Right To Reply #4: Part One

Yes, the long-overdue return of Right To Reply, the feature for which I gather together the views of an assortment of bloggers and friends on a particular issue.

The subject: Poetry - present and future

The participants:
Martin - a professional poet from Nottingham and author of Exultations & Difficulties
Joe - an amateur performance poet
Pete - a voracious reader and the man behind The Whole Wide World Of Fat Buddha
Olav - a fellow bookworm
Ben - your host

Today, the first half of the feature.

What is poetry, for you?

Martin: It’s impossible for me to say what poetry is. And if you set yourself a little project and gather together as many definitions of poetry as you can lay your hands on, you’ll soon find you have several sheets of paper full of contradictions. Poetry takes different shapes and forms, not least because in the last hundred and fifty years it’s gone through so many changes and innovations, and that’s not to mention what went before. And then, of course, somebody will come along and say "This isn’t a poem" or "That isn’t a poem". As if there is some kind of rule.

Olav: [Poetry is] something that shines much-needed light upon some rare instance of emotion. A moment of recognition in the mirror of words. Blah blah. Fancy shit you can quote that makes you look good and other people feel silly. The best words in the best order as someone far more talented, but twattier, than I once wrote. All of the above.

Joe: Poetry expresses what we think and feel, and I think we ought to remember to focus some attention on this apart from robotic daily life. Poetry clarifies our own and other's thoughts. It encourages the sharing of observations – we may take more of an interest or feel we have more in common with others.

What makes a good poem? What should a poem do?

Pete: For me, poetry should speak directly to me, not in simplistic terms, but in ways which I not only understand, but empathise with. I want it to say things better than I can, more astutely, more profoundly. I want it to get to the heart of the matter and open that heart up. For me, poetry represents an emotional, rather than an academic experience.

Martin: I’m as stunned and moved and excited by Ezra Pound as I am by Samuel Daniel as I am by Paul Violi as I am by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as I am by Frank O’Hara. When I say stunned and excited, I’m approaching what I want a poem to do because poems by these people have one thing (if not more) in common – they satisfy the following: I’m not particularly interested in a poem that tells me something I already know. But that goes for my relation to all art, I think. I also look for wit, intelligence, elegance and something that doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. If the poet and the poem are looking over the shoulder for approbation, then forget it. The artist has only himself or herself to answer to. Now, somebody, ask me about communication … (use the phone).

Olav: [A poem should] make you feel happy, sad, melancholy, brave etc. It should be capable of making you feel anything the poet desires.

Ben: A poem should be more than the sum of its parts, and say much more than simply the words on the page. And a poem should move me – the direction of that movement isn’t important.

Olav: Don Paterson recently commented on amateurs cutting in on his action and he is right. A good poem is the work of an artisan, skilfully combining a number of talents I couldn't possibly understand. Meters, for instance – I don't even know if that's spelt right. Also naive Grandma Moses types who write poetry and think they're fucking Rimbauds. They can twat off and read lots and lots of old poetry. People need educating.

Ben: The best poetry is often stunningly simplistic and thus may appear to have been a spontaneous artistic creation, but this simplicity is often deceptive and conceals a great deal of craft and sweat.

Pete: John Hegley might seem a bit simplistic, but I would challenge anyone to do what he does and I reckon he is successful not because he is easy, but because he speaks to us all – well some of us – and he does it with wit, insight and warmth.

Are you an avid or regular reader of poetry?

Martin: Of course I read poetry all the time. I write poetry professionally (a word which in this connection always seems a little odd, but it’s the correct word) and so my expectation when I get up in the morning is that at some point in the day I will encounter poems. I read poems in new magazines, in new books, and poems in old magazines and old books. I review poetry books, and publish poets on my website. And I write poems, and even if I’m not actually writing, part of my head is always engaged with work in progress or work not yet started. It’s a constant flow of poems, and it’s not all good, far from it. Sometimes it drives me round the bend, but one good poem brings me back to why it all matters so much to me.

Pete: I wouldn't exactly say that I am an avid reader of poetry, but I do read it, irregularly. It's funny, but I never consider poetry. I spend just about every waking minute thinking about football, I devour novels and I love music, will talk about it all day and all night, but poetry, no thanks. Then again, I visit the Football Poets’ website, have even sent a poem in. I buy all John Hegley’s books and see him if he ever appears in these parts. I think the kids’ poems of Benjamin Zephaniah are genius. I became aware of Linton Kwesi Johnson as a poet rather than a musician. I love Bukowski; Simon Armitage gets to the heart of the matter as well as anyone. I will happily read Whitman and there are others, loads of them, people I come across by chance on the web, in the New Yorker or the Barcelona Review or dozens of other places. So I do consider poetry, in fact I love poetry, and, now and again, I write it.

Ben: My bookshelves contain many of the poets who form the staple diet of the English undergraduate – Larkin, Plath, Hughes, Lawrence, Auden and Eliot, as well as slim volumes by Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Wendy Cope. There’s a book of Elizabethan verse, alongside the ‘Penguin Book Of The Sonnet’. Without a doubt my favourite, though, is a collection entitled ‘Scanning The Century’, which introduced me to numerous previously unfamiliar voices and which illustrates that poetry, like art in general, is often a revealing reflection of the times in which it is created. And yet I’m ashamed to say I very rarely read poetry, or expose myself to it in any form. I rarely have the inclination. Fiction and non-fictional prose have a primary claim upon my bedside table. Why that is, I’m not sure. My predilection for prose over poetry isn’t something I can readily explain or excuse.

Olav: I tend to read it most in quiz questions. That's how I started on William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and Hart Crane.

Is there interest in poetry amongst the general public? Do people still buy it?

Joe: I think people still buy poetry, but maybe I'm just aware of more books / anthologies.

Olav: According to sales, the general public does not buy and read it. Except in the rare instance of a ‘Birthday Letters’ where the soap opera aspects are too hard to resist. I think most Londoners have consumed poetry on the Tube in nice bitesize portions, but the concept of buying a book of poetry seems anathema to normal people. All that money for so few words?

Martin: I don’t know the general public as a whole, but the members of it I do know are a mix of people who have a variety of responses when one mentions poetry to them – as if one ever does!! Seriously, the notion of "the general public" really pisses me off. The fact is, poetry is pretty much hidden away, and most of it doesn’t want the general public anywhere near it. I don’t care much. I give poems to people I know who otherwise never go near poetry books – people know what I do, and sometimes a transaction occurs. They’re happy, I’m happy. I don’t worry these days about the audience for poetry. The general public doesn’t visit private art galleries in great numbers either, and it’s way easier to wander into an art gallery and get out of the rain than it is to find good contemporary poetry in Waterstones.

Olav: Poets were pop stars, now they're weird up-their-own-arse beardies in bondage to an ancient craft that nobody deigns to understand. Poetry is impenetrable, and when it gets on TV it’s some old crap from ‘Opportunity Knocks’ winner Pam Ayres or some twit in ‘Countdown’'s Dictionary Corner - Richard Digance, you're amusing, but not THAT amusing. We look to anthologies that are put together by Daisy bloody Goodwin. We don't have the old avenues that would for example bring films via Film 2005 to us. Television thinks poetry’s dead, and print thinks it’s esoteric, unless it's election time at Oxford University.

Pete: I know, from the few readings I attend, admittedly by the more populist poets that there is a big market and a big base of poetry lovers. All the events I go to sell out and sell out quickly, and there will always be long queues at the bookstall. I hardly visit a website that doesn't have a poetry page of its own and there are loads of really good poetry sites on the web. Someone must be visiting them.

Has poetry suffered as the novel has risen in popularity and status over the last three centuries? Might it be said to have suffered in any other way?

Pete: I don't know if poetry has suffered against the novel – I'm not sure how popular it has ever been – but I think quality literature has suffered in comparison with popular fiction, chick lit and stuff cobbled together by some celebrity or their ghost writer, so poetry probably comes a poor third. In any case, you are not comparing like with like; they are two different specialist art forms each with their own genres and sub genres.

Joe: I don't see the two in competition, unless you devote all your time to literature. There is still plenty of time for both.

Martin: I don’t think the novel is actually a runaway success these days, either, except for the few that get given the celebrity treatment and are made into a movie. And when that happens you don’t have to read the book. They don’t make movies out of poems, although ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is out there and still waiting.

Ben: Poems, on the whole, aren’t long enough for the kind of TV or film adaptation that sells novels these days. It’s just a natural consequence of the brevity of the genre. There are exceptions, though – from the earliest poem written in English vernacular, ‘Beowulf’, to Tony Harrison’s meditation on language and class in 1980s Britain, ‘V’.

Martin: Poetry "suffered" because it was taken over by academia at the beginning of the twentieth century or thereabouts. At least, that’s the received knowledge, and it’s pretty much true. So, in other words, it was taken away from ordinary people (whoever ordinary people are) and made into some rarified form accessible only to the privileged few who had the code to crack an otherwise obscure text.

Pete: It's [not poetry as a whole but] an idea of poetry that I don't consider: the classics, or modern, classical types. I suppose it is middle class poetry that I don't consider, written by the over-educated for the over-educated. I read reviews of poets and will think that I like the sound of it and will seek stuff out, then I find that it is completely incomprehensible and I retreat, bewildered and frightened. I don't say that poetry, or any art, should be easy, but I find life is too short to bother with stuff that requires constant flicking through a dictionary to understand it, or assumes a cerebral knowledge of the most archaic of references.

Ben: The issue, I guess, is whether poetry has genuinely become more difficult in response to its appropriation by academia, or whether this is simply a popular misconception, and people only think it’s become inaccessible to them. Perhaps people have been made to think this way – perhaps academics have exaggerated the difficulty of understanding poetry as a means of setting themselves up as part of an elite who "get it" (as opposed to the "masses" who don’t), and of justifying and legitimating what it is that they do. As an academic myself, though, I can’t subscribe to this view wholeheartedly, though there is some truth in it. Academia isn’t quite so cynically self-serving and self-preserving as that.

Martin: Personally, I think [the argument that poetry has suffered at the hands of academia] is only part of the story. You have to throw into the mix the growth of other mediums, like radio and TV, and now of course all the technologies we have…. I mean, sitting down and reading something is probably not as common an activity as it once was, and to sit down and read something slowly, like perhaps you have to do with a poem…. I don’t want to sound precious, but a good poem is something to spend time with, to read and re-read; the time and space and quiet that requires doesn’t actually describe our lives very accurately these days, I think.

The second half of the feature follows tomorrow.

Related links:

Martin's homepage.

Pete provides a whole host of poetry-related links.

On Box Social Skif reviews poetry readings by John Hegley and Simon Armitage.