ictus
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Poetry as Fraud
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?
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?
Monday, 14 January 2013
The Text Will Start Talking To You
I was really taken by something I read in an interview with the American short-story writer George Saunders in The Guardian on Saturday, as it chimes with an intuition I've often felt about my own poetry-writing but haven't able to articulate before:
"...my whole schtick is, doing short fiction is like trying to suspend your conceptual understanding of the story for as long as possible...Donald Barthelme has this great essay called 'Not Knowing' where he says that your job as a fiction writer is to keep yourself confused for as long as you can. And the text will actually start talking to you. If you can keep your own designs a little quiet."
The short story is a form I'm increasingly drawn to, whose guiding principles of concision and ultimate indeterminacy - that sense of being left equivocally hanging after the briefest glimpse into a rapidly-sketched fictional world we encounter in all the seminal practitioners from Chekhov and the Joyce of Dubliners to Helen Simpson and Lorrie Moore - seem to overlap beguilingly with those of poetry.The recent spin-off "flash-fiction" or short short stories are indeed often hard to tell apart from prose-poems: at their best fragmentary, skewed narratives that thwart their own progress.
Although I wouldn't extrapolate generally-applicable rules from it, my experience of approaching the poem I'm trying to write is precisely akin to Saunders' sense of willed ignorance in the face of the story, a struggle to suspend my conceptual understanding of the lineage and parameters of "the poem" - never a given, always something to be rediscovered in the very process of writing. (Two Robert Frost insights spring to mind: " I write to find out what I didn't know I knew" and "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader").
Somehow, out of a paradoxical double-think, I have to get myself into the condition of not knowing how to write a poem before I can write one. Of trying to sidestep all the rational directives I might have made the other day about writing more like So-and-So or avoiding closed forms or "using the page" more (though these might eventually emerge). It's almost the feeling of beginning afresh each time the inceptual word-cluster for a poem suggests itself and - having wrong-footed my conscious mind with a menial task or a distracted reverie while, say, listening to music or staring out of the window on a train - what I call the formal imperative for the poem tentatively starts to take shape. Chance - another element beyond my conscious control - operates in tandem with patience, therefore, to mediate this rare, crucial entry-point into the poem.
If I approach the writing in a more thought-out, head-on way, it feels like I'm merely repeating myself and writing the same poem again and again (which of course many poets seem happy to do) or liable merely to write in the predictable manner I've gleaned from a mishmash of all the other recent poets I've been reading. But as I say this is less a conscious strategy than the only way I seem to know how: it's partly, I think, a ceding of a good deal of the compositional process to the unconscious, an acceptance that rational control will only take you so far when you are working with such a rich complex of internal and external materials as a poem worthy of the name arises from. But on the other hand it's certainly not automatic writing: perhaps you can only loosen the reins in this way if you've read and reflected and worked at the craft of poetry for years.
And this is only the way-in to the poem: now the real work, the drafting and deleting and redrafting until you stumble upon something that finally satisfies that initial blindly-groping instinct, can begin.
"...my whole schtick is, doing short fiction is like trying to suspend your conceptual understanding of the story for as long as possible...Donald Barthelme has this great essay called 'Not Knowing' where he says that your job as a fiction writer is to keep yourself confused for as long as you can. And the text will actually start talking to you. If you can keep your own designs a little quiet."
The short story is a form I'm increasingly drawn to, whose guiding principles of concision and ultimate indeterminacy - that sense of being left equivocally hanging after the briefest glimpse into a rapidly-sketched fictional world we encounter in all the seminal practitioners from Chekhov and the Joyce of Dubliners to Helen Simpson and Lorrie Moore - seem to overlap beguilingly with those of poetry.The recent spin-off "flash-fiction" or short short stories are indeed often hard to tell apart from prose-poems: at their best fragmentary, skewed narratives that thwart their own progress.
Although I wouldn't extrapolate generally-applicable rules from it, my experience of approaching the poem I'm trying to write is precisely akin to Saunders' sense of willed ignorance in the face of the story, a struggle to suspend my conceptual understanding of the lineage and parameters of "the poem" - never a given, always something to be rediscovered in the very process of writing. (Two Robert Frost insights spring to mind: " I write to find out what I didn't know I knew" and "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader").
Somehow, out of a paradoxical double-think, I have to get myself into the condition of not knowing how to write a poem before I can write one. Of trying to sidestep all the rational directives I might have made the other day about writing more like So-and-So or avoiding closed forms or "using the page" more (though these might eventually emerge). It's almost the feeling of beginning afresh each time the inceptual word-cluster for a poem suggests itself and - having wrong-footed my conscious mind with a menial task or a distracted reverie while, say, listening to music or staring out of the window on a train - what I call the formal imperative for the poem tentatively starts to take shape. Chance - another element beyond my conscious control - operates in tandem with patience, therefore, to mediate this rare, crucial entry-point into the poem.
If I approach the writing in a more thought-out, head-on way, it feels like I'm merely repeating myself and writing the same poem again and again (which of course many poets seem happy to do) or liable merely to write in the predictable manner I've gleaned from a mishmash of all the other recent poets I've been reading. But as I say this is less a conscious strategy than the only way I seem to know how: it's partly, I think, a ceding of a good deal of the compositional process to the unconscious, an acceptance that rational control will only take you so far when you are working with such a rich complex of internal and external materials as a poem worthy of the name arises from. But on the other hand it's certainly not automatic writing: perhaps you can only loosen the reins in this way if you've read and reflected and worked at the craft of poetry for years.
And this is only the way-in to the poem: now the real work, the drafting and deleting and redrafting until you stumble upon something that finally satisfies that initial blindly-groping instinct, can begin.
Monday, 31 December 2012
A Poetic Riddle
"When Chuang-Tze explains that the Tao experience implies a return to a sort of elementary or original frame of mind, where the relative meanings of language are inoperative, he resorts to a play on words that is a poetic riddle. He says that this experience of returning to what we originally were is like ' entering a cage of birds without making them sing'. Fan means both 'cage' and 'return'; ming both 'song' and 'names'. The sentence therefore equally means 'to return to the place where names are superfluous': to silence, to the kingdom of the unsaid. To the place where names and things melt into one: to poetry, the domain where naming is being"
Octavia Paz, quoted in the Preface to For The
Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel
Charles
Sunday, 23 December 2012
Burying The Year
 |
| Deryn Rees-Jones |
The round-up of the year edition of The Wire magazine ('Rewind 2012: The Year in Underground Music') is also well worth checking out, whatever your musical allegiances. Mostly alerts me to all the interesting stuff that has passed me by this year. Are their tastes softening perhaps? Bryan Ferry is featured on the Invisible Jukebox and I never thought I'd see a new Bob Dylan album at no.7 on the Releases of the Year rundown...
Also just got a link to the new Blackbox Manifold, another trove of strong writing with poems by John Peck, Carrie Etter, John Wilkinson and Ian Seed and a lengthy appreciation of Peter Robinson.
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
Saturday, 8 December 2012
I Too Was a Shoe-Gazer
In fact on that dimly-recalled occasion, attended with my best friend Rob at some forgotten London dive, our drunken enthusiasm saw us accost the band after their performance and fervently entreat them to give our own fey guitar-duo (entitled The Chattertons after the legendary suicided teenager-poet) a support slot at their next gig...
Needless to say we never heard back from them - nor indeed did The Chattertons ever get to the stage of playing a gig - but that's (as they say) another story...
What's also interesting about Petridis' article is how he reveals that most of the other Gosh members have gone on to dayjob careers as successful as Elizabeth Price's - Fletcher, for example, is Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trading.
From the perspective of those shoe-gazing, C86 days, when shambolic unworldliness and child-like naivete were often counted as virtues, who'd have thought it?
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
New Review
Great to receive the new PN Review last week after a bit of a lapse on my part. Among new poems by John Ashbery and fascinating essays on Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare and Edwin Muir, my brief review of Peter Riley's superb collection The Glacial Stairway may be found. There are also two pages of striking photos of 20thC American poets such as HD, Denise Levertov and WC Williams.
But the stand-out for me is the poem The January Man by Beverly Nadin, a sort of 'broken Britain' post-pastoral written with remarkable conviction and vigour.
But the stand-out for me is the poem The January Man by Beverly Nadin, a sort of 'broken Britain' post-pastoral written with remarkable conviction and vigour.
Thursday, 22 November 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)