Saturday, June 17, 2006
poetry is not a horse in a field
It may have seemed ill-tempered to have had a go at Larkin the other day. To some perhaps it may look like little more than cripple kicking – shooting a straw fish in a rotten-apple barrel. A brief flick through the Review section of today’s Guardian quickly suffices to remind one of how miserably, suffocatingly provincial the mainstream British scene is. It’s always interesting to note how many of the hacks muttering their plausible sixth-formisms about each other are actually poets; Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, Andrew Motion, David Harsent. Why, then, you might wonder, do they make hardly any mention of their own metier? Ashamed? Motion, in a dull review of the forthcoming Rebels and Martyrs exhibition at the National Gallery, makes a cringeingly apologetic reference to Bunting’s ‘What The Chairman Told Tom’, an angry poem about poetry’s undervaluing by capitalists, by bosses. Motion more or less shrugs his shoulders at this, extending Buntings philistine enemy to include, well, more or less everyone. Compared to visual artists, he says, “…poets are so evidently the poor relations that the public can’t even be bothered to typecast them any more.” And that’s it. A fawning review of a new collection by Grace Nichols, repeatedly referring to her as ‘Caribbean’ (she was born in Guyana, lives near Brighton with the poet John Agard), and her book as ‘vibrant’, but underwrites its status as real poetry by referencing Eliot, is the kind of perfunctory shit that passes for criticism around here. Why bother at all? It’s no wonder that, as Alan Warner mentions elsewhere in the same section, less than 300 people in the UK buy contemporary British poetry, if this kind of third-rate defeatist crap is what our most powerful poets preside over. Talk about pulling up the ladder after you. During last year’s poetry week David Harsent wrote us all a poem describing what poetry was. Poetry, it turned out, was a horse in a misty sort of field in a non-specific part of England some time in The Past. These are powerful people, remember. They could help, instead of just awarding each other commissions and prizes and writing memoirs about their fucking Dads.
To this lamentable pack of shit-eating weasels I offer two rebukes: one to their preposterous passive vanity from the great Denise Riley – her shortest poem and one I long ago memorised as a talisman against the likes of Andrew Motion and Monty Don (ask me sometime):
Not What You Think
wonderful light
viridian summers
deft boys
no thanks
And the second to their refusal to accept the seriousness of their job from the early 20th century American socialist poet John Wheelwright (I was gonna do Shelley, but hell, no man would wear a fur coat better until Peter Perrett):
Train Ride
After rain, through afterglow, the unfolding fan
of railway landscape sidled on the pivot
of a larger arc into the green of evening;
I remembered that noon I saw a gradual bud
still white; though dead in its warm bloom;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
And I wondered what surgery could recover
our lost, long stride of indolence and leisure
which is labor in reverse; what physic recall the smile
not of lips, but of eyes as of the sea bemused.
We, when we disperse from common sleep to several
tasks, we gather to despair; we, who assembled
once for hopes from common toil to dreams
or sickish and hurting or triumphal rapture;
always our enemy is our foe at home.
We, deafened with far scattered city rattles
to the hubbub of forest birds (never having
"had time" to grieve or to hear through vivid sleep
the sea knock on its cracked and hollow stones)
so that the stars, almost, and birds comply,
and the garden-wet; the trees retire; We are
a scared patrol, fearing the guns behind;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
What wonder that we fear our own eyes' look
and fidget to be at home alone, and pitifully
put of age by some change in brushing the hair
and stumble to our ends like smothered runners at their tape;
We follow our shreds of fame into an ambush.
Then (as while the stars herd to the great trough
the blind, in the always-only-outward of their dismantled
archways, awake at the smell of warmed stone
or the sound of reeds, lifting from the dim
into the segment of green dawn) always
our enemy is our foe at home, more
certainly than through spoken words or from grief-
twisted writing on paper, unblotted by tears
the thought came:There is no physic
for the world's ill, nor surgery; it must
(hot smell of tar on wet salt air)
burn in fever forever, an incense pierced
with arrows, whose name is Love and another name
Rebellion (the twinge, the gulf, split seconds,
the very raindrops, render, and instancy
of Love).
All Poetry to this not-to-be-looked-upon sun
of Passion is the moon's cupped light; all
Politics to this moon, a moon's reflected
cupped light, like the moon of Rome, after
the deep well of Grecian light sank low;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
But these three are friends whose arms twine
without words; as, in still air,
the great grove leans to wind, past and to come.
# posted by alan hay : 7:36 pm
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Yes. We’ve reached a point where the learned behaviour of elite cultural practitioners causes them to abandon any hope of redemption and cast themselves virtually as Chaldeans, doomed to haemorrhage such arcane secrets of the humanities as they care to divulge until they deliriously accept their fate and are wiped off the face of the earth.
Hear me now. I think this has something to do with clubs and societies for philosophy, literature and the like being abandoned over time, in parallel with the drift towards 'movements', which were naturally more exciting and interesting because they engaged internationally and promised real results. It's a shame that, in this respect at least, ideology piqued more interest than discussion.
Slightly tangentially - stay with me - there's a current Guardian letters thread about the extent to which mutual societies helped working class people to manage their non-working lives (illness, infirmity, etc.). Some say nay, others are more positive. Many organised working class communities had this facility, which was extended by nationalised health provision. But it's fair to say most did not (farm workers, etc). National insurance has given more people a better quality of life than mutual societies ever did. Nevertheless, after that was introduced, working class self-definition, and to some extent self-determination, was sluiced away bit by bit when mutuality was made less viable. Of course, the process was helped by social mobility, generally.
As with the mutuals, so with the old-time cultural societies - I include the various workers' libraries around the British Isles - which prompted discussion of arts and letters throughout society (there were posh ones and prole ones). Once people began to rely on curriculums - for the altogether sound reason that a quality standard allowed social mobility – the lure of amateur study faded. In fact, I should imagine it began to look rather shabby (think in Great Expectations, where Pip is horrified by Joe Gargery’s gauchness). Incidentally, I don't know enough about such organisations to say exactly what proles might have been reading or discussing, but given what I've discovered about self-education and working class cultural interests in various archives, I'd be loathe to say there was strict adherence to any contemporaneous canons. Ah, if only we’d had a Gramsci. The nearest we got was Richard Hoggart, but he was too late.
Now, I recognise that I’m exclusivist, at least, to the extent that I don’t want to view, talk about or have anything to do with celebrities or celebrity product. I’m also elitist, I suppose, because I prefer to get my cultural knowledge from poets, writers and musicians from further out on the continuum. But like most people, my interests lie somewhere in the middle ground. Currently, my cultural activity involves taking sightings on Michael Moorcock, academic debate on politics and spatiality, Douglas Oliver and Dr Who. Among other things.
This is all terribly disjointed, but I’m trying to agree and say that fostering elite and proletarian practices is a bad thing and it would be better if poetry were the product of informed discourse at all levels. Any writing involving opinions on people, space and time that seeks to affect its consumers should properly be regarded as functioning poetry. A polar corollary of Motion’s airy dismissal of the affecting of his practice would, I suppose, be an amateur garage-rock musician claiming that his songs were all mix-up from other people’s and were shit anyway.
On a totally different tack, in a debate on a piece of secondary legislation on human tissue transplants, Rosie Winterton has just said: "It is important to stress that faces would only be donated after death."
Hear me now. I think this has something to do with clubs and societies for philosophy, literature and the like being abandoned over time, in parallel with the drift towards 'movements', which were naturally more exciting and interesting because they engaged internationally and promised real results. It's a shame that, in this respect at least, ideology piqued more interest than discussion.
Slightly tangentially - stay with me - there's a current Guardian letters thread about the extent to which mutual societies helped working class people to manage their non-working lives (illness, infirmity, etc.). Some say nay, others are more positive. Many organised working class communities had this facility, which was extended by nationalised health provision. But it's fair to say most did not (farm workers, etc). National insurance has given more people a better quality of life than mutual societies ever did. Nevertheless, after that was introduced, working class self-definition, and to some extent self-determination, was sluiced away bit by bit when mutuality was made less viable. Of course, the process was helped by social mobility, generally.
As with the mutuals, so with the old-time cultural societies - I include the various workers' libraries around the British Isles - which prompted discussion of arts and letters throughout society (there were posh ones and prole ones). Once people began to rely on curriculums - for the altogether sound reason that a quality standard allowed social mobility – the lure of amateur study faded. In fact, I should imagine it began to look rather shabby (think in Great Expectations, where Pip is horrified by Joe Gargery’s gauchness). Incidentally, I don't know enough about such organisations to say exactly what proles might have been reading or discussing, but given what I've discovered about self-education and working class cultural interests in various archives, I'd be loathe to say there was strict adherence to any contemporaneous canons. Ah, if only we’d had a Gramsci. The nearest we got was Richard Hoggart, but he was too late.
Now, I recognise that I’m exclusivist, at least, to the extent that I don’t want to view, talk about or have anything to do with celebrities or celebrity product. I’m also elitist, I suppose, because I prefer to get my cultural knowledge from poets, writers and musicians from further out on the continuum. But like most people, my interests lie somewhere in the middle ground. Currently, my cultural activity involves taking sightings on Michael Moorcock, academic debate on politics and spatiality, Douglas Oliver and Dr Who. Among other things.
This is all terribly disjointed, but I’m trying to agree and say that fostering elite and proletarian practices is a bad thing and it would be better if poetry were the product of informed discourse at all levels. Any writing involving opinions on people, space and time that seeks to affect its consumers should properly be regarded as functioning poetry. A polar corollary of Motion’s airy dismissal of the affecting of his practice would, I suppose, be an amateur garage-rock musician claiming that his songs were all mix-up from other people’s and were shit anyway.
On a totally different tack, in a debate on a piece of secondary legislation on human tissue transplants, Rosie Winterton has just said: "It is important to stress that faces would only be donated after death."
# posted by 
: 7:33 pm
: 7:33 pm
Interesting to think about curricula, canons and amateurism. My suspicion is that the emergence of curricula as horizontally integrated across institutions rather than vertically integrated within them is closely contemporary with the British turn away from continental modernism. I suppose by this I mean WW2. Ezra Pound is yr guy here. He's the ultimate amateur, crashing around the drawing rooms and libraries of Europe and America with a load of half-digested classicism, embryonic and misunderstood anthropology, nonsensical economics, and yet somehow generated more cultural heat than Lorenzo de Medici and The Beatles put together. It all ended badly, I know, but that kind of swallow-it-all Giordano Bruno style 'curriculum' is falling fast and far away - it's a function of variety and individuality. Have a look over at Sillimans post (link on the right) on Olson's reading list (L A Waddell mean anything to you?)
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