Like Buses

There was an interesting article in the Guardian about the "health" of poetry recently, by Anne-Marie Fyfe. It was interesting partly for the names mentioned - some of whom I've heard of and some of whom I've not, but also for the fact that a lot of names were missed out. There's an awful lot of poetry about at the moment. It didn't, for instance, include the names of Annie Clarkson and Eleanor Rees, two recent first collections I've particularly liked. And that's just for starters. The number of poets around is ever increasing: how does anyone keep up?

The fact that there's so much new writing out there can only be a good thing. It would be dreadful if there were only a few names in the "promising" pile; where would the next generation come from otherwise? But the fact that there's a lot of them also brings up its own problems: how do you judge who will be lasting? Some people worry a lot about this; but I can't say it bothers me that much. The poet who worries too much about his or her posthumous reputation is the poet who ends up writing nothing at all. All you can do is listen to the voice(s) of the world around you and attempt to write down, as clearly as possible, what it is saying. Poets who thought they would be remembered forever are long-forgotten (Nahum Tate, Colley Cibber anyone?)

In fact, I'd venture to say that the more you look to your posthumous reputation, the less likely you are to have one. Frank O'Hara had a very casual attitude to publication and wrote about the things that were happening "now", though the "now" he wrote about is over forty years old. And people still read him. Shakespeare wrote for the audience in the stalls and in the pit, not for posterity; he had a keen eye on the box office and never let an idea of "greatness" stop him from being popular. Nevertheless, with his language and his stretching of the iambic line almost to breaking point, he was one of the most innovative writers of his day.

Still, as Ron Silliman is often pointing out, there are now many more poets out there than there ever used to be, and there's no way that any reader can get round them all. Just keeping up with the local scene here in Manchester is quite exhausting, and I don't think I've begun to manage that. So if somebody mentions a name I should have read, or heard, and I look blank, don't worry. There'll be another 3 poets coming up behind that one.

Columbo - "Oh, and one more thing..."

I've been reading quite a lot recently - in particularly, and slowly, Rupert Loydell's latest from Shearsman, An Experiment in Navigation. There's something about his poems, and the way that they meditate around issues of art, spierituality, representation and lyric that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, edging towards prosiness and away from a strongly musical rhythm; but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. In one poem, he can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena.

Perhaps this is what led me to think of the nature of innovative writing. This book, and the thought of an interview for an MA course in Creative Writing: Innovation & Experiment. There was a question about this on the letter inviting me to the interview, and yesterday, I sat down in a coffee-bar and thought about this. I suddenly had this vision of Columbo, having just interviewed the suspect, turning back to him as he reaches the door, and saying: "Oh, and just one more thing..." The suspect is caught off guard and made to answer on the hoof, and so reveals himself for the duplicitous cad he really is...

So the innovative poet can operate - while language or the reader thinks it's got away with its description or understanding of the world, the poet comes in with one further question, one further twist: Did you really mean to say that? That's innovation for me, and that what Rupert Loydell's poems do for me.