My Objection to Competitions And Other Thoughts

I'm not a big fan of competitions. Competitions encourage the idea that there are winners. And if there's winners, there's losers. Especially in poetry, the idea that you can win competitions with a certain kind of poem means that the conservative notion of poetry as a kind of compressed narrative which doesn't rock the boat or challenge expectations is preserved. The same is true of slams as far as 'spoken word' is concerned. It's not necessarily the crowd-pleaser that wins, but the judge pleaser.

Then again, competitiveness encourages poets to compete with one another rather than exist as a supportive community. It's a form of capitalism, whichever way you put it: and slams are even more so, poets competing in a kind of bear-pit of 'verbal dexterity'. Not that it doesn't produce good poets; but that it produces lots of losers, who with a helping hand might find their own poetic stream to swim. Like capitalism, it produces conformity not diversity. Poetic revolution it is not.

Which brings us to another thing. A friend of mine came to a poetry workshop with a poem written in the shape of a square. A 'shape poem' as it were. Not unusual in the world of poetry; but I suspect rather unusual in the common or garden poetry meeting. What would happen if someone came to your writing group with a shape poem? Who would be the first to say 'that's not a poem'? There is a whole tradition - dating from as early as the beginning of last century - of concrete poetry, 'sound poetry' and experiments with the look of poetry on the page. How many people are even aware of this history, much less have an opinion on it?

Fortunately, that person met me: because I myself know about this history I can say to someone who brings something like that. "actually, you're not an aberration, you're not completely out on a limb, you're not mad, have a look at this, and there's that, and you might be interested in this..."

Sometimes, it's not about 'good' poetry or 'bad' poetry; and while standards exist for each type of poetry, they are never entirely objective. A good competition poem would make a bad experimental poem etc. That's why I think categories matter; not as a way of dividing one poet from another, but so that those who do things in a different way, are not totally isolated and made to feel 'mad.' Going to poetry events where everybody is telling you how wonderful Carol Anne Duffy is, while you're reading Robert Creeley, can feel terribly isolating.

Poetry is the glory of "things being various"; and ought to be a community not a bearpit. Which might be terribly utopian and naive of me; but I can't help but dream.

My Debt To New York

I just posted on my Facebook page a video of Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan reading their historic collaboration, Memorial Day, and I thought I'd try to express a few thoughts about what it is that the New York School means to me as a poet in 21st century Manchester.

Firstly, they are for me the great enablers. Every poet needs enablers: poets whose work you read and identify with immediately, who make it possible for them to write the poems they want to write. For many, it might be Thomas Hardy, or Philip Larkin, or even Simon Armitage. Thomas Hardy, however, never struck me as someone who spoke my language. I have no complaint with anything he wrote; I just never got struck by its lightning the way I did when I first read Frank O'Hara. For awhile, I wanted to be O'Hara: a gay man in New York, meeting great artists and going to lots of parties. Of course, I'm neither gay nor do I work for the Museum of Modern Art; but I learnt more than I know from him about how to structure a poem, about how to hold several thoughts into one line and how to go on your nerve.

Secondly, and I see it in the performance of Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan, there is a seriousness about the New York School that is leavened with humour, irony and a deep awareness of the world around them. I say humour; but it's not 'comic verse'; although Koch for instance can be hilarious, he's also intensely aware of language, of love, of despair. These poets are not putting on an act; but neither are they taking themselves so seriously that they fall over into bathos.

Thirdly, there's a freedom in their verse that I think we can all learn from. They're not constrained by the thought-policeman that says that you can't put that in a poem. Take Ron Padgett's silly little poem:

I will sleep
in my little cup

- that's the whole poem. Just that. No attempt at making some poetic epiphany, or "myself am hell" self-dramatising. Just a little daft quip; and instead of hiding it in his notes, he puts it in a book. It's in his Selected Poems along with a whole bunch of more 'serious' verse that is much more involving and deep! Daftness is OK! And sometimes I like to be daft.

I spent an awful lot of my writing life trying to be something I'm not. the New York poets stopped me from trying to be whatever that was. They opened up the world of urban writing to me. I live in a city, not the rural England of Thomas Hardy; and the New York poets showed how it was possible to be a poet in the city. Not simply by 'writing about it'; but by hearing the energy and the music of the city. Or wherever you are; it's about being in the 'now' not the 'then'.

Hardy, for me, is all about 'then'. O'Hara was about the 'now'. The New York poets made it possible for me to escape the lure of 'then' and write about my 'now.'

Now That's What I Call Chugadelica, Vol 95

My flatmate Fiona created a new musical genre recently. It's called Chugadelica and basically consists of any music that is reasonably well-put together, that chugs along at a medium pace from start to finish and that never really does anything exciting all the way through the song. Examples of the genre might include the complete works of Travis, Oasis and Coldplay, for instance. Inoffensive, bland but not so bland it never becomes an earworm, mildly pleasurable but nothing to get excessively excited about.

When I first heard punk, I heard music that deliberately offended, either lyrically or musically. It was often deliberately offensive to the ear. But it was undoubtedly exciting; and it made you at least sit up and take notice. Unlike a lot of contemporary rock/pop music which is perfectly tuned for the market, it wasn't trying to impress you with its musicianship or pluck your heartstrings with its sentiments. Its motto was, Fuck Art Let's Dance.

There's quite a lot of British poetry that reminds me of Chugadelica. It's not bad poetry, let me be clear about this. Bad poetry abounds too, but it can easily be spotted; obvious rhymes, de-dum rhythms and a plethora of cliches. Like playing Chopsticks on a piano. No-one would give it a second glance. But the OK stuff, the chugadelic stuff, is given awards, is published in magazines and is generally well-represented in the anthologies.

The thing about the really interesting music is that it never was found in the usual venues. Those of us who preferred the noisy blast of punk and the fractured funk of post-punk, who would rather listen to the Fall to the musical conservatism of Phil Collins (grandfather of Chugadelica) and Mike & the Mechanics, had to turn to John Peel's show to hear anything worth listening to.

It's the same with really interesting poetry. It's almost never found in the Poetry Review or other organs of Chugadelic poetry; but it is to be found in alternative magazines and publishers, among reading series and poetry nights where literally anything goes, and it's out there ready to be discovered.

Fuck Art. Let's Poet!

On Conceptualism and stuff

I'm not, I'll freely admit, the world's biggest fan of conceptual poetry; but I've recently been rather amused by the hoo-ha about in American literary magazines and blogs of late. It's accused of being all concept and no affect: all head and no heart if you like. Which strikes me as odd because those poets conceptual poets I do like, Caroline Bergvall and Christian Bok, don't strike me that way at all. I haven't read much of Kenneth Goldsmith either, but he strikes me as a profoundly comic writer as much as he's anything else.

The thing about comic writing, though, is that it isn't supposed to be 'affecting'; it's supposed to provoke a reaction. Hopefully to make you laugh. The idea of printing out the whole internet is not a serious idea; it's ridiculous, silly, absurd; and if it provokes you to squeal in protest, "but how is that poetry?", then it's achieved its effect. It affects you by making you angry or amused, or possibly even both.

Now I personally learned how to write by carrying Frank O'Hara around in the pocket of a leather jacket I affected to wear at the time. Humour and seriousness go together like Laurel and Hardy in my mind. The idea that one should be grimly serious all the time in this ridiculous world of ours strikes me as one of the funniest jokes around. I like some flarf too though being British, I don't keep up with it very much. There's also the whole alt lit schtick which I've barely scratched the surface of.

I've fortunate to live in a city with its own conceptualist writers. In a bid for literary infamy, I'm going to refer to them as the Manchester Conceptualists, who use Oulipean and permutational methods to create poetry that is often funny and serious at the same time. Tom Jenks created a wonderfully funny text from chat-room comments about Putin that was read to support Pussy Riot. Phil Davenport, for my money, is one of the best poets in Manchester; his use of the techniques of visual poetry, his juxtaposition of his own diaries with found material, and his work as writer in the community often create texts that are both very conceptual and profoundly moving.

The problem with a lot of people is that they want poetry to be one set of things; but not another set of things. They want poetry to be about feeling; fine. But all poetry involves concepts, ideas, forms into which the feelings are put. Free verse is one form; sonnets are another, visual poetry yet another. Sometimes the feelings are on the surface and we can all go "aaah"; but sometimes they are deeper underground. Laughter is an emotion too, remember.

Anyway, I'm off next week on my annual jaunt to the island of Arran. I may well come back and report on it. Or I may not, I'll see how I feel.

Performance vs Page?

Just wanted to put down some vague thoughts about the performance/page thing.

I often find that I really like a performer when I see them perform. Then I read their work, and without their voice, it doesn't lift off the page. What's that got to do with?

Often, it seems there's too many words. Too much waffle around the subject perhaps. Too much trying to explain what you're saying perhaps. Like we won't get it if you don't explain it.

If I want to red-pencil a poet's work, it's because it's not working for me. Too many words. But some performers do get it right for the page as well as the stage.

Many performance poets are very dramatic and exciting to watch. That's in contrast to the mousy quietness of a lot of 'page poets.' However, sometimes they can overdo it and come across as stagey.

Many performance poets actually learn how to use a microphone. This is in contrast to page poets who seem afraid of it.

Performance poets are often refreshingly direct and don't go round the metaphorical houses to say something. Sometimes they're too obvious, but then page poets can be too subtle sometimes and avoid actually saying anything.

They're not afraid of jokes, though quite often they tell bad jokes and that's not good.

Page poems are often quieter and more reflective than performance poets, but that's not always the case and sometimes quieter voices get lost among the noisier ones.

There's a lot of sniffiness about which is best, the page or the stage, from both sides. I've been guilty of it myself. 'I don't like performance/page poetry' is often like saying 'I don't like carrots' though you've never eaten a carrot in your life. Or the one time you ate it it was overcooked.

Both page and stage poets can get stuck in doing things in over-familiar ways, or just pleasing one's audience. Don't, in otherwords, be afraid to experiment for yourself.

The Word 'Innovative'

I recently got into a discussion on Facebook in which someone actually declared that Carol Ann Duffy was an 'innovative poet.' Now, I don't want to get into a discussion about the relative merits of CAD as a poet, whether she is good or bad, but I would like to ask, in what way, if the word 'innovative' is to mean anything at all, a poet like CAD can be called that.

One person suggested that it was because she'd written love poetry as a woman to a woman. Hello? Did the 1970's feminist poetry never happen? Or perhaps the people saying this never read past the '80's, and a very narrow definition of the '80's at that? The 'Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry' not the Paladin British Modern Poetry' version of poetic history perhaps? An '80's British poetry without 'Conductors of Chaos' might make Carol Ann Duffy into an innovative poet, just about, but even then I doubt it.

Or: it's her use of the vernacular that marks her out as 'innovative'; and here we get even further into the realms of historical revisionism. What happened to Chaucer, for instance, or coming within living memory, Philip Larkin? Her use of the dramatic monologue is derived from Browning, including even her use of rather unsavoury characters (psychopaths and the like: see Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess.) Her use of ordinary working class characters isn't too original either: Wordsworth's Leechgatherer springs to mind, though perhaps she's less philosophically allegorical.

Which isn't to say anything about how good or bad she is at doing these things. There are good things in The World's Wife and Meantime that any mainstream poet would be proud to have written. But none of them do anything but develop forms and methods that were already around; often very well, I have to say. She's a consolidator, and perhaps, due to her exam board status, a populiser, not an inventor of new forms or an explorer of new themes. Which is perhaps what you'd expect from a laureate poet; someone who is always on the outer limits of linguistic daring is hardly going to appeal to your average Guardian reader.

The word innovative would, it seems to me, imply that the poet is stepping out into new territory, trying something new that might not actually be very popular but would prove to be an influence on future generations. Gertrude Stein comes to mind as someone who is still innovative: someone who changed and increased the possibilities of writing both poetry and prose. Are there any truly innovative poets today? I'm not sure there are; even the non-mainstream poets of today are basically riffing off the revolutions of the past.

However, at least they are experimenting and taking things forward. Carol Ann Duffy, whatever her virtues, is not; not that she ought to of course. Many poets are content to develop what has already gone before. That's fine, and nobody should be criticised simply because they don't want to be experimental. We should all be criticised for what we do, well or badly, not because of what someone thinks we ought to do. If I don't think much of her latest laureate poem, it's not because it's not experimental; it's because I don't think it's very good.

There are lots of good poets who are not in any meaning of the 'innovative'. Despite my interest in experimental writing, I don't think I am, really. I just like mucking around with language, rather than just 'having something to say,' like a lot of people in the non-mainstream camp. I use cut-n-paste and collage, juxtaposition and various other 'avant garde' techniques; but I haven't invented a new way of writing.

Carol Ann Duffy is good at what she does; if it doesn't interest me much, that's because of a different approach to poetry and language.  But don't make claims about her that can't be backed up. Carol Ann Duffy has never 'innovated' in her life.

Thoughts After Cusp 2

Never underestimate the value of a good library. Somewhere I came across the poetry of Frank O'Hara. It must have been the poems read in anthologies in the John Rylands University of Manchester Library. I remember I bought the book Lunch Poems from a bookshop no longer there on John Dalton Street. Then I carried it around with me, heaven in my pocket, for ages and ages, even across Europe because I couldn't bare to part with it.

Strange things in little magazines: there was for awhile, a collection of filling cabinets in Withington Library, which included back copies of 2nd Aeon, the Eric Mottram era Poetry Reviews and a whole host of weird and wonderful stuff. I was fascinated and barely understood half of it. It was where I first saw my first visual poetry.

Getting an understanding of what makes someone follow the less well trodden paths of British avant garde and experimental poetry whilst others go down the more mainstream paths isn't easy. I was fascinated, I suppose, rather than put off, by things I didn't understand. At various times, I was involved with working class writing, with wanting to be a performance poet, with wanting to write like Simon Armitage or other mainstream poets (Tony Harrison for awhile) but they never seemed to fit.

I never really knew many people who were experimental. Rupert Loydell of Stride magazine and press was one. I went to visit him at his studio in Crewe once; and an early publication was in Stride magazine, when it was still a paper edition. There I was exposed to another set of adventurous writers.

I never showed my most experimental poems to people, didn't know what to do with them. I went to Manchester Poets group, where everybody was extolling the virtues of mainstream poets I secretly found a bit dull. Craig Raine's reading was memorable only for his snazzy jacket. I used to go to Peter Sansom's workshops in Huddersfield, which at first were great and I learned a lot. There was at least an awareness of the New York School there, and I still like the underrated Geoff Hattersley's work from then, like a slightly later more cynical and funnier Jim Burns.

I borrowed John Ashbery from the library. I increased my book collection because of reviews through City Life.

But the central mystery remains. I like the odd stuff, the outre, the outside the mainstream stuff. In the end, however polite I am sometimes about it (and I'm not always), the poetry that interests me is experimental, strange, outside the obvious. Finding a community hear in Manchester, however small we are, has at least made me comfortable about that.

After 'Cusp: The Event'

It was a great reading: hearing poets read not their own work mainly but the work of other poets. Geraldine Monk was the hostess with the mostest, and the readers included Jim Burns, Tim Allen, Ian Davidson, Frances Presley, Nicholas Johnson and sundry others. Readings of Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull, and other luminaries of British Modernism; but one of the highlights for me was hearing part of a poem by Elaine Randell. Cusp the book is a kind of collective biography of regional poetries throughout England, so the whole event sent me down my own set of memory lanes.

Jim Burns talks in the book of how hard it was to find friends who liked the kinds of things you do in the '50's. Not much call for Beat poetry in Preston; and there wasn't much call for poetry of any kind in Accrington in the '70's either. We did have a bookshop, and I got into Ted Hughes because of it; and two libraries: the one in Accrington and the one in Blackburn. I remember going to a day dedicated to Ted Hughes in Padiham Library once, at which Glynn Hughes was the guest reader. There was another event in Blackburn library; I can't recall much about it but there was a Lancashire dialect poet there.

It was when I got to Manchester to do a theology degree that I began to discover other poetries than the standard ones (Larkin and Co.) Frontline Books on Newton Street were a great help: I was introduced to Geraldine Monk, Kelvin Corcoran and the Pig Press edition of Beyond All Other by Elaine Randell. Lee Harwood's work I first began to read extensively via a bookshop in Grassmere of all places, on two successive Quaker Meeting retreats. I'd read a few of these people in the Paladin Book of British poetry and I got a few of the Paladin books via writing reviews for City Life magazine. Unfortunately, in a fit of anti-modernism, I gave some of them away. But I still have Iain Sinclair, Douglas Oliver and Christopher Middleton.

There was nothing much going on regarding readings. Manchester Poets was essentially very conventional. I used to go just to meet other poets. The workshop was quite helpful, but it seems to me that for many years there was a division between what I was writing and what I was reading. It wasn't until I started taking a pair of scissors to my poems that I began to properly explore my experimental side; though there are things in files that are attempted experiments. Sometimes they fail miserably, but I was working in a kind of vacuum. I was aware of all this stuff that didn't get attention and it fascinated me even if I didn't understand it.

There's more to be said; but I'll come back to it in Part 2.

Anthologies and stuff

I've been reading lots of anthologies recently. There's been a lot of them about, from Identity Parade to the new anthology of North-West Poets, Sculpted, only just out, beautifully packaged and full of poets from the North-West of England, including me. (Of course you all want one don't you?)

One thing I've noticed about all of them is that they all represent a fraction of what is happening, even given the restrictions they placed themselves under. Anthologies of young poets, for instance, that don't include so-and-so. Why don't they include who-je-ma-flip? But that's OK; because look, here they are in this anthology of young poets. This is true even of regional anthologies: I can think of a few poets missing from Sculpted, for instance, some who joined the group after the anthology was already in production or some who are not yet members of the group or might not want to be part of it.

Even an anthology of young often experimentally inclined poets such as Nathan Hamilton's Dear World and Everything In It, does not include every deserving experimental young poet in the country. If we can have Keston Sutherland, for instance, why not Sean Bonney? Or where is Richard Barrett? Etc... I'm sure there's people all over the country saying, where's she, or he?

Anthologies used to be representative of at least the best of the trends in poetry at the time, whether that was the mainstream as represented by the Movement-influenced Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, or the more radical, Modernist influenced Conductors of Chaos. No anthology includes everybody; but pretty much anyone who you'd expect to see, plus a few surprises, tended to be in them all.

But there's so many poets writing now, that it's become impossible for one anthology to represent the whole scene. Perhaps it always was the case; and there have always been good poets who never got into the anthologies; but it's even more so now. Sculpted, with 62 poets, represents a fragment of what's being written now, and is worth reading, in the North-West region alone.

Which is all to the good, but no-doubt confusing. There are names that keep cropping up in many of the anthologies: Luke Kennard, Emily Berry, Ahren Warner and Heather Phillipson seem to be the names do jour of the present crop of young poets. No-one however is dominating in the way that Carol Anne Duffy and Simon Armitage did. One thing that is evident is that there is a spread of formal possibilities, from variations on traditional forms to the opennest of open forms (it that a word? It is now!) and they're all mixed up together in the one anthology, not cordonned off into their own corraal where they only ever speak to like minded individuals. In Sculpted, for instance, we have prose poetry, dual-column poetry and rhyme rubbing up against one another, arguing with one another, making friends with one another perhaps. It's not been like this since - maybe the Sixties (when according to Andrew Motion, nothing much was supposedly happening.)

I think there's two possibilities. Either we can get over the binary thinking that puts experimental and mainstream in two camps firing potshots at one another; or we can embrace the pluralism, get with the programme as it were. Poetry in this country is enjoying a renniasance, even if the media hasn't cottoned on yet.

Excess All Areas?

"In New Lines (1956) Robert Conquest advocated 'a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry', after the self-expressive 'excesses' of the poetry of the 40s, the mistake of the generation was to give 'the Id, a sound player on the percussions side under a strict conductor, too much of a say in the doings of the orchestra as a whole.' Instead, felt Conquest, a 'new and healthy general standpoint...[demonstrating a] reverence for the real person or event' was required [my italics]."

Nathan Hamilton from the introduction to Dear World and Everyone In It, the new anthology of young poets from Bloodaxe.

This is interesting: are we seeing a new revival of excess in poetry, a new generation of poets who, like the 40s poets, feel they have nothing to lose by going over the top in terms of imagery, feeling, ideas, in terms of the shape of poems and the page? It seems like there are very few, or certainly a lot less, younger poets writing those well-behaved, sensibly-clothed poems the Movement advocated. Maybe it's a consequence of the recession and its continuing uncertainties, or the rise of new media and the access to all kinds of ideas provided by the Internet; but there does seem to be a seachange in poetry, away from neat lines, controlled metaphors, regular verses and tentative feelings into something wilder.

This is true I think even of those young poets who are now beginning to be published by Faber & Faber: such as Emily Berry, a poet who is not wildly experimental, and maybe owes something to early Armitage but who is really entirely her own voice. There's something devil-may-care about the poetry of young poets which is, to my mind, very refreshing. So it's not just about the old binaries of avant verses mainstream; it's about wearing a very unsuitable pair of pumps to walk up Goat Fell, and surviving the attempt. In fact, some (not all by any means) of the new experimental poets look a bit too like the previous generations for their own good.

I don't know how long this will last, or whether it will have a lasting effect; all I know is that I like it. It's about time for a little excess: maybe we're partying while the Titanic of this nation's economy is sinking and we're ruled by a party of puritanical blame-the-poor-but-not-the-bankers Tories, but it's producing some great poetry.

More categories not less?

One of the perpetual arguments in the poetry world is the old old binary position of non-mainstream verses non-mainstream. The most common response is to say that 'I'm just a poet, I don't need categories.' The problem with this is that clearly there is more than one kind of poetry out there. However, the old binaries don't really seem to operate anymore; or at least in the same way.

In the '60's and '70's, there was clearly an official  culture; the stuff published by the major publishers, for instance, the Movement poets and others were in the ascendant. Then there was the 'poetic underground': the experimenters, the beats, various forms of poetry that were shoved together into one block and largely dismissed as irrelevant by the so-called mainstream. This meant that the '70's could be dismissed by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison as the era of 'nothing much happening'; whereas an awful lot was happening.

Even then, however, it's clear that the binaries didn't really work. How could one put the work of, say, Peter Riley and Bob Cobbing into the same category? They were both poetry, or labelled as such; and they were both seen as being in the 'non-mainstream' category; but in what way do they have anything in common apart from 'not being mainstream?'

We could, of course, just call it all poetry and be done with it. But that's to ignore the fact that it's impossible to assess a poem by Andrew Motion in the same way as you'd assess the poetry of, again arbitrarily, the poetry of Bill Griffiths. And it also doesn't seem fair to so-called mainstream poetry, as if all 'mainstream' poetry were the same.

I've been reading Janet Rogerson's A Bad Influence Girl, a pamphlet of seemingly straightforward narratives that often start off in the ordinary world, and end up somewhere strange, dreamlike, a bit nightmarish sometimes. The techniques are fairly straightforward, but the results are not. Is it mainstream? It seems to have no influence from the Duffy/Armitage school, except in technique. It reminds me of Charles Simic - but also of Russell Edson, whose surreal narratives are placed somewhere between experimental and mainstream.

Younger poets now especially seem much more able to slide between categories, to avoid binary oppositions, than they ever did before. There are many who explore different forms of experiment, and combine it with a much more approachable surface. So are we all justpoets?

I don't want to be the one to make a lot of new categories; but it's always seemed odd that in other art
forms, and even other forms of literature, there are lots of categories, but in poetry, we're all justpoets. Science-fiction, detective, fantasy, thriller, 'mainstream fiction' are all out there. We have cubist, abstract, landscape, portrait, installation, land art etc etc. The major problem with this, of course, is that it further divides readers. A science fiction reader might not look at a good historical novel. Someone who writes surrealist verse might not read formalist verse at all. We all might miss stuff we might otherwise like, or become terribly sniffy about other kinds of poetry to the one we like, the way science fiction readers are all thought of as geeks.

Nevertheless, it is important to remind ourselves that different kinds of poetry require different kinds of attention; you can't read a visual poem the way you read a narrative poem, anymore than you can listen to a heavy metal track the way you'd listen to Monteverdi.

Political poetry and stuff...

Been thinking recently about the vexed problem of how to write about the political situation of the present age. I had a poem accepted and printed in The Robin Hood Book, one which was a cut-up including the words of Bob Diamond, CEO of RBS and a commentary on a picture by Paul Klee. Now, that is definitely political - its intent is at least partly satirical - but its other, and perhaps major, impulse, is aesthetic. The mixture of two languages - corporate speechifying and art crit - is what interested me as much as any message it had.

Being in such an avowedly political anthology, however, has made me think about how poetry can be 'political'. I have a great deal of sympathy for the position of George Oppen, who gave up poetry rather than become a mouthpiece for a political ideology. Poetry is about language, primarily; and its duty is to language not to ideology. Oppen's poems nevertheless have a sympathy for, and involvement with, 'the small nouns' and with the ordinary life of the planet; but they're not trying to impose an idea of the world onto the world. The same is true of Charles Reznikoff, whose documentary-style are incredibly moving without ever trying to impose a meaning, or indeed a feeling, onto the reader.

This is often what's missing from political poetry. A lot of political poetry seems preachy to me. I often find myself agreeing with the sentiment, disagreeing with the way it's stated. Besides which, it's often stating the bleeding obvious: capitalism is bad, poverty's bad, let's all get together in solidarity and fight The Man or The System.

Ultimately, what I like about the Objectivists, including Lorinne Neidecker, and the English poet Elaine Randall, is that their poetry allows the voice of the other through the words of the poem. They take a step back from imposing their meaning on the world; they're looking for what the world can say to them.

It's not the only way to be political, though. I was rereading Ian MacMillan's The Er Barnsley Seascape Poems yesterday: a sequence that is as political as it is funny, that sets up the absurd notion of Barnsley as a seaside town, celebrates the non-word 'er' and manages to be very moving and angry about the decline of Yorkshire mining communities all at the same time. His poetry can often be very funny, and sometimes that's all it is, but often the humour comes barbed with a political edge that makes it catch on your mind and sympathies like a fishhook.

Politics isn't just about ideas; though ideas are important. It's also about the way we live together. Poetry isn't always the best place to preach ideas; but it can be about how we live together. That, to me, is where political poetry is at its most effective, and that's where I'd like my poetry to be. On the side of the 'small nouns' not the big imposing ideas.

What I Dislike About Damian Hirst

On the bus coming back home from Accrington today, I was thinking about what it is I don't like about the work of Damian Hirst. I have nothing against the Young British Artists so-called as such, but I just do not like his with a kind of passion. So what is it I don't like?

It's something to do, I think, with what I perceive to be a lack of heart. His lack of competency at painting, recently revealed in a couple of exhibitions, is neither here nor there. Neither is the fact that he gets his assistants to do a lot of the work; the same has been true of a lot of major painters and sculptors from the medieval age down to the present. Neither is it to do with his subject matter; often to do with death and decay, and the contemporary obsession with surface, with product and the quotidian. There is a tastelessness to his work: that diamond-encrusted skull for instance, that could be right up my punk street, if it wasn't for that lack of heart.

Art - whether it's painting, music or poetry - has to in some sense come from the heart: a lot of us accept that as a kind of truth, but it's very difficult if not impossible to define what we mean by that. This isn't just to do with 'feeling' or it just turns to sentiment and mush. nor is just the intellectual play of ideas, though that is good too. The word 'truth' keeps trying to creep in here; but it's less to do with putting across a, or The Truth. One need not have a message particularly; most of us spend most of our lives in a perpetual state of uncertainty about what's true or isn't true about the world. Out of that uncertainty, however, comes the sense of exploration, of search, that we find in some of the best art produced since the Renaissance.

You don't have to be any kind of believer, either in politics or religion, to be an artist. Hirst's art, however, seems to me to have neither a conviction nor a sense of search about it; just a cynical exploitation of the art market. His works are often essentially 'memento mori's' without any sense of angst. All life ends in death, we're all essentially meat, and nothing means anything. All these views are potentially very profound, leading either to angst or a calm acceptance of the inevitable. In Hirst's world, however, they become truisms, just another thing to sell in the art supermarket. A diamond encrusted skull, a dead shark in a tank, are nothing but product.

Which could be a comment on late capitalism, which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; except I have the feeling that he doesn't care about that. He's making no critique, nor is he making us think. He's got more in common with the kind of art you find in commercial galleries on the high street: paintings to put in that place on the wall of your living room, that goes with the furniture, not art that disturbs or intrigues. It has more in common with Jack Vettriano than Picasso. Like Vettriano, his art is sentimental and shallow and overpriced.

Boxing Day Thoughts

So what have I learned this year? It's been a year of ups and downs. The biggest down of course was that my mother died. Even thought it was really expected from the beginning of the year. The euphemism "after a long illness" hides the truth of th long slow decline of dementia; by the end, my mother was barely existing, and I have sometimes the strangest feeling that in her last fortnight, she was allowing herself to go. When the doctor placed her on a care pathway, she took just a few hours to die.

When I was doing Christmas shopping I would see the odd thing that made me think, "Mum would like that." A collection of the Bee Gees, for instance. She'd have loved that.

Writing wise, happier times I think. I'm continually glad to have found the company and acceptance of the more experimental writing community. I know it sometimes annoys people of a more mainstream persuasion, that I sometimes make comments that reflect the old binary oppositions. I know also that my own writing is probably nowhere near the farthest edge of the experimental. I use techniques that are perhaps already a hundred years old; but I continue to feel more at home among the more exploratory writing community than with those who want to emulate Simon Armitage or the latest Faber poet.

The Other Room, and Writers Forum (North) have been hugely important for my development as a writer, because they give me ideas, they are relatively unjudgemental and they have helped to increase my awareness of neo-modernist writing by leaps and bounds. It was a real thrill to be part of the ensemble performance of Bob Cobbing's ABC in Sound, for instance. Bob Cobbing will never be flavour of the month; he's far too extreme for most people, and I can understand why. It just doesn't look like proper poetry does it?

But I'm also glad that I became part of North West Poets, and the forthcoming anthology is going to be fantastic. There's an incredibly mixed bunch of writers involved in it; which is really how it should be. I'm tired of homogeneity; I want variety. I don't mind if someone has written a sonnet on one page, and someone else is tearing up the rule book on another. Confusion isn't always a bad thing; and not understanding completely leads forward if you let it. Unfamiliarity is a spur to discovery; either that or it sends you back under the covers. Difficulty doesn't patronise the reader.

So I'm going out of this year thinking, what's next? I don't know and I love not knowing.

Some Post-Apocalyptic Thoughts

Well, I am disappointed - the Mayan end of the world hasn't happened after all. I was looking forward to the Rapture, or to being taken up in a UFO by the Interstellar Rescue Squad from Sirius or some such place. Maybe it's late. And maybe the company of a bunch of obsessive bibliolatrists or UFO obsessives would make me want to jump out of the rescue vehicle and join the burning masses anyway, so it's perhaps a good thing I'm not one of the chosen.

Anyroad up, as they say in deepest Lancashire, if it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen. I thought I'd bother you all with my thoughts about poetry and what I think is happening.

Over the last few years, I've observed a kind of opening out of the poetry world. This is no bad thing, though it's at least partly to do with the fact that there's now so much of it about. The proliferation of poetry on the whole I take to be a good thing; though it does mean that there is going to be an awful lot more poetry that I and indeed anyone else will never have time to read, or poetry names that I mean to follow up and never quite get round to reading. If you're among that number, I do apologise. But I thought I'd talk of a couple of my discoveries this year.

This year, I discovered the amazing poetry of Andrew Crozier. I guess he would be classified as belonging to "the Cambridge School", a loose association of poets who were captivated by the anthology, The New American Poetry, published in !960; and by the slightly earlier Objectivist poets such as George Oppen, Louis Zukovsky and Lorrinne Neidecker. They tried - with varying degrees of success - to find a British route through this poetic movement. This way of writing produced - for me - some of the best writing of the last 50 years - from Lee Harwood to John James, to Peter Riley, to J H Prynne - and of course, Andrew Crozier. But this stream of British poetry has often seemed hidden and been dismissed as 'difficult', 'obscure'
but the vast majority of the poets of this stream (actually, it's more like a full blown river) are nothing of the sort. They just don't look like the left-justified, neatly-boxed poetry of the officially-sanctioned schools of English poetry, best represented by the so-called English line poets, from Edward Thomas through to Andrew Motion.

Motion (along with Blake Morrison) infamously said that 'nothing much was happening in poetry' in the '60's  and '70's - which is ironic if you actually look at the evidence. There was so much going on, it almost bears comparison with now, when there are so many young poets, it sometimes feels like a glut. I worry about these young poets, that in all the courses in creative writing that there are now, they're still not being given access to the full range of English poetry. I hear rumours of poetry teachers telling their students to avoid the poetry scene in the cities where they study, and I hope that isn't true. I worry that teachers only teach a narrow range of poetry - whether that is only Carol Anne Duffy and friends or only Sean Bonney and friends is immaterial.

Poetry - as Stephen Burt recently said - is a continent. It's not a single stream that you stray from at your peril. I love that image: it avoids that whole idea that there is a 'correct' way of doing things. At the edges are probably the experimental poets, the neo-modernists, the visual poets, and a lot of people who live in the middle. Personally, I'm a fan of the edges; other people prefer living in the middle. That's OK; but I hope we can get over the continual war between the middle and the edge.

I also discovered the work of Tim Allen, a poet I mistakenly called a Language poet, a movement which is really confined to America. His poems have a swing about them, and a real understanding of the riotousness of language. His single-book poem The Voice Thrower was one of my favourite reads of this year. I recommend it to everyone; but it takes a little while to get into its method. You have to read it without unduly looking for those logical narratives that you might find in Simon Armitage, say. That's the thing with negative capability, though: it's actually something you have to learn how to do in order to be able to read a lot of the more experimental, neo-modernist poetry. You have to switch off the need to be 'told' something, to have an 'epiphany', and you have to learn to go with the flow. It is, in fact, often based around autobiography (though obviously not just that): but when you learn to go with the flow, you pick things up as you go, rather than have them thrust upon you by the wise poet.

I could go on; but I'll leave it for now. More later (apocalypse permitting.)

Paper Patterns by Angela Topping (Lapwing £10)

This is a very enjoyable collection of largely mainstream poetry by a very skilled poet who writes about family, personal recollection and love in closely-woven verses that repay reading. Angela will hate my use of the word 'mainstream' of course; but in that these are largely straightforward, plain-dictioned and linear narratives, that's precisely where they are. Names like Edward Thomas and Thomas Hardy come to mind: that English line that is only part, but still an important part, of the map of English poetry.

That said, they are often deeply felt and the sequence dedicated to Matt Simpson in particularly gives the whole collection an elegaic feel that is often very moving. This extends to poems such as The Gypsy Camp, which reveals an empathy for the underdog and the oppressed traditions of English life:

One autumn day the bailiffs called. We fought
to stay. Then 'dozers came, my mum was bashed
and all our pitches wrecked, our friends forced off.
I doubt I'll ever see my girl again.

One of my favourite poems in the book is Sparrow, revealing a real ability to celebrate the ordinary, without trying to imbue it with over-symbolic significance. Its close observation ('a chirrup like a giggle fastened/ in its throat like a comedy brooch') shows what is important to Angela Topping: the beauty of simplicity, the simplicity of beauty; the life everybody lives being celebrated for what it is. She writes too about lemons, cauliflowers, jam; and about loving Doctor Who (John Pertwee's version  at least).

There's so much more to be said about this poet. Her sequence The Lightfoot Letters continue a theme from her first book: the life of her father, this time through a series of letters that came to light recently. One gets the feeling of a hurt that's never quite gone away, and from an early poem about her father's violin, to a poem here about her father skating, it still produces some very moving poems about a working-class family trying to survive in a previous 'age of austerity.'

The collection as a whole feels ever so slightly too long. A poem about The Shawshank Redemption doesn't really add much to the experience of the film, and there are a couple of don't quite work for me, including the first poem in the book. But I've not known many collections that haven't included makewheights; and there aren't that many here.

With that very slight quibble (and it is slight), I'd recommend this collection to anyone who likes good plain food, properly cooked and properly filling.

Pussy Riot Event: Thomas Restaurant, Manchester, 20th November

Last night, a collection of some of Manchester's finest poets gathered in the upper room of the Thomas St restaurant to protest against the completely over-the-top convictions of the Pussy Riot protesters in Russia, now languishing in Putin's gulag for the 'crime' of being critical of the state in a public place. The poets included Richard Barret, reading from Ariana Reine's Mercury; Lianne Bridgewater performing an elegy for an animal rights activist over a backing of avant-garde noise that was quite painful to listen to, but somehow entirely appropriate, Anna Percy's feminist performance poems that skirt the edge of stridency by hiding an unexpectedly lyrical heart, David Keyworth's poems with a Russian theme, and a host of other delights.

It's questionable, of course, whether such an event can achieve anything directly, beyond giving some comfort to the Pussy Riot girls that they are not forgotten, nine months on from the original 'offence.' Except that it adds to the record of dissent: that the powers-that-be are not going to silence those that want to stand up and protest against the status quo. Last night, there were issues aired that went beyond the particular incident that we were meeting for: especially with regard to the treatment of women in Anna Percy and Stef Pike's poetry; but also, in John Calvert's poem from the book Catechism, 'They Spruce Themselves Up', the wider issues of top-down political and economic power. This was also addressed in Gareth Twose's Top Ten Tyres.

I actually think that the girls' protest, in the power centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, was as profound a spiritual act as Jesus' cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem, something which ultimately led to his execution. The association of the church with the powerful has had a terribly destructive and corrosive effect on Christianity over the centuries, such that its original message of reconciliation and love has got buried under a pile of guano known as 'orthodox theology.' So, in the end, I think they were right to do what they did, and were not guilty of 'hatred of religion'. Instead, they were guilty of 'love of the oppressed, the poor and the so-called sinners' that the church rejects in its bid for power and influence.

But - rant/sermon over - back to the event. What I really liked about the event was its variety. - from Susan Birchenough's hastily-written but rather beautiful pieces about climate change, to a delicate love-song; from experimental to performance, to mainstream, to Judy Kendal's lovely bird-poems (especially the one about the chaffinch with its gorgeous use of word-sounds.)

I hope Tim Atkins doesn't mind, but I ended with his wonderful, angry version of Tsvtayeava's 'I Love The Rich' - a poem full of viscious irony even in the rather more sedate Elaine Feinstein version. It led to the possibility of poets who want to speak about politics getting together in the future, and hopefully we'll find a way to be more engaged in future, and poets and artists across Manchester will be less timid about being political.

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.