Some Thoughts Around The Red Wheelbarrow

I recently posted a couple of 'experimental' poems on writeoutloud.net. One was William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. Some positive comments, but some negative ones too.

1) Some people seem terribly suspicious that people are being fooled by these types of poems. They, however, are 'immune' from this, because they've guarded their imaginations against this somehow. What they can't seem to realise is that some people actually enjoy that kind of stuff and seem to be of the opinion that their taste is the only legitimate taste. The emperor may have no clothes, but maybe he really wanted to be a naturist...

2) Poetry for some seems to exist withing very carefully defined barriers, and what's outside 'isn't poetry'. Others have much more fluid boundaries, and others still seem to almost have no boundaries. It seems important to some to have these boundaries, but to others it's not as important.

3) Ideas of authority - who gets to define what poetry is/isn't - seem to bother some people a lot. There are questions of tradition around this too: as if Western white male poetic tradition were the only 'legitimate' tradition, and, say, Chinese womens' poetry, or African praise song, or haiku, say, were not really poetry.

4) How to define 'good' and 'bad' poetry seems to bother some people. What is bad poetry when any form is allowed, a poem can be visual or sound-based and still be a poem? For me, bad poetry is whatever sets my teeth on edge.

5) The question of meaning is another difficult area. A poem that doesn't have much meaning, or in which there is real difficulty working out what it does mean, seems to bother some people. Though in fact these problems are opposites, they both seem to be bothersome. If it's either too simple (like The Red Wheelbarrow) or too difficult (JH Prynne perhaps) it's somehow keeping out its audience.

6) It seems to bother some that some poetry is not going to be enjoyed by everybody, or a lot of people. Accusations of 'elitism' come up; as if somehow you're only supposed to like what everybody else likes. But most of us who like experimental poetry probably like it much the same way that we might like Thai food; because we like it. Because it gives us good feelings or experiences. Or we might prefer Captain Beefheart to Kylie Minogue because we just prefer that kind of music. Insert your own likes/dislikes.

Wot No Philip Larkin?

After so long away, what else can I do but give you a list of all the British modernist poets you really should read before you die? (Note: it doesn't include Seamus Heaney or Simon Armitage.) In my ever so humble opinion, of course...


Lee Harwood,
Denise Riley,
Geraldine Monk,
Tony Lopez,
Carol Watts,
Maggie O'Sullivan,
Roy Fisher,
Allen Fisher,
Tom Raworth,
Robert Shepherd,
Frances Presley,
Gael Turnbull,
Edwin Morgan,
Harry Guest,
Kelvin Corcoran,
Nicholas Moore,
Douglas Oliver,
Lynette Roberts,
Mina Loy,
Barry MacSweeney,
Hamish Henderson,
Peter Riley,
John Riley,
David Jones,
Douglas Oliver,
Elaine Randel,
Wendy Mulford,
Dylan Thomas,
Peter Finch,
Christopher Middleton,
Ken Edwards,
Andrew Crozier,
Veronica Forrest-Thompson

and I can't think of any more for the time being. But that's just the basics, and only includes the ones I've personally got to grips with. So no JH Prynne (apart from Kitchen Poems and a few others.) I will continue to edit this list and increase it when my memory gets better...

I haven't included a lot of the younger poets and there's obviously names missing that ought to be there; but if you're going to pretend to be any kind of expert on British poetry and haven't read at 10 of these poets, then who are you kidding? Get to a library immediately.

'Exclusive?' Or just a safe space?

I went to Writers' Forum (New Series) in London on Saturday. A really good event, even if extremely male dominated (there were no women readers.) People read from their work, not in any order, but sort of 'as the spirit moved them' - rather in the manner of a Quaker Meeting, which apparently the founder and eminence grise of the original series was when he set it up way back in the late '50's, early '60's.

It was great to hear so much new avant garde poetry, in the lovely atmosphere of the Fox pub not far from Old Street. Next time I go, I'd love to visit Bunhill Fields, Blake's old stomping ground, which is five minutes away.

On the way back, Gareth Twose and I talked about a problem we have with our own small version of Writers' Forum in Manchester. We have someone coming along who is not in the least bit avant garde, in fact is more in the manner of Pam Ayres than anything else. Nothing wrong with that, of course,  but it isn't avant garde. He said we shouldn't declare ourselves as avant garde because it might 'exclude people'.

Well, we've decided against this: we're going to, in all publicity, make sure that this is known as an avant garde space. For two reasons: one, to enable those who are interested in avant garde and experimental poetry to come to a space where they can present their work in a supportive atmosphere; and two, to exclude those who have no sympathy with the kind of writing we're interested in doing.

Which sounds terribly elitist, doesn't it? The problem is that there are precious few places where avant garde and experimental writing can find a supportive space, one where you're not immediately derided for producing something that doesn't fit into either the mainstream bracket or the performance bracket. Or not derided, but patronised, or looked at with general incomprehension. I don't think any of us set out to be 'difficult'; but the number of times I've heard work that I value and love dismissed as 'emperor's new clothes' or 'just chucking words on a page' is legion, I'm afraid.

Having tried to fit into many poetry groups over the years, where everyone was talking about Simon Armitage while I was reading Ashbery and other Americans, I know how it feels to feel excluded. Not that anyone is trying to exclude you; but the baffled looks when you mention some of the greatest English poets currently writing kind of get to you after awhile. I make no apologies anymore when I say that Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Geraldine Monk and Maggie O'Sullivan have written greater poems than anything that Heaney, Duffy, Larkin or Armitage could ever manage.

I don't think that the avant garde should lock themselves into their nice safe spaces and never engage with the rest of the world. Of course they should. But they should also be able to talk to one another and exchange ideas without always having to explain themselves, and that's why Writers' Forum (North) is a space for experimentation and avant garde explorations. If you have an interest in that, in any form and however you define those terms, do come along to the workshops. They are open to all; though perhaps they are not for all.

Review: Lung Jazz, Young British Poets for Oxfam

There's been a blizzard of books and features about 'young poets' over the past few years. There's a new generation of poets that are, apparently, blowing new breezes through the poetry world at the moment. 'Lung Jazz' joins two Bloodaxe anthologies, The Salt Book of Younger Poets, a Penned In The Margins Book, and a feature in Rialto magazine in attempting a generational survey of the poetry 'scene'.

Its task is made a bit more difficult by only assigning one poem per poet; and it's harder to assess a poet's possible contribution to the new generation from one poem rather than from a selection. Todd Swift would have us believe, rightly bigging up his own choice, that these will be the poets to read in the future. Well, some of them will be some of the poets to read in the future: inevitably, there are so many young poets around these days, that no one anthology can contain all of them.

Already, there are some names that could be said to be ubiquitous. Luke Kennard, Chris McCabe, Amy De'Ath, Joe Dunthorne and Ahren Warner are all here; though Sophie Robinson is missing. Emily Berry is here too, and other newly-familiar names, all with good poems. In fact, this anthology has a lot of good poems; though there are a few indifferent ones, there's nothing really bad. Perhaps a reflection of the creative writing boom: there are a lot of young poets now writing 'good poems'.

All well and good; but what's missing from this anthology is also significant. There are a lot of poems here in which all the feelings and ideas have been packaged into neat and tidy little boxes, complete in themselves and often perfectly livable in. "Little boxes, little boxes, and they all look just the same." Even the ostensibly more experimental poets here, like Emily Critchley and Amy De'Ath, look rather too tidy here. Partly the nature of the beast: one poem per person tends to favour the individual poem against the sequence, or the fragment.

But there is precious little political poetry here: though it does exist, as anyone who's experienced the work of Stuart Calton and Sean Bonney can testify. The collectives around Oppened and The Other Room, and other experimental reading series, are scarcely represented. Of course, they may well have felt that it wasn't for them, or have ideological reasons for not participating (as they often do...)

OK, no one anthology can represent everything, and it probably represents the rather more mainstream to hybrid tastes of the editors. But you can't really be representative of young British poets without them, however good your selection is.

There are significant inclusions however: and this includes prose poetry. The rise of the prose poem in the last decade is one of the more interesting developments in modern British poetry, and there are about a dozen in this selection. Phil Brown's Health & Safety and Siddartha Bose's The Muckworm are my two personal favourites; but the others are great too. They perhaps make the book less tidy than it otherwise would be.

Which brings me to the introduction, a little. The poems are described as 'original, formally skillful and, in some way, thrilling.' Which is about right for most of them; but I think, worryingly, gets its priorities slightly wrong. 'Formally skillful,' in particular, suggests there is a particular skillset that a poet has to 'master' before becoming a 'good poet'. Formal skill is important; but it doesn't in itself make for a thrilling poem.

One further comment. I find it odd that no-one in this anthology seems to be acknowledging the Internet for its formal possibilities. Many of these poets are on Facebook, Twitter and are no doubt familiar with Google and other forms abound on the net. Helen Mort's marvelously disturbing Thinspiration Shots is the only poem which gets its subject matter directly from the Internet, but how about the poem as status updates, twitter feeds etc...? There are poets using flarf, for instance, as inspiration; but you wouldn't guess it from this anthology.

All of which is not to gainsay the poetry in this book. Which on the whole is very good. Despite some reservations, I'd recommend everyone buying a copy of this book from your local Oxfam. Partly because that way, all the money goes to Oxfam; but also because it does give a very good idea of a lot of what is going on in the poetry world. Just not everything.

And there's some great poems in it too.

Vain Attempt to map British poetry

Yesterday, I attempted to put down in a map all the different influences/tendencies/movements I'd heard of in British poetry over the last 60 or so years, and came up with this list (in no particular order):

Formalist, fractured narrative, eco-poetry, comic, New York, Lang-Po, linguistically innovative, vispo, concrete, narrative, sound, Movement & Post-movement, the Group, post-modernist, performative, conceptual, issue-based (gay, feminist, black, political), modernist & late modernist, British Poetry Revival, New Gen, nationalist/regional (Scotish, Welsh, North-South etc), free verse, confessional, nature mysticism, metaphysical religious/spiritual, collage, prose poetry, conventional lyric, neo-dada/surrealist, oulipo, urban pastoral, pastoral, radical landscape, landscape, flarf, Cambridge school, avant garde, performance, London school, black mountain/objectivist, Facebook poets, devotional, amateur, card verse.

I've probably missed lots of movements and tendencies, and conflated some together (as in issues-based and regional), and I'd appreciate any additions to the list. I wrote this on a landscape piece of paper, and scattered them across the page. These would be the towns and villages of the map, and different poets would make their own routes through them. My own route would start at devotional (I was a born again Christian trying to convert "the lost") and end up somewhere in the linguistically innovative, via conventional lyric, New Gen and urban pastoral.

Why is it important to do this? Well, I think if you're going to assess a visual poet, you can assess him or her by the same values as you assess a post-Movement poet. They're not going to share very many values in common. Yet they would still both call themselves poets. It's also why there's really no such thing as 'just poetry'.

Some Comments On Bad Poetry

Someone said on Facebook recently that "bad poetry is barely poetry."

I wonder what this means.

All poets worth their salt probably write more bad poetry than good poetry. What is really bad stays in notebooks, or gets thrown in the bin, or doesn't survive. But is it still poetry? I confess I don't really know...

But sometimes the definition of 'bad poetry' is more like 'the kind of stuff that I don't connect with'. A poem, say, at the extreme end of experimentalism such as Aram Saroyan's

 "lighght" 

(that's the whole poem, by the way, not just the title.) How is that a poem? is the question that gets asked, frequently, at great length sometimes.

Yet for others, that definitely is a poem. They also speak at great length about what it means: they talk of the 'flicker' of the word like a lightbulb flickering. The one side thinks the other is mad, or a con, or taking the piss.

'Taking the piss' might of course be a perfectly legitimate reason for writing a poem, good or bad.

Then there is the other end of the "is it really poetry?" debate, where the Patience Strong and the Purple Ronnie poems sit. Are they really poems, or just (contemptuous sneer at the ready) "verse"?

What I think is bad, what you think is bad, are probably two different things. But it's too easy to dismiss something I don't like as "not really poetry." It makes me feel good to dismiss whole swathes of writing into the outer darkness. But if poetry is a field (rhizometric), rather than a single line, then I don't think we can easily dismiss as "barely poetry" whatever section of the poetry world we don't happen to connect with.

Some Gentle Thoughts on Gentility: A Quiet Word

There was an interesting review in the London Review of Books recently about the exhibition, Picasso in England, at Tate Britain. this exhibition pits Picasso against his English imitators, which include Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and others. It's obvious who comes off the best: there are few painters of the 20th Century who come anywhere close to Picasso; but when I went to see it, I didn't think the English painters did all that badly.

The reviewer of the LRB, however, went for the usual argument that the trouble with the English was their gentility. Picasso took risks and was revolutionary and did things that no-one else would dare; while the British 'prettied things up' and made a much more modest modernism that was more acceptable to the patrons and buyers in Britain. Britain as usual is portrayed as being suspicious of Modernism, hanging back and trying to incorporate a more 'traditional' approach.

Well, yes, there is some force in this argument; but it's also somewhat unfair to suppose that British artists were always hampered by their 'gentility'. Ben Nicholson, for instance, was not just influenced by Picasso, but  by the neo-plasticism of Mondrian, the 'folk art' of an old sea-dog and other things. His pictures have a quiet grace about them that insinuates itself into your head. Graham Sutherland's tortured landscapes are not conventionally pretty, and seem as influenced by his Catholicism as by Picasso.

We English people have a habit of doing ourselves down. Self-deprecating humour was probably invented by an Englishman. We also like to think of ourselves as somewhat apart from what is going on elsewhere. Sometimes, our modernist instincts are quieter, less noisy than, say, Cubism or Dada; despite its desperate attempts to be radical, Vorticism seems like a late guest to the party, who's only dressing up in radical chic.

Sometimes European and American modernism can seem a bit shouty: look at how radical I'm being!!! Sometimes we need to shout more, and not be so gentle.

With poetry, I find myself loving the quietness of a poet like Lee Harwood; whereas I've only ever been able to admire Charles Olson's more insistently radical poetry. Again, with Roy Fisher, I find a quietly insistent voice, not an inyerface shouty man on a soapbox, which is how Olson sometimes comes across.

Gentility definitely has its bad side: too many mainstream poems read like 'polite literature', not really saying very much. Not that you could accuse Larkin of gentility; but many of his followers seem like they'd never frighten anyone's horses. Edward Thomas is the very model of a modest voice; which is all very well, and no-one can deny he was a good poet. Not, I think, a great one though; because, like so many mainstream poets, he was afraid to take risks. He rejected Pound because he was too scared of the opinions of others.

So: I do like the gentleness one sometimes finds in English poets, at least some of the time (though there are radical poets like Maggie O'Sullivan and Geraldine Monk for whom that's not a good adjective.) But I dislike the way much mainstream poetry is almost afraid of its own shadow. Explore the shadow of your English reserve, however, and you may just find something deeper than the nicely modest poetry of an Andrew Motion.

Some Notes on Collage

I was reading the first chapter of Ian Davidson's "Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry" yesterday. It made the point that collage is probably the 20th Century's main contribution to avant garde technique. Introduced by the Cubists in the period 1911-13, then taken up by Dadaists, Surrealists, installation artists and all manner of modern artists, it's almost become part of the atmosphere of contemporary visual art.

It's also been a part of modernist poetry and non-mainstream poetry right from the off. From T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Zukovsky and many Dadaist poets, through to the present day poets like Tony Lopez, who use it as a large part of their practice.

For me, it's become almost second nature. I'm either cutting up my own words, or cutting up articles from newspapers, writing down and rearranging overheard conversations, mixing in slogans from shop windows, flarfing (using phrases from webpages) or making use of found material.

The effect of this is to attempt to get away from the chronological, to the poem as a kind of field, in which interesting encounters of sound, meaning and image can be found. It also - hopefully - helps to reader to complete the poem for themselves. The number of possible meanings is increased; but none of the meanings are complete, and all are subject to uncertainty.

Collage is paratactic: it puts things side by side to see how they feel together. It juxtaposes, it disturbs settled orders, it creates coincidences and relationships between things and words that weren't there before. It can shift register sometimes mid-sentence, burst out in all directions, imitate the semiotic overload of contemporary culture, confuse and dazzle.

Finally, here's Tristan Tzara's instructions on writing poetry:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Some Thoughts on Issue Poetry

So this was prompted by reading a poem in which a mother celebrates the engagement of her son. A rather dull poem on the whole - except the son's fiance is a man. Oh, I think, an Issue Poem. She can't have been unaware of the implications of what is an explicit reference to The Gay Issue (see how I use those capital letters.) It must be deliberate - to highlight the issue of Gay Marriage.

Except, reading the poem, it isn't really. It conveys a mother's delight at her son's happiness, that is all. But because the son is gay, it becomes an Issue. Then I think of all those gay and lesbian poets who talk about their boyfriends or girlfriends, their love affairs and encounters, and wonder what my reaction says about me. I think of John Ash's poems Following A Man or Cigarettes, two wonderful poems about his gay experience, or I think about Thom Gunn's poetry about his experience, and how uneasily they actually fit into the boxes that we have a tendency to put Issue Poems in.

I also realise that I'm still at the back of my mind bothered by the idea of poetry being about issues. It could be any issue: peace for instance. As a lifelong pacifist, I've written relatively few poems about peace. I also consider myself to be a "person of faith": how do I write about that without coming across as strident, or preachy? So far, I've found one solution in using collaged voices; but there's probably other solutions. I'm wary of too much message, because I've learnt over the years that this is A Bad Thing. I also don't like being preached at even when I agree with the message.

Really, what makes Thom Gunn a good poet is his humanity, his honesty and the accuracy of his observation; but the fact of his sexuality is not a by-the-by; it's part and parcel of who he is; just as my straightness is part of who I am. In the past, gay people used a lot of coding and hidden symbolism because it was illegal to be gay. Nowadays, you can say what you like; except, if you do, you will immediately be classified as an Issue Poet. Thom Gunn wrote about being Thom Gunn, not about Being Gay (again with the capital letters!*); and his poetry was all the better for it. Apart from possibly Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer and a few others, I think he was one of the earliest poets who didn't cloak his sexuality in symbols.

One day, maybe, the sexuality of a poet will be something so boring as to be hardly worth noting; or at least be acceptably normal. Until that day, my reaction to the rather dull poem I started with might be repeated: oh dear it's an Issue Poem.

* A note on Capital Letters: of course, all poets who are not white, anglo-saxon middle class males are going to at some point be accused of being an Adjective-Poet. White Anglo Saxon middle class male poetry is, as we all know, "just poetry". If you happen to mention your colour, gender, sexuality or class anywhere in your work, or if you are in anyway experimental, you are an Insert Correct Adjective Poet. That is a Fact of Life.

Some Thoughts On Quirkiness

I've been told my poetry is 'quirky' a lot over the years. Here's what the Urban Dictionary says about that:

quirky	737 up, 162 down
	something that is strange/not normal but cool Wearing long stripy socks that are odd...
2.	quirky	426 up, 198 down
	Unconventional, surprising, odd. A word often used by narcissistic scenesters when they describe their oh-so-unique selves in their Livejournal user info pages in attempts to sound like interesting people. It is a word best used by one person to describe another. Those who apply "quirky" to themselves thereby call into question their very own "quirkiness" by seeming gleefully self-aware (just like everyone else).

I've never called myself that, so I hope part two doesn't really apply to me. I am, I guess, attracted to the unconventional, surprising and odd. I've never worn long stripy socks that are odd, though. Maybe I should start...

I'm sure that's meant as a compliment, but I always feel slightly uncomfortable with the term. A lot of the poetry I read is only odd to people who don't normally come across things like that. When I read Tom Raworth or Geraldine Monk, I don't think, "I say, this is rather quirky, isn't it?" It seems to be the way things should be written. It attracts me in a way that a straightforward narrative doesn't; it just seems natural that is the way the world is.

Oddness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Those of us attracted to modernist/postmodernist practices don't think about their oddness all the time.

Calling something or someone quirky is a way of putting them into a box and saying, well, they're a bit odd, so we can smile wryly at them, tolerate them, but not take them seriously. The challenge of challenging poetry is in the way it doesn't conform to expected norms; calling it 'quirky' means you can accept it without taking up its challenge. You can carry on in your own, sweet, 'normal' way as if nothing has changed. Don't mind him, he's a bit odd, but he's all right really.

But when I write a poem that uses found material or cut'n'paste; or when I notice something 'odd' about the world, something no-one else has noticed perhaps, or not noticed in that way before, I'm not trying to be quirky. I'm trying to reach for some kind of truth: however compromised by language and the media such a concept is, I still believe that it's the job of the poet to seek truth. Truth is often hiding in some odd places, and that's where I like to go looking.

Some Questions On Voice

1. Does everyone have only one authentic voice, or can we have many authentic voices?

2. How much time do we have to spend 'finding our voice' or do we just get on with the writing and 'the voice' will come to us?

3. Can I lose my voice, and can I find it again if I do lose it?

4. If I lose one voice, can I use another, or must I stick with the same one all the time?

5. What is an authentic voice anyway?

6. Can I use different voices in the same poem?

7. Can I use the voices of other people or must I stick to my own?

8. Granted that all my poems are probably going to sound a little like all my other poems, does that mean they all speak in the same voice or do they speak in different voices that have similarities?

9. Can I put on a robot voice now?

10. Can I do the police in different voices?

11. Can I be authentically inauthentic, or inauthentically authentic?

12. If I keep hearing voices, on the train, in the air, out of the radio etc., do I write them down or do I ignore them because they aren't my authentic voice?

13. If I have nothing to say and am saying it, does that mean that I have no voice?

14. How do I voice voicelessness?

15. Am I voice or a chorus of voices?

16. Whose voice am I using today?

17. Does silence have a voice?

18. Have you got some linctus for my voice? I think I'm losing it...

Some Thoughts on Reading Abstraction

This came from a comment of a friend of mine. She said she did not understand the poems of Amy De'Ath, a young poet whose first book, Erec & Enide, was published last year from Salt Modern Voices. Now, I don't have any problem with, in fact I think the collection is really strong. It occurred to me that it must have something to do with the different ways people read poetry.

My friend is very intelligent (in fact she has three degrees), but I think it would be fair to say that she thinks linearly. That is, she thinks in a logical fashion: one idea follows either logically or chronologically from another. Which is perfectly fine with most mainstream poetry, which usually has some kind of argument, or narrative; but it doesn't work very well as a way of approaching much contemporary non-mainstream writing. Hence the difficulty.

Reading non-mainstream poetry is not a question of 'difficulty' as such. None of Amy De'Ath's poems are in any real sense of the word, about difficult subject matter. A lot of them could be described as 'occluded love poems', and in poems like Poetry for Boys, there is a feminist approach that again is occluded. What is a difficulty is not the subject but the approach to the subject. The approach (approaches?) is indirect, circular, deliberately imprecise.

It's like the painting in Frank O'Hara's Why I Am Not a Painter, in which a painting called Sardines ends up as a painting without sardines in it, because "it was too much." The idea of sardines is in the title but not in the painting anymore. So this kind of poem is partly an abstraction from the world, rather than a direct reflection of the world.

It's fair to say that even the most ostensibly realist poem is aware of itself as ultimately failing to live up to the actual experience, or the emotion, that begins it. Language always fails to describe a sunset; or an experience in exactly the way you wish it to. The non-mainstream poet is intensely aware of that fact, highlights that failure, makes it a feature of the poem.

There's also another feature that I want to call the "atmosphere around the poem." I sometimes read poems by mainstream poets that seem to be perfectly fine in themselves; they express an emotion or relate an experience in clear terms, and I know what they mean. Except there's another poem surrounding that poem, a kind of invisible poem that is everything that the poet has left out. So a love poem is surrounded by all kinds of implications about how women are seen by men, about the society that accepts certain romantic tropes and ways or relating but not others, about the whole history of courtly love poetry from Wyatt to the present day, etc...

There is, in other words, a map of meanings, not just a particular route through that map. The mainstream poem, generally speaking, is a route through all those meanings. The contemporary non-mainstream poem is heading toward a more rhizomatic way of reading, where particulars routes are not privileged over other ways of reading, and this means that a mind more used to a singular, linear view might have difficulty because it's looking for a linear reading, an argument or a narrative that isn't there.

As Deleuze and Guattari have it in A Thousand Plateaus, it is the difference between a map and a tracing. A map offers many routes through; but a tracing only offers one. In this sense, the old AtoZ books offer a multitude of routes, but the SatNav only shows you one way: the supposedly more efficient, more direct route. It gets confused if you veer off course, however, and go exploring through the back streets and back routes; or decide you're not going there after all.

So it is with non-mainstream poetry: it has no particular destination, or a series of destinations, or only one destination with a variety of different routes to getting there. Or, as in Amy De'Ath's Letter to John Clare, we have a poem that is approaching the eighteenth century poet, but not biographically, and by a variety of routes that are surrounding the poet's life and work. Maybe it never gets there, maybe John Clare's presence was "too much"; but he's actually still there, under the layers of language.

These thoughts are by no means complete; but I offer them to my readers as a possible way in to reading work that is perhaps 'beyond their comfort zones.'

Some Thoughts On Dissent

As a Quaker, I'm a member of one of the more well-known Dissenting churches in the country. Dissenters are people who disagree, who refuse to toe the Established Church line, who seek their own interpretations of belief and scriptures and creeds; and Quakers have managed for over 400 years without the usual paraphernalia of creeds and dogmatic statements because they believe in direct access to the spiritual, not through ritual, priesthoods or rules.

So it is with my approach to poetry: and with my approach to the poetry I read. I've just started, for instance, to get my head around the multi-faceted world of Maggie O'Sullivan's poetry. Now there is a poet who dissents from the mainstream of British poetry in ways that probably ensure that she will never be part of any establishment. Blakean and wild, it's also as far from being academic as it's possible for a poet to be. Not that she isn't supremely intelligent, but this is not poetry that displays its cleverness. Like all the best dissenters, she doesn't spend too much time arguing against the establishment; she merely gets on with the job of providing an alternative space for the autocthonous speech of her own vision.

The same is true of poets like Michael Haslam and Geraldine Monk, and the best of the non-mainstream seems to me to have this sense of providing a space for vision and alternative ways of seeing that are excluded from the tidied-up social verse of the mainstream. John Ashbery once said of Frank O'Hara that he didn't so much as protest against the establishment as ignore it. I'm not sure that's entirely possible; but I can see that would be an attractive thing to do.

Some Thoughts About The Well Made Poem

1. Recently, I experienced the strange sensation of having to 'press return to factory setting' on a couple of poems.

2. They were poems that were going in a certain direction towards being 'well-made' in the sense of being perfectly engineering little machines of ideas and emotions.

3. But they felt wrong. In trying to create a poem worked I was trying to squeeze the poem into a shape that 'looked good'. In doing that, I was actually falsifying whatever it was that I was trying to say with the poem.

4. I was trying to be 'clever.' Or maybe to merely appear clever. I find myself prey to the same appetites other poets I like to criticise have: the idea that you have to appear to be 'clever' in your poems, to fill it with 'wit' and the kind of musical lines that get you admired.

5. But the poem didn't fit. I was, for instance, trying to write in regularish stanzas. Not strictly iambic but heading in that direction. I seemed to be going back to the time before I started cutting and pasting.

6. Writing can become habitual, which is why you have to constantly 'make it new'. When it feels like I've done it before, or very nearly, I get twitchy.

7. So I had these poems that weren't working. They were well-made in a sense. They may have been clever.

8. With the first one, I took the first two lines which I thought were good, and wrote about them and a lot of other stuff came out, whilst free writing around them. I started with the phrase "So I had these two good lines..."

9. With the second, I again rewrote if from scratch.

10. In both cases, I did it at night before I went to bed. My mind was loose. I wasn't trying to be clever.

11. They both work better now. They're freer, looser, baggier even. They don't look like little boxes one on top of one another.

12. So what do I conclude? That I can't do the well-made poem? That the well-made poem is, in the end, a back alley?

Some Myths

1) That we can do without 'labels' in poetry. Even the word 'poet' is a label we put on ourselves to distinguish ourselves from, say, prose-writers. The word 'writers' distinguishes us from 'non-writers', musicians, artists, etc... and from people who don't do 'creative' activities at all. Labels like 'avant garde', 'lingusitically innovative," "neo-formalist", "modernist" etc are often annoying and divisive when thrown around as weapons to put other poets down but help to understand where a poet is coming, and how the poem should be read (eg, if you know it's a "surrealist" poem, you won't be looking for the kind of logical sense you'd expect in a "movement" poet.)

2) That mainstream poetry is not in itself a style of poetry - that it is 'just poetry'. There is no such thing as 'just poetry', just as there is no such thing as 'just jazz': there is trad, be-bop, post-bop, free, modal,  hard bop, swing, 'm-base', fusion, indo- and several others that I've left out. Again, it's a matter of expectation: though it can be restrictive. A musician who moves from one style to another (like Miles Davis) may be in danger of being pigeon-holed, so the boundaries between styles ought always to be in flux. The same is true of poetry: John Kinsella, for instance, moves between avant-garde and more mainstream with ease.

3) That 'accessibility' is the first thing a poet should think of when looking at his/her poetry: perhaps "is it in some way honest in feeling, does it do something unexpected, does it make the reader think?" are more important questions. Nevertheless, a poet ought to be able to explain to somebody unfamiliar with the style they're working with, approximately what it is they're trying to do.

4) That the poet should always have something to say. A poem is not a message, though it may contain a message if the poet chooses or if the poem arrives at one. Poetry can be as much about discovery as about, say, the poet telling us of an experience that has already happened.

5) That young poets have to 'find their voice' and then stick with it. Poetry is at least partly a form of ventriloquism. But it's not a bad thing to find a style and stick with it. Some poets make a career out of being many voices. Edwin Morgan comes to mind. A poet who only has one voice might end up being very boring; or they might end up being Norman MacCaig. In any case, your 'voice' will find you: Edwin Morgan never sounded anything other than himself, whether he was the Loch Ness Monster or a Mercurian.

6) That any anthology representation of a country's poetry can ever be complete. I'd recommend getting several anthologies of writing from all sides if you want to get a fuller picture, and remembering always that something is always left out. How many anthologies of British poetry, for instance, include visual poetry as one of its components? I can only think of one: the Oxford Anthology of British & Irish poetry ed. Keith Tuma has Bob Cobbing next to Philip Larkin. But that's only one poet.

Happy New Year, dear readers!

Some Possibly Wrong Things I May Have Learned This Year

Poetry is a rhizome, a root system, a web of connections. It's not a tree with the best at the top and the worst at the bottom and lots of rather indifferent branches in between. It springs up in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of forms. It isn't just the Faber/Cape/Picador hegemony, nor is it just the experimental/post-avant. It takes in the visual and the sentimental: a Christmas card verse is still a poem, even if it isn't what many of us would choose to call 'good poetry'.

To say it's only poetry if it's 'good poetry' is to put a fence around certain kinds of poetry and say 'this is poetry and this is not' and poetry essentially had no fence. It includes Bob Cobbing and Helen Steiner Rice whether we like those poets or not.

That doesn't mean that all poetry is 'good' and there is no such thing as 'bad poetry': but what is considered bad cannot be rationally decided upon. A 'good sonnet' is not necessarily the most metrically correct; nor is good free verse just chopped-up prose. A good visual poem is aesthetically and visually pleasing; but isn't necessarily the one with the most paraphrasable meaning. If one writes a piece of 'inspirational verse' one isn't terribly interested in the subtlety of meaning, or even getting the metre absolutely correct. One is interested in inspiring certain sentiments.

No one anthology of any country's poetry can represent the whole range of poetry in that county. I'll believe that's possible when Wendy Cope sits next to Keston Sutherland in an anthology. Nobody can like everything. I've met people for whom doggerel is the only poetry worth reading, performance poetry the only poetry worth hearing, and others who generally confine themselves to avant garde, sound poetry, visual poetry, and everything in between. People who think if it doesn't rhyme it ain't poetry.

Poetry is a meadow. In a meadow, there are many kinds of plants, all fighting for attention from the sun (the reader?). Will we please everybody? Probably not. There is good and bad poetry (poems that survive and poems that do not may be one way of distinguishing) but not good and bad poetries. And survival isn't always the point: sometimes a poem is meant to be thrown away when read, or even written.

A Happy New Year to all poets.

Merry

Christmas

to all

my

Readers

Three Writers I've Discovered This Year

1. Ira Lightman
I'm currently making my way through three of his books: Duetcetera, from Shearsman, with its dual columns "conversing" with each other: sometimes you can read across, sometimes they seem to be arguing with one another, sometimes they're complementing each other. He includes some translations and I've just downloaded Trancelations (ubu editions) to read more. Mustard Tart As Lemon (Red Squirrel) seem to be a gathering together of poems that didn't fit into previous series; and Phone In The Roll: which reads like it's cut up from phone messages and other forms of communication. They all show a conceptual poet who isn't afraid of including both personal and spiritual perspectives into his work: and they repay rereading.

2. Amy De'ath 
A lovely little pamphet from Salt, which promises much more, Eric & Enide is ellipitical in a way that seems finally to be starting to reach through into more prominence in British poetry. She can be political in a subtle way, and there's a sense of ideas bouncing against one another in this collection. She has a new pamphlet which I must get hold of, from Oystercatcher.

3. Stephen Emmerson 
His book from Department Press, Telegraphic Transcriptions, is rather like listening to a whole host of voices at once. There are passages taken form medical literature, passages that seem like episodes of psychosis, passages of strange disparate voices coming in from all directions, and I'm still only part way through it: I have to take it a little at a time or if becomes overwhelming. Stephen is going to be someone to look for in the future, I feel: he has ambitions for his poetry that go beyond merely producing a group of stand-alone poems. He wants to write long, in series, with each poem referencing other poems, itself and the outside world, working on several voices not just one.

Some Optimistic Thoughts For Christmas

It's been an interesting year for poetry, hasn't it? I've bought and acquired loads on anthologies this year; it seems like it's been a year of change in the poetry world. The old guard - well, they still have the increasingly irrelevant awards for themselves - but it's been a year for young poets. The Salt Anthology of Younger Poets, Eighteens (Knives Forks & Spoons) and the Shearsman anthology of innovative landscape poetry all showcase a raft of new poets who are increasingly showing what they can do.

The energy levels of all this new poetry are often exhaustingly breathtaking. Poets like Jonty Tiplady, Amy De'ath, Emily Critchley, Sophie Robinson, Stephen Emmerson, Richard Barrett and many others are doing things with language that are elliptical, innovative and often quite quite beautiful and strange, in ways that didn't seem possible when I started writing 30 years ago. The days of innovation seemed to be over.

And in one sense, they are, in the sense that no-one is inventing a whole set of new forms; the 'heroic' age of the futurists, the dadaists and a whole sweep of manifestos has probably passed. But the fact that more young poets than ever have access to that history seems to be what makes these writers so adventurous. There are still poets being straight-jacketed into the mainstream, and maybe that suits their temperament; but when a click of the mouse can take you to the poetry of Mina Loy and you can access so much amazing stuff online, it's no wonder that things are opening up.

The categories are a lot looser than they were. Though they still exist: the mainstream is still the genre that pretends it's not a genre (the way 'literary fiction' likes to pretend it's not a genre); and there are still those fusty edifices of award-winning Faber/Picador/Cape poets who like to pretend they're the Best, despite history having passed them by. But there's a lot to be hopeful for.

With regard to that Best word: I can understand why Salt used it for their anthology; and why Puppywolf use it for their anthology of Manchester poets. It's a good marketing tool. It looks good in a bookshop. But neither anthology can be an objective view of what's 'best'; the Salt book is one man's view; the Puppywolf book has four editors' opinion. Either way, they leave out a lot of excellent stuff, and include some stuff that I wouldn't consider as good. There is no objective view of 'good poetry' though; and no doubt my choice would reflect a whole different criteria of 'best' than the ones in those anthologies.

They're both good anthologies, though. Occasionally, BOMP in particular has the kind of poem that makes me cringe ('This is poem about brown eyes is really about prejudice gay people' for instance: sorry to the poet concerned, but it just struck me as too much like it should have had the word 'Moral' pinned to its last line.)

I discovered some new writers this year, rediscovered a few older ones; and felt rather more optimistic about the state of poetry than I have done for awhile. A good year for the roses, and for poetry.

Launch of Best Manchester Poets (On The Eighth Day, Dec 1 2011)

It occurred to me in a moment of madness this morning how there is always somewhere a little corner of show-biz, the end-of-the-pier show, the TV variety show, in the arts world of Britain. Dominic Berry's performance as the master-of-ceremonies yesterday was one such example. As someone who finds all the bigging up Manchester somewhat embarrassing, I can't say I felt entirely comfortable with his performance, but that's not his fault. I used to cringe at the TV when Bruce Forsyth came on too (still do, come to think of it.)

What of the poets themselves? A mixed bunch, a gallimaufry, a Woolworths assortment of voices from surprisingly imaginative poems from old ladies to more dramatic performance poetry. Not all of it worked, and once or twice I wanted to say "cut the beginning," or "cut the end"; if the poetry was anything it was rather downbeat than upbeat, which might reflect the mood of the country. The age range was very wide, and the subject matter too, from Rosie Garland talking of cancer to poems about clubbing and a couple of rather rude poems which were subtly effective.

Apart from anything else, it was a kind evening. Everyone seemed to be listening and no-one was talking over the readers. Everybody who read got on, gave their reading and got off with great efficiency. Considering the panic beforehand about the number of readers, a surprising number of people read. It was a very inclusive evening.

As I am in the book, I perhaps ought to give some reflections on the book, but that will have to wait.