Mainstream and original poetry: proposed terms for a future dialogue
For years we have been talking about such a dialogue. So far as I know nothing's happened yet; because I expect the first talks to be quite fruitless, I have written this preliminary study in order to focus everyone's mind. To begin with, everyone will be talking past each other; without shared terms there is no true dialogue. it is very difficult to stop poets talking, but pointless to release any more "I'm wonderful because..." communiqués. The end of talk is the start of dialogue.
Let's touch some of the limits to expectation; I don't expect the two sides to come out writing the same poem. After all, if you played a Metallica fan half an hour of jazz, you wouldn't seriously expect him to at once abandon heavy metal; nor would you expect a committed Monk fan to forswear bebop for ever after listening to a Metallica CD. Nor do I expect the dialogue to solve any problems: the problems of poetry are not of this sort. There is a slushy wish on the part of certain poets to embrace the whole audience: if you all understood me you'd all love me, in effect. But I think it is desirable for someone to have the practical connoisseurship of poetry that a wine merchant does of alcoholic drinks, having that is a grasp of the entire cultural field. More to the point, I find it dubious that anyone should be writing reviews of poetry if they do not possess such a grasp. The purpose of this dialogue is not repentance: I don't define success as coming out of the session believing that Sean O'Brien is a good poet. This would make failure inevitable.
I have been reading the new social anthropology of European society, in writers like Laslett, Emmanuel Todd, and Alan Macfarlane, whose shared effect is to push the origin of the nuclear family, in England, back to the late thirteenth century, and so to the beginning of usable documentation. English society may have been individualistic for thousands of years. The idea of an egalitarian, sharing, society, bound together by the obligations of kinship, was a projection based on (dubious) analogies with other societies, and has no support in the written record. The central feature of a system based on the nuclear family is the split of the adult son from the parental household: the split, traumatic but inducing self-reliance, competence, and self-consciousness, which also founds the split in poetic style. I hardly expect the split to get de-fetishized, or for the poetic field to recoalesce, flatten, and pour backwards into unity. People who regret this may do so because they regret the results of the nuclear society and of possessive individualism.
The concept of personal style is not finally separable from the practice of possessive individualism. The notion of something belonging to you (and so not to someone else), the practice of differentiation, rely on a concept of the self, with borders demarcating in from out, self from others, which is not possible in all societies, and which is to some extent a shared fiction.
I have elsewhere analysed the poetry scene into eleven groups, on the basis of anthologies. (The non-overlap between anthologies is where this argument usually starts.) But that is very complicated; enough to speak of two groups, i.e. the mainstream and those conscious of style.
The mainstream writer or critic should come to terms with the following propositions.
In the 1960s, there was a book called The Mersey Sound which eventually sold a million copies. Big money. The bookshop managers, publishers, and event promoters absorbed the pop aesthetic with great thoroughness. So, the mainstream of today represents a merger of pop and conservatism. That is, pop has become conservative, and literary conservatism has dropped an interest, in thought, religion, and the possibilities of language. I can't see that the kind of poets promoted by Bloodaxe have anything new about them. They seem like the same old boiled beef and carrots that made our grandparents' lives a misery. Pop always had the potential to be deeply conservative because of its short attention span; it rejected almost the possibility of thought. Pop came out of a milieu of art students which was quite well-informed about Prevert, Apollinaire, and their visual artist friends. Prevert had finalised the style by 1930, and Apollinaire had developed almost everything brilliant about it by 1912. Style history does not show the pop poets of the 1960s as vitally original in 1965; to label poets imitating their procedures, in 2001, as new and innovative, is either dishonest or deluded.
When conservative poetry was rejecting ideas in case they implied a need for political change, and Pop poetry was avoiding ideas in case they induced seriousness, convergence was pre-ordained and happened with the smooth irresistibility of a dead hippopotamus sliding into a lake of old fuel oil. The stylistic result—maybe 80% of the poems being published now? 90%?— is irritating, but keeps the irritation as slight as possible.
Justifying banal poetry in terms of a larger audience it might some day attract does not excuse you in the presence of an individual whom you are boring and who will leave the poetry audience because they are bored.
The province of originality also has to make a few admissions. There is a basis of group loyalty in avant-garde style choices. Extreme individualism is no basis for political activity, and cooperation is the chief political virtue. The avant-garde has been alarmingly weak at publicising the innovative reading rules without which the new poetry cannot be understood. Poetry grants, prizes, etc. have to be based on the aesthetic reactions of the panels, and not on some extraneous and superordinate argument to do with "seriousness", "philosophical significance", etc. The poem has to give pleasure-to someone, at some time. Many avant-garde writers are solipsistic and have weak command of language as a means of dialogue. Avant-garde readers appreciate archaic fictions of the self when presented in narrative cinema or rock music.
Quite early every morning, somewhere, a thousand bad poems plump onto the mat. You may have thought Tony Harrison was the low point of aesthetic degradation, but in the mail of magazine editors are dozens of poets who are even more blustery and inept. It's clear that Andrew Motion is not exceptionally poor in comparison with the dazed mass of rejected poets; on the contrary, he is more astute and edits more carefully, however dim his creativity. The ambience of amateur and confused poets corrupts professionals by seducing them into a belief in their own abilities. The cultural managers eat bad poems and build up bad muscles, a terrible egoism which lets them look down on outsiders.
One of the issues where spokesmen of the mainstream could be helpful is in turning up those elusive mainstream poets who can actually write. It's true that the experimental world never reads mainstream poetry at all, and though I haven't done the backbreaking course of reading to "cover the field", I would be happy to hear of gifted conventional poets. It seems to me, for example, that Derek Mahon, Alison Brackenbury, and Isobel Thrilling have written successful poetry. Examining the work of Ian Duhig, Robert Crawford, or WN Herbert in this light convinces me that they "belong to us", i.e. their best poems are so because they damage and sally out from the rigid conventions. Past discussions of this topic have been sabotaged by wilful lies from mainstream hirelings; they spout the names of 20 poets one hasn't read, claim them as proof that the mainstream is no longer pop/conservative rubbish, and the argument dries up for that reason. How many times in the past 25 years have I been cheated by this propaganda. Kill yourself, wear beach pajamas, join the Foreign Legion, go jogging, do whatever you want, but please stop lying to me. Enough is enough.
We ask the question, when was the last significant mainstream poet. But a search reveals that the concept since the shift which brought into existence Pop poetry, and also a "marginalised" serious poetry, as something underground, experimental, innovative, and so on. Dylan Thomas was both difficult and popular. The split was, then, rather later. In the fifties, the major poets to emerge were Hill, Hughes, and Redgrove, indisputably difficult and intellectual poets, for whom ideas are quite central. So the split is later than that. Perhaps Larkin's decision to simplify everything (and to reject ideas) is the moment of the split. After 1960, it seems no serious mainstream poets arrived; we could redefine this to say that a network of conservative critics decided to forbid innovation (and to force the real poets into a parallel structure). Actually, many of these critics were trying to shut out Hill, Hughes, and Redgrove, right up until the 1980s.
The emergence of pop culture and poetry, the rise of a new broadcasting, the decline of Anglican selfconfidence, the decline of the traditional middle class, the emergence of ruthless conservative critics who marginalised serious poetry, the British Poetry Revival and its cognitive leap into new language: all these happened in the same timeframe. They are not really separate phenomena. The resistance to "serious" poetry is linked to the self-defensive rules of the radio and television, simplifying the difficult.
Does the mainstream/radical split obtain in the 1930s and 1940s? My research suggests that there is something parallel, but which is definitely not continuous with the situation of the 1960s. A shift of the whole field erases the identity of points or groups of points.
One of the factional claims is that poetry which is in any way complicated is perpetuating middle-class hegemony and protecting the "territory" of the old educated group. The politically uneducated are vulnerable to this kind of lie, as if to a virus. I'm sure it's convenient to present your stupid and vacuous poetry as a moral act. "The knowledge missing from my poetry will free all men", and so on.
Conservatism implies retention of old artistic schemas, as sites embodying shared feeling. It should have a special relationship with the past. What my researches reveal is a thorough collapse of poetic traditions, their irrecuperability even for the Right Wing. People who like the past don't bother to read contemporary poetry. They've got their Wordsworth by their hand. Mainstream poetry hasn't got extensive stylistic resources; it is deifned by its failure to get away from the domain of conversation and the newspapers. This tallies well with a society based on the nuclear family, where everything starts again from zero in every generation. I would say it's a bad thing. The tradition which does seem to be available includes Auden, Larkin, and Roger McGough—no very great chronological depth. The balance on the experimental side is quite different—rejecting the colloquial and everyday altogether, but possessing much greater riches from absorbing other texts, both poetic and of ideas.
It's no good speaking of tradition as if there were still people around who could write living poems in the manner of Shelley, Donne, or Shakespeare. For discussion to go on without friction, we need to be clear about the style concretions of "the academic 1950s/ the Movement", "the 1960s/ Pop", and "optimistic radicalism/ the 1970s", with their quite different implications. It would be easy to exaggerate the solidity of these concepts. However, one can describe quite a lot of contemporary poetry fairly successfully just by using these three concepts as adjectives.
It used to be that poetry was read by a homogeneous group, which we could call "the old middle class", for convenience. When someone revolted, it was the unconscious rules followed by this group, i.e. not by imaginary people, that motivated the revolt. Beside the revolts, there was constant assimilation, taking place by reading or even by writing, to embodied values. This literary public was thoroughly swamped by the expansion of the reading public in the 1960s (though this was not the first major expansion of the educated public). The poem had to survive this loss of shared values. The most common solution was to purge the poem of values, to reduce it, as self-expression generally is reduced by social anxiety. The resultant awkwardness and stiltedness largely produced today's mainstream. Of course, saying anything reduces anxiety and creates a bond. But such nervousness about feelings and ideas is a symptom of anxiety.
Popularity. No amount of arguments about the management of culture, claiming that poetry has to reach a wide acceptance, can efface the fact that I am being bored, now, by a conventional piece of writing. Of course difficult poetry is not going to reach a large audience.
Social psychology tells us that someone is much more likely to understand an utterance if the speaker makes eye contact with them before speaking. People who don't grasp original poetry feel it doesn't make eye contact with them. The reader feels unaddressed and their brain doesn't switch on. But as a poetry reader one can adjust. The personal tone is limiting and repetitive.
Ambitious poetry loses readers because it uses certain conventions of style, different from the way newspapers are written. There is a conservative topos about them being secret codes, although they are public. You could learn all these codes in a week if you really wanted to.
So if people don't catch the drift is it because they don't love poetry? are we right to think of them as ignorant and insensitive? I think back to my need to learn about rock music, and how I devoured Melody Maker or NME for several hours a week for so many years. I needed to know because I loved rock music. I suppose you have to start with the insight that you love poetry. And don't find thinking about it a waste of time.
There is no outside to mainstream poetry because there is no inside. The simplicity of the language is repellent and prevents intimacy.
Thinking back, it amazes me how resistant to the conventions of modern poetry I was. It was so easy once I decided it was a good idea. I was late starting because there were so many loud cultural stimuli that I didn't have any curiosity about advanced poetry. It's a mystery to me how anyone can splash around in the poetry scene for a few years and not pick up the codes. You would really have to have a block. There are people on the scene teaching that blocks are good and moral and brimming with integrity.
The rise of the underground began with identification and fear. One could read, can still read, anthologies of mid-century British poetry and find the whole of it tedious and uninspired. Anyone starting out could read those books and be filled with a huge fear: this could be me. An anti-reaction followed. I am not going to define the problem with the English tradition, just point out that it explains all the wish to innovate.
I was reading about Edmund Blunden just now. When he was about 20, a lot of people thought he was going to be a great poet. But he failed to develop. My fear is that the promoted poets of the late 20th C, Raine, Patten, Motion, Harrison, Armitage, Duffy, etc., are just as trite and inhibited as Blunden, just as forgettable. My perception is that the same weariness afflicts late-century British poetry, everywhere outside the "underground", the marginalised. This situation is, apparently, structurally stable.
I will write for twenty years and in the end turn out to be as untalented as Elizabeth Jennings. How could anyone miss out on this fear? It came out of pride, but it dripped a huge amount of energy.
The ownership of style is a shared fiction made possible by shared ideas, which are only shared, in fact, by a minority. The laws of originality are a convention within this minority, so it is possible for someone outside it to question them. This is an issue which could easily cause tempers to be lost.
The rule about originality causes me misgivings because I think poetry should be taking place in the impersonal, the liminal space —outside oppositions of interests, outside positions, outside the self. But I have to admit its positive results.
Stylistic dissimilation is organised competition, shifted into the realm of the symbolic in order to dissipate the conflict. It relates to display and possessive individualism.
Debates about originality can be very frustrating unless the group already agrees about stylistic values and about the history of the last 40 years of poetry.
Originality is measured in a frame of perceived possibilities. The areas of contention, in recent times, are line structure, association of ideas, sentence structure, the presentation of personality, the use of speculation versus definite knowledge, the use of philosophy. If you are conventional in all these categories, you are conventional. The originality of mainstream poets is measured in a frame where all these areas are defined as unchangeable and so not able to yield originality. All other poems are defined as "illegitimate". Of course, if you accept the legitimacy of varying these structural elements, poems which treat them rigidly appear as unoriginal. Conversely, by defining away all the radical poetry of the last 40 years (since City, by Roy Fisher), you can redefine deeply conservative poetry as being original (i.e. less conservative than conservative poetry of the 1950s).
Originality, distinctiveness, newness, the disturbance of learnt frames of reliable connections, are assets all sides wish to snatch. Thinking out the sociology of originality, the sociology of value, will help the discussion. I don't think it's feasible to separate the drive for originality of style from the values of possessive individualism.
Maybe it's helpful to think about the undifferentiated. If a poet is 2% original, then they are 98% in line with collective norms. Why should we focus on the 2% when it's such a small part of the whole? This hypothetical quantifying doesn't sound right at all; but you must have quantified before saying that "Mr X is more original than Mr Y", because the word "more" contains a comparison of quantities. Can we bring this "kitchen science", this folk mathematics, into consciousness? how does it hold up?
Of course, it is possible to make this 2% the most important by means of emphasis. The devising of emphasis is one of the key aspects of the craft. Competition is a very powerful element in human affairs, and contrast with other witers is therefore something the audience notices; so originality emphasizes itself. The readiness of the audience to notice things begins outside the text; an astute poet exploits the area of sensitivity in the general culture. We can speak of a momentary universe of sensitivity; completed by a map of desensitisation.
Contrast explains why the zone of originality can also be in focus the whole time, even if it is only 2%. However, it also relies on the reader being able to perceive the contrast.
The empirical quality so noted in English poetry is not necessarily wisdom. It can be diagnosed also as "fear of my own ideas", i.e. anxiety. or, as "hostility to other people's bright ideas", i.e. hostility to other people". The hostility inherent in a society composed of possessive individuals can be channelled as empiricism.
Living in ideas is a basic human activity, and the inability to think is a problem which may coincide, more or less, with the inability to do art. Both are features of the local scene.
What I mean by "the mainstream" is "poets with their intellects and sensibility switched off", and I think failure to innovate is a symptom of this, rather than the kernel of the matter. When I spend time with them, my own intellect and sensibility switch off. An experience less painful because of the numbness that comes with it. I'd rather be alert enough to feel the pain.
he who empathises with a moron is halfway to being an idiot. Who mistakes the absence of wishes for reality. Who mistakes the absence of theories for the truth. Who mistakes the inability to think of alternatives for honesty.
A lot of confusion arrives from different interpretations of the word "innovation". I take this word to relate to changes that are not banal (i.e. like conversation or newspaper stories), which are visible inside the poem, which are reasonably frequent (not e.g. affecting 1 line in 1,000), and which were not already around in the 1930s. I say this because I do not regard new poets as innovators if they are still writing old poems. I do not take non-literary poems as innovations if they resemble the non-literary poems that were being written a century ago. The mainstream seems to be uncritical about a mass of poems that belong with the 1950s, and to use words like "original" or "innovative' in an imitative, meaningless way, because our society loves innovation. In fact, this vocabulary is used fluently by people who love the familiar and are scared of the new in literature. The public forum is corrupt in the sense that critics who love the familiar do not say "I love the familiar".
Faced with an experimental poem, everyone has much the same experience: they don't know what's going on, and they are faced with multiple possibilities. The dividing line is whether this makes you anxious, or whether it fills you with hope and energy.
I read a report on refugee children in the English school system. They had a terrible time, but they all said the maths was easy; there were Ethiopian refugees saying how easy the maths was compared to what they were doing at home. Maths teaching in this country is completely screwed up, as government reports say quite clearly; part, I am afraid, of a general clumsiness with abstract formal systems, which deprives people of the pleasure inherent in them. Yes, maths is like a game and poetry is like a game; and non-congealed poetry is also like mathematics, where you can invent rules for free and select them according to how interesting their consequences are.
I suppose this induces panic among the insecure. The original style is a variant set of axioms, which can only have emerged from wandering in this zone of wonderful freedom, and which points back to it at every moment. The poet selects the rule-sets which can successfully manipulate meaning at the same time.
Anthropologically, the inability to enjoy this splendid play may correspond to inability to enjoy food, fine wines, and intellectual speculation, as well as mathematics. It could be related to the weakness of the English (and Scottish and Welsh) contribution to modernism in the visual arts. Well, perhaps it isn't.
In the critical chat, phrases like "becoming accountable for the language you use" and "having to pay for everything" seem to indicate authority figures trying to repress fantasy and speculation. I observe that these claims are lies; speculation is free. Ideas are free. Play is free. Don't pay anyone for the language you use.
The mainstream views on literal truth seem to everyone else like saying "nail his right hand to his left shoe. nail his left hand to his right shoe. Now let's see how fast he can run!"
Suppose you could make the change from being afraid of new experiences to being confident and willing to experiment. Wouldn't that be a change worth making?
The theory that there is a time-line of style, inexorably advancing according to "world-historical logic", is deeply flawed. Gombrich's strictures on this ideology in art criticism are especially convincing. But I don't need a linear theory of style-time to say I'm bored with a poem. No amount of critiques of Hegel can tell me I'm not bored by Tony Harrison. Patterns get worn out. Some poets are born worn out. Discussion of theories of stylistic change could waste a lot of time. At this moment, many styles are alive. But not all; not the ones which are not alive.
Suppose you can't respond to a poem. You should ask yourself if you're tired and run down. Many critics are fatigued. You can forfeit the right to pronounce.
Because the poetic thrill keeps drying up, one needs constantly new styles to move on to; each one a revival of one's depleted emotional gifts. This makes it reasonable for a poet to start their career by moving out of accepted verbal patterns. So why attack them for doing so?
If you're faced with the unfamiliar and unidentified, and your response is irritation and fatigue, you should ask yourself if you're really on form. Are you acquiring a collection of artistic opinions, or just memorising your fatigue over and over again?
Poetry keeps on running down. It has to be renewed, by a shift into a new cognitive pattern. If we forbid the shift, we prevent the renewal. The renewal includes a phase of doubt, assimilation, of mental effort. It is always easier to avoid it and remain in sloth. The life of the mind keeps running down. We constantly strive to make our environments more predictable; we constantly learn, and so destroy the newness of ideas. The juncture line where thought ceases to be a pleasure, and becomes an effort, is decisive for the gap between mainstream poetry and the innovative world. You cannot feel energetic without expending energy.
It's reasonable to say that the experimental field is interested in new ideas. The conventional opposition would be between ideas and emotions. However, the mainstream is unhappy with both of these. The most cited names simply do not write emotional poems. The goal seems to be more that of moral authority, so that the reader accepts the poet's interpretation of the events in the poem. That is, multiplicity and incredulity are the starting point, present before the poem, and what the poem denies. This authority seems to be undermined by showing emotion or by having thoughts that change from one day to the next. Authority is firm, so you just can't have ideas that change from one day to the other, i.e. you can't think.
The terrain of poets who write emotionally seems to me just as marginalised as the intellectual poets. It just doesn't fit in with the atmosphere of pop/conservative poetry. It's also rejected by the experimental scene.
Sean O'Brien's work in (have forgotten name of book, sorry) is identifiably Left. It challenges, then, the bases on which our society is actually organised, and calls for a different society—one which is conjectural now. However, his poems are written in such a way as to discourage a free flow of ideas. A gesture repeated throughout the book (in the majority of poems, though not all) is one of putting a stop to thought by showing facts which are too plain. He intercepts the bird of thought and beats it out of the air with a log. He does not give over time to thinking; and denies the ambiguity of the world which makes thought useful. His leftism is expressed through images of squalor, which are not beautiful and which puncture (Right-wing) illusions, but which refuse thought. Their plainness is their merit, for him. He probably dislikes the government, but rejects the potential for imagining alternatives which this, at first, opens up.
It is possible to form a universal chain of alliances through dislike of thought, because there are groups, homologously sited, in every walk of life, who dislike thought. This grouping could hardly do anything to change the status quo.
It is O'Brien's privilege to write anti-ideas poems if he wishes. But it is a falsehood to say that such poems encourage conjecture, or that they give a stage to ideas. They are unable to release the imagination; this is where they differ from the poetry of ideas. Because of this truculence, they are within the borders defined for poetry by The Movement, and this submissiveness accounts both for their popularity and for their lack of artistic impact.
If the world were unambiguous, there would not be three major political parties nor several factions of poetic taste.
It may be that the rule "poems have to be simple so that ordinary people can understand them" means "poems have to give a clear message" and so "poems cannot express doubts".
Cultural decisions tend to speed up and become habitual. Then, we can pick a book by the author's name, without further study. When someone says yes or no to a poem, or a magazine, on the basis of style, this makes decisions quick but also deprives them of evidence which would alter their hypotheses. This is comfort—if you don't like Indian food, you don't go to an Indian restaurant— but it is not acceptable in a reviewer. One has to ask how much of taste is just habit and emotional identification. People who become polarised can't then act as witnesses.
I would not wish to read a review of a book by someone who hadn't understood it. If you don't understand something, you can't also make generalisations about it, tell the reader not to read it, and draw trenchant conclusions about the morality of the author. It's clear that the competition for space has thrown some people into a state of rage where they want to close down other factions. This is a terribly unproductive state. It's good that the editing mechanisms around the printed word keep out the opinions people spout when they're enraged, drunk, bitter about rejection, and so on. Even if a war is still going on, we can advance from the positions of the war that was taking place in the 1970s and 1980s.
The structure of a debate suggests that any moment is a test case where the whole affair can be diagnosed, because we are all paying attention to the same detail at the same time. We are, then, like paleontologists poring over some bones: if we identify one bone as a duck, we know the whole creature was a duck. This idea can only lead to frustration! It is no good saying "I don't understand this Prynne poem so I don't want to read any more Prynne poems and as a spin-off I can dismiss the whole small press world", or "this book by RS Thomas is wooden and monotonous so I can write off the whole of mainstream production as being wooden and monotonous". There is no test case. Guilt by association has no standing at this tribunal.
If this is our purpose in the discussion, we cannot go away satisfied; to reach a feeling of completion, we have to propose other objectives to ourselves.
If there is no test case, what moment of the discussion can ever be satisfying? how can we justify focusing on any single fragment of information?
A moment before Time when each of us was all the others. Maybe there was a time when each poem was one metapoem, and all the differences are later events. Crises where a smooth space split into separate parts.
We can perhaps locate simple decisions upstream which explain complex differences downstream. For example, the rule "thou shalt not publish a banal line". This accounts for a certain edginess in modern poems: walking sideways, or walking the roof-ridge. So far as the innovators are concerned, Andrew Motion has never published a non-banal line.
Maybe we can only see the field by losing focus.
It seems possible that every inhabited position of taste can be seen as a point on a spectrum, with edges on either side where it stops. So why cling to that millimetre of wavelength? why is it better than the adjacent millimetres?
Trust and identification are big issues. I doubt the use of articulate argument about these. Perhaps it helps to see identification in terms of a "spectral identity": the niche on the spectrum that you call yours. It might help to draw some of these spectra and site real poets at points along them. If we translate these into three-dimensional space, we can imagine points with three co-ordinates. In this "space" we can site all poets, expressing their difference from and similarity to the other poets. This space may have an unusual shape. It turns out that not all combinations are possible; to be seven squares away from one point means that you cannot be within seven squares of another point. We could define this space by describing where it is impassable and not space; discovering irregularities and discontinuities.
Any discussion relies on a shared conceptual model. Any geometry will do which gets us away from the egocentric perspective.
Why does a point have edges?
A 3D space like the inside of a large building. Where we could at least experimentally site every British poet in a special order where their closeness to, distance from, each of the others is expressed spatially.
We can construct a general word by removing actual phonemes. We could show it as C(C)(C)VC(C), or something like that. Or even phoneme1 phoneme2 phoneme3... phoneme n. We can construct a general tetrapod form by stripping out specific features and leaving what is common to reptile, mammals, and amphibians. It has four limbs, grouped in pairs, each with five digits. (A very early tetrapod had seven digits on each limb; I saw this on television.)
The form with the set of zero values, minimally displaced from the axis of the average for each feature. Would this shape look like a book by Sean O'Brien? A notion of the collective. An idea of healing the depleted public zone of language (always depleted in a society based on individualism) by eliminating what is individual. I'm more like you than you are.
The search for an intact and capacious public space underlies almost everything that happens in poetry.
The issue of morality seems likely to streak across the pitch and to waste everyone's time. At some level, the conservatives are saying that someone who thinks is unworthy of trust, because they are conscious, and can make free choices. Someone who reads is not trustworthy. Someone who physically moves around is unsafe and dynamic.
At some level, someone is saying "life is ambiguous. Moral judgments are not. So we want writing to remove the ambiguity of reality, so that moral authority can be preserved." Can we improve on this?
The sense of being spoken to by a blank, a person who isn't really there, depresses everyone. Mainstream poets seem to me psychologically absent from their works. RS Thomas was concerned for morality, but his poems don't give any impression of presence or generosity. His ideas about politics are "firm" because he does not see them as ideas. The question of how Wales should be ruled is obviously ambiguous, since there is so much disagreement about it in Wales; it can only be resolved by answering detailed questions about how public administration works. Thomas makes no attempt to answer these questions or even to offer a model of how administration would be changed by devolution. His moral firmness is reached by ignoring the wishes of other people; not the most moral thing. It is reached also by excluding most of the relevant information from the poem; not the most poetic thing to do. He mistakes ideas for objects. If he always said the same thing, this does not amount to credibility. Someone who thinks could be just as trustworthy. Someone is saying "someone who breaks the rules of verse breaks the rules of life".
The aftermath of the decline of Anglicanism is one of the basic factors in the modern poetic scene. I suppose, if you decide that originality of style is proof of immorality, then that is up to you. To me it seems like a conservative counter-attack.