Legends of the Warring Clans, or, The poetry scene in the 1990s; contents
Introduction
Out of Everywhere, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan
The poetic right-wing: Oxford; Mainstream postmodernism (Muldoon, Fenton, and Motion); Christian poets: (Hill; Abbs; Thrilling)
Born in the 60s, part 1: Soft Metal; part 2, avant-garde neoclassicism (DS Marriott, Simon Smith); part 3, reviews (David Rushmer, sand writings; Nicholas Johnson, David Greenslade, Tim Atkins, Tim Allen, Andy Brown, Helen Macdonald)
Real space and virtual space; the volume that sound fills (discusses Norman Jope)
The critique of language and everyday life: Peter Finch, antibodies; Tony Lopez, Stress Management; Kelvin Corcoran, Lyric Lyric; Purple and Green; Two Women Dancing, by Elisabeth Bartlett
The pursuit of eunomia: David Barnett, All the Year Round; RF Langley, Twelve Poems; Four Poems, Michael Haslam; The Mummery Preserver, Vittoria Vaughan
The Talking Dead (Peter Riley, Distant Points; Steve Sneyd, In Holds of Earthen Coil; Kerry Sowerby, The Resuscitators; Elisabeth Bletsoe, Portraits of the Artist's Sister)
House of the Shaman, Maggie O'Sullivan; essay on shamanism
The Book of Demons, Barry MacSweeney
Rhymes with Hayworth: Tom Raworth
Allen Fisher and the School of London (Fisher; R Sheppard)
The tyranny of distance: essay on poetry and the Internet
Introduction 28.3.97
A central sociolinguistic gesture in poetry is diminishing reality; there is wanting a verb whose meaning is "I diminish your reality", "I write off what you are about to say". This is called "blanking" in social contact: you say "hello" to someone who then ignores you. Of course selective attention is a weak phrase, all attention is this. One source is inherited class strife; middle class people wrote off those of low income (also of low education, and low status), and working class people wrote off middle class people out of revenge and solidarity with their families. "Not reading" and "misreading" are local skills, people walk around with de-perceptual equipment, 80% of the social spectrum suppressed, as if by a high-tech glass. Non-listening sulks, tantrums, and walk-outs are absolutely standard in the poetry world, as common as amplified attention; dissimilation as violent as assimilation; people are still sulking about things that happened twenty years ago, or fifty. What we call personality could be an array of repressions, a unique signature of blocks dissecting an originally intact and common signal.
Harold Perkin observes, in his remarkable study of modern British society, that the membership of both major political parties halved during the 1970s. Politicisation, at that point, actually meant depoliticisation - withdrawing into your bedroom and re-designing a toy universe, while leaving public and economic power structures to the unscrupulous. If you hear Keith from Prodigy yelling "FUCK 'EM AND THEIR LAW" ('Their Law', 1995, recorded with PWEI, a protest against the appalling Criminal Justice Bill), at least you know where his heart is, he's not suddenly going to change his mind; what you hear is abiding. And in my heart of hearts I know he's right. This song is richer in ideas than most poetry, because it has reached a conclusion, it's not a mere representation of facts which fails to reach the level of ideas. Poetry since the 1970s has undergone massive depoliticisation. I like poets who want to erase the city of oppression, not plot to live in one of the nicer parts of it. I laugh at people who accept a need for objectivity at every level without realising that this qualifies them to make good employees who will carry out any policy and leave the making of value-judgments to somebody else.
Critics often refer to the need to earn emotions and heightened language, and to do work as part of this. I see this as a reflex of a drive, intrinsic in a capitalist society, to own property and to make other people work for you. You don't have to earn emotion because you aren't born in debt. Nobody owns beauty so there is nobody to pay. Of course you are surrounded by malevolent, cynical, and lazy people, but there is no way of facing them off; least of all by obeying them and recognising their sadistic claims. Poetry inhabits free association, the boundless and repetitive, the weakening of bonds of space and time, the capacious drift of fantasy, the liberty which follows the disappearance of purpose. Art has been made in all periods and by all peoples and is natural. People lack interest in primary pleasurable experience because they are surrounded by hostile people, where territory is short and contestants are many, and are themselves hostile.
The word fair strikes a deep chord with almost everyone in these islands, an ambient word spreading out to vast dimensions, even though no-one can say quite what it means in aesthetics. I have been constantly visited, during composition, by an involuntary daydream in which someone storms into my living-room, tears my hand from the word processor, and says "This is false and partial!", and I say "You're wrong. Kindly leave the room.", and they say "No, you're wrong. Kindly leave the room", and I find myself in the street below, longingly looking up at the suggestive silhouette of the Macintosh in the window. I cannot be balanced and impartial, because that would imply that there is a majority group among the readers who will, at some undisclosed date, declare themselves in broad agreement with me: such a group does not exist. Imagine a poet who, before a reading in some provincial city, looks at the audience and thinks, I can't read what I planned to read, and then, I don't know what to read because the audience is too mixed and much of it can't be gauged from their appearance. Should I devote energy to disqualifying those who disagree with me? Not only the poet needs to be liked but also the critic; my advice is of little use to someone whose aesthetic reactions are different. Even the geometrical existence of a place above the plain of poetry from where one could observe more than a few square inches is in doubt; is detachment from the overt content of the poem an access of exciting power or simply an appalling loss of information and energy? The claim that there is a depth to the poem—concealed and unknown to the poet, and open to the rapacious power of the critic—is seriously in question; it may be simply an act of colonialist violence. The speech in which a human being has diminished reality says something about both the object and the subject. Is there a depth or is the poem all surface? what is the analogy between this unseeing vision and the managerialism which looks through people to see their work output and the possibilities of manipulating them? We have an odd fork between poetry which advances in sensitivity and economic weakness and criticism which advances in insensitivity, analytical chillness, and economic power. I am not interested in reducing the prose text to what is demonstrable and visible to all, because this is fragmentary and empty compared to the reaches of subjectivity, the part which really interests us about poetry. Discussion should be confined to what's in the text, but the totality of illusions, fantasies, involuntary memories, philosophical crises, projective identifications, washes of emotion, etc., which the text permits, are also inside it, and cannot be closed out by a critic fussed about keeping his desk tidy. It would save the time of those who are going to disagree with my judgments if I described the boundaries of my own position—but this would take longer than the book. If identity could be summed up in a few words, we wouldn't bother to read poetry, I think. Anyway, a great deal of the experience of poetry consists of becoming, temporarily, someone else, and ceasing to be me. I am constantly being accused of unreconstructed socialism, brazen conservatism, arid intellectuality, pop culture superficiality, pathological open-mindedness, Calvinist fanaticism, etc., and I deny none of it.
I was touched by RL Mégroz's complaint, in his excellent 1934 book on modern British poetry, that poetry publication had by now reached such a spate that no-one could keep up with it. (It is upsetting how few elements of the contemporary scene really can't be found described in Mégroz.) Faced with some 2,000 poetry publications in a single year, my treatment is rigorously selective—in other words, indulgently exclusive. I have obeyed my own enthusiasms throughout, and where I get bored, I stop. Accusations about representing the official version will only evoke a sardonic sneer from me, since I wrote almost the whole book while on Income Support. The small circulation of almost all of those books points to a multitude of very precisely defined, elusive, markets: broad sweeps of description are therefore hopelessly inaccurate, and I have concentrated on a few dozen texts rather than grope for a transcendence by blanking out all the differentiations. On the other hand, I have tried to define, in a form of qualitative market research, what some of the component markets feel like. I can only guess at the shape of what I didn't read; I hope it is full of masterpieces. Any prose summary is premature but can speed up the next step forward —which builds on it and denies it. I am apparently unable to abandon a review until I am completely exhausted and unable to broach the topic ever again. I have not attempted to review every book of interest. My favourite books of this decade would include Robert Crawford and W.N. Herbert, Sharawaggi; John James, Dreaming Flesh; future exiles (selected poems by Allen Fisher and Brian Catling); John Seed, Interior in the open air; Tom Raworth, Eternal Sections; David Chaloner, The Edge; Denise Riley, Mop mop georgette; Maggie O'Sullivan, In the House of the Shaman; R.F. Langley, Twelve Poems; Michael Haslam, A Whole Bauble; Grace Lake, Bernache nonnette; Floating Capital: 15 London Poets, ed. Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke; Conductors of Chaos, edited by Iain Sinclair; Colin Simms, Goshawk Lives; Barry MacSweeney, Pearl; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake; Alexander Hutchison, The Moon Calf; Geoffrey Hill, Canaan. I have reviewed most of these in various places.
The best publisher of contemporary poetry is Equipage. It is annoying that this should be so, when they don't have a staff, don't do publicity, don't put blurbs on the jacket, don't have a grant, photocopy the poets' own camera-ready copy, do only pamphlets which bookshops won't stock, but there it is.
Stress has been placed on explaining how a kind of poem can be read; a kind of kitchen expertise for using the poem once you have it on your table. In writing a book about rock music, you might say "when the guitar sounds like this, you are supposed to feel Young and Rebellious". I feel this is what readers most want. Less time has been given to judging the poems as works of art, but my evaluations seep through anyway; overwhelmingly, at the level of selectivity of what to write about. I had better make a confession: in general, mainstream poetry is only here to make you unhappy, arousing tension before the blissful release of reading about wonderful intelligent poetry.
I cannot talk about poets who want to be like everybody else because they are like everybody else and so I cannot think about them. Memory works on distinctive features, and where these are absent it comfortably fails to dredge anything up. Is there a better way of storing the numerous data in mental models? My method of reviewing is fairly straightforward; I look in the poems for anything original and distinctive, save this special something, and build a model of the author's generative method; I segregate difficult passages for special attention and discussion; I turn the new generator over to see if it can raise a new hypothesis about the underlying mysteries of society, emotions, language, etc.; I comment on the difficult passages; I compare the generator with other patterns, to locate it in a certain field historically and intellectually, which also supplies me with a vocabulary for setting it down, however tenuously, on paper. On paper, I try to create a likeness of the style, using due diligence to make it faithful.
I expect poetry to be even more wonderful than pop music; I am not exercised by poetry which is flat, dull, grey, and low-affect. Sensibility is shifted by constant reading. David Bowie said, in a recent interview in New Musical Express, that he wasn't interested in BritPop, "It's pleasant, but it doesn't stimulate me in the way that a radical new form does. No, because I don't yet see the germ of a truly different vocabulary there. I understand what they're doing in terms of that ironic grabbing things from the past and utilising them. In fact, some of them are just working in a very British tradition. Pulp, for instance. (...) But it's like the Stones—I like them as people but I don't like their music much, it doesn't mean anything to me. They're traditionalists." This probes the critic's weakness; of course most modern poetry is Mid Century English Boilerplate; but it suggests that greater experience erodes one's capacity for attention and pleasure, and the critic who lacks great knowledge, acuity about form, capacious attention, and a talent for feeling pleasure, cannot do the job. If, after twenty-three years of reading modern poetry intensively, I am bored by a book, (say My Green Tambourine, by Derek Luton) having nothing new to offer, I am worse off than a teenager, who does enjoy My Green Tambourine, not recognising any of its sleazy, inept steals. How can I advise the teenager when our sensibilities differ? But, the other way, I am looked down on by people who find my taste enthusiastic and uninstructed—I like Britpop a whole lot, I listen to Radio 1, I like Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove. Sophistication is a poisoned issue. But the sophisticated position is the revolutionary one; partly because that wing of poetry is silenced by the media; partly because I believe that the great untapped audience for poetry is among people who like Ashbery, like Deleuze and Derrida and Foucault, but ignore modern British poetry because it all seems to be little airheads like Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage; partly because it's unrealistic to ignore the social factors of taste, elevating prestige, sophistication and intelligence; and partly because the discourse of criticism has been one-sidedly pastorally concerned and anti-intellectual in the past thirty years. Even the unfashionable admire sophistication.
While writing this introduction, I was faced with a poem, submitted to the magazine I edit, which described the author's memory of buying, in 1987, the limited-edition special extended 13 minute 12" mix of 'This Corrosion', and of hearing it on the radio and seeing the radio play as dedicated to her. This is commodity fetishism; someone presents themselves as an adjunct of their consumption habits, using the exceptional act of consumption as a self-adornment, like a very special outfit; a shimmering extension to the identity. I see the Sisters of Mercy (from York) as a dated Goth band, and 'This Corrosion' (of which I do have a copy somewhere in the archives) as the modern equivalent of 'Johnny Remember Me', by John Leyton; but I think only poetry extreme and brilliant enough to be desired, fetishised, and consumed in this way can reach a large audience.
The parameters of the book are: Britishness; poetry; modern; and so I appear as advocate of these, if only to make my subject more interesting and compete with other books. In fact these limits are a form of alienation, abnegation, and imprisonment; specialisation is akin to being in love with something, but isn't quite the same thing! The single most visible factor in the area is the lack of public interest in it; its prestige abroad is even lower than its prestige at home. This is fact; my interpretation is that there is a tendency, among the poets I have studied, not to develop their own individuality to its full potential. Too many have gone a little way and turned back towards the centre, haunted by a nostalgia for the past and afraid of isolation. This anxiety gives rise to an inadequate grasp of theorising, and so of generating hypotheses which are the necessary forerunners, through experimentation, of new styles. British people feel that taking important decisions for themselves is a kind of treachery against central authority. A longing to share in impersonal authority blinds people to the generative powers of language— the 'sorcery, perfidy, and artifice' slumbering within it: the absence of style is taken as veracity. Almost everything we know is the result of conjecture; a precious few poets have taken the risks to become original.
I believe there is a pervasive bad faith on the scene; as people achieve new formal intuitions and deny them, out of apathy and fear. Editors and critics accept the avant garde of twenty or thirty years ago but are happy to ignore the avant garde of their own generation; the moral results of this bad faith are corroding. Anyone who makes a close study of the literary process in a Communist country will have been struck by the similarities between their literary functionaries and our own. Intelligent people who begin by making one compromise with the truth, in the name of social solidarity, tell lie after lie after lie in the process of proving their compromises right, achieve institutional power, and end up controlled by their perceptual blocks. Young people smell this from a long way off. The scene might be improved by getting rid of the 200 most prominent poetry managers, as they are too steeped in cynicism, low expectations, connivance, dishonesty, and self-righteousness to be saved. The 1997 election, which threw out several hundred Conservative MPs, was inspiring to me in this connection. The presence of Stephen Rodefer and John Kinsella, two foreigners, on the scene, has been inspiring and unforgettable as a contrast to the institutionalised despair around them.
Much of first-person awareness consists of representations of third persons, because people are the most complex elements in the environment which our brain is trying to fathom. Where a situation is being observed by several participants simultaneously, the reality of that situation is composed by all of them; the poetic transition from the awareness of an individual to a valid meaning, put into words and therefore shared, is fraught. If incomprehension were so inevitable, we would abandon language and act in darkness. I see a great many statements of the general types:
You cannot understand me (i.e. I understand what you understand)
I have a perfect understanding of myself (i.e. I do not need to listen to other people's opinions)
I find both types perfectly untenable. Most contemporary artistic positions, of critics or poets, can be disassembled by spotting erroneous statements of these two types in them, and pulling them out. Epistemology cannot be recruited to the cause of pure self-regard, or of pure promoting the self like a commodity. You cannot deny the validity of other people's awareness without denying your own; and we must do both these things, creating an empty space which we slowly refill by conjectures and tests and dialogue. A modern poem has to include third-person, attributed, perceptions as well as first-person, unmediated, perceptions. Some poets wipe out the fraught area of feelings and ideas, leaving only bodies and objects, achieving nihilistic brutality; some integrate by cutting out the moments of affect, leaving only what is banal, faded, and compromised; others express the tension and dialectic between conflicting and affective individuals. The governance of our behaviour belongs to us but its meaning belongs to others. In sum, a poet needs to understand the overlap of epistemology and social psychology, not in order to get a degree, but in order to write even one good poem. The difficulty, multiplicity, uncertainty, expand the poem or devastate it.
The value of the share capital of listed companies went up by a factor of 15 during the period 1979-97; the main process in these years has been the rise of the corporation, causing a redefinition of the middle class identity towards the good corporate employee, a model or rule-set derived from 1950s America and mediated by business consultancies. The eclipse of the private client, the direct owner, has been reflected in literary discourse by the rise in the prestige of impersonality; words like rigorous, analytical, conscious, give an account of show the decline of interest in first person experience, displaced by a new ideal of being an employee. The great energy of these years has been upward mobility, and all parts of the landscape reflect its impulse. What we may be seeing is the decline of the bourgeois subjectivism defined by historians like Arnold Hauser as marking the literary rise of the middle class market in the eighteenth century. The striving is no longer for sincerity, but for the repression of feelings and the possession of expensive high-tech gadgets and behaviour strategies learnt at management seminars.
The claim to have assimilated the nineties and reduced them to a finished picture is not being advanced; emerging poets such as David Greenslade, Karlien van den Beukel, Rob Mackenzie, Robert Smith, Nick Macias, Nic Laight, Niall Quinn, are not treated at length, although they have been published in Angel Exhaust, the magazine I edit. The cut-off date for new publications has been December 1996.
I have not dealt with pop poetry because analytical prose is inappropriate where photographs of the participants in bathing costumes are already quite serious and analytical enough.
I suspect that all the political poetry written during the heyday of radicalism could be re-interpreted as displaying the author's mastery of scepticism, learning, and insight into pattern-values conducive to upward mobility. Overtly political poetry is puzzlingly rare even in the radical decade of the seventies. What about people who want to interfere with poetry for political reasons? I suggest a practical solution. For the first infraction—a bullet in the head. For the second infraction— two bullets. This should do away with the problem in short order.
Something pervading the scene is the medical metaphor. In any newly literate society, some of the earliest texts to be written down are medical. In 19th century China, the doctor was simply the literate man, held to be able to understand, and to have studied, written medical texts; there was no certificate of practice. In fact, people who read do not simply enjoy it and pass on, they build up, long term, models of how a mind-body works and interacts with its active environment. The phrase "knowledge of human nature" sounds archaic, but only to the ears of an educated minority. It is chiefly mental wellbeing which is in question. This expectation of poetry fractionates the market, since psychological problems are specific and unshared; it suggests that the poet has information which is precious because it is non-unique; it stinks, because poets do not have certificates of practice; it has tended to replace the setup, of twenty years ago, whereby the intellectual was an "expert" in psychology mainly to uncover and punish sexual-political crimes. I suspect that poetry has a lot to do with the search for happiness, and that in a poem we are aware as much of the poet's state of mind ("energy level", to use a dumb metaphor from physics) as of the subject of the poem, that good poetry is the product of regions (or periods) of exceptional happiness, enthusiasm, associative power, directedness, openness, and freedom from compulsion, and that the reader is unconsciously searching the poetry for evidence of these.
Having no money made me especially resistant to people offering me third-rate poetry on the grounds that it would make me a better person. There seems little point in deriving social or artistic values from a radical solution which all influential political groups have written off. We are used to resisting the support which art in all known societies gives to the power structure and the power elite, and to accepting it; in literature, the object of praise is not the party which chances to hold power within a cyclical alternation of elusive significance, nor the owners of wealth, but the possessors of cultural capital, which is simultaneously the productive material used by both readers and writers to generate the literary experience. Literature belongs to a small class spectrum (that which in Bourdieu's terms possesses high cultural capital and low physical capital), massively invested in the education industry; a field based on devastating inequality which offers impressive material and status benefits to the successful. The attributes of the successful are attractive to everyone caught in this field, and it is these which supply, in various forms, the attractions of poetry. There was a possibility of making radically different values attractive, but it has failed both in political and in poetic terms; positing a world in which culture and affluence would not be admired is a long way from possessing it as an internalised and organic literary sensibility. To return to my state of poverty... how attractive it is to eat in restaurants and to have enough education to have a cultured conversation. This attraction probably motivates most poetry reading. The sense of leisure is evoked, necessarily in a looped and otiose way, by the furbelows of style. The appeal of style is based on real social power and security, guaranteeing an escape from squalor. The need to be loved is inseparable from the need for material comforts. The social system generates lacks, wants, desires for purely symbolic experience, as structures fully specified and charged with force by its own matrix, as a kind of shadow or shelter. Taste is full of structural meaning. Places on the class curve dictate aesthetic reactions, but these are real responses to real security and real glamour. A fear of the beautiful inhabits modern poetry.
There is a shortage of social power, only ten times as much as there is would satisfy those greedy for it. One of the great problems of poetry is people swollen with opinions. Writing about literature is compelling, but so preoccupying that it prevents the arrival of new sensations. I hate giving readings to quarrelsome academics, and would far rather they stayed in the bar and attacked each other. A clinamen of disposition, almost of physiological mood, separates those who merely wish to assert themselves and humiliate other people from those with receptivity and sensitivity, willing to enjoy poetry. The former state may be simply a testosterone problem. The contest of ideas may be simply sublimated aggression; perhaps academic language is refined to permit attacks on everyone else for "imprecision", by those who carry out symbolic attacks in order to assert that they are useful and important and must be listened to. Passivity is especially hard to achieve. I only wrote about poetry because I interrupted the writing of my own poetry for extraneous reasons.
Researching poetry is about finding good poetry, but as a daily duty mostly involves reading bad poetry—which makes me apathetic, unhappy, and full of self-regard. I feel virtuous for doing it. This act of self-exploitation (and people on the dole do tend to go through repetitive cycles of self-punishing monotonous stressful tasks) made me receptive: my gratitude to talented poets who relieved the monotony was piercing. I read some 300 books of poetry, not a few thousand. (Many of the best poems of the period I inspected in manuscript, or in magazines.) This dearly won receptivity vanished when I began recording the results—the incomplete text swallows one up and blocks out everything else. Having a thesis to nurture, a plot of ideas to defend, drives everything else out of people's heads.
So many aspects have been left out. Philip M Taylor's fascinating book The Projection of Britain (1981) has described the efforts of the Foreign Office, between the wars, in circulating imagery suitable to project Britain as attractive and powerful. This body of vapour (what else are we to call it?) entered the bloodstream of literature in a big way between 1939 and 1960, when the common employment of literati as government propagandists obliged them to be recycling it from 9 to 5. The imagery it floated was then picked up by advertisers, as something which everybody recognised, which played as "common culture", and which wasn't seen as capitalist. I think the situation is that the bureau of ideology used imagery which came (at two stages of degradation) from the art we had, and the art we have comes (at two stages of degradation and decalation) from advertising and propaganda. The Empire was, amongst other things, a fantasy shared by millions of people, and with a rich (this richness added up to less than its debts!) stock of images, scenes, and narratives. I don't believe in archetypes, I think this is just a name for a stored image whose origin you can't remember, and which probably does come from propaganda. Poetry has to deliver glamour, the idea that delivering squalor and the disagreeable is "authentic" is anti-art. The poet who delivers scenes from contemporary life is bound to resemble the English Tourist Board images, which themselves draw on the creations of admen and the propaganda bought to further the war effort and discredit colonial dissidents. The search for "legitimate fantasy" is a wild goose chase. I haven't worked this topic out, and it's not in the book. So many others.