Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side, one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative.My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when one reads that Bloomsbury's profits are down massively due to the absence of a new "Potter" - one has to face facts. There is a publishing industry in Britain. It is a commercial enterprise, endorsed by government bodies, and cultural organisations and affiliated media sponsors, and festivals. Together, it constitutes an "establishment". On the whole, this system favours the novel, and narrative, over poetry of any kind, and surely, poetry with disrupted syntax. Why is this?
It has nothing to do with poetics, and everything to do with profits. "Most" people who buy books want a "good read" - they want "a story". Novels with stories can be made into TV shows, and films. Money can be made. I have often said this at this blog, but poets are now second-class citizens. I often meet literary figures who barely know any poetry, except that published by a few large presses. For most "writers" and those involved with culture, "literature" in Britain is novelists, life writers, screenwriters, and a few poets.
This is not troubling, to most people. For, the definition of an establishment, surely, is that it is an order of things that represents what appears, on the face of it, reasonable, and natural. This is why it is so easy to marginalise bloggers and poet-critics who demand a different way of considering writing and publishing - because they appear as mad and violent as some of the G20 protesters - they seem like people who just want to smash some glass and spoil the fun. I have spent over 24 years organising poetry events, supporting fellow poets, editing, reading, performing, writing, studying, and teaching, poetry.
Most days I feel that I have "wasted my life". The impact that poetry writing and poetry promotion has, on the general public, the popular culture, and for the average person, in the UK, is close to nil. Despite the hundreds of superb British poets - who do touch some lives, of course - poetry has been marginalised, by precisely the sort of Anglo-Saxon narrative triumphalism that does so much for fiction. In fact, one of the mistakes that lyric poets have increasingly made, I feel, in the 20th century, is to try to make compromises with science, business, government, and also prose and its handmaidens plot, suspense, narrative, and lucid structure (admittedly all part of Epic Poetry). Lyric modern poets have tried to downplay what is most poetic about poetry (its artificial language) and emphasise its pleasures, and how it is part of the same world as "novels" - or have they become what is known as "experimental".
The truth is, poets buy in, far too much, to the idea that fiction has won, and that its delights and world (of fame and celebrity and film deals) is one they might approximate. The flourishing in the UK over the last 20 years of all these prizes for poetry and all the marketing, has been a sometimes desperate attempt to package and sell poetry as "a good read" - as work that, like a "good novel" - satisfies the reader. Poetry is more radical than that. Poetry makes demands on the reader - of time, and of thought - that sometimes lead to demands for action. One's life may have to be changed.
Novels can also do such a thing (George Eliot, for instance, has such an effect). Yet too often, novels are, more or less, "entertainments". How many arts organisers, and festival directors, really want to see the world shaken to its foundations, or the way that life and language is perceived profoundly altered? Not many, I'd imagine. Instead, there is a desire for more comfortable "books" and more sheeplike readers, who are meant to "buy" the "latest" "read". Literature, sometimes, is as sad as money.
Comments
There's certainly a literary establishment, and it certainly favours fiction (though serious novels too are much harder to sell than they were. Specifically, it presently favours the kind of washed-out 'literary' blandness offered up by people like Ian McEwan.
But poetry, surely, will never be 'popular' - unless it succumbs to precisely that kind of blandness; and even then. I'm not convinced that poetry has ever been a popular artform, anywhere because, as you say, it is hard and requires work. It has always been the preserve of an elite: druids, shaman, court composers. Most people do not want it - even now. Even Heany sells nothing compared to Dan Brown. Narrative, stories, characters, plot - these have an ancient appeal and most poetry cannot offer them.
It seems to me, then, that trying to make poetry 'popular' beyond a certain point - or trying to get the mainstream literary establishment to see it on the same level as McEwan or Amis et al - is always going to be doomed. It would certainly seem like a waste of time if that was your aim.
But surely what poetry offers is something smaller, more profound and more distilled - an acquired taste. Surely it's not about the numbers or the approval of Richard and Judy. Surely if great poets can reach those people who can really appreciate them, that's enough?
However, whilst you are an admirable proselytiser for poetry Todd, i think your ambition is aiming at unrealisable targets.
The thrust of your argument, that the visibility and impact poetry has in and on mainstream literature, is somehow an unfair and improper fact of life - whilst understandable and laudable to a degree - is, I believe, secondary to what s/he the poet should be cardinally concerned with. The learning and writing of poetry.
Now this post is the first one of yours I have read in the htreee years I have been a follower, which invokes a sense of reciprocity - by which I felt I could reply on a truthful plane of regard that engenders speaking as an honest practitioner on what my take on the fundamental prinicples of poetry are - rather than as a comedian competitively seeking to make a humorous crack.
~
I am in full agreement with you on the superficiality of promoting and marketing poetry as a poor relation of fiction - one in need of jazzing up and wrapped in the prize and winner packaging in order to fit in and succeed as an artistic activity and commerical concern in popular culture.
I also agree with you on the *compromises* modern lyric poets make and downplaying what is poetic about poetry in order for what they write to fit in with the prevailing commerical-centric ethos. And this I think, is the nub of it.
In much of what I read and the converstations between practitioners that I follow, there seems a disproportionate concern, fixation and engagement with, the winning of prizes. It is as if the bestowing of a prize itself is the indicator of poetic merit, rather than the language in the poem. One important affect this obsession has, is that much of the *serious* poetry that gets written, rather than originating from within us and displaying the unmistakeable sound of a unique inner voice (which we all have) - the (winning) poetry often appears homogenised and composite.
Not being anywhere near the winners enclosure, and founding my own practice on an obscure and unknown curriculum most of my *competitor* minded colleagues higher up the food chain, in their wisdom, choose to disregard as one which leads to the gongs and ribbons of contemporary success as a professional poet - I can only watch from the sidelines how one goes about becoming a poet in this model.
It looks like one need found their intellectual base by immersing onself first, in recent contemporary poetry, learning from Duffy, Armitage, Larkin, Hughes and a whole host of other recent 20C successes, and eventually, through them to the various figures in British poetry, to the beginning of the Tudors and the one or two mediaevils, then the Romans and Greeks -- rather than the other way round of starting one's learning at the ancient source from which all else stems.
Now, this is only a theoretical model, but founded on the contemporary poetry I read.
It seems that poets starting out, imitate the most recent, living heroes first, and this explains the composite quality in much of what appears. Pull a few tics from the commercially succesful poets of the day, mix and match and pass it over to the juries who then award the cash to the most convincing imitations whose contemporary sources can be immediately recognised and cited, as the original new gear, rather than the composite is is.
So, in this model, we have Heaney at the top, whose influence, (like Yeats in the first half of the 20C), has been so ubiquitous over the final third of it, that a sizable proportion of poetry being written in the last thirty years, by future critics, will be immediately recognised as the Heaneyesque stuff it really is, rather than the groundbreaking, innovative, etc, stuff the blurbs of the day claim it as.
The same with poetry influenced by Armitage and Duffy, themselves using the general template of Larkin, in the sense of making short, well made lyric poems, by mixing demotic and quotidian language to form 90% of the content, and tagging on a stab at the highblown, abstract, intellectual flag on top of the well made and palettable cake which can sell because they offer an immediately recognisable narrative
Standing by the window
Looking beyond, below
on the street a carrot
picker playing hop-scotch
...essentially, in prose-like sequences but kinked slightly and ending with something a bit deeper, or of a sudden or any number of tricks. But essentially, a very narrow form. Whatever the passing fashion of the day is decided by the establishment pickers of winners, who are all related in some way. Be it publisher picking a poet in their stable, or poet A choosing their pal poet B.
So what we end up with is a system where the emphasis on affirming as a poet, comes from without, instead of within. You write a poem, it appears in a prestigious mag early on in our learning, which we take as a sign of being on the right track, at the expense of learning to recognise and listen to our own judge - instinct - and confirming spiritually. So, we judge ourselves by what other people think of our work, who may be awarding us a prize for reasons unrelated to the merit of the poem, if some deeply machevelian force is at work, which Fiona Sampson in her recent interview for Horizon, explicitly stated does go on.
At the end of it all, we only have words on the page, and my take has always been, if the *best* poem in the world appears on one page pf foolscap locked in a drawer and read only by the author, or in a billion books - it is the same poem.
I could go on and on Swift, but will leave it there for now.
thank you very much
slainte
Swords
I'd say to Nic Sebastian that it's true that mostly poets read poetry - a consequence of marginalisation, but not necessarily a bad thing. It makes it more of a participative, collaborative, even communal art-form, as Todd has argued previously on this blog.
And, after all, if fiction is a broad church - ranging from Celia Ahern to James Joyce - so is poetry, from Nora Ephron or Pam Ayres to - well, James Joyce. I find it really weird how we lump it all together when we talk about it, yer Basil Buntings in with yer, oh, Rod McKuen.
There's no law that says just because it's poetry it has to be highbrow! I think this is a way of sort of shooting poetry in the foot. I prefer intellectual stuff, but that's just me. Ironic in a way, that the UK is lauded for having this great General Readership, but america is the home of the great Middlebrow Poets - people like Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser... the poets of the people. I wonder how that graph lines up.
I don't differentiate between the two forms, so much, myself. For me a good novel has to operate on a poetic plane as well, eg Toibin's great James study, The Master. Rosemary Tonks, the lost poet, write "poetic novels" & I can see that.
I understand that I was an unusual child but I was also never TOLD that poetry was going to be hard, for example. More people would read it if they had simply been taught to think they might enjoy it.
Cathy also knows nothing about modernism, which is not and never was about incomprehensibility.
And second: one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and you reply, "what about poetry"? Your leading literary cultural figure is a racist. I mean, you start out well enough: "My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England"; but then you turn to "this system favors the novel over poetry"? The system that identifies itself by the phrase "Anglo-Saxon" is a system that confines its cultural heritage and membership to white people. Yay poetry, but what else do you all talk about at Klan meetings?
If a poet were to get Harry Potter scale sales, I suspect there would be complaints about 'dumbing down' or pandering to commercialism. For me, poetry is most alive in the small venues and writing groups - it is vibrant and human and the opposite of elite. Poetry is, in a sense, subversive because it can belong to anyone who reads or hears it, it can be carried in the head and taken anywhere.
Alison Brackenbury said in an interview (paraphrasing because I don't have time to find it) that she saw poetry as being like weeds: the seeds spread on the wind and pop up in the small gaps and cracks.
As for wasting your life - that rather depends on what you would consider not wasting your life. Every reading organised or cd sold is, for me, worthwhile for itself - one can never know what difference one may make. It seems to me that it is rather like my 'day job' in that respect. I work with very challenging teenagers and will/can never know if I have made a difference. If I looked for short term gains, I would soon burn out because it just isn't going to happen 90% of the time. I do the work (and organise poetry readings, edit journals etc) because I believe in it for its own sake and believe that somewhere along the way it makes a difference, even if I never see it.
Nic has a point: much of what gets published is by "practicing" poets writing to other poets. The general populace lets other media establish their relation to language. The problem I have with the post is that it suggests poetry shouldn't try to appeal to that type of general audience, but should try to alienate them further. Granted, that's often the position taken by the avant-garde, but it courts a clannish (pun intended) coterie following. Which is pretty much all poetry ever has any more anyway. And yet, thanks to the internet, it's much easier to be informed about farflung poetry communities, which may or may not help the art, but it certainly helps reach the browsing reader.