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
Tom Chivers has a fascinating post up at This Is Yogic regarding a competition-winning poem by a writer called Christian Ward which was found to be almost identical to an existing poem by Helen Mort. Ward then attempted to justify himself by saying that he'd been using the Mort text "as a model".
Flabbergasting as it may seem for any writer with the tiniest iota of integrity to believe that merely by altering a few words he could reclaim an original poem as his own, what's worse are his other attempts at self-exculpation by implying that he can't even remember how often he's turned this fraudulent trick before:
"Furthermore, I have begun to examine my published poems to make sure there are no similar mistakes. I want to be as honest as I can with the poetry community and I know it will take some time to regain their trust. Already I have discovered a 2009 poem called The Neighbour is very similar to Tim Dooley’s After Neruda and admit that a mistake has been made. I am still digging and want a fresh start."
Tom discusses the issues surrounding such plagiarism so well that I won't rehearse them again here. I can only agree that Ward's apparent belief that "closely modelling" his own work on that of other poets can be a legitimate compositional method takes the contemporary tendency for the churning-out of pre-set, derivative writing-exercises in Creative Writing classes to a new level. One of the abiding strengths of poetry is that, in the vertigo of fake, contentless vacuity consumerism forces upon us, it safeguards one of the few areas where any notion of authenticity or truth in language can still preside.
Furthermore, Christian Ward has probably breached publishing copyright law by substantially reproducing Helen Mort's work under his own name. Any poet submitting her or his work to publishers and competitions should have some security that this kind of forgery cannot take place, or if it does the perpetrator will suffer legal consequences.
And how could the poetry community ever trust him again?
