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

JHW 1942-2014

    And now John has died. I realise I reflect too often in this blog on the passing of poets - no doubt a sign of aging - but there always seems to me something especially tragic when a poet leaves the world. What was it Pasternak called them? "Hostages of eternity in the hands of time". Something of this although there is something assuring about that quote too; perhaps something also like this line from a Lorrie Moore story: "What is beautiful is seized".

   But John was a friend. He would have laughed at me for bandying such grandiose quotations. Like most genuine poets he didn't have much time for the pretentious baloney that's spouted about poetry and literature; he preferred to get on with it and let his work do the talking. I can only echo the generous tribute written by Todd Swift on Eyewear the other day about both John the man and John the poet, although I knew him for a much shorter time than Todd.

    I missed John when he made his final trip to England three weeks ago to read from his new volume The Golden Age of Smoking at the LRB Bookshop and I had been meaning to email him to see how it had gone ever since I've been back in London. On the other hand I'm really glad I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with John last autumn on this blog and I hope now it reads as a last summing-up of his views on poetry and a potted autobiography for those wishing to look back.
   What comes through, however, is the sense of himself as a figure somewhat eclipsed by the poetry scene he had not so long ago been a distinctive part of, a disillusion born of struggling to get quirky, unconventional poems like his heard above the chugging drone of mediocrity. I hope that John's death will occasion some form of revaluation of his achievement (perhaps a Collected, for example, will appear before long) and see his reputation restored to its proper standing.
   I just flicked through my favourite book of his, Canada, for a line or stanza appropriate for this moment but I could find nothing mournful or gloomy in the whole collection. In fact almost every poem is full of energy, good humour and zing: he was very much a poet "on the side of life" and as a person too. All the sadder, then, that he is now gone.
   Obituary by his friend John Lucas here.

No Longer a Mere Blob: Christopher Middleton’s ‘Reflections On a Viking Prow’

                                                    

   This was a piece I wrote hastily in September for the Christopher Middleton tribute in The BowWowShop, a festschrift collated by Michael Glover and including figures such as Tom Lowenstein, Alison Brackenbury, Roy Fisher, Rosemary Waldrop and August Kleinzahler (http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page10.htm). Middleton, now 87, has been in poor health for a while and this eloquent, enthusiastic honouring of his achievements seems wholly appropriate and timely.
    My contribution didn't quite make the cut but I include it here as my own meagre tribute to one of the poets who has meant most to me over the years:

    In a recent blog-post, Todd Swift waxed doleful about the relevance and status of poetry in our dumbed-down age: “the efficacy of poetry has long been a myth.  Poems, except to poets, are a rather dull affair.  They sit there on the page like a lump of cold meat.” In our digitized, bleeping world of never-ending distractions and designer time-saving devices, who wants to go to the effort of reading the kind of stuff we were forced to plough through in English lessons at school? “Poems are often remote, and indifferent, objects.  Their technological prowess is equivalent to that of the gramophone.  We have moved on.”
     And caught at a jaded moment, considering how difficult it is to make one’s own poems heard above the twittering, text-alerting clamour that surrounds us - let alone the maunder of self-advertising slapdashery that all too often passes for poetry these days, so derivative that serial plagiarists are only outed after they’ve won prizes and had books out, less a “lump of cold meat” than a sliver of microwaved spam – I wondered if Todd’s bleak estimate wasn’t right after all and if poems had regressed into fusty museum-pieces read only by a coterie of leather-elbowed cranks?
     Glover’s email snapped me out of it, reminding me that one of the most important English poets alive was ill in bed in another continent, one of the few contemporaries who has figured in my personal pantheon over the years. I reached down the dog-eared Paladin Selected Writings from my shelf (on the back: “a poet with the disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem”) and my flicking sortilege immediately found this:
     'What troubles us now is the likelihood that some sort of vacuum, having eroded the presences of original things, artefacts and handiworks, is eating away the awesome reality of individual human lives...The totally politicised world, with its economic imperatives, grievances, greeds, is punctured all over by ideological syringes that suck and pump singularity out of everything, and flood, with embalming fluids, every vein of difference, every muscle of human oddity...A nightmare of designification is running its course...The (poet’s) regard resting on the object is thus the key to self-affirmation: a self reclaims itself from nonentity and, as the object reveals itself in a certain light, that self can gaze into its own depths as an agent of interiority, no longer a mere blob to be pushed around in a flat world'.
    If, in a time of cultural vacuity, you want an ars poetica that goes to the roots of how poetry remains inextricably bound up with the whole process of societal myth-making and human identity, a reinvigorating jolt of primal poesis elaborated in a style that is wittily vivid and learned yet the opposite of academic, return (or turn anew) to Christopher Middleton’s ‘Reflections on a Viking Prow’, an essay that’s as intricately-wrought and rich in imagery as any prose-poem. If, like me, you need to periodically “recapture poetic reality in a tottering world”, this is the most resonant emergency-resource I know, delineating the short-sightedness of the autobiographical default-setting of so many contemporary poems (“foregrounding his own subjective compulsions, ...cataloguing impressions,...hanging an edict from an anecdote”) and outlining in its place a potent conception of poem as thingly artefact and the poet as historically-grounded artificer whose “writings are formal creations which enshrine and radiate poetic space”.
     Needless to say, the essay also affords illuminating perspectives on the kalleidoscopic array of verbal artefacts – at times dizzying in their diversity and range – that make up Middleton’s Collected Poems. Never allied to any school and wisely self-exiled from the trivial rivalries of the UK scene, he is one of the two or three absolute originals of the post-war period, doggedly pursuing his own prolific course through enthralling congeries of forms, themes and ideas that aren’t even on the radar of most English poets. In this he is also one of the very few English-born poets to have achieved anything like international stature in our time, his standing in fact higher in the States and in Germany than in his own country.
       But if Middleton is less appreciated here than he should be, I see him as the osmotic forebear of two major tendencies of recent years. Firstly, decades before it became the done thing to claim Rilke, Leopardi, Celan, Rimbaud or whoever else you can think of as your key antecedent and model, Middleton was not only assiduously learning his craft from difficult, outré continentals but also translating them, his explorations as a translator (of prose as well as verse) having proceeded in closely-knit tandem with his own writings.
       Secondly, if we have finally now managed to get over the reductive dualism of mainstream versus avant garde that has lead to such pointless “poetry wars” over the years, with a more “hybrid” approach now becoming increasingly adopted, Middleton’s oeuvre has again been ahead of its time and always demonstrated too much breadth and scope to be crowbarred into either camp, an ongoing object-lesson in how experimental poetry can be made inclusive and approachable, and how clarity and emotional depth need not be incompatible with formal inventiveness and play.
      

Eye Focus

 I have a poem up on Eyewear today, where Todd calls me a ' young British poet' - inaccurate but nice to hear...
  The downside of Todd's prolific post-rate is that you get a very rapid moment under the spotlight before you're superseded - blink and you'll miss it.

Eyewear

I'm in Eyewear today, which I believe is the UK's most widely-read poetry blog (or blogzine, as I think Todd calls it). It's a review of an interesting volume by the Canadian poet Steve McOrmond ( link in blog-roll).

Identity Parade 2

                                         
Returning to my reflections on Identity Parade, I wanted to briefly expand on the sense of generally high quality of poetry-writing around today I gained from the book. This for me is characterised by several phenomena which have invariably been wanting in all but the anomalous best of post-war poetry.
   Firstly, what I can only distinguish as a rediscovery of confidence in the possibilities of poetry in English, the overcoming (at last!) of what A. Alvarez in the Introduction to his original New Poetry anthology (1962/66) called "the Gentility Principle", the "elaborate defence mechanism" which has involved a longterm entrenched anti-Modernism, a generalised resistance to foreign influence and a retrograde conservatism epitomised in the disproportionate lionisation of Philip Larkin. In a recent post on Eyewear Todd Swift suggested that the main influences on younger British poets remained "Larkin, Hughes and Plath" and that left-of-field tendencies had been overstated: "they remain charming, lyrical and conservative" (which sounds like trying to cram dozens of poets into one Todd-shaped mould). I fail to detect any Larkinesque influence in Identity Parade (Hughes and Plath in places, yes): the progression away from tight stanzaic forms and polite bicycle-clipped ironies is very apparent. It's clear that a canon of much more inventive, challenging poets has become important: Mahon, Muldoon, Prynne, Harsent, Michael Donaghy to name but a few, as well as figures from the previous generation such as Sean O'Brien, John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie.
   Secondly and allied to this is a new openness to poetries from abroad, which seem to many of the poets as formative as UK sources. The impact of American work, in particular, is gratifying to see: for a writer who died in 1966 the belatedly widespread influence of Frank O'Hara comes as a wonderful surprise. Ashbery and the other New York Poets also seem very current, as do other poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham and Charles Simic. But the work of presses like Bloodaxe and Carcanet (and magazines like Modern Poetry in Translation and The Wolf) in widening the net of available translations has meant an ever richer array of multicultural poetry coming through to us and this seems to have filtered into quite a few of these poems.
   Thirdly (and again a related point) is the breakdown of the hackneyed opposition between mainstream and experimental/avant garde poetries that previously hampered so much dialogue and innovation (and which even as intelligent a critic as Ron Silliman still perpetuates with his own School of Quietude/Post Avant division). A good many of the poets in Identity Parade seem to base their practice on models from both camps; or rather, they decline to limit themselves to one set of procedures and prefer to utilise all the models and strategies available to them, which to me seems to be the only course of action to follow if a poet wants to remain vitally alive to their own thought-processes, craft and intuitions.