Their Numerous Cancellations

  The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019) brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for Slattern in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology. She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences Some Kids I Taught came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.

  So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points. 

  What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the criticisms, while some of the accusers (including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.

  It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.

    It's informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spectrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar treatment of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

   Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in Mrs Dalloway (which I re-read with great pleasure over the summer) through the character of Septimus Warren Smith, as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself. 

    It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read. 

*As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms

Make Some Noise

 Made it along to Café Oto in Dalston the other week for an evening of 'Brighton noise-poetry', an oddly alluring tag for a scene bigged-up in a recent piece for The Wire magazine by one of its proponents, Daniel Spicer. I'd missed the article but had friends who were involved in the performance; the proposition of a live amalgam of poetry and noisy/improvised sounds was inviting too as this kind of interface has always fascinated me.

    We're all aware of poetry's archaic origins as words (or vocalisations) set to music: Nietzsche goes further and suggests that "the poet cannot tell us anything that was not already contained, with a most universal validity, in such music as prompted him to his figurative discourse". We all know the other quotes about literature aspiring to the condition of music and poetry atrophying when it gets too far from music but when we turn to famous poems that purport to be composed in musical forms - Bunting's Sonatas, say, or Zukofsky's "A" or (ho-hum) Four Quartets - you discover, despite a foregrounded musicality of language, that the form is being employed more as a structural analogy than as an actual acoustic principle (as, more impressively, Joyce used the fugue in the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses) and that on the whole, when compared with the vastly more complex arranging and orchestrating of impalpable tonal textures and ideas which composers have to deal with, poets are little better than apathetic scatterbrains merely writing down the ready-made verbiage they find around them and sometimes counting the syllables and inserting homophonic parallels. Equally, compared with the expressive skill and dexterity born of years of dedicated practice displayed by a concert pianist, a jazz drummer or a Tuvan throat singer, most poets are complacent loafers who merely stand there and read out their lines from a sheet in the funny, over-earnest voice we're all supposed to use.
    Not to say that interesting things haven't been done in trying to marry music and poetry in areas outside the mainstream, white, academic field: I'm thinking mainly here of jazz-, rap- and dub-poetries as well as the sound-poetry of writers like Bob Cobbing and Tracie Morris. Of course, playing with the inherent rhythmical currents and cross-currents of language and being alert to oscillations between sound and sense are what makes poetry compelling in the first place so there is considerable potential to explore links between this and musical collaboration, although the challenge for me remains in transferring the density and complexity of language associated with more page-based poetry (ie. poetry that does not yield all its meaning on a first hearing but bears repeated re-reading and contemplation) into a live context with other auditory materials (as well as performance dynamics) to compete with.
   Although bracing and far from run of the mill, the Café Oto night was a mixed affair for this very reason. Several of the acts fell down on a lack of balance between voice and musical backdrop, both on a sound-engineering level (ie. you couldn't always hear the words) and on a conceptual level, where to me the music was more engaging than the spoken text and therefore distracted me from connecting with the texts properly (extraneous noises, during quieter pieces, were also an issue at times.) The duo Map 71 more successfully welded jagged beats to Lisa Jayne's declamatory utterances, closer in delivery to a female Karl Hyde than any other poet I could name. Alan Hay, sans backing, came across as a performer whose poetry held one's interest on its own merits: mercurial, disarming, with a Frank O'Hara insouciance and fluidity about it though equally tinged with an O'Haran downbeat edge.
   Compared to Hay's aslant beret and goatee, Keston Sutherland came on in conspicuously unbohemian guise: short hair, Todd Swiftian glasses and a pair of those reddish chinos usually only seen on Clapham Common or perhaps at Henley regatta. I'm an admirer of his work, in particular relishing the development from the more demonstrably Prynnean stylings of his earlier poetry to the more recent 'Ode to TL61P' where a more articulately transgressive energy is hit upon. Live, in collaboration with the grime-like beats and discords of THL Drenching (don't ask me what he was playing), Sutherland presents like the Professor of Poetry that he is having an apoplectic seizure and venting random tranches of garbled post-Marxian theory in every direction: ranting, spitting, stuttering and jerking his arms as though to vocally reinforce the already disjunctive intransigence of his texts, delivered at relentless breakneck velocity.
   I stepped out into the chilly Dalston night bewildered as to whether this was one of the most cutting-edge performances by a contemporary poet I had seen or a bizarre and impalatable mismatch. Or both. What it certainly wasn't was a complacent loafer merely standing there reading his lines from a sheet.
http://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen_brighton-noise-poetry-recordings

The Fascination of What's Difficult

   One of the upshots of the recent, tiresome Forward-orchestrated Paxman mini-controversy was the news that UK poetry book-sales have fallen (as have - to put it in context somewhat - all UK book-sales) from not very many at all to even less. One recalls Todd Swift's bleak estimate a few years ago that hardly any debut volumes sell more than 200 copies. As a response to this ever-dwindling market-share, there seems to have been a tendency among some publishers and poets for their first books to play it rather safe and go for a pacey, jokey, zeitgeisty effect of surface phrase-making without much grit or linguistic texture and with little sense that the writing of these poems was what Ted Hughes called "a psychological necessity" for their authors. As for ideas or political resonances - well, let's not put off what few readers we have with anything too taxing or provoking.
   Toby Martinez de las Rivas's excellent debut Terror resolutely baulks this trend and it's to the credit of such an established mainstream publishing-house as Faber that they've been willing to take on board a collection that's powerfully non-mainstream and challenging in its approach, difficult and dense in a way that harps back to Modernist poets like David Jones, Basil Bunting and early Geoffrey Hill but - also in the manner of a neo-Modernist - highly allusive both to earlier English poetry and history and to the literature of other countries. Despite being a formally exploratory volume which frequently calls into question what one poem calls "stability in the text" - for example, through the use of strange marginal annotations and diacritical marks - it's also an impassioned, glossolalic one, full of invocations, prayers and entreaties, and the kind of quasi-mystical struggle with religious faith and the possibility of the numinous that feels nearer to Blake, Smart or Hopkins than it does to the likes of Burnside or Symmons Roberts.
   There was a further reason to be cheerful last week with the news that my publisher Penned in the Margin has been awarded £135,000 of Arts Council funding over the next three years. Perennially innovative in the projects he's tackled and with a bold intention to blur the boundaries between poetry, drama and live performance, this is a well-deserved achievement for Tom Chivers and - like the publication of Terror - a clear indication that the impetus of UK poetry doesn't reside solely in the mainstream and the populist.
   PS: Falling sales-figures are affecting not just poetry but the novel too :http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/richard-godwin-dont-be-so-fast-to-write-off-the-printed-word-9594149.html

Review: Chris McCully's Selected Poems (Carcanet 2011)

  The second-hand bookseller from whom I purchased my copy of Chris McCully’s Selected Poems had affixed a sticker to the cover saying it had been discounted to £1 because it was ‘curvy’. As well as for its slightly warped appearance, ‘curvy’ might stand as an appropriate adjective for the book’s contents too, in so far as the poems deviate in interesting ways from the flat and predictable surfaces of much current verse, in particular offering a more varied and rounded sense of formal accomplishment than usually encountered.  If his deliberate, carefully-honed style seems – in a positive way - ‘out of key with its time’, this is because McCully benches his work in an intimate and complex engagement with the whole tradition of English poetry, rather than drawing only upon other contemporaries or near-contemporaries.

   Trained in linguistics and more latterly an academic specialising in prosody and Old English, McCully often resembles Modernist luminaries like Pound and Bunting in forging innovative permutations out of older materials, adopting a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ approach to remould universal themes and tropes: mutability, seasonal change, love turned bitter, separation, all met with a wry Horatian stoicism. (Knowing that McCully has published a memoir about his struggle with alcoholism – Goodbye Mr Wonderful (2004) - makes it all the more admirable that he never lapses into confessional self-disclosure.)

     McCully’s astute ear, however, is attracted more to metre and rhyme than to freer forms, and everywhere throughout the selection the major forebears cited in his Preface – Hardy, Yeats, Graves and Auden- are apparent (one might perhaps add another masterful verse-technician, Louis MacNiece).  In fact the influence of the early, ‘English Auden’ is perhaps the dominant one on McCully’s first volume Time Signatures (1993) -  the adapting of Anglo-Saxon models to create dense phonetic textures and a sense of haunting estrangement can be heard in the Audenesque  ‘Towards the unknown region’:

            ‘Wry light on slate,

              leaving the darkening trees...

              It is the stranger wanting peace

              at the watershed knows peace recedes

              beyond each stride’

 Where McCully also follows Auden is in returning lyric to its original source in song-based forms such as the ballad and villanelle, with frequent use of refrains, syntactical repetition and other acoustic devices that appeal to what Eliot called the “auditory imagination” as much as to the intellect. Again, McCully’s insistence on the poem as highly-crafted verbal artefact sets him apart from less scrupulous contemporaries: short pieces such as ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Demeter’ have all the plaintive grace and fluency of Elizabethan lyrics.

   As with Auden, however, one wonders if McCully’s impressive technical facility has occasionally lead him in the direction of the merely facile: by the time we reach ‘Mass’ from The Country of Perhaps(2002), the too-obviously Auden-borrowed rhyme-scheme coupled with a reaching towards faith quite as unconvincing as the older poet’s provokes bathos rather than uplift:

              ‘Throw away the calendar,

                The critical key.

                Cancel the cleverness

               That calls you free...

                Look back at history

                As it pours into space

                And into the mirror

                Of your disgrace.’

   Some of the most successful pieces in the book, on the other hand, are the translations from Old English texts (2008), where McCully’s handling of the rugged, two-ply alliterative line seems to capture the strident thud and anfractuous intensity of the original poems with unfaltering tact. To compare McCully’s version of ‘The Seafarer’ with Pound’s is instructive: despite the many virtues of Pound’s famous (or infamous) adaptation, it seems rather overdone and in fact romanticised when compared with McCully’s starker, more pared-down and therefore more tangibly human Seafarer-voice. It also highlights how much editing Pound did both of the poem’s original length – not that McCully’s rendering ever seems overlong – and also of the strong Christian elements within the poem, such as the invocation and ‘Amen’ at the end: surely, without these, the whole moral context for the Seafarer’s laments on worldliness is lost.

     McCully’s structuring of this Selected Poems is intriguing. At the forefront of the book he places a five-page prose-poem called ‘Dust’, which is actually from the last volume represented, Polder (2009): its darkly spiralling cadences, somewhere between the King James Bible and a Beckett monologue, are bleaker than anything that comes after. This seems to be thematically intentional, whereby (as McCully writes in his Preface) “the poems which succeed the piece may be read as fragments of consolation, of partial vision, of a tempered, amended voice.” Certainly the trajectory of the book plots a development from more troubled, rueful, at times satirical work through to the calmer, more consoling voice of Polder, written after the poet’s relocation to the Netherlands. Two groups of poems in this volume count as among the most achieved and effective in the book: a cycle of ekphrastic studies based on paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and another of well-measured imitations of Horatian odes addressed to McCully’s own Torquatus-figure. They form a fitting culmination to this excellent, far-reaching selection.

                                                                  (First published in The BowWowShop 2012)