I do get hate mail — from the rejected and those reviewed in The Journal — and nowadays I rarely reply. It has become my experience that the offended, the outraged, do not expect or want a dialogue, only to express their hurt by retaliating in some small way. And more often than not I agree with them: yes I am a know-nothing arsehole, yes I am a know-all smug bastard.
Past attempts have shown that any response from me will more than likely bring further abuse or will involve me in a time/brain-consuming correspondence. And I don’t have the time, and I probably don’t have — before any of those I have offended leap gleefully in — the brain capacity either for such tit-for-tat point-scoring dialogues. Only here, with these occasional articles, will I attempt something by way of a pre-emptive response.
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes 6) Poetry as therapy? Poetry as affliction? 7) Unacknowledged Legislators 8) Funding
The beginnings of a manifesto: acceptance-v-rejection?
I want a poetry that can speak to strangers.
Individual poems can be eavesdroppings or gestalts. As a gestalt the poem should bring no externals to it, should have all contained within its beginning and its ending. And I want each poem in a language that is sparingly precise, that shows/tells it exactly how it is. (Exception makes the rule of course. Without knowing the antecedents to Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters half the poems of that master of the sparingly precise would be lost to the reader, and should the Birthday Letters’ editor have been following the gestalt rule the poems would have been lost to us. So let us include Birthday Letters under Eavesdroppings.)
Eavesdroppings are those poems of part open doors, their gaps offering glimpses into, overheards hinting at, universal experience/knowledge; hints and glimpses allowing each reader to complete, to build on the poem from their own lexicon of experience/knowledge.
As reader, as editor, I look for lucidity in a poem, for elegance. I also want poems that possess the illogicality and the happy sense of Zen. Or, and this requires genius, I want the simply told description — or seemingly so — that yet sneaks around the edge of consciousness and one finds oneself haunted by the poem.
That’s what I want. To what I don’t want....
Unfortunately the writing of serious poetry has come to be seen by the wider English public, and even more unfortunately by more than a few aspiring poets, as the advertising of one’s ‘poetic’ sensitivity. And by those who labour to fulfil this expectation the oblique and the obtuse are made great use of. Poetry though should say, regardless of the form, what it needs to say with the least words allowing minimal misinterpretation. Any overt, and written in, ambiguities signal the failure of any poem. Which is not to say that a poem cannot be subtle: what it mustn’t be is coy.
Because what I most definitely do not want is the coy and cosy poetry that one meets with at damn near every poetry reading today. Often anecdotal this is a poetry that without fail refers to, if not nostalgic brand names, then to some private and personal shared experience. The kind of poetry that all too frequently emerges from workshops or poetry groupings.
The workshop group go on an ‘inspirational’ river walk, or a slow moorland trek, and along the way remarks are passed on topographical peculiarities. Those remarks then find their way into the poems, such allusions being lost on anyone not of the group, and at subsequent public readings those allusions have to be explained — explained at a length in inverse proportion to the stripped-down poem. (I won’t bother here with a consideration of Slam/performance poets, or with those who confuse — at poetry readings — being entertaining with stand-up comedy. Neither work on the page, and as reader and editor it is the page only that I have in mind.)
As with group allusions the same applies to the terms of reference that lovers employ. The resulting poems are essentially a showing off of private matters, and which almost invariably come across as smug, and which come into my rejection category of ‘knickers-off poetry’.
Also under the heading Smug is that poetry which emerges from any subculture, that indulges that subculture’s slang, brand names and arcane period details littering the piece. And it’s but a step from that one-of-us poetry and the excruciatingly personal — but which yet offers no real insight into the person or their relationship — to those who seek to impress by throwing in names of philosophers. (Ludwig Wittgenstein said that a private language is no language at all. Although, as is the way with thinkers, he may well have later, or earlier, have appeared to contradict himself.)
And then we have those poets manqué who wish to demonstrate their nudging familiarity with the classics. At readings, condescending to explain briefly their poem — which is usually lengthy — they use expressions such as, "As you will be aware such-and-such in the Greek/Roman/Celtic pantheon was the bringer of...." Yawn. For most present that is. Although the equally pretentious members of the audience will, loud enough to be heard, snigger over the oh-so-many learned allusions.
And let’s not overlook the poet who instantly alienates by assuming a shared value ‘us’. "We all know what it’s like...." Especially, in my case, when it is a middle-class-income-taken-for-granted us. Again such poems offer no real insight into the person or their relationships, are only a confirmation of the author’s acceptable/respectable ordinariness.
Last words here I will leave to two others.
Anthony Barnett said of current British poetry that it appears to be mostly "....trivial anecdotal descriptive narrative, downright lies, and violence to the imagination, or.... in an aspiration to effects akin to advertising copy."
While Osbert Sitwell, when asked how to tell good poetry from bad, said, "In the same way as you can tell fish.... if it’s fresh it’s good, if it’s stale it’s bad, and if you’re not certain try it on the cat."
© Sam Smith 2009
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes 6) Poetry as therapy? Poetry as affliction? return to top? - Hate Mail
Lately we have come to hear of athletes described as ‘physically intelligent’ and carers as ‘emotionally intelligent’. The intelligence I am to refer to here however is neither. This intelligence is solely cerebral, intellect taken as being remote from any emotion. Except, self-evidently, it cannot be. Cerebral intelligence is ultimately indivisible from the emotions, from the metabolic make-up, from the personality, from the spirit which directs the intelligence.
Here in the UK intellects directed to obviously loathsome ends were those of Oswald Ernald Mosley and Enoch John Powell. Both men were universally acknowledged as ‘clever’ and both men used their intelligence to foment racial discord. The blackshirted Mosley blatantly so; and, despite Enoch Powell’s protestations that dockers marching in his support and chanting racist slogans was a symptom of the very malaise he had been describing and was not of his seeking, he thereafter made no sustained attempt to disassociate himself from his previous racist rhetoric. In fact he elaborated and expanded on it at every public opportunity, drawing — as I believe he intended — the support of all those overtly racist.
* * * * *
If intelligence all on its own does not lead to understanding and compassion neither does intelligence necessarily include insight.
I can recall one patient, a scientist who had gained three Phds by his late twenties and who subsequently developed a schizo-affective disorder. He started to hear voices and to act on what those ‘voices’ were telling him.
His scientific colleagues became concerned, he was referred to a psychiatrist and his schizo-affective disorder diagnosed. The scientist didn’t agree with the diagnosis. Exceptional in his field, an entertainer of odd ideas, he was a man accustomed to trusting in and defending his own deductions, and he refused to accept that what his own mind was manufacturing could be wrong, even though what the ‘voices’ were telling him was patently absurd. Nor could he be dissuaded, brought all kinds of rationalisations, formulations even, to the defence of his subsequent actions. Even when his voices were pharmacologically silenced, still he sought to prove the validity of what they had told him to do. They were his ideas and he fought to prove them right, solely because they had come from him. He denied that he needed medication, almost came to welcome the return of his ‘voices’. Exceptional intelligence, nil insight.
Another patient, with not even a GCSE in woodwork and also diagnosed with a schizo-affectve disorder, had insight enough to discern that what his ‘voices’ were telling him was ‘daft’. He also had sufficient insight to realise when he was becoming unwell and the need for a return to, or for an increase in, his medication.
* * * * *
Although not as extreme as the cases psychiatric and political cited above literary endeavours are likewise subject to the guiding spirit. To what end intelligence here? Is it the author’s intent to enlighten, to entertain, evoke, amuse...? Or is this author simply seeking praise, is his/her writing solely an exercise in self-aggrandisement? Or could the intent be solely to express, to discover in its making, a truth? Or is he/she out to settle a score? Because, as with any other grouping, there lurks within many writers a meanspiritedness, a shrivelling spirit that seeks not to share, but to best, a spirit that seeks to promote the self at every opportunity. If only by putting another down.
Or, being generous, could the author be merely, and unselfconsciously, hugging him/herself — as in the self-regarding poetry and the self-regarding prose of the self-regarding professional classes? Theirs the irony beloved of post-modernists, postmodernism which also presupposes a shared value system, grown from their shared education/culture. Based not on external experience and imaginative observation postmodernism is language and literature deconstructed into crossword clues. Clever. Pat-self-on-back clever. Self-aggrandisement near every time. Backward-looking it does not move literature forward in any definable sense, its authors seeking only to produce work acceptable to their peers and to their college mentors.
So also does postmodernism's cousin intertextualism betray a lack of real life experience to be drawn from, its authors reliant on second and third hand experience, on those lives and observations already filtered by their tellers, making of the proponents and practitioners of intertextualism a nonparticipating people, recycling the images and histories known to them all, sponges soaking up manufactured excitements and neatly parcelled and reparcelled concepts. A people unshaped by events, un-self-made. Sofa people soaking up calories , grease and other people’s ideas; no events. Intertextualism doesn’t, so reliant is it on existing material, have the shock, the awkwardness of the new, doesn’t say anything new.
School-taught, tutor-pleasing, or left with no life beyond point-scoring academia, such writers seem to become occupied with the desire, if not to recreate the classics, then to rewrite them in contemporary idiom — reworked Shakespeare, rehashed Homer, redone Ovid — or they pounce upon a text previously overlooked and obscure and ride it to a small fame.
* * * * *
There is art and there is academic art. The one art that is art is art that is universally accepted, is art that speaks to a deep need in people. An excellent example is Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ and his ‘Spirit of Place’. Another such universal art would be Gaudi’s sculptures in Barcelona. Academic art on the other hand is smally clever art, is art that requires MA and Phd studies to win acceptance. The studies not solely to explain or to understand the art, but to add another layer of cleverness, which will require yet another Phd treatise, another MA project....
In the writing of poetry another intelligence that seeks only to display its intelligence is one that delights in mastering form, in producing conventional poetry containing conventional wisdoms, in penning poems that are no more than clever, no more than pleasingly true to form. All too often such superficial works are in rhyme, and all that they have managed to do is rhyme.
Cosily familiar, rhyme of itself tends to lull. While the values intrinsic to any language, in its expression, are its logic too, leading any attempt at reasoning solely within that language to an already existing conclusion. Rhyme propitiates this trend.
At the other extreme we have ‘free verse’ poems that are often no more than scribbled jottings — usually by those who would be known as poets rather than give themselves up to the production of worked up and worked upon poetry. Such jottings elicit at best a so-what? shrug.
Both practices say nothing new, are limited to the acceptable by their timid spirit. New art, all new art to be new, should startle one into awareness, should discomfort.
Poetry, serious poetry, first and foremost has to be a vehicle of truth. Form is secondary. Where form is seen as primary usually sight of poetry’s purpose has been lost and the result is a poem that is not — not a poem that needed to be written but that the writer needed to write a poem. Such a poem, if in any way new, is all too often a self-regarding innovation — look at me, aint I clever? Poetry cannot be just the latest from the pen of.... it has to say something new, be something other, cannot be just a piddling about on paper.
As editor I often have this nightmare vision of would-be writers leaving in hordes their ‘creative-writing’ classes/workshops all with shining faces eager to please, to not cause offence, to belong.... And with nothing new to say only the desire to be saying something — something which their tutors will praise, will find agreeable, acceptable.
To belong.... Such are the writers who will ultimately put themselves on the side of authority, and revel in its little paradoxes and privileges, be desperate to win its prizes. Their every published work seems to plead — Oh please let me join your circle, your establishment. Let me in. Please let me in.....
On the other side of the same sheet are the writers who seek to exclude, who seem to want only to play with words, who make poems that hide meanings within meanings, and who seem to produce work that is mere smart-aleckry. Or they mark their superiority by their time-consuming study and commentary upon lengthy and convoluted texts. Thus they exclude the great majority of the uninterested and the time-restricted. On top of that they often employ a language and/or punctuation all their own.
And then there are the writers, there are, who do have something to say, who do want to draw your attention in a novel way to what they’ve seen, to what they’ve thought, felt. But even here having something original to say is not enough. Especially if, in a poem, the poem implies the superiority of the poet writing — the only one to have seen, to have felt, to be able to express.... so very sensitive, so thoughtful, so obviously talented.... And such off-putting arrogance.
Of all the arts poetry’s is a process of reduction, of distillation, of draft-by-draft losing ownership, a distancing from the self, a diminution of one’s self, of one’s ego. A true poetic spirit, guiding the intelligence, should see the self as but a vehicle, a conduit, and without a personality of its own. Unless that personality can be put to use within the poem. Disguised preferably.
© Sam Smith 2009
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes 6) Poetry as therapy? Poetry as affliction? return to top? - Hate Mail
If as Henry Miller said "a clown is a poet in action" then, mirror-like, a poet has to be a clown writing. Let us be laughed at.
Poems, whole collections, are personal things — author speaking to reader, the writing and the reading both solo, private activities, publication the conduit between them. Despite publication’s dissemination each book, each poem, will enter each reader’s consciousness differently. So where is a reviewer to start?
Critics — and I don’t mean those using the book under review to exercise some private spite, but those who attempt to engage with the work, who try to give reasons for their possible failure so to do, and who are not mere categorisers — critics are as various as the authors whose work they review. Add in the ethos of the publication they are reviewing for, the period during which they are doing the review, and it has to be apparent to even the most prejudiced that there can be no absolute, no authoritative view of a work.
I believe that, in reviewing contemporary works, every review being a part of the ongoing creative process, the reviewer should assess each poem, each collection, on what he/she believes it appears to be trying to say, trying to be. Unfortunately there are those critics who so take against a work at the outset that they only count its faults — punctuation, syntax, spelling — while missing the spirit of the piece. So was John Clare dismissed by the oh-so-smallminded-clever for nigh on a century.
On the other hand there are those critics who, not having shared similar experiences to the author find themselves unable to assess the veracity of a work. One such author for me is Seamus Heaney. However not only is his background, and the values therefrom, alien to mine, he fails to take me into his created life. Which has to be, despite the many garlands cast his way, a failing on both our parts. I can’t see the failing as entirely mine. Other writers, with even more alien life experiences and values, have taken me into their creations — Chinua Achebe, C. P. Cavafy, Djuna Barnes and Yukio Mishima for instance. Which variety has to demonstrate that one can have sympathy with any piece of imaginative work that invites one to enter the logic of the piece. But it must invite.
Unfortunately many critics tend to join with the author under review in — it would seem deliberately — excluding the reader from the piece. The pair of them showing off their arcane learning to no advantage to the reader of the review, the reviewer demonstrating only her/his intellectual snobbery.
Similar to the snob are those critics who are too aware of their subject’s life, or who are even a part the same circle, which will all too often be a praising circle. Here in the UK those closed circles can be an Oxbridge crew or a part of the same publisher’s list. Or they may be the same people who review and get reviewed in, say, The Guardian. With such circles it is not always easy for the out-of-the-loop reader to get past the hype and the mutual flattery to work out who are the authors worth reading. Because beyond that current praising circle, beyond that competition-judging circle, the work of such an insider can be very soon forgotten.
One has only to look back to those lesser/minor poets who were acclaimed in their own time, and who have now passed beyond memory, to ask how many of our feted contemporary poets producing works of similar mediocrity are but proficient networkers and self-publicists? The well-connected Alice Oswald springs to mind here.
Having thus far mentioned several names I am in imminent danger myself of being accused of pursuing vendettas and of inviting others to read author and not the work. Because for a praising circle critic the name of the author can be as, can be more important than, the actual work under review. So it is that excessive praise will be lavished on an older, and revered, author in his/her attempt to produce something/anything new. When on the author’s part there has been no urgent need to create, was only the middle-aged squeezing his/her pot-belly into the latest fashion.
What must also be taken into consideration is that most literary critics, being writers themselves, are likely to have some sympathy with work that has similar stylistic concerns and/or subject matter. For instance I prefer work that, much like my own, has relevance to matters outside of literature. Therefore for me the language has to be familiar even if the ideas are strange.
Which brings me — excuse the confusion of loosely applied terms — to the intertextual Language school of writing and reviewing. Postmodernists as I assume them to be, ironists all, their playing with language would seem to negate the very medium through which they are attempting to communicate: the medium is and isn’t the message?
Not that I am opposed to it as a form — that we should deny our learning in order to communicate with the unlearned? And language poetry, commentating on and questioning itself, is fine it what it successfully does; but even then it is only following where philosophy long ago led — in debating the ideas/values/narratives contained within the words and phrases that control our thinking, that contain and confine our thoughts, frame our perceptions.
A common language is what unites us, and we all of us take different meanings from it. What, for instance, is a poem?
As for Language poetry reviewing itself as it is being written I have enormous respect. What other art, aside from writing, has to describe, to analyse itself using the same medium? Are statues used to pass comment on statues?
I think it has to be the wannabe Linguistic poetry that I find so offensive, its coming across as no more than the verbal salads of the pressure-of-speech psychotic or as the associative cadences of the demented. Feeding on itself such artless Language — prose or poetry — can seem to be nowt but auto-cannibalism; and not that far removed from the out-to-impress learnéd allusions of the academically-inclined poets. Which is not to accuse all Language poets of being academics. Often they are but academics-manqué, with their work appealing only to those academically-aspired like them, and who make a show of gleefully following the many (supposedly free-association) erudite references and, having so followed, can knuckle-polish their lapels.
Such self-feeding work may bring the authors and their ilk much pleasure. But the more obscure the references, the more satisfying to the self-preening author, the more off-putting to the uncommitted reader.
Reviewers, if not seduced into complicity by the name-dropping subject matter, tend to shy away from such work. If they say that this sample of language poetry left them cold, or that they simply didn’t get it, they fear being labelled reactionary: Language poetry presents itself forbiddingly as the new. Even where a reviewer may have sympathy for any genuine attempt at the new still they might hesitate to say that there is as much self-conscious artifice in Language poetry as there is in the torturing of syntax to achieve da-di-da endrhymes. I personally need to know less where the poetry has come from: I want to know where it is going.
© Sam Smith 2009
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes 6) Poetry as therapy? Poetry as affliction? return to top? - Hate Mail
What is an editor to do? Poetry is in a state of flux, is at a similar stage to that of early cubism — clumsy, ugly, monochrome structures built on theory.... no song, no beauty, too reliant on the appreciation of a partisan cognoscenti.... And that’s just those few attempting the new. Other poets labour on from the — let’s call it a — pre-cubism past, want their work to be pretty still, that is conventionally attractive, praiseworthy. Or they write solely to entertain, to amuse, and make no attempt to stretch their readers’ imaginations.
Confused? Allow me to attempt a loose categorisation. Though please be aware that in listing these ‘categories’ I am not being dismissive. Indeed at one time or another I have included most of these categories in issues of The Journal.
But let’s start at the beginning of the process. With every submission to The Journal, envelope unsealed, pages unfolded, e-mail opened, and once beyond the author’s paeans of self-praise (really if he/she is that good why are they sending work to the humble Journal?) the swiftest of glances over the poems has the categorising switched on.
Top of the list, of the first 3 instantly recognisable, will be:—
Rhyme And one can get trapped into rhyme the way one gets trapped into lies, the next one and the next leading one further and further away from the truth.
First Person The use of ‘I’ in any poem is usually the signal for throat-catching sentimentality; or, with first person plural, teenage angst/strictures.
Linguistics On the page barely distinguishable from computer spill.
Onomatopoeic Linguistics gone barmy.
Trash poems Unworked juxtapositions of the discarded.
Regret Lines which are one long regret for ever having grown up, the author’s childhood having been oh-so-much clearer.
Post-nostalgia Close to Regret, but more a wish for having had a better past.
Having got thus far with a submission — poems not yet rejected, still reading — I am then, often subconsciously, deciphering the author’s allegiances — humanist? fogey? religious evangelist? racist? anarchist? Suspicion of a sexist subtext...?
And I have to say here, Beware irony. Irony does not translate, nor does it travel. Irony is completely lost on Gee-whizz Americans, for instance, and every half-wit Australian thinks they’re being ironic every time they open their mouth.
So we come to the Poetry Group/Workshop poem — which is loaded with meaning and which requires an explanation at least twice the length of the poem.
Poem as puzzle Where one has to find one’s way into the meaning.
Code-breaking poem As above.
Self poems Can be mistaken for the above, but are poems written for the writer as opposed to poems written for the reader. Such poems are also not readily comprehensible.
Poems of Boredom are written with no object in mind, and often in the middle of the night, are simply a playing around with words for something to do. Often self-descriptive they ask time-starved readers and busy editors to sympathise with their ennui.
(Having written that I realise that these Poems of Boredom require additional categorisation. In that there can be two kinds of poets writing them — those poets who are seeking to express in some manner their life’s truths, and those who enjoy playing with words and form. Can be the same poet at different times; and occasionally a poet can combine the two in the same poem.)
Nature triumphant poems But if poetry is the alchemy of truth then any poem that these days presupposes cyclical rebirth is a lie and is therefore not worthy of consideration.
Lyrical Always tempting, but skating always on the thin ice of whimsy.
Over-exclamatory haiku Brevity already making of haiku an exclamatory form the addition of a single exclamation mark betrays an attempt to infuse it with drama.
Behold poems Behold the poet looking into the human soul and crying out in pity.
Posterity posturing In anticipation of their every phrase and minor eccentricity being dwelt on by acolytes as yet unborn, and with future academics quarrel-quoting their work, these are poems with leaden and signalled nuance.
Suck-up poems Similar to the above, but which suck up to a single group’s prejudices/dogma, seeking only to elicit sympathetic responses therefrom.
After that it can be a relief to come to current/topical poems and their wry reportage on the day, or
the self-mocking even the self-mocking doggerel of the stand-up
contrast poems that try to reconcile newspaper/TV reports of atrocities with the author’s own safe going-on day-by-undifferentiated-day.
anecdotal poems something really did happen.
stored experience poems beyond anecdotal, more an examination of the experience, giving it a context.
And so we come to a further categorisation of the poets themselves. Or more accurately of poets as met in that most peculiar of sit-down affairs, poetry readings.
Peculiar I say because what matters post-Chaucer is not the oral tradition, but print. Since the advent of print and latterly of near universal literacy the succinct expression of ideas/narratives (poetry) no longer requires mnemonic devices such as Italian/French rhyme or Saxon alliteration. Poets can express themselves on paper alone, have no need to meet their public in person. (Idris Caffrey, for instance, continues to be one of Original Plus’s most popular poets, by which I mean best-selling, yet he has opened his mouth at a poetry reading but the once.)
Nevertheless it has become accepted wisdom that poets still need to give public readings. Albeit that the ‘public’ at those readings will be 90% other poets. And those other poets will not usually be listening, but mentally rehearsing while waiting their turn to read, or thinking back on what, on how, they have just read.
Now the psychology of performance is that the performer (the reader) tries to win the audience’s approval/applause; and generally audiences have a taste for the new. Not though for the unknown, not for the truly original. The familiar, the singalong, and knowing where to laugh, knowing what is expected of them is a comfort to any audience.
Also to be taken into consideration is that at a poetry reading, in order to keep the audience’s interest, one thing has to quickly follow another, so the audience aren’t given time to puzzle on, to ponder over a poem, let alone a single line. Performance poetry is therefore unlikely to break new ground. Indeed it’s not a surprise that at readings, Slams in particular, the lowest common denominator reigns supreme — doggerel which gets a laugh, rhyming sentimentality which generates a sigh and applause.
Or — a subtle variation — the performers are young college-educated men with floppy hair, or curvaceous round-eyed female students, all of whom have pitched their charms according to an allusive lexicon. Both male and female seem to excite learned editors of a certain age. And both seem to say a lot without saying anything new, anything very much.
A truism these days is that any poet who doesn’t in some way entertain will be neglected. Another truism is that to be a poet, or indeed any kind of creator — given the odds against success and taking success as public recognition if not financial reward — requires naiveté. (Sophisticates do not risk being laughed at, sneered at, mocked.)
Unfortunately not all writers are fetchingly naive. Many are simply deluded to their writing’s worth. And some are so arrogant, think themselves hugely superior to other mortals because they have found themselves under a compulsion to put pen to paper. A consequence of this compulsion, and solely because of this compulsion, being that they call themselves a poet. Leonard Cohen said, ‘Poet is a verdict not an occupation.’
Disregarding the astonishing arrogance of blatantly bad poets we still have at readings the establishment English parading their poems of refined gentility. So very softly spoken, voice dying at line’s end; or that oh-so-polite hesitant drone into a microphone.
With or without microphone, page held before their face, observe their stance. One foot is held flat to the floor, while the ball of the other foot twists and presses down, down, almost wearing a hole. One which readers of their own poetry might yet disappear into.
Sam Smith © 2009
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes return to top? - Hate Mail
I’m a writer who has difficulty recalling verbatim: always I paraphrase, rehash, rewrite. Furthermore, when working on my own writing, I have actually taught myself to forget, in order that when I approach a previous draft I can almost see it, assess it, anew.
In creative mode this forgetfulness is beneficial, can trick me into exploring ‘new’ ideas, can see me scampering after what I think may be previously unconsidered concepts/scenarios and have me end up in unexpected places.
In other aspects of my writing life though — when reviewing, editing, compiling, publishing — forgetfulness such as this can be a handicap. A piece, a phrase, can seem worryingly familiar and I will have to go searching back through the MS to check for possible repetition, or go flipping back through previous issues of the Journal, or go a’tipping spines off my bookshelves to seek out the reference, the duplication, even to uncover the possibility of plagiarism. My self-induced forgetfulness then can make hard work of what should have been the simplest of tasks.
However, having seen what the cultivation of memory can do to other writers, I wouldn’t now change. The performance poet who, for instance, has learnt their own verses by heart and who can confidently recite them without recourse to sheets of trembling A4.... He or she can be very impressive the first time of hearing. Possibly as impressive on the second hearing too, with their extended repertoire. But, thereafter, year on year they repeat. Nothing new has been written.
My suspicion is that every creative urge of these memory-adepts gets stillborn. A phrase, a single word even, that could have been the beginning of a creative adventure, that could have sent them careening off into the new, instead brings to mind a line, a verse, from their own rote-learned work and off they totter down a well-trodden mental path.
Nullity.
Likewise with those who, in their desire to appear learned, have crammed every classical allusion into their skull. How many times does their pen pause, their typing fingers still.... and they think, Hasn’t this been done before? Yes, so-and-so in such-and-such said.... And off they go to wander that memory.
Nullity.
Art and Science both come from ‘Seeing what happens if....’ But if one already knows? Or if one thinks, one suspects one knows?
Nullity.
While we forgetters, although we may subconsciously recreate a previous work, may re-use a phrase, may even unwittingly borrow... at least we are making, have immersed ourselves in making, have no idea where the next thought might lead.... This is where imagination goes, extracting a particle and growing it to an image. And we can remedy any partial repeats, acknowledge any borrowings later, can have new and uncreased A4 sheets trembling in our fingers at readings.
Not that such trembling belongs only to the nervous novice. Forced from their working isolation, being made to stand before all those faces — who might well display sympathy, who might well appear to be paying attention, but by what they later say they obviously haven’t understood.... Even the feted and the famous can dread these public outings. I’ve seen such working authors reduced to mumbling puzzlement by praise for a work of theirs several years old. And they are puzzled because, leading a creative life, the author has yet to make, is still in the process of making, the perfect work. And yet here is someone praising what was obviously years ago imperfect. Had it been perfect there would have been no need for the author to go on striving after perfection. How though is one to respond to undeserved praise without causing offence? Yet to descry the value of that old and deliberately forgotten work would be to cast doubt on the flatterer’s taste, and even the most reclusive authors require a public.
Sam Smith © 2009
Hate Mail topics in order of posting:- 1) The beginnings of a manifesto 2) The spirit that guides the intelligence 3) Reviewers reviewed 4) Categorisations 5) Mental Modes 6) Poetry as therapy? Poetry as affliction? return to top? - Hate Mail
Art, every kind of art, can be defined by its function. When any music is played as background music it becomes by definition musak. Likewise when painting or the writing of poetry are used solely as a means of self-expression then both become by definition therapy.
Now let us suppose that there are only 3 purposes to writing — to explain me to you, you to yourself, and me to myself. Therapy can use the first and last of these. And that is as far as such writing goes.
Such ‘poetry’ therapy depends on the lingering superstitious belief in the runic power of words, on the use of the magic power of words to make the strange commonplace, ordinary and unthreatening — express a troublesome idea, a bothersome fixation and, by putting it into words, make it safe.
But any artist, to be worthy of the name, has to begin by questioning his or her every assumption; and assumptions are the glue which hold most individuals together. The true artist then has to go beyond assumption and question their every certainty, must question even the validity of their own experiences.
This self-regarding, this destructive narcissism, although essential to the process of making art, does not lead to psychologically well-balanced individuals. Consequently those who place art, or any other goal, as more important than equilibrium, have to be a psychotherapist's nightmare. And yet counselling groups employ poetry as therapy? And those ‘poets’ assume their outpourings to be deserving of publication?
For any such self-expression to become art further critical self-examination is required. Because without that self-lacerating, self-disparaging self-criticism all such self-expression is but self-decoration.
That is not to say that the creator, to be a true creator, must risk his or her equilibrium. John Clare, for instance, initially took strength from his unique talent, even though he ended as a man driven mad, driven into himself. The foundation for that, however, was laid first by a denial of his art, then by a brief and false celebration of it. What it was that destroyed him, what near obliterated his sense of self, was not his art, but the physical and social destruction taking place all around him. Making John Clare truly a poet for our time.
Sam Smith © 2009
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(Or are we victims of our own hype and aiming far far too high?)
"....poetry which is a debased form of speech." Thornton Wilder
Where our language continues to be abused and debased by politicians, by corporate apologists, media chatter and lazy journalism, contemporary poets have yet to reinvent and reinvigorate language. Oh we have tried. And on the way to a reinvention, to a reclaiming of language, we have created (within poetry) a syntax without sense, a verbless grammar, and have even played around with computer spill-out. But still we haven’t made a new sense.
If what concerns us is communication — and it must be or we wouldn’t be so concerned — then the deconstruction of language in an attempt to reinvent it has to be self-defeating from the off. Rather, being aware of its entrapments, we should be attempting to transcend language. Each of our poems should seek in its expression to become a thing in itself. A thing to be referred to, to be used as a measure. It must alter the reality of which it speaks.
Most mainstream poets however seem intent only on recreating the past, seem to want to be, to gain the reputation of being their generation’s Shelley, Keats, Byron, Eliot, Kerouac.... (yer takes yer pick). And they end with poems of a self-defeating cleverness, incomprehensible to those not in the know, to those not of their class, with poems dated and irrelevant, making of their poetry a comfortable and little-read ghetto. Although they themselves might refer to it as an ‘elite’.
Outside of the mainstream attempts have been made to extend poetry/language into other art forms — text incorporated into image, image allied to text. Collaborations across disciplines have been many and various — haiku bricks, poetry pavements, jazz poems; along with wordless performances that range from a sequence of Neanderthal grunts and glottal clicks to a toneless Iroqois howl. Add to that the many internet endeavours — a randomised Google, updated OULIPO — and the collaborations within poetry — informal renga, all-comers invited to add a line, a word....
And the language remains unchanged, the poetry failing still to engage the wider public.
To engage the wider public, and to give themselves some street-cred, some poets make use of slang. But slang takes us nowhere. Slang is a disfigurement of language, a deliberate obstacle to communication. Its raison d’être is to make the person using it unintelligible to an untutored public and is therefore as excluding as the snobbish overuse of classical allusions.
I suppose that within our greater tellyocracy it is inevitable that a subculture of poetry should become inward-looking. A self-regarding self-conscious and defiantly embarrassed alternative society that eschews those works loaded with tabloid prejudice and which places words in such contexts where their dictionary use can be the only use. Pedantry in a poet though has to be more unseemly than in a clerk.
The English generally confuse culture with gentility. Probably the closest we come to the concept of an English intelligentsia is a bunch of drunken hacks lounging about the Groucho and sneering sub-wittily at one another.
History tells us, should we care to look, that it is not suffering that produces great art, but generous patronage, a stimulating environment, constructive criticism and, above all else, way above all else, time — the time to immerse one’s self in one’s art.
But the English seem incapable, such philistines are they, of giving writers money solely in order that they can buy time to sit alone in a room and practise their art. Oh writers will be given public money so that they can be forced onto a public stage to read from their writings; albeit that others — ‘resting’ actors probably — could do it better. But to be paid to stay industriously alone in their rooms...? No, such invisible solo activity will never do.
The English, if they give any living money to writers at all, have to dress it up in a commercially respectable way. For their being given a one-off payment writers will be asked to run workshops, to give readings, take up residencies, collaborate on videos.... All of which have the effect of taking the writer away from his or her writing.
For solitary-loving writers, internal exiles all, the truth is that, the trouble is that, like most English people they don’t like most people. I don’t much like myself, certainly don’t much like the English (when you’ve been bottom of the heap you tend not to think that much of the heap), and in a belonging world, where individuals are led to take their identity from groups and subgroups, to seek parts in plots and subplots, to see oneself in tableaux both as perpetrator and victim.... even writers can catch themselves, against their better judgement, wanting to belong — to belong to something, to anything, a landscape, a group, oneself. And wanting to be constrained by none — not even by oneself. To be a freefloating intelligence, while resenting the dominance of cold intellect, of reason, craving the luxury, the flux only of emotions, of sensations. And despising their animal roots. To be free. To belong. And not to belong. In England to not belong is to keep passing by. To be passed by.
No time. The problem in England is that, because it is only academics who prize the creation of literature (their foodstock), it is only they who encourage their fellows, only they who allow them time to think, time to read, time to write. But their being all of an academic background and similar class this is bringing about too narrow a creative channel, is like inbreeding, the literary stock becoming ever more feeble.
One has only to witness the dead hand of Oxbridge at work, poets Laureate and Nobel continuing to present their versions of ancient Greek and Roman texts. With would-be Oxbridge types also peppering their efforts with allusions to similar texts. A cosy, if fuelled by petty resentments, classic-panelled club. Ossified.
Most writers now are sat somewhere alone and are, like the mad, talking to themselves. Which is not itself a bad thing. In any get-rich-quick society like ours what is often overlooked is that work of itself can be rewarding. Accomplishment can be satisfaction enough. Writing doesn’t necessitate a cash incentive. But serious writing, new writing, does need funding for it to be allowed to happen and to not get lost in the small spaces of a busy working day. Ivan Klíma said, ‘For a writer, any new experience is useful, but over years it [menial get-by jobs] demolishes your inner self and your capacity to think.’
Writing is how private, solitary people bear witness. And they need to be heard, society needs to hear them. And with the changes in publishing leading to less and less paid-for writing writers now need patronage, not to be patronised.
© Sam Smith 2009
