Embracing the Gap

  The belated recognition of Eileen Myles, as celebrated in an interview with Emma Brockes in The Guardian Review last weekend, seems one of those novelistic turnarounds of destiny which sees proponents of outsider-art eventually welcomed into the mainstream and applauded for all the qualities that made them weird and unpalatable twenty or thirty years ago when they were struggling for any kind of look-in. You usually find, moreover, that this volte-face of taste is less an arbitrary lottery-win than the reward for decades of unremunerative hard work, dogged persistence and stubborn self-belief. A veteran of the seminal St Marks Poetry Project and its artistic director in the eighties, Myles's poetry sits somewhere within the third New York School yet equally comes out of the movement of women’s poetry of the 60s and 70s: it foregrounds the voice of personal experience pushing uncomfortably hard against the alienating constraints and sharp edges of urban reality, couched in a slangy demotic candour that feels at once hard-won and throwaway. 

    I returned to Myles’s work in two big anthologies I frequently go back to as source-books for richly atypical writing: Up Late - American Poetry since 1970 (ed. Andrei Codrescu) and PostModern American Poetry - A Norton Anthology (ed. Paul Hoover). Its her O'Haran “personism”, her reluctance to separate lived experience from the experience of writing poems, which still seems so rawly compelling, and perhaps it's this that has endeared her to more recent readers who have misread her work as a set of transparent portals on a complex, unconventional personality: “The process of the poem…is central to an impression I have that life is a rehearsal for the poem, or the final moment of spiritual revelation…As I walked I was recording the details, I was the details, I was the poem”.

     This keys in with something Myles talks about in the interview about embracing the process of writing rather than always striving for crafted products: “it’s like how do you learn to write poems that look easy? Just writing in this wasteful way all day long.” This strikes me as intriguing in the context of Rebecca Watts’ phrase “the rejection of craft” as applied to poets like Hollie McNish (see previous post). Perhaps there can be a positive rejection of craft in the service of a focus on process and revelation which a poet like Myles embodies, as well as plenty of the various other “post-modern” poets in these anthologies, unified only in their repudiation of academic traditionalism.

     I say this as much as anything as a reminder to myself not to make a cult of craft and form as I have often done in the past; not to become bogged down in technical minutiae and endlesssly redrafting old poems rather than ensuring I invest enough of my writing process and myself into each poem to make it resonant, communicative and - indeed - alive. Serendipitously I find the opposite tendency summed up in a brilliantly mordant poem by August Kleinzahler on the adjacent page from Myles in the Norton book:

 “Too daunted to field what he might,

    (He) Takes refuge in a text

     of a text, 

     finding tickle points of nyceness

     there to stay him…

    Backing off from the authentic

     like a jackal from the lion’s scent”.

                                          (A Case in Point)

    I also warmed to Myles' definition of poetry and its physicality on the page which culminates the interview: "The difference between poetry and prose, and why if you're not acculturated to poetry, you might resist it: that page is frightening. Why is it not filled? The two categories of people who don't feel that way are children and prisoners. So many prison poets: they see that gap and experience it differently". Emma Brockes goes on to say, in a beautifully-turned sentence, "The gap, of course, is where we all live, in the space between conventional categories, and it has been the project of Myles's work to celebrate it; the indeterminacy of where one thing ends and another begins."

Pop-Poetry Will Eat Itself

  A work-colleague asked recently "What kind of poetry do you write?" and I was stumped for an answer. Not only did no coherent response come to mind, but as I hemmed and hawed I was confused as to the kind of reply that might be expected. On a Lit History level, of course, there are generic categories of poem (lyric, narrative, elegy, satire etc.) which are still often employed by poets and critics, although in many cases they feel inapplicable to the hybridised, mashed-up forms we now write in; but surely this wasn't the kind of answer she was looking for (eg. "Well, my work flits puckishly between the ode and the dramatic monologue, with occasional forays into the satirical epic.") 
    It's difficult to surmise the kinds of poetry that exist in what is sometimes bizarrely called "the popular imagination", but the teacher gave an inkling of one of them when she rescued me by saying "Is it the really heavy, depressing kind?" (presumably shorthand for any poetry written with serious or, broadly speaking, literary or artistic intent.) For want of any better designation (and almost detecting a kind of back-handed compliment ie. at least I'm not a flippant rhymester in the mould of Purple Ronnie or Pam Ayres), I said "Yes, probably" and we left it at that.
   What this odd exchange brought home is our lack of meaningful terms for the large array of subtypes at play within the field of poetry, in comparison, say, to music where there's an abundance of different styles each with its own name, tradition, values and audience. Some (classical, jazz, art-rock ) are more artful and crafted than others at the pop end of the spectrum which tend to be both more immediate and more simplistic but are also usually more commercially successful in terms of their reception. Other musical styles dwell somewhere between these poles, striving to attain a level of popularity while also maintaining some semblance of artistic integrity.
     Is there a kind of "pop poetry", as well as (again, very much for want of a better word) a "literary poetry" whose practitioners align themselves with the making of something akin to art? I'm straining the analogy here in reference to the rather heated discussion that arose the other week after Rebecca Watts' essay in PN Review in which she inveighs against several female poets, in particular Hollie McNish and Rupi Kaur, for "the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work". It's hardly a balanced work of criticism, and the somewhat lofty, de haut en bas tone does run the risk of accusations of a snobbish condescension, as its detractors have been quick to point out. I found myself thinking of that old Alexander Pope line "Why break a butterfly upon a wheel?"
    I do, however, find myself in agreement with many of Watts' points. I have to admit to a sense of bewilderment whenever I go into Waterstones and approach the poetry shelves only to discover that a proportion of the ever-dwindling book-space allotted is taken up by small decorative volumes you might expect to see in a twee gift-shop, their pages adorned with wistful line-drawings of flowers and snowflakes amid which brief clusters of lines nestle, each a sentimental cliché or banal pseudo-profundity you might be more likely to find on a poster in a morose teenager's bedroom or perhaps biro'd on the back of a doodled exercise book in a moment of angst. This, in case you haven't encountered it, is Rupi Kaur's "Instagram poetry" (now there's a genre for you), a "short-form" production which seems to exactly conform to a public perception of what poetry should be - emotionally tortured, introspective, "spiritual", romantic with a small r. If you think of the word "poetic" within everyday parlance, these are the connotations it invariably evokes. (It would perhaps be an intriguing study to look at why The Dictionary for Received Ideas' entry on Poetry is stuck somewhere between post-Georgianism and watered-down Confessionalism and seems to omit from its definition the rest of its richly heterogeneous history.)
   The first time I read some of Hollie McNish's verses - and indicatively I think it was in The Guardian - I thought they were a parody or post-modern ruse cleverly aping a gauchely rhyming, agit-prop type poem of the kind (again) that many of us wrote as moody adolescents. I had to read it several times before deciding with a mixture of mirth and perplexity that no this was an actual poem and The Guardian was actually printing it. And Picador is publishing her new book and now she's won the Ted Hughes Award!
    Rebecca Watts' argument that the literary establishment's acceptance of McNish in a kind of disingenuous Emperor's New Clothes consensus is a valid one and seems to say more about the ever-looser criteria some publishers and promoters are holding to in an age of shrinking readerships and depleting returns than it does about any genuine new impetus towards populism. Populism, after all, is nothing new; as I suggested above, there has always been a vein of what used to be known as "light verse", often written by specialists who are far more skilled and indeed more artful than McNish or Kaur. Some will remember a few years ago (ok I just looked it up and it was 20) a somewhat analogous controversy being sparked when the unfunny comic poet Murray Lachlan Young reportedly signed a contract with EMI for £1m in 1997 (for recordings of performances rather than against his book-sales) - the ludicrous soundbite "Poetry is the new rock'n'roll" was widely touted at the time and many more serious poets (such as Michael Horovitz) waxed wroth about Young's sudden acclaim, saying that this was not real poetry and that he was debasing the art-form etc. 
    The point I'm attempting to make in a laborious way is that poetry continues to be as multifarious as music, yet we often lump it together as though it didn't contain diverse strands each with their different audiences and different channels of exposure: inevitably these will overlap and rub each other up the wrong way at certain points. The positive "takeaways", perhaps, are firstly the huge potential book-buying readership for poetry it shows at a time when, as I say, "literary" poetry seems to be selling less than ever - Kaur's Milk and Honey has apparently sold over half a million copies, which is incredible in the context of the tiny sales of most UK volumes. I'm certainly not saying that we should all embrace "Instagram poetry" and write like Rupi Kaur in the future - far from it - but just that we should perhaps consider all those readers who are showing a perhaps new or reanimated interest in poetry. Secondly, the debate which Watts' essay has provoked demonstrates an appetite and need for informed critical discussion about the status of poetry in the UK; it implies we're a broad church and that there's a great deal of scope for the interaction and cross-pollination of voices within this bustling community.