Parmar cites another essay
(”Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Garde”, by Cathy Park Hong) which is
reported to be about the American avant-garde’s belief that rejecting
Republican values (crudely) makes them politically innocent and neutral (this
is the “delusion of whiteness”) and so that there is no need for further
engagement with poetry by ethnic minorities - whose critique of dominant
American traditions (and the propaganda for the avant garde has been
overwhelmingly nationalistic in the USA) is assumed to be anticipated and
rolled-up and answered by the critique which founded the official poetic
avant-garde. She also published a much more detailed essay (in the Los
Angeles Review of Books, 2015, available on-line) from which some quotes
are as follows. (BAME means “Black and minority ethnic” and
seems to exclude Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. The acronym BME seems to be more common
in Britain.)
>>It
can only be a good thing that British poetry publishing is slowly becoming more
racially diverse. But is it enough for poets of color to simply win prizes and
appear more frequently in publishers’ catalogs? Does this adequately challenge
a national tradition in which so few ethnically diverse voices have been
historically heard? I worry increased visibility of BAME poets is superficial
and, when the dust settles, British poetry will return to a largely
monochromatic, monolingual expression of sameness. The literary establishment
here needs to rethink the subject matter, aesthetic modes, and assumptions
about “literariness” made about poets of color in the United Kingdom.
While
it won a major UK award, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a
striking example of exactly what is not happening in popular
British poetry. [...]
Both
contemporary avant-garde poetry in the United Kingdom, with its dispersal of
the lyric “subject” through linguistic process, and the British mainstream’s
Movement-inspired poem leave little room for expressions of complex identity
and difference. At times, in the hands of a BAME poet the lyric form can become
a beguiling call toward the homogenous white space of intimate revelation and
universality. Expressions of difference enact a kind of closure that erases the
ambiguities and subjectivities upon which poetry depends — after all, as bell
hooks reminds us, “language is a place of struggle.” And while no one wishes,
least of all me, to argue that BAME poets should or should not write about
specific subjects, the singular lyric voice should not merely reproduce poetic
sameness through an universal “I” or self-fetishizing difference through a
poetic diction of otherness.
Contemporary
British poetry lacks a vocabulary to speak about race, and a willingness to be
critical, despite this happening elsewhere in literary and cultural studies.
How is
it possible that only a few poets of color in the United Kingdom appear in
anthologies, magazines, reading series, presses dedicated solely to innovative
and experimental poetics? How is it that the centers of “radical” poetics — the
supposedly progressive, Marxist annex within overwhelmingly white universities
— willingly exclude poets of color from their registers? Especially those who
partake in the dreaded work of “identity politics”? One recent example is Emily
Critchley’s anticipated follow-up to Maggie O’Sullivan’s Out of
Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America &
the UK (1996), which has just been published. Out of 44 experimental
women poets, it appears that three are of Asian descent (Sascha Akhtar, Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge, and Myung Mi Kim) and only one is black (the British poet
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett) — a total of two North American and two UK writers of
color. I can think of several inexplicable omissions — a jaw-droppingly long
list that would include Harryette Mullen, Bhanu Kapil, Evie Shockley, and M.
NourbeSe Philip, and even slightly more mainstream British poets Sarah Howe and
Vahni Capildeo [.] <<
Poetry is not a study, I don’t
think.
I emailed Sandeep about this, in
connection with some other things.
>> […] about ethnic
identification. I read your article and it is very interesting. I do agree with
it. I have to say that where you describe Emily as “excluding” certain people, it
might seem to EC and others that they spend all day including people, to the
point of exhaustion, and it is only post factum that their activity is defined
as excluding people all day. I think there is an equality (& diversity)
problem with the uptake of BAME poets, and it has to do with empathy fatigue.
Empathy is powerful but gets tired quickly. When the Cambridge Conference of
Contemporary Poetry was happening, German poets used to come over and there
would be almost no audience for them. Kevin and Leslie got them over and got
funding from German arts bodies, I would translate them, which was bloody
difficult, and then there would be 20 people in the audience. Everyone stayed
in the bar. They were right there, in the building next to where the poetry
was. This was mild xenophobia. Karlien explained it to me, as the students
(others too) were willing to go to English and American poets but it stopped
there. European poets didn’t count. Anyway, if
everyone you know is in the bar, it is attractive to stay there, you would
follow if everyone else left to go to the gig. So I think this is probably true
for BAME poets. Did you carry out a xenophobic act? no, I just stayed in the
bar. When Romana organised an Anglo-American conference, about 15 (?) years
ago, in Michigan or somewhere, and busloads of English poet/ideologues were
there, I was told that when there was a talk about an English poet the
Americans weren’t in the auditorium. They were in the cafe or possibly
even in the bar. If it was about Americans, they had to go, but if it was
somebody English it was obviously Totally Unimportant and time for an extended
coffee klatsch and networking session. Hi, I think you’re so great, please plug my next book. These are the
silent rules. It’s a little hard to see who makes them. People are
centric, they get out of being egocentric but move into being group-centric.
I think it’s good to talk about these things. Reflexivity is
desirable even if people resist it all they can. These aren’t conscious decisions and there is no rule-making
forum which deliberates.
I spoke of empathy fatigue. I
think it needs a bit of a jog.I calculated/ guessed that there are 9000 people in Britain who have published at least one book of poetry. The figure may be wrong. Anyway, there is no institutional power of comparable magnitude. There is no institution which would bring about justice. Who are you going to sue? Instead there is something spontaneous and ineffective. It does seem possible that we now have a grasp on what happened in the 70s, although the “we” may not be able to get that view across. It took a long time to reach this.<<
I doubt this was very convincing. Actually, this exchange filled me with a pervasive sense of doubt.
My voluble and excitable critical
career has NOT involved talking about the topic which Sandeep says we want to
avoid. Except for me banging on about Wales and Scotland, which involves
majorities rather than minorities. Am I an ethnic minority or not. Maybe we
could run through the findings again. If you take the subjective act of
identification and projection as an action sequence, you can imagine it being
filmed. And then, the film being examined frame by frame to find the patterns.
This is like what athletes do with film of their running actions and so on -
things they can’t see but need to be hyper-aware of. If you could look at a
film of poetic subjectivity, you would find a systematic bias towards the
in-group the reader belongs to - so egocentricity, group-egocentricity,
“centricity” in general. So minority ethnic poets don’t get the uptake, in
anthologies, maybe in reviews or textbooks, probably in bookshop sales,
probably in live audience response, which they deserve. The poem-response does
not involve the language of the poem, only, but also preverbal identification
with the people in the poem, so the person speaking as much as other people.
This identification, this occupation of another self, is ethnocentric, as well
as being egocentric, and in practice there is a White Anglo-American in-group
and this diffuse, unarticulated, self-domain is a factor in the appreciation of
contemporary poetry. Due to the influence of television and popular music on
the socialisation of children growing up since about 1960, or maybe 1956,
Americans are readily accepted as identification objects in Britain, and so the
in-group can sensibly be called “Anglo-American“.
Just to recap, we never did photograph
that process. So my version might not be true. It’s just that I feel it’s like
that, and this feeling is shared by a lot of people. If you ever come to look
at anthologies over the period 1960-2010 (let’s say), it is very noticeable how
few “minority ethnics” are found in those pages.
I can’t make any clear statements about this “in group” thing, but, as
Sandeep said, people find it hard to talk about, and I think just by talking
about it we can make progress on this thing. Talking might help unconscious
decisions rise to the surface and become visible. We are talking about empathy
fatigue, and trying to reach people about this is like waking them up. It is by
definition where consciousness and interest have stopped. Until they wake up
they obviously can’t hear you at all.
I am much more emotionally
involved in the silent exclusion of Welsh and Scottish poets than in, say,
South Asian poets. Obviously, the centric effect is not the only one in operation, and there is also an exoticism effect, where something strange is much more stimulating than something familiar, and indeed poetry has to be strange to some extent. If we consider archaeology, it is apparent that the search for ancestors means that people look for an in-group which they belong to in the first millennium BC. This is absurd, but if you read the literature it is obviously happening. But if you look at British Museum exhibitions, the two most popular they ever had were the Gold of Tutankhamun and the Terracotta Warriors. So, both from another continent. The market is not rigidly ethnocentric. Of course both those exhibitions were associated with supreme secular power, monarchs who possessed staggering power, and artefacts built to embody that power.
We also have to mention the aspiration to equality. People genuinely want culture to be fair, not predisposed to leave some people out in the cold. This impulse can either take the form of anxiety which puts you off the pleasures of culture, or of denying the suggestion that the poetry culture is biased towards the dominant ethnic group. Further, the basis is spontaneous and personal, whereas the egalitarian drives come mainly, or seem to come mainly, from the government, from officials who are structurally inhibited from pushing their personal views - but who recognise the whole spectrum of citizens as their target and, indeed, as their employers and bosses. It is hardly a secret that grant awarding bodies have put pressure on publishers, possibly also event organisers, to take on more poets from ethnic minorities. This may have had the corollary of publishing books that the public isn’t very interested by (and which possibly haven’t been looked after very carefully by editors). One more thing - the border of the “in-group” can change in five minutes. The edges of these “domains of the self” are remarkably soft - their capacity for change is so prominent, and drawing a map that embodies the limit of identification is dubious because the border has probably moved by the time you have drawn the map. The “in-group” for poetry is evidently Anglo-American; due to the prominence of television and pop music in the socialisation of children since 1960 or so, it is easy for British people to identify with Americans in art and there is no real barrier. This connects with the way literature is taught in schools. While this is a culture on a large geographical scale, it is hardly an in-group with no out-groups.
You can’t have a multi-cultural society made up of monocultural individuals. Of course the immigrants, first second or third generation, etc., are bicultural and it is the “old northwest Europeans” who are monocultural. My point is that it is feasible for grant-awarding institutions to be multi-cultural. It does seem like a collaborative thing, a thing provided by institutions. The government belongs to everybody but culture belongs to the people who enjoy it.
Sandeep also pours scorn on the dislike of the “alternative” poetry scene for the politics of identity. I can’t agree with this. The idea that poems are just vehicles for a personality is dangerous, because every personality has equal value and it seems likely that poems have unequal value. To explain what happens, we do better to shift axis and say that a poem is a piece of linguistic technology and that this is known to few people, comparable to the knowledge of how to write a program in C. Obviously much of the discourse around poetry acts as if poems were no more than lumps of personality. The residual elements of narcissism and group narcissism within the poetic field are essential but very hard to articulate. No particular words or syllables of the poem record this element, and analysis of it is retarded. It is likely to cause particular problems to people perceived as outsiders - immigrants, for example. Uncertainty must hinder the act of identification, which relies on inner certainty. Conclusion - hostility to a person means hostility to their art. You can’t wrench this back to objectivity. If identity politics is the central pattern, then the alternative poetry scene is completely wrong and has to disappear.
I am not aware of any actual text where someone claims that Underground poetry, by dint of its link with the New Left and so its ability to subvert capitalism and bourgeois values, is offering liberation to ethnic minorities. If that position exists, it has obvious flaws. First, the promise to overthrow bourgeois society has been devalued somewhat after 45 years of not being honoured. Secondly, I don’t understand why poets from ethnic minorities would desist from writing poetry on the grounds that the message had already been delivered by the stars of the Poetry Underground. This does not seem to claim that Underground poetry since 1972 has been unnecessary because the stars have already written the real story. I think the claim is more “because we are totally ignored outside a tiny niche we don’t have cultural power and so if you are angry about the cultural power structure we are not to blame and refuse to feel guilty anyway”. That is more plausible. Actually, it means that the scene had to disappear in order to become the Underground.
People want to say, “I changed the rules”. This is a pervasive fantasy, and the scene is largely made up of fantasies. This one needs the assumption that there are rules which everyone else is following. This may be wholly untrue. If 3000 people say, quite loudly, “I changed the rules”, it is easy to get the impression that the rules have changed. But, maybe they haven’t. Maybe another 20 people making a career doesn’t change any rules at all.
Weakness of empathy
Empathy and intuition are so much
the foundation of the poetry scene that to understand the way things happen we
have to offer a critique of them. They are partial, inefficient, spasmodic,
easily tired. They date back, as a form of knowledge, to the Palaeolithic, and
they are inaccurate. They are not particularly compatible with justice and
equality. The poetry world is all founded on the sovereignty of empathy. In the
end we have to draft a critique of empathy, it is too structural to the
landscape to be pushed behind a screen of awe and silence. Around the edge of
warmth we find the cold. Cold, cold, cold. There is a limit to how far you can
write about the poetry world under this ancient and feudal sovereignty without
stubbing your toe on the problems of empathy. It just isn’t going to reach the
outer fringes, and people are so happy to issue entire books which don’t
mention any Scottish or Welsh poets. You don’t want to go there, so why would
you want to read poems about there?
If I could dwell on one cell for
a longer moment, it is that the government officials may be less biased than
the individuals following empathy and subjective wishes. The scene may need
cold and indifferent governmental processes to balance its in-built favouritism
and loyalty and centricity.
What is justice?
If you look at the scene and
decide that (other) people make the right decisions only 5% of the time, that
might also mean that 95% of people disagree with you and that, really, this is
a measure of how different you are from other people. Suppose you belong to an
in-group which extends to 5% of the whole realm. That might be a little large
to enjoy the notorious benefits of being an in-group, preserving warmth and
loyalty. The wish for it to grow outwards and take over 100% of the territory
might be projective rather than the voice of reason and necessity. Could the
“picture” be described as blanking out the 95% of the realm that belongs to
other people? just not being interested by them and not recognising their right
to occupy territory and to make judgments? The majority of discourse directed
by poets boils down to an argument for their own work to get more love, fame,
admiration, attention, praise. This extends quite readily to similar arguments
in favour of their in-group. It is difficult to re-normalise these impassioned
and organic utterances of need to something that you could call public or
accountable or rational. And the unmediated cries of need just cancel each
other out. One poet is quite happy for another hundred poets to be cropped out
of the picture and have their microphone mysteriously go dead. The only way for
one faction to win and have their ideas become “official” is when the other
factions fall off the boat and can’t get heard.
Suppose we have 10,000 people [in
Britain] who have published at least one book of poetry. It may be more. This
is a large number. It is growing all the time. How can you take this number in
and still assert that everyone gets their little bit of fame, that there is a
slice of the pizza for everyone? It doesn’t stand up. But if it doesn’t stand
up, how can there be a basic situation of justice proportionately distributed
to everyone, so that deviations from that would show up as anomalies? where is
this basic situation situated?
There is a problem of defining
how much recognition anyone gets, much easier for dramatic incidents which
probably aren’t typical. Poets are obsessed by recognition but there are
several steps between burning resentment and an objective view of success &
reputation which would then be the basis for serious critique. Poets are
obsessed by praise and find it difficult to reach an objective view of it. How
much praise does any poet deserve? This is hard to agree about. And how much
exposure, praise, recognition does any particular poet get? In a poetry scene
which has 200 magazines, dozens of readings series, and an uncounted number of
Internet sites, it is demanding to count up how much recognition any individual
gets. This takes hard labour rather than just a feeling of need and being
rejected. How on earth do you measure if anyone gets more than they deserve? I
can see that if you start with an overwhelming feeling of Injustice, then
stopping to measure anything is just a waste of time, a bourgeois evasion of
Facts which everyone already knows. But the scene is so big. If you can’t
produce a convincing measure of two quantities, merit and reward, it is
doubtful then that you can assert that there is a disproportion between them.
Better research is called for, I think. A way of measuring recognition that has
objective results would be useful, even if it only applied to a finite subset
of the poets of interest. Counting reviews could yield interesting results,
although I don’t see anyone doing that. Surely we need a convincing measure of
the success of at least one poet, and a measure of their merit which is agreed
by different factions. Lacking that, it is hard to see how you can reasonably
scale up to talking about the degree of justice allotted to a hundred, or four
hundred, or a thousand, poets. I am suggesting that the work has not been done
and that intuition is not enough to propel public debate.
Is there any point to writing
about poetry unless to move towards justice?My problem with all this is that the transition to a scene where a few poets decide what is the proper way to behave and what is Wrong means that poetry readers are faced with a setup where they are being scored out of 10 for their ability to be poetry readers. I think this is incompatible with cultural freedom, pleasure, and volition. It is unable to happen but it is fraught with problems even in partial implementation. If you dislike the people who actually buy and read poetry, your ability to write something which pleases them is going to be severely abridged. The idea of the empirical bias is, among other things, that inherited prejudices and class solidarity are things you have cast off as outdated. The idea that culture is based on narcissistic acquisition of pleasurable sensations belongs to the suppressed zone and is consciously rejected by key players.
I think there is an underlying
metaphor based on the coming of American independence. This has several steps:
A naturally separate group exists
on a heroic frontierThey are spoken of and talked down by reactionaries at the centre who wear ridiculous clothes
You get hold of muskets and shoot your way out
You achieve autonomy and control vast amounts of territory
You expand into this territory, the population of which miraculously disappears
You are transformed by autonomy into maturity
This is really “what happened in
history” and it is hard to get away from. (That is, Anglo-American history.)
But it is unrealistic for ethnic minorities to address the mainstream cultural
market through these episodes. You can’t define the cultural realm as territory
without defining the cultural consumers on that territory as beings enfieffed
to your ideas and having to behave in a certain way laid down by you. The
metaphor has this implication, that “you are on our land and have to follow our
laws”. As a metaphor, it inevitably blocks an understanding of the cultural
market - where consumers do exactly what they want.
Shared scenarios
It’s pretty obvious that the most
prestigious poetry tends to be written by the people with the most formal
education, and within that group, even, by people closest to a sociocultural
norm of families with a long tradition of speaking English. The acquisition of
poetry-fertile qualities, that is, seems to start in early childhood rather
than, say, at age eighteen. Hardly less obviously, the people who ascribe this
prestige (i.e. successfully ascribe prestige, in contrast to rather large
numbers of people unsuccessfully ascribing it) themselves conform to this
pattern. There is a geographical factor (if we divide Western Europe into
subjectively cold and warm zones then it is obvious that peripheral areas are
relatively “cold” and that Wales and Scotland are less attractive as areas to
come from) but as American poets do not suffer from this it seems likely that
language use is very important. Poetry tests linguistic knowledge more deeply
than any other exercise, so it may be that the way in which the English
language is acquired is significant to what kind of poetry you write.
Because the educated classes
implicitly believe that what they embody is high skills at empathy and high
openness to individual merit, the idea that there are silent blocks against
people from immigrant families is massively unacceptable. Voicing it marks you
as a dissident. Ethically unacceptable might mean "intellectually
valid".
Writing a poem may involve use of
an inherited code which is of obvious complexity, although not so complex that
an individual brain cannot master it. This code is implicit and I am unable to
formulate it. It is acquired chiefly by reading messages written in it -
however, that may be an incomplete concept, as vital parts of the transmission
may happen during face to face interaction with older speakers. If you live far
away and know poetry only from books, the way you read the books may not be
enough to let you grasp the code. Eliot was preoccupied with the idea of this
Tradition; it has become deeply unfashionable among later strata of critics
(employed in an education industry which is instructed to deliver social
mobility and so to make tradition packageable) but this may inhibit them from
seeing what is actually going on.
A book called Ways of Sensing (by
Howe and Classen, 2014, the title is an allusion to Ways of Seeing)
talks about the symbolic forms of the Desana people: “In one image the human
brain … consists of layers of innumerable hexagonal honeycombs. … Each tiny
hexagonal container holds honey of a different color, flavor, odor, or texture
or it houses a different stage of larval development. … A brain can be seen as
a bouquet of flowers, a fluttering cluster of butterflies, a glistening swarm
of tiny tropical fish, or a quivering mass of multicolored frogs.” The coding
is described as arbitrary but stable - synaesthesia could form associations in
any direction. An initial freedom is exchanged for a later stability, and this
process is the formation of culture. The associations relate to experiences
while using a psychedelic drug from a plant called yage or ayahuasca. In this
people’s theory of sensory correlations “colours emanate from the light of the
Sun or Moon and then combine with heat to produce corresponding sets of odour and
flavours. Purple, for example, is said to come from the moon and is linked to a
rotten smell and acid flavour [.]”
If a culture has a stable coding
for an arbitrary set of associations, that argues for a process of destructive
coding. It is destructive because it wipes out other possibilities- it stays in
place and is recollected. This memorised quality is what makes it collective.
The destructive quality is what makes it specific to a culture, different from
the neighbouring tribe.
If we accept that very complex
codings are shared and at the basis of our collective culture, it becomes
obvious why an outsider would be reluctant to create cultural structures which
rely on that coding. Simultaneously we have the definition of an outsider (it’s
someone who has trouble with the coding). Because the code is complicated, it
is difficult to use and only a minority can create new assemblages of signs, as
opposite to participating in shared realisations of the completed sets. English
culture may be, to a much greater extent than we usually believe, based on
founding scenes which are remembered and repeated. People want to believe in their radical originality. That may not be a true idea- it may be much more true that they create within a universe of pre-existing symbolic relationships. So if an outsider creates something radically new because based on ignorance - it may fall flat. The English language is obviously a pre-existing set of relationships.
Another Desana image sees the
brain as “formed by a bundle of pencil-shaped hexagonal tourmaline crystals”
which produce sound waves. Woo!
Relatively few individuals who
have English as an additional language (code for immigrants, or rather from
immigrant families) publish poetry. This may well reflect a perception that
poetry has a close relationship with levels of the English language which are
incalculable and implicit and likely to make your efforts go wrong. Other
branches of art are less subject to invisible problems. Moreover, there is no
living to be made out of poetry. The situation may be comparable to demographic
patterns for barristers: there are now quite a few barristers from South Asian
or Caribbean backgrounds, although there were few in the 1960s. This may
parallel the pattern for poets. You don’t get to be a barrister by deciding in
the first place that the law is ridiculous.
Half a century ago, during the
education revolution which brought secondary and higher education to millions
of people from the working classes, the perceptions of these outsiders becoming
insiders were articulated very frequently and offer a description of the English
middle class and its mechanisms of defence. The cultural politics of the last
35 years (I mean roughly 1979 to 2015) have involved a consistent switching of
this kind of discourse to a branch line. It is not listened to and is
frequently described as boring. However, its validated results are likely to
explain the relationship between those other outsiders, the first or second
generation immigrants, and the culture around poetry. Giving right explanations
is not necessarily the way to gain prestige and popularity among the people
whose conduct you are explaining.
There may be a simplified
English, just as there is a simplified Welsh used by learners who acquire it as
a second language. It may be that this actually explains the phenomenon of dumbed-down
poetry, and that the work of several hundred poets fits into this category. It
is not likely to impress connoisseurs of poetry. The literary code, most
probably, was developed to make ambitious poetry possible. (The language of pop
lyrics may have a close relationship to this simplified poetry; and the lost
strata of language work more with the rational faculties than with the
affective ones.) Dance, and music, and clothes, may be easier to translate
across cultures than language. They are more detached from daily life and yet
less artificial. This may not be true for all forms of music (for example).
(The Desana material comes from
research by G Reichel-Dolmatoff.)
The definition of outsiders
raises the spectre of a group which already believes that they are the
outsiders and that they have overthrown every assumption of literature - along
with them, evidently, the prejudices of the middle class. But the market position
of this group suggests that they use an implicit and obscure code far more than
mainstream poets. In fact, that might be a way of defining their site. Their
texts are baffling to outsiders, and that includes the professional literary
critics of the day, paid to review them. The deletion of connectives made the
texts more subtle and open to possibilities, but also made them baffling and
frustrating. The claim to cultural openness does not match especially well with
an audience that has an amazing knowledge of the history of modernism and
critical theory. If it was open, wouldn’t there be an audience which has no
specialist knowledge, like most of the population?
The outsider franchise is
enclosed.
Resistance
If there are 2700 books of poetry
being published every year, which is what we are told, then evidently most of
them are going to disappear leaving almost no trace. Equally evidently, no
critic is going not read all 2700. [the figure comes from Randal Stevenson but may not be completely accurate as a count of "new poetry"] The decision about which books will survive
and reach “daylight” is made by experts on the basis of a prior filtering
process. Roughly, made by experts on a basis of ignorance. It is this filtering
process which we would have to reform, if reform is desirable. An individual
committed to poetry decides what to read on the basis of advice: other readers
push books towards them, whether this happens via anthologies, magazines,
reviews, bulletin boards, selecting poets for live readings, or simply personal
messages. This network involving humans and information is more important than
the dispositions of individuals. Its effect is to ensure the emergence into
daylight of a few books; the poets not selected are resentful about this, but the
alternative might be for no books at all to emerge into daylight. I spoke about
Allott’s anthology in terms of Allott, but this is unlikely to be fair, because
he was not an extremist, and his choices were undoubtedly suggested and
validated by a network of peers, in which he had participated between going up
to Oxford (in about 1932?) and 1960, when he finished the expanded, 1962,
edition of the anthology (originally 1950). The real object of study is the
network, not the individual. He was smooth, had allies, and was successful - so his personality just cannot be the issue.
I have interviewed quite a few
poets, and they often mention face to face interactions. That is, it’s all in
the books but you get to the books because you hang out with people who guide
you to them. If you get these experiences then you penetrate to the inside of it
all. Poets hang out with poets. It is private but not secret. The prevalence of
variants of the traditional code makes it even more difficult to write poetry.
It may be written up as freedom but actually it makes for more invisible rules
and more ways of being wrong. Actually, even if you get the books you may read
them in the wrong way. How do you acquire prestige among your peers? Well, it would seem that a history of past intelligent decisions is key. People are always disappointed when they discover that they don’t have peer prestige and that their recommendations of poets are in practice ignored. Eventually, the “shared map” stabilises, and some poets emerge as being part of the legacy (while others vanish). This is the collective effort of several cultural networks, and may reproduce the values of the network as well as those of the poetry. Individual critics only evaluated the poetry they read, and the major effect of prejudice was felt in the processes pre-deciding which books they read, not in the actual reading. Sigh. If you want to replace the network, what do you replace it with?
As this might imply, I think
close reading is the most desirable cultural tool. Everybody has a personality,
but few people can write poetry. We are interested in the poetry, not the
personality of someone we have never met. So it is valid to restrict everything
to examination of the texts. This is going to work well for people from ethnic
minorities who can actually write, and expose poets with rich in-group connections
who can’t write. Moreover, it is a focus which will push forward excellent
books based on their contents, and those books will reach library shelves and
so on complete with their content. The reader gets to read the poems, not to
take home a personality in a shopping bag. Close reading protects production
standards and improves the commodity which our business is producing. It didn’t
cause the shortcomings of Allott’s work, those shortcomings were injected at
several other stages of the reception process.
I believe that “we” now have an
effective map of what happened in the 1970s. I feel we are ready now to produce
an anthology of “British poetry 1960-90”, on the lines of Allott’s book. That
is not to say that such an anthology currently exists. It may be decades before
we have such a map of the period 2000-2015. The volume of poetry coming out is
just so huge. There was a 35 year delay in assimilating the material from the
1970s, when a maximum of 800 books were coming out annually.
Conclusion
I am not sure we have got
anywhere but I have to stop anyway. I am thinking about a dance where the
attendants mainly do know each other but come from several different groups,
perhaps several different schools, so the groups are strangers to each other.
If you let the individuals choose their partners, very little mixing will take
place. Actually, some people will not get to dance very much and some people
will be frustrated. If the people in control decide that there is going to be
formation dancing, not partners, then that issue can be made to vanish.
Everyone gets to dance a lot and everyone encounters strangers and has a kind
of intimacy with them, shared physical excitement and the mood evoked by the
music. Mixing takes place. So, we hear that particular publishers were told by
granting bodies, Publish more poets from ethnic minorities or you lose your
grant. This is not a public message so it may also be non-factual. I can’t
verify it. The result may well be that some books come out which their publisher
doesn’t like very much. The result might also be that individual inhibitions
and levels of cultural exhaustion are locked out of the decision process, and
what emerges is fairer. Mixing takes place. So I think this is the way to
direct the power of public funding. The in-group can expand and the “cultural
managers” can help it to expand. Also I think individual choice is influenced
by inhibitions, and needs pushing at certain points. Intimacy and inhibitions
are inseparable.
Postscript
This is not vital but is
interesting as gossip. Allott states in his Introduction that “It is a
representative collection of English verse written between 1918 and 1960.” This
cannot in fact be true - he was trying for the best poetry, not the average.
The inhibition about stating that was that he was, most probably, including
poetry which he did not like. This is an interesting fissure. Already then, an
expert was seeing personal preference as distinct from expertise. I think he
disliked some poems because he attacks them in his prose forewords, or
indictments, to each one. But also, there are clearly poems he does not
understand and is unwilling to give the seal of validation to. Thus on p. 390
we have him saying he can’t follow the Geoffrey Hill poems (‘Annunciations‘, 1
and 2) which he prints. “I can understand ‘Annunciations’ only in the sense
that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they
grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice) [.]“ Evidently he wrote to
Hill and said “Explain yourself“. And then he prints Hill’s explanations, which
we have to get through before reaching the poems. I think 1960 was about the
last time when a critic could say to a poet, What does this mean. It was the
1950s - and poets actually wanted to be understood. Advanced poetry has since
then plunged into an ocean of complete subjectivity. One effect of this was to
restrict the “audible realm” of the poem to an in-group and so to make the
power of the in-group, and centric effects, also complete and unrestricted.
It seems to me that such
inclusions are an example of Allott bowing to the wishes of the in-group when
they conflicted with his personal perceptions. That is admirable, but it points
to the next step, of inquiring who was in that in-group. The step after
that is to ask if its field of vision covered all of English poetry or just a
segment. But really, it was so easy in 1960. The number of poets around was so
small.
PPS
April
2016
Sandeep read this and says she
just doesn't accept "empathy fatigue": "I don't believe in
empathy fatigue as you do. I have yet to see real empathy in places where the
avant-garde exist." So this argument will go on. I think my personal
reference group CAN do empathy and is NOT the avant-garde. Yes, many people
regard empathy as "residual bourgeois humanism" and want it to be
stamped out of the poem.
