Duncan's Underground

Andrew Duncan's Origins of the Underground: I've been reading it on the train from Manchester to London today. The book is must-have for anyone interested in British poetry from the 30s to the present, and counting. It's as if Lester Bangs, or Greil Marcus, those great rock and roll / punk critics, had been turned loose to consider, in freewheeling yet always informed, and brilliant fashion, poets like Terence Tiller, F.T. Prince, George Barker, and Lynette Roberts - yup, that's right, it's a completely personal, eccentric, yet researched foray into my favourite British period - the Forties.

This isn't a review or a full-blown commentary on the book - wait for my book on the 40s for that - but an appreciation of a book that's never less than controversial, impassioned, and often deeply useful, even when annoying. One of the things that Duncan really achieves is to push along the tired us/ them, avant-garde/ mainstream thing - and observe that the real issue should be poets driven by ideas, or intelligence, and those not. Duncan writes with such an engaged conviction that poetry is not obsolete, he breathes new life into it.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

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 ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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