Beautiful feelings two

This is further about a project which began with looking at the Poetry Book Society website to spot titles to review and expanded into downloading five years’ worth of lists and collating them into a spreadsheet with the names of 990 poets featured in their “shop window”. I was asking “who the hell are all these poets”. A book emerged.

I subscribe to an on-line text library called scribd. I have discovered that they have hundreds of volumes of recent poetry which I can read for free. The trouble with this is that they aren't necessarily the books I want to read, and there are too many of them. The stage I have reached with the book is that I have completed the text, I have too much text and I want to reduce it, but I also want to read more books so that I have more context. Right now, I have to take a break. Like, a week with no thinking about the book at all.
This morning I was dreaming of a passage in the book which I had to rewrite. When I woke up, I realised that the passage didn’t exist anyway. This is overload. I want to sleep without worrying about flaws in the book.

I have the idea of thermal sensing – that if you read 100 books of poetry from a 5 year period, then they stick together, and the information which normally wisps away as waste heat remains as evidence. This brings out the unconscious elements of style and treatment. Poets don’t always like this, but it gets you away from simply paraphrasing what they say. The light is the conscious level but the unconscious level is a trace of heat.

It also develops an idea of time and art, namely that there are collective states which animate art, especially poetry, and that these are temporary and so make up the substance of a time. A few years later they have dissipated away.
So I have read 100 books from the last 5 years. Themes do keep recurring. Three mentions of kintsugi – one was actually in a prose book (Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, fantastic) and not the poems by the same writer. But this is a sort of “ping” - kintsugi three times, I have found the edge in some way. Where the edge is, that is part of the frame. Postscript. I have now seen a fourth reference to kintsugi. Surely this is a signal to stop collecting evidence.

I talk about the mainstream of an older era (say 1952 to 1980?) disappearing to be replaced by a new central style, which I actually like. That is the big picture but clearly poets are still writing poems inside the limits of that older style, which was criticised so much. I don't want to name them, in a context which already puts them down, but the pattern is not disappearance. Instead, we have a dozen or more styles flourishing and securing their own parts of a wider public realm. It’s like plants competing in my untended garden – the losers don’t disappear altogether. Although ragwort doesn't seem to have come back since 2018. The Carcanet New Poetries 8 includes poems that hark back to the 1950s stylistically.

I have this image in my mind of 990 poets as a self-sustaining structure with no supports. It is erect, or it can't collapse any further. At any point where you are, the pressure of other poets holds you up. You don’t need economic support. If you have the esteem of your fellow poets, then it is a grand place to be. If you don’t have that esteem it is a painful place to be. Your achievements flow away like rain down the gutter. This is so vivid, but I don’t have any external evidence for it. It is just an image, like a dream. The structure is almost invulnerable to assault, but it puts pressure on all the individuals… the heat of winning, of losing, of being halfway down a field of 100, of seeing other people succeed, is too much. People who buy into meritocracy too much have a hard time because it doesn't allow for serenity.
Teaching a class where everyone assumes on day one that they are more talented than you. Maybe that is the story of our time. A poet with a pay cheque but without the will to write poetry. The class certainly aren't there to read your work. Just the opposite.
Spent a day in the South Bank poetry library basically looking for books by the people in [2013 anthology] Dear World, or about 20 of them. I used the 74 names as a proxy for saying who wasn't included in the PBS lists, but on investigation it may be that a lot of them gave up after one book or even didn’t get a book out. You go to the right spot on the shelves, and only find one slim pamphlet. You have this classic anthology, collecting a swarm of poets under 35, who haven’t reached their peak, in 2013. Did they go on after that? So my text says that the absence of 53 names from Dear World in the lists from the PBS shop window is an indicator of how incomplete the shop window is. But this may be wrong, it may be that half those 53 names had just given up writing regularly, and the PBS thing is actually a good view of who is producing serious, long, substantial books. What if the people you admire give up? I am seeing this picture of people spending ten years learning how to write poetry and then not writing it. They found lots of other things to do which had a bigger audience. There just wasn't a big splash when they got their pamphlet out. This is just a picture. Maybe the amount of poets floating around is so big that it diminishes the space each one can occupy as they write their work. Small audience, big competition. And so people drop out. I am wondering how that would apply to the 990 recent names, in the PBS list trawl which I did. Are they going to be career poets or is one book going to be it?
I have the “Salt Younger Poets” anthology, 2011, hoaching with good poems, 50 writers who hadn't had a book out at that point. A brilliantly edited book, they had done the research to an incredible degree of efficiency. So, if I do the catalogue checks, maybe 30 of them never got a book out. This is depressing; I am not sure I want to do the sociology. Writing poetry just isn’t that rewarding, it is easy to see why people give up. I am not going to do that catalogue work. (However, 24 of the 50 have a book within the PBS list I collated. Not bad.)
This crush of poets, the 990 names I culled from the PBS “shop window”, it is great for the consumer, but maybe there are side-effects which aren't so great. There is pressure because of too many poets striving to get the outlets. And maybe there is resentment of editors and panels because they can’t give young poets what they want. Pressure from below. When people are so angry with the gatekeepers, it is hard for anybody to reach a sense of legitimacy. Possibly the ones who persist are the ones who do respect the institutions and who aren’t charred with resentment.

I am interested now in the level of disillusion. I have a feeling that there were 990 poets in contention in 2010, and that quite a few of those have already quietly given up. The data section I examined in 2022 had too many people who had started in the last five years… the age spread wasn't right, it had too many young people. Someone gets a book out, even two books, and the feedback is almost inaudible. They wanted victory rather than serenity. So maybe, of these 990 now hunting for success, a third are going to give up before the next time someone does a large sample. Being turned down is just so painful, you don't want to repeat it and repeat it.

Have spent a frustrating morning trying to access annual figures for poetry publication. I subscribed to The Bookseller on-line to get these figures, but I can't find anything relevant by searching their back issues. I think they did a breakdown of titles by genre in the 1990s, but I can't find anything in the stuff available on-line. I think the ISBN agency asks publishers to categorise their titles and produces breakdowns annually based on that, but I don’t know where to find those figures. When Randall Stevenson claims 2700 titles being published annually at the end of the Nineties, I think he is using an ISBN report, but I don’t know where he obtained that figure. It's an exciting figure.

I got hold of a 2012 book from Salt, “In their own words”. Statements by 56 poets. This is really weak. It is good to know what poets think about their work, but this is unrevealing. A forgotten book. As always, there is something to be retrieved – Ira Lightman’s statement for example. In general these writers compose intuitively and have no idea what intuition is made of or how to talk about it. Very few of them published with Salt – a lack of coordination there. I would have been interested to see a book about Salt’s debut poets and what they valued as a generation. I was probably hoping for that. Instead, two editors signed up to do this prose book and didn’t have any interest in the Salt list. At a quick glance, only one of the 56 published with Salt. (real count is 3!) This is a lesson, possibly – when someone has a view of what poetry is happening, in a given decade or half decade, their view may not even overlap with yours. It is difficult to have a conversation about poetry when you don’t read the same poets. But the field of readable poets is so huge.
I have doubts about secondary commentary which is 90% about “theoretical” poets, because intuitive poets are unable to explain their processes. But really, what can you do with processes which are so defended and so buried in silence.