt , ignorant of course, for everything from Auden onwards. The only modern poetry I knew and cared about was in translation, Penguin Modern Poets from mainly Europe and Latin America.  Belatedly, at the end of the 1980s, I felt provoked into seeking out  the poetry of my own time and place.  At first, like any High Street browser of the time,  I thought Faber and Oxford was the place to look.  Oliver Reynolds, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Douglas Dunn, Heaney, Mahon, Hughes, …. I struggled to like this writing, though  I had hardly any sense of what I might like better.  
>> 
>> Funny how that era has  all gone now.  No poetry world is static. You don’t find Raine and Reynolds in Faber any more.   They’re reduced to Raine’s own  Arete magazine,  the natural heir of  Ian Hamilton’s New Review, with Ian McEwan replacing Julian Barnes and John Updike. (Class and ideology  do come into these things.) [ TLS readers are currently re-reading… Waugh, Powell, Proust (this is the current TLS blog)…]  Alan Jenkins isn’t in Chatto any more, but Enitharmon.  Douglas Dunn (who I don’t wish to suggest has any but a left-wing ideology) hasn’t published a book since 2000. But you will find Timothy Thornton in Penguin! 
>> 
>> My overall view is that the feeling of distaste and hostility reported by Tim and to an extent experienced by myself is a proximity effect.  Readers are thin-skinned at home, where they’re acutely sensitive to unexpressed meanings, but thick-skinned abroad, blithely unaware of possible causes of offence.  
>> 
>> [Why did Adorno loathe Strauss’ Alpine Symphony so much? He’s unable to explain, and when we listen to the magnificent music now we can’t see it. But I don’t doubt that the offence was there for Adorno, he heard it as clearly as anyone who hears a tone and knows they’ve been insulted by it. (And sometimes, we get this wrong.)  You can appreciate that, for Adorno, there was  a lot at stake. ]  
>> 
>> As Tim rightly said (if I understood him right), the thing that offends is mostly not something said or meant personally by the poet in question, but something as it were encoded in his medium of expression.  In fact the knee-jerk reaction may, if I can speak autobiographically, be more about an unconscious stylistic, a manner, than anything that the poet consciously put into the poem.  That’s why  it only takes three or four lines to identify. I’m thinking of identifying markers such as the particular use of the present tense. (http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2006/02/first-person-present-tense.html)
>> 
>> Though I am calling it a proximity effect I don’t mean that the reaction is not a real insight.  I don’t think the mainstream poetry of today is really an anomaly (or if it is, that’s rather a compliment – I’m all for anomalous poetry)  ;  but it certainly is unique.
>> 
>> For example in its extraordinarily heavy usage of the word “He’d”. (Also” I’d”, “She’d”. But I did my Google searches on “He’d”.) 
>> Anyhow, the elided past continuous  (short for “he would” or “he had”, both are equally characteristic). 
>> 
>> A word that’s vanishingly rare in linguistically-innovative, exploratory, experimental etc…  (Prove me wrong!) . It’s obvious that there’s some quasi-sociolinguistic lining-up here. 
>> 
>> A word with a great deal encoded in it.   As briefly as possible, you might say it means being persuaded that poetry can be made by rehearsing narratives of the habitual past in an informal manner. Of course that’s a reductive and prejudicial way of putting it. But a prejudice is what we are talking about. I frankly admit that it gets in the way of comprehending the specificity of the poems in front of me.  
>> 
>> I’m not sure if this particular usage would be one of the things Tim dislikes, probably not,  but I instance it as demonstration that what is reacted to is not merely imaginary, there is some demonstrable objectivity in the recognition of difference.  
>> 
>> Manny Blacksher:
>> 
>> When he hastened 
>>   back from lunch at one each day, his heart 
>>   brim-full of blameless industry, he'd stop 
>>   to buy cigars and chew the toothsome fat 
>>   with Mister Stein, who'd bought the lobby shop 
>>   with money found inside a fresh latrine 
>>   in a dun field outside Dachau where he'd sat 
>>   and seen a shadow snake like pain in sunshine.
>> 
>> Michael Donaghy:
>> 
>> He needed a perfect cathedral in his head,
>> he’d whisper, so that by careful scrutiny
>> the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind
>> could find the secret order of the world
>> and remember every drop on every face
>> in every summer thunderstorm.
>> 
>> David Wheatley (translating SEÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN)
>> 
>> You could see that he understood, and his fellow-feeling
>> for the pain in the horse’s eyes;
>> 
>> and that dwelling on it so long he’d finally stolen
>> into the innermost space
>> 
>> Simon Armitage (“Hitcher”)
>> 
>> We were the same age, give or take a week.
>> He'd said he liked the breeze
>> 
>> to run its fingers
>> through his hair. It was twelve noon.
>> The outlook for the day was moderate to fair.
>> 
>> Carol Ann Duffy (“Eurydice”)
>> 
>> 
>> He’d been told that he mustn’t look back
>> or turn round,
>> but walk steadily upwards,
>> myself right behind him,
>> out of the Underworld
>> into the upper air that for me was the past.
>> He’d been warned
>> that one look would lose me
>> for ever and ever.
>> 
>> [The lineage: 
>> Thomas Hardy (“The Man He Killed”)
>> 
>>           "I shot him dead because — 
>>           Because he was my foe, 
>> Just so: my foe of course he was; 
>>           That's clear enough; although 
>> 
>>           "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, 
>>           Off-hand like — just as I — 
>> Was out of work — had sold his traps — 
>>           No other reason why. 
>> 
>> Wordsworth (The Ruined Cottage)
>> Five tedious years
>> She lingered in unquiet widowhood,
>> A wife and widow. Needs must it have been
>> A sore heart-wasting. I have heard, my friend,
>> That in that broken arbour she would sit
>> The idle length of half a sabbath day—
>> There, where you see the toadstool’s lazy head—
>> And when a dog passed by she still would quit
>> The shade and look abroad. 
>> ]