Prog 2 (Tales from Typological Oceans)

To compare innovative poetry to prog rock is, perhaps, rather cheeky, and there's not that much in common really, apart from the fact that they both started in the late '60's. Prog bands that "made it" (Yes, Genesis & Pink Floyd basically) ended up as bloated shadows of their former selves and were not all that experimental really, except in their early days.

But the urge to step away from the norm, to explore new territories, new sound or wordscapes, is the continuity between all these movements. And I don't see much of it happening at the moment, except in isolated pockets. Tony Trehy's innovative Text Festival, groupings such as Oppened and The Other Room, aside, there's the constant need to try and sell books. And people do like to be able to hum the tune...

But there's always a tension between writer & audience. The writer wants to reach for some kind of (even if only temporary, provisional and fractured) vision of the world, the reader wants something to read. That challenges - if they're in the mood for it - but is approachable. But not too approachable - we want to feel that we are special for being able to understand this. Prog fans saw themselves as a breed apart - largely male, geeky and grammar school. Do readers of innovative writing feel the same way?

How much do writers consider their audience?

I've just read a poem that is very approachable - an elegy for Brian Glancy. A very traditional elegy in many ways. Not at all experimental. Bit like Pete Sinfield writing for Bucks Fizz?

Prog & Poetry

I watched the programme, Prog Britannia, on BBC 4 yesterday, and it was interesting that there were some of the same problems you get with people who are "non-mainstream" in poetry. In some ways, it confirmed my prejudices: a lot of them were public school boys or music school graduates who were often very good musicians, playing as many notes as possible and coming up with "concepts" to do with Tolkein and fantasy rather than real life. And its demise was as much to do with the bombast of its attempt at a Gessamptwerke (total work) involving overblown theatrics and lots of dry ice. But then one remembers U2's Achtung Baby tour...

But what struck me was that here again were a bunch of highly intelligent people being - well - highly intelligent. That old bugbear of English anti-intellectualism began to rear its ugly head. Though shalt not have any big ideas... And the other bug bear of not wanting to be bored. If you're capable of writing a work that lasts 20 minutes, involves several key changes and references everything from TV theme tunes to Schoenburg, why limit yourself to the 3 minutes blues/rock riffathon? Some of the people involved were not only considerably good musicians, but actually wrote challenging music that actually utilised new ways of working: Robert Fripp, in particular.

Others, of course, such as Caravan and the Canterbury bands, were plugging into a vein of English romanticism that includes Vaughn Williams and Britten, as well as utilising that peculiar ly whimisical strain of British surrealism that includes Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. And they were bringing this into rock music. Bands like that were, in many ways, the very opposite of the bombastic strain of Emerson, Lake & Palmer; which, frankly, even now just looks like a low-rent Wagner.

There were many things wrong with it, of course. Often, the ideas were not all that original: concept albums around the theme of Tolkein are a bit, well, jejune. Sometimes all the twiddly guitar and keyboard solos were less virtuoso and more self-indulgent posing. A little restraint would have avoided some of the pitfalls. But then, they were young, smoking a lot of wacky backy and no-one was actually stopping them.

It all reminds me a bit about the avant garde poets of England in the '70's: no-one was really stopping them do what they liked, because not many were actually listening. No doubt, if a non-biased way of reading such poetry ever happens, we would sort out the really good stuff from the not-quite-acheived and the overblown. But the fact that lots of people were trying things out, experimenting, making odd noises, going in wrong directions to see where they led, that wasn't a bad thing, was it?

MERRY CHRYSANTHEMUM!

Gob blues us every wan

Adrian Mitchell RIP

I've just read the sad news that Adrian Mitchell has died, of pneumonia.

He was something I could never be: a popular poet who never compromised on quality, who entertained, was thought-provoking and an inspiration for so many others. I have seen him perform on a couple of occasions and he was always great, a graceful reader with a quiet but assertive voice. He never had to shout and never went in for histrionics, and he always looked comfortable in himself.

His last poem has been posted on the Bloodaxe site.

On Having Nothing to Say, and Saying It

Seems to me there's two approaches to writing poetry, which can be summed up as "having something to say" and "letting the something say you."

Many poets, I suspect, "have something to say": a subject, either over their whole life, or for a particular work. It could be "capitalism is bad, socialism is good" or it could be as simple as, "I had a really good time on holiday in Greece."

Others - and I sort of count myself among them - actually don't have something to say themselves, but are trying to "listen in" and then record what the world is saying to them. The American poet Jack Spicer, put it succinctly: "you don't speak to the Outside, the Outside speaks to you." He had this idea that the poem didn't come from inside the poet, but from some outside source, as a kind of channeling thing, that you ought to remove yourself as far as possible from the poem so that you can hear what the poem/world is saying to you.

I can see this as sounding terribly mystical and foggy, but I can identify with it as well. Some of my favourite poems of mine are in some ways mysterious to me - I don't know where they came from. I work out what they're about as I'm writing. Or sometimes months later, after I've read them several times or published them in magazines. I still don't know what some of my poems are "about."

That is really why I started cutting and pasting, and why even though I don't use that technique as much now, chance techniques are still really important to me. Poetry to me is not about imposing my view of the world on other people but about seeking what the world is trying to say to me.

All this, of course, is only a partial explanation of what I do. And it doesn't mean that I've totally rid myself of ego in some zen kind of way. I'm still the same bundle of ego and uncertainty I used to be. But it does explain why "meaning" as in something imposed by me on the reader rather than something the readers discovers in the act of reading, is something I might want to get rid of in my own poems.

Sonnets

Been reading the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, edited by Jeff Hilson recently. I'm inclined to actually agree with Ron Silliman that it's one of the best and most significant anthologies produced in the last 25 years. It's full of so many different versions of the sonnet (and some things that aren't even sonnets) that it makes me gasp at times at the possibilities of the form. Everything from the concrete poetry of Mary Ellen Solt to variations on Berrigan's sonnets to the recent uses of the sonnet "box" by Abigail Obourne and Sophie Robinson.

There's a great deal of humour in this collection, and the sonnet is variously stretched, squashed and bent out of shape, though most people stick to at least one of the rules, even if it's only the 14 line rule, or the volta, or that peculiar out-of-balance octet/sestet division that makes it still so fascinating. There are poems and poets I don't get on with yet, but that's true of any anthology. A lovely Christmas present for the post avant poet and linguistically innovative chaps and chapesses out there.

Speaking of presents, I have recently reached the grand old age of 50. Time to lift my old willow wand to the crowd to acknowledge the applause of the crowd at reaching my first fifty. And I bet you never expected a cricket reference from me, did you?

Remembrance and Hypocrisy

Anybody else out there feel that all this Remembrance stuff that's all over the place is a teeny weeny bit hypocritical? Here we are again, remembering the "heroic sacrifice" of the First World War, while another set of young men go out to the Gulf and Afghanistan to be "heroic sacrifices" in another pointless war.

All those young men who died on the Somme (including among them, ancestors of my own family) didn't die for a great cause. Let us be clear about this: they died in vain, to support the flawed values of a bunch of tired empires trying to prop themselves up by killing young people. They were not heroes, great warriors going in to battle evil dragons; they were ordinary working people who died in their millions to uphold the great dragon of British imperialism. The Germans who they fought were also ordinary working men upholding their own dragon of imperialism. They were no doubt terribly loyal and patriotic and, like the well-brought up young people they were, they did as they were told.

But they were sold a lie. Just as the young men (often, in the case of American troops at least, poor and ill-educated) who march off to Iraq and Afghanistan are now. Watching the black-uniformed officers marching up to the Cenotaph to lay their wreaths makes me kind of sick. These people - or at least the politicians who declare wars - are still sending young men to die for British imperialism, pretending that it's a great sacrifice, invoking God and Christ as being on "our side", and it's just as much a lie now as it was then.

But there are still some brave souls who refuse. The conscientious objectors who refused to "go for a soldier", who refused to obey orders, who refused to prop up the dragon of hatred, prejudice and greed that is still what imperialism means, deserve to be saluted. They deserve their own monument. Refusing to kill is every bit as brave as going out to kill your "enemy." In fact, it's braver. Who is my enemy anyway? An ordinary Iraqi who gets in the way of a bullet? A young German man who's just come from the fields to die in another field?

Geeks and Elites

I went twice last week to the Fab Cafe in Manchester, a place dedicated to cult TV and what it calls "independent" music. It made me think some rather naughty thoughts.

There I was, basically in a crowd of geeks, people who could tell you cast lists and continuity errors in Doctor Who or Star Wars, who could talk the hindleg off a donkey about Star Wars, and I wondered, are poets like this too? Except, of course, we're interested in "high culture", not the "low culture" of long-running TV series that are perhaps not the most intellectually stimulating of programmes.

Except - they do often deal in quite poetic themes about the nature of reality, of time, even of memory. There are often quite complex themes about the nature of what we call life - is a pan-dimensional cloud of glass "alive" in any way, for instance?

I used to read science fiction all the time, and now I rarely do. Nowadays, I read an enormous amount of poetry. Most poets like to put themselves as rather superior to science-fiction fans, especially the kind of fan that dresses up as a Klingon. Yet being passionate about our art is exactly what makes us poets. Fandom is, perhaps, rather secondhand; someone else has usually done the writing, unless you become one of the many who write their own stories as an adjunct to the franchise; even then you're just slotting into an already established format. Rather like neo-formalist poets, he suggests with a tongue wedged firmly in his cheek...

One thing that fans have in their favour is that nobody ever suggests that their interest in and love of a science-fiction series is ever called "elitist", unlike those of us who are interested in "high art." Whether that "high art" is contemporary visual art, classical music, opera, or poetry (especially of the difficult late-modernist variety), it's assumed that if you like something that only a minority like, it must be "elitist."

But it's really no more elitist than watching every episode of Blake's Seven 10 times. Or prefering Tom Baker to David Tennant. We may like to think of ourselves as being concerned with more important ideas to do with language, culture etc etc etc, but I often wonder if a good science fiction story isn't as much concerned with those as poetry is.

Of course, all this could just be a temporal shift anomaly and really we're still back in Kansas.

Conscientious Objectors, Richmond Jail

Today I saw something truely humbling. I was looking at the archives of the Northern Friends Peace Board, getting them ready to deposit in a library, and came across a series of photos taken in the '70's, I think, of the graffiti by conscientious objectors in Richmond Jail.

I came across these two verses, by one HE Hancocks, of Sheffield, from June 21st 1915:

Ez for war I calls it murder
There you has it plain & flat
And I ain't to go no furder
Than me testimint fur that

If yer takes a sword and drors it
And go sticks a feller thro'
Gov'ment ain't to answer fur it
God'll send the bill to you.

Not great poetry, I suppose, but heartfelt nontheless. It made me realise even more that poetry's in everyone's soul, not just in the mind of the clever, and when people are in extremis, they don't turn to prose. No doubt they'll not put this in any anthology of first world war poetry, most of which seem to ignore the conscientious objectors, but this is just as meaningful to me as anything by Owen, and shows that not everyone buys into war propaganda, in any age.

I don't know what happened to Mr Hancock, or how far he suffered for his beliefs; but I salute him: fellow poet, fellow human, fellow child of God.

Two Readings Reviewed

Two readings proved instructive this week. Another installment of The Other Room, with Joy As Senseless Vandalism, David Annwyn and Caroline Bergvall, and The Poetry Party. I'm afraid, in the end, I prefered the first, the more avant garde of the two. But they both had their interests.

JASV were a bit scrappily presented, with photographs and accompanying poems (or is that the other way around) but apart from that, they produced some interesting material - a combination of found material, list poetry and visual pun. David Annwyn was wonderfully lively and physical in his reading style, reading poems about figures of the avant garde like Mina Loy and others. It was lovely stuff, wonderfully presented. Caroline Bergvall was a quieter figure, reading from her Salt book, Figs, and poems such as Fuses; but the effect if anything was more charged; these were wonderful conceptual pieces which were full not just of subject matter, but the substance of language, the way it drives meaning into other areas.

It was a wonderful evening again at the Old Oak,

The Poetry Party has visions of balloons, or perhaps a meeting of lefties in an upstairs room in a pub. It was more like the latter, though, like the Old Oak, it was a packed room. It also had music, unlike the Old Oak, though I left before the last band, dischuffed that I hadn't been able to last long enough for the open mike. I was just too tired and had to go to work.

But the poetry: best of a mixed bunch was Micheal Wilson, who actually pitched his reading just right. His poems were deep enough to intrigue, and his memnonic devices didn't just include rhyme; I noticed that he looped in several refrains and iterative devices into his poems. Plus, there was something of the Dylan Thomas about his writing that was lovely. John G. Hall himself was his usual self; wonderfully vituperative, spitting out his poems with real energy.

Sophie McKeown was one of the two guest, and she was very lively and again political; but her over-reliance on rhyme and a rather obvious plain style was a bit wearing for me. I couldn't agree more with her sentiment, but wish that the language wasn't so ordinary, that there was something of the same energy in her words as there is in her performance.

Abie D'Olivera read a long poem from someone else to start with; it was a strong piece about the Troubles that apparently was written in the '80's. And therefore, I'm afraid, rather dated; though it had a very Ginsberg energy to the words. In fact, there was something of Ginsberg and other Beat poets in her poems; though on the whole they seemed to drag (something true of Ginsberg at times) and repeat themselves rather too much. A good poet who needs an editor, methinks. Sometimes the poems were very powerful, full of emotion and anger.

But her performance was something else. If there were Oscars for over-acting she would be nominated. Her poems are quite dramatic enough, especially the one about being beaten up, without the theatrics. If ever there was a case for reigning back the performance in order to pay attention to the words, it's that poem. Some element of intonation and performance is a good thing, but I often feel that the more dramatic the writing is, the less you need to perform it. It's rather like a Whitney Houston song: too much vibrato ruining a perfectly good tune.

I prefered the Other Room because it's mostly my cup of tea. But it's good to know that not all performance poetry evenings are full of dull attempts to shock or tubthumping.

Collage World

I watched a weekend of Arts TV on BBC 4 this weekend: old issues of Arena, Omnibus and Monitor; interviews with Henry Moore, Orson Welles, and a wonderfully oddball programme about Pop Art directed by Ken Russell. A programme about Picasso, an edition of Civilisation, and the wonderful Ways of Seeing with John Berger.

In it, the sadly neglected figure of Pauline Boty was featured, showing some of her collages, and she helped me to complete a painting I've been doing for ages, by incorporating some collage. I don't paint much, and it takes me ages to see where the painting is going; so that was an evening well spent. Thank you BBC.

Collage, I suspect, is pretty much the twentieth century art form. That, and its sculptural equivalent, assemblage, seems to be what the art world does best these days: disparate elements drawn in to make something new. (The turner prize is full of assemblage and collage, and very little straight painting.) From Ernst's collages made from old etchings down even to Tracey Emin's Bed, art these days has more to do with picking up the bits and pieces from life and putting them together, not into an order, so much as a jigsaw of pieces missing, and pieces from other jigsaws. It doesn't make much sense, because it can't make much sense, because our lives are often cobbled together from disparate elements. A bit of religion or anti-religion, a bit of politics, a bit of New Age, a curiously reactionary bit there; it's not exactly a fully-worked through philosophy, more a kind of smorgasbord of found ideas.

Poetry's version of the collage is the cut-up, or it could be these days, flarf. It makes a new set of relations from the materials we make. Sometimes, we collage our own writing when we make one poem out of more than one; or we collage our experience when we don't write about one thing but about many at the same time. Simultaneity, as Appollinaire might have put it, is everywhere. We flip channels; in fact, perhaps the most potent symbol of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century could well be the TV remote and the set-top box.

Keeping Up

Does anybody else feel like they're not reading the "right"poets? I sometimes get the feeling that because I don't go out and get the latest Faber or Picador poet, that I must be out of the loop. I know it's impossible to keep up; but then there's still the pressure to read "what everybody else is reading."

And then there's all the young poets. I should be keeping up with them, surely... Not really. Some.

And I'm probably missing some good poetry. I know that the few poems by Nick Laird that I've read in magazines have been enjoyable; but I wonder if I could read a whole book of them. Instead, I get hold of a review copy of Robert Shepherd's Complete Twentieth Century Blues because that's the one I want to read. It's like I'm deliberately being awkward. If Sean O'Brien or Don Paterson are bringing out a new collection, I may get around to it one day; but I'm too busy ordering the latest by Geraldine Monk.

I might even enjoy their books. But not as much as the new Geraldine Monk; or the little pamphlet of Rupert Loydell poems he's just sent me. There's a massive amount of poetry out there, and the majority of it doesn't float my boat particularly. But I don't feel like dissing it either; most of it will appeal to someone, and most poets have their coterie of readers who can't wait for their next publication.

Nevertheless, there is still the vague feeling of not reading enough, especially when I read that Roddy Lumsden reads 100 books-plus a year and I look at the long list of Books Recieved on Ron Silliman's blog. Some of them even look really interesting. And that's not to mention all the poets from earlier ages I've not read yet. People have been recommending Wyatt; and if I can find an edition that's not too expensive, I might well have a go...

But, first, I'm not made of money. Second, I have other jobs to do. Third, there has to be time to relax, take in the world outside of poetry, sleep, eat, listen to music, stare at the ceiling/stars and even, dare I say it, write. So I don't feel that bad.

Sheer Numbers

One of the things Ron Silliman is frequently commenting on is the question of numbers. There are now more poets writing than there are ever were before. Is this a good thing, or are we going to see a decline in quality because of so much quantity?

Certainly, it's impossible to read all this poetry, unless you spend 24 hours a day reading it all and have a private income big enough to buy all the books (or you're important enough to get them all sent free to you...) And where would you put them? I have to have regular a clearout just to provide some space to put the books...

And there are so many different kinds of poetry - or writings that come under the banner of poetry in some way - from highly experimental to highly traditional, and every combination in between. If I feel personally that England at least produces rather too much bland quietist verse, there's still plenty out there to keep me interested. Poets I think I ought to be reading, and haven't got round to, poets I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot bargepole, poets I might find interesting if I had the time.

Then there are the poets I ought to discover that have been forgotten about. There's a new anthology of Mervyn Peake's poetry that looks fascinating - a good addition, I think, to my collection of forgotten '40's poets. There's soem poems in an article about Nicholas Moore in PN Review that look really good.

How do we evaluate it all? Most of it will probably not last - but then some will be forgotten forever, some will get rediscovered, some will get reforgotten. Some big names now will disappear, I suspect.

I ought to be reading more Peter Riley, for instance. He sounds fascinating from the recent article in PN Review - just up my street. But when will I get the time?

The Other Room

Barely a week since my last post, and here I am again. What's going on?

Well, despite a summer cold (aren't they the worst?) I ventured out to the Other Room, a reading series in a pub behind Manchester University, last night. And very glad I am I went, though it's a shame that one of the readers, Philip Davenport, wasn't able to make it. The two other readers, Maggie O'Sullivan and Stuart Calton, were there however.

From what I've seen in anthologies, I haven't quite got Maggie O'Sullivan's work yet, but her performance last night went a long way towards me beginning to appreciate her work. It seems to straddle various strands of avant garde poetry. There's a large element of "radical pastoral" that one can see also in poets like Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Geraldine Monk; but also a large element of pure sound in the work. It's interesting that the book of early work she brought with her was called "Body of Work", but it does have a very physical element to it; this is a poetry concerned as much with the physical articulation of sound as with "meaning." It seems to be to be very "instinctual"; as opposed to a more "calculated" approach. Which doesn't mean that there wasn't a very feirce intellect behind the words, because there certainly was. Although I don't want to make too obvious a connection, it's something I also find in poets such as Geraldine Monk and Micheal Haslam; although all of them have a strong intellectual basis for their work, there's something untamed about them, a kind of wandering spirit that seeks to go beneath the surface of the world and bring something elemental back.

Stuart Calton, on the other hand, seemed to be a much more calculated poet. The two long pieces he read were sometimes funny, very involved, fragmented narratives and arguments with a strong political bent. The second poem was about the Co-Op, in fact, which he is ambivalent about. Although this was very definitely non-mainstream, this was on the surface much more controlled and probably represents the more politically-charged end of the non-mainstream as represented most publically by Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady and Barque Press. It was difficult to understand, but also fascinating, and I enjoyed his performance, especially the halting way he sometimes spoke half-phrases and sentences. I bought one of his pamphlets, so I can pore over it and seek a way through it.

All in all, a fascinating evening. The Other Room is a good series to have in Manchester; we've had so much mainstream poetry for years, it's good to have something rather stranger at last.

Improvisation

Since last time I was here, I've been on holiday, a writing holiday to the beautiful Isle of Arran, and I wrote 4 poems there. But I was thinking recently about improvisation (I've just written a review of the Manchester Jazz Festival for Jazzwise magazine.) How does it relate to poetry?

If you're writing a poem that fits a particular shape, say a sonnet, then improvisation is less important: like a piece of music, you have a particular shape that it fits into (sonata form, symphony, or the generic pop song.) But you still manipulate that shape, twist it into slightly different shapes, otherwise what you have is the same as everyone else. But if you break too far away from the basic shape, then it stops being recognisable as a sonnet, and becomes something else. That's where poetic improvisation comes in: the poem starts to develop a shape that the author isn't aware of before starting the writing.

It happens too with subject matter: if one sets out writing about one thing, one may end up writing about something wholly other. Ashbery's poems always seem to me to set off in one place and end up somewhere else, because he doesn't have a subject to start off with. He has an atmosphere, perhaps, a form of words. These lead somewhere but he's not strictly in control of it, he's let go of that control. Perhaps that's what improvisation in poetry: letting go of the controls and letting the poem lead the writer.

In Arran, I found myself writing a poem out of one of the workshops that didn't fit any shape at all. It was free-form, even open-form - even the left-hand margin wasn't sacrosanct. Then I cut a heart-shaped hole in the front page of the Observer's business page, and wrote down what was found there. I also used quotes from songs. The shape was arrived at, not because it was decided on beforehand, but because it felt right. There was no idea of what was going to be said even.

Later, the poem was revised to jazz music. Some things were changed, others stayed the same. Revision wasn't done with the idea of trying to make it tidier, but with the idea of making it truer to the moment of writing. It felt organic (Denise Levertov's essay on Organic Form comes to mind!) and I didn't feel entirely in control. Quite an exhilarating experience.

Some pictures from my recent trip to Arran.

The English Line

Rachel Fox has asked me for my definition of "English poetry," one that include Nick Laird (an Irish poet) and Andrew Motion.

It's a difficult question to answer, and I think now that it might be better to talk of the "quietist" poem. Not as in Ron Silliman's rather pejorative "School of Quietude", which is largely a rhetorical device to dismiss a lot of poets who don't fit into his notion of the "post-avant" (I see he now wants to try to encompass flarf & conceptual poetry in the same set as Ojectivism and the New York School.)

But I think it's a good description of what the English Line (to use Neil Corcoran's useful phrase) is about to call it "quietist." Here are a few characteristics I've picked out:

The quietist poem tends to be discrete, both in its aversion to extreme statement, and in the tendency for the poem to be a discrete unit in itself, unlike, say, the often messy, open-ended non-mainstream poem. There's a tendency to irony, to not expressing strong emotion.
The quetist poem tends to be written in a largely rational form, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Its syntax tends to be normative.

The quietist poem tends to be "about something" reasonably discernible - that is, it has one or two subjects and tends to stick with them. The non-mainstream tendency to drift from subject to subject, to slip between meaning and nonsense, is not much in evidence.

Use of chance techniques, improvisation, collage, is not something your average quietist poem will countenance much. Direct use of material taken from popular culture (as in flarf) or technical literature is generally frowned on, though pop cultural references can be used, as long as they're filtered through the quietist frame. Visually, left-justified is favourite, and the visual poem isn't generally seen. It's more like classical music than jazz, for instance. Not that there can't be surprise, as there is in classical music, but the resources for surprise are limited by the form.

These are just a few things I think distinguish the "quietist" poem. There are some very fine poets who fit right in here, so I'm trying not to be dismissive. Not every poem that can be identified as "quietist" will be entirely so. Not everything is as quietist as it appears.

I hope that answers the question, as well as bringing up a whole host of more questions than it answers.

Maintaining the Crumbling House

I came across this rather intriguing comment the other day by Jon Stone, on Todd Smith's Eyewear blog:

In seeming very dismissive of the mere fact of the English postulating on
an English tradition that needs to be maintained,

I wondered about what it might be saying for quite some time, and still don't know what it means. "An English tradition that needs to be maintained" sounds as if something is under threat, or fragile, or vulnerable to dry rot. It makes poetry (for that is "the tradition" of which we speak) sound like one of those old manorial fastnesses that need to be maintained by the National Trust. All very nice and historic, but not exactly relevant to the modern world.

I'm sure it's not the intention of Jon Stone to make English poetry sound like this; it's the kind of thing you say in a blog comments stream, not a considered argument. But it nevertheless does continue the postulation that English poetry (as opposed to American, say, or Australian) is somehow under attack. From whom? And what is this English tradition that is under attack?

Well, it's very rarely the English tradition of radical dissent: the Diggers, the Quakers, the Chartists, the peasant balladeers, the trades unionists, the Blakeans etc. It's usually some notion of what I can only call an Anglican compromise: middle-brow, middle-of-the-road, middling and conservative with a small c. It's certainly not the "extremism" so-called of the experimentalists: open-form, open-ended, frequently messy and unclean. It's certainly one English tradition - and it shouldn't be gainsaid that there are some great examples. Edward Thomas is a great example, and more recently, Nick Laird.

But I don't see how it is under fire. Sure, it's probably having to compete with a more open poetics, it's having to absorb a few more influences. But - rather like the English language itself - surely it can do that without having to "maintain" itself. The great thing about poetry is its ability to both continually renew itself - often in the past through translation and cultural exchange - while staying in contact with its past. And its past ought also to contain a few more of those dissenting voices (like the '40's Apocalyptics, for instance) than it does now.

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.