To my great excitement Shearsman are putting out my new book of poetry, With Feathers on Glass, in the next couple of weeks. This is the first new book since 2006 so this is a big event for me. (Some of the poems came out in magazines.)
The title refers to the use of feathers, sometimes, for painting on glass (Hinterglasmalerei). A blurb follows: “The original idea of “Feathers on glass” was to get close to folk art. After a long period attempting to learn Gaelic and Welsh, this new poetry is saturated in folk-lore and myth. The paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the peddlers who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.
This is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance.
A statue park around The Mall allows for a re-enactment of the history of the State.‘Tautology’ is a poem about neuroscience as something setting out to replace self-awareness as an account of how the mind works. It gives a history of the self as a block on perception, behind which an intact world hides. Where the claim to omnipotence of the ego is ruined by the cosmic impartiality of light.
‘Dr Mabuse meets Dr Marcuse’ tells an adventure in which the famed theorist of de-repression and ‘one dimensional man’ faces the more famous super-villain of Weimar cinema, and they struggle for the future of California and its beaches.”
I had to compile a new Selected poems in 2017, which I found difficult, as you might expect. Thirty years of writing. But as a result of the difficulty I got interested again and began having ideas, so the first sketches for Feathers were in about September 2017. I then wrote a lot of poems and I was nervous about the effect and about dividing the poems into two books. I wanted that division to be perfect before going into print. So this delayed things. I don’t really want to get into why I stopped, back in 2005. It had to do with “The Imaginary In Geometry” being very difficult to write and then not getting reviewed when it came out. I felt it was a climax. When it was time to start again, I felt that it was just too difficult and anyway I couldn't do better than “Geometry”. But a whole set of things changed in 2005. My job in London vanished (it wasn’t on the new corporate organogram) but I got a new one in Nottingham. I moved to Nottingham which is about 13 miles from where I grew up, in Loughborough. I think part of the pattern was that in London I was under strain the whole time, the environment was insecure and competitive, and I didn’t belong there. This was very stimulating, in its way. When I moved to Nottingham it was going home and I wasn't under strain any more. What changed, later, was that I acquired a house with a garden, I acquired a cat who liked the garden, and then I retired and didn’t even have to go into the office any more. So I felt united in a new way. I was happy. And this was the basis for new poems. I wanted to write about this and a series of poems set in my garden seemed to be the way forward. What I discovered, hidden under an aggressive elder hedge, was a sink with cockle shell (and snail) decoration: obviously an ornament in imitation of a Grotto. This was naive art in my own back yard. I was very happy with this. It connected to the paintings on glass. The centre had sent something out to the periphery and visibly this was me, I had reached the periphery and had only vague ideas of what was happening in the world’s cultural metropoleis. I had a long relationship with naive art which came to a head with reading Harald Szeemann’s book Visionäre Schweiz. Szeemann just filled me with enthusiasm, like a jug. The shells of the decoration referred to the distant sea, and by an obvious shift they could be referred to the tides, stirring in obedience to the Moon. There was the glimmering of a poem here. The idea was to record the feelings I actually had and to use the processes of naive art to bring them into words. He quotes “a way of thinking that shows magical-animist traits, without sharp separation of fantasy and reality” and in which “the way of thinking and acting is pre-logical, concrete, with symbols, compressions, dislocations; objects are perceived as animate”. Another source was a document called the Papyrus Jumilhac (known to me from a description rather than directly) which relates to a single nome (province) of Egypt, the 18th, but sets all the great myths locally, in terms of the hills and waterways of that province. So everything happened here. The gods shrink to local scale. They are small enough to be seen in a garden. This reinforced the idea but it was already there, really. So this is “personal mythology”, written as folklore rather than myth. I really liked, also, a painting by Gerhard Altenbourg called "Ich-Gestein", or "I-ore"; the geology of an attachment to your home.
Szeemann was an exhibition organiser and essayist. He did all kinds of things but one of them was to bring naive artists, of whom Switzerland seems to have produced quite a few, right up against modern artists (of the 60s and 70s, usually) and erase the boundaries between them. So his exhibition catalogues were sacred texts for me. I also have catalogues (bulletins) from the annual exhibitions of naive art at Bratislava, edited by Štefan Tkač, a Slovak art historian. He had to rename the events “Insite” (= in situ), because the Party did not accept that any citizen of a communist country could be called Naive. No, they were all enlightened. So he could have the exhibitions as long as they were called something else. There was also a 1964 book about peasant artists in Yugoslavia by Oto Bihalji-Merin, which the library here gave away for about 50p. A wonderful book. This is actually where I got interested in painting in glass, I suspected that the paintings he illustrates were influenced by an older Catholic tradition in the Hapsburg realms, although after investigation I don’t think that's true. (Bihalji-Merin is categorical about this.) Someone called Hegeduśič went to teach art to villagers, in Croatia, in around 1929, and glass was one of the media he used. It is significant to me that these historians were all European; Swiss, Slovak, Serbian, this appeals to my abiding ideals.
For the first five years I had no money – the pension was about 20% of my previous salary. So I wasn't going anywhere. I was already there. This was really the end of alienation but also of events: every day was empty and I had to fill it. Everything was very simple and the poems could only record what was there. My gestures were magnified: unconscious fantasy was audible because there was no other sound to make it unclear. The poems started with images, or clusters, which I found significant, and used “pre-logical” means to develop this primary material into more elaborate structures. I am not sure how this fits in with the ethos of Alternative Poetry. I suppose the direction was prescribed by the lack of the autobiographical themes which I had written about in previous books – so falling in love, being rejected, conflicts with an employer and with the business system in general. I had reached a stage in life where that music had stopped playing. The new direction allowed me to connect with what was happening inside me and so to write a new autobiography, even if the themes seemed esoteric.
The poem most about glass painting is called “Paintings on glass”. This mentions the Peace of Westphalia. The story is that the paintings, aimed at modest households, were originally of saints. Protestant households were not interested in buying these. The producers reasoned that the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, had been the basis for free and unpersecuted religious activity for Protestants in Germany. The envoys to the peace discussions had faces and you could make paintings of them. They were undoubted representatives of Protestantism as a secular and political interest, a community. (The design is a few decades younger than the Peace, around 1700.) So you could produce stylised paintings of them and sell them to Protestant households, to decorate their front rooms. This does mean something to me, because a large print (from a painting from a photograph!) of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843 was a feature of my grandparents’ home. It was later a feature of my parents’ home, although it was not in the front room. This is continuous with the glass paintings tradition, although I am not aware of any significant art being produced in this line. That 1843 photograph (a composite of many photographs, I believe) is significant in the history of photography.
Having reached the point of retirement I was doubtful about the value of learning anything more. It was hard to explain how it would equip me to lead the rest of my life. I went on studying Welsh and Scottish Gaelic and impulsively added Irish Gaelic. I found this difficult because there was so much of it I didn’t know. But it was wildly stimulating. I was drawn to these languages, old and dwelling on the periphery of Western Europe, because I was also on a periphery and because I felt close to my ancestors – the effect of age and simplifying life. It was like withdrawing into my garden. I was getting closer to what was fundamental, intact although buried by everything less stable and more superficial.
It’s hard to change your style after sixty. It is no good thinking that when you open your mouth something different is going to come out. More probably what you hear is just what was there before, but more developed, bonier, more essential and less distracted by graces and trills.
Sunday 30 July 2023
Friday 21 July 2023
Jack Lindsay
Jack Lindsay
am reading Bernard Smith’s book of essays about Australian art (mainly), The death of the artist as hero. He includes three essays about Jack Lindsay (1900-90), a marginal figure who I suppose has some role to play in the story of British poetry.
In about 1976 (??) I bought a copy of his 1945 pamphlet Perspective for Poetry in a bookshop in Loughborough. It was published by a Communist Party publisher although the packaging carefully does not mention any such affiliation. As if it represented freedom of thought. The pamphlet completely failed to impress me. It seemed like conscious mediocrity, someone who was desperately afraid of taking up a position and was unable to say anything original. I read now that he published 160 books. This sounds like the biography of a hack. If you have such difficulty developing new ideas, then signing away your soul to the Party is attractive because you can just go on writing up unoriginality for ever and a day.
He was responsible for the series of Key Poets pamphlets around 1950. Andy Croft writes about this in his excellent cultural history of the Communist Party. They were really good. It wasn't a good time for British poetry but he had come up with a whole row of fascinating poets. As Croft records, the Party leadership ended the series because they didn’t want to be associated with something middle class like poetry. This is, I think, one of the reasons why poetry in the 1950s ended up in such bad shape. I have to emphasise how good Lindsay was at doing this. Good editors are rare.
If you summed up Lindsay’s message, it would be “art has something or other to do with society”. And maybe “just give in to the Party and study the thought of the First Secretary and you will be free”.
His original project was Australian nationalism, with an emphasis on culture. Without having many details, I think that what he did was unsuccessful but that that brand of nationalism had a long way to go, from its start, and that anything dating to around 1920 seems shallow from a modern perspective. All the same it was a fertile idea around 1920 and he deserves credit for having this interest. Smith doesn't say what he contributed to Australian nationalist thought. Obviously I am reading Smith’s book because I want to know what is specifically Australian and how a cultural programme developed in the 20th century. This was Bernard Smith’s life project, I suppose. He records Lindsay converting to Marxism around 1937 and that seems to have been the end of his Australian nationalism. He records Lindsay buying a cottage from which the previous owner’s library of books on the history of religion had not been cleared. He spent a year in 1933-4 reading these in a consistent way and thought about the long-term history of human symbolism or spirituality. The outcome was A Short history of culture (1939). Lindsay certainly had that deep perspective:
Can we draw conclusions from this shamanistic stage, which will bear validly on the later developments of the creative function? I believe we can. Though specialisation breaks up the shamanistic experience, and though the simple yet intense unity of personal and collective experience cannot be maintained, the basic element survives.
(Perspective on Poetry)
The interest in shamanism is very early in 1945, and the perspective which links something as old as shamanistic rites with 20th C poetry is dizzying. But these sentences are saying nothing at all. I believe he is getting the “Tatars as shamans” material from a 1936 article by Nora Chadwick in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which has those words in its title. (Most Tatars are Moslems and do not practice shamanism.) It may have been the write-up in The growth of literature (by Chadwick and Chadwick), in fact. Chadwick (N.) says “Shamans are a class of professional religious and intellectual men and women in North and central Asia”. Can I record my doubts that Lindsay had actually read poetry from the Altai Tatars, even in English. And I am certain that Chadwick had not done any fieldwork – not among the Tatars in the Altai mountains, not anywhere. It is all a version learnt through prose, probably several stages of prose. This may be why what Lindsay says is so colourless. And, the Altai is an incredibly long way from north-west Europe. Why should societies in that plateau region of Central Asia be ancestral to societies of north-west Europe, or why should their artistic forms have any bearing on artistic forms in Wales, England, etc.?
If there is any connection between Central Asian shamanism and the shores of the North Sea, it would be amazingly interesting. But Lindsay does not identify any such connection.
I suspect the underlying idea is that ancient societies (in some millennium or other!) had collective art, and we have had individualistic art since about 1580, which is part of Alienation. And if we advance to Communism, we will again have Collective Art, and we will stop being alienated. And we will all vote for the same Party, there won’t be another. Lindsay isn’t quite this stupid. But he doesn't explain why individualistic art, since the advent of reflexivity in the Renaissance, has been so good. Or why Soviet art is so bad. (George Thomson's Marxism and Poetry, also 1945, also published for the Communist Party, follows this line of argument. It is more interesting than Lindsay but even more at odds with the known facts. Thomson dismisses all English poetry since the 16th century for not being collectively created.)
Chadwick says that Siberian and central Asian shamanism (together) are “among the most influential and interesting” of creative illiterates. OK, that is certainly interesting. Had she read all the others? If we jump ahead a bit, Ted Hughes read vast amounts of ethnographical literature (in translation) and recycled its motifs in a modern English style. The area is fascinating. Smith at pages 289-302 of his book talks about links between “White Australian” artists and “Black Australian” artists, an area of equally great fascination which is quite outside my visual experience. The essay is called “Cultural convergence”.
Chadwick says that her revision of the story is because “we have been dependent for our impressions on the reports of travellers” but she does not say what information she has except the reports of travellers, of Tsarist date. She specifies that she has never seen the performances nor learnt the languages their texts are composed in. Her main source is the ten volumes of VV Radloff’s collection (in Russian and German translation). It is certainly inspiring to learn that there is a whole range of literature outside the “European” models, and the possible connections with early artistic creation in north-west Europe are tantalising, but the writings of the Chadwicks are not illuminating. It is like reading a history of the symphony by someone who had never heard one. I have just read the 1936 paper and to be honest it has nothing to do with Eliade’s romantic version of shamanism. So Lindsay is thinking of Chadwick’s high/religious concept and not the image we have today.
Lindsay issued in 1927 an anthology of Bedlamite poetry from the 16th and 17th centuries. I like to connect this with Logue’s Bedlam poems and Sean Bonney’s poem about Tom O’Bedlam (in Blade Pitch Control Unit). I like the continuity over 70 years. The link has to do with the idea of the world turned upside down, radical critique being like someone whose perceptual framework is truly mutated and illegal. It has to do with altered perceptions. I see that the chorus of the primary Tom O’Bedlam poem has “Bedlam boys are bonny”, which is probably what attracted Bonney to it. Lindsay’s book had musical settings by Peter Warlock (who was the father of poet Nigel Heseltine).
I am reading Lindsay's Selected Poems 1935-81 (a copy turned up at a sale locally) but it is not very good. I have been thinking recently about poems by Jack Beeching and EP Thompson – who were also in that British Communist milieu around 1945 and 1950. I think Beeching was a friend of Lindsay. But I don’t think Lindsay got involved with Thompson's “opposition” magazine, the New Reasoner. He stayed in the Party. Anyway, Beeching and Thompson need to be taken very seriously as poets. There was a Left poetry in the 1950s. It doesn't need rehabilitating, you just have to read it.
am reading Bernard Smith’s book of essays about Australian art (mainly), The death of the artist as hero. He includes three essays about Jack Lindsay (1900-90), a marginal figure who I suppose has some role to play in the story of British poetry.
In about 1976 (??) I bought a copy of his 1945 pamphlet Perspective for Poetry in a bookshop in Loughborough. It was published by a Communist Party publisher although the packaging carefully does not mention any such affiliation. As if it represented freedom of thought. The pamphlet completely failed to impress me. It seemed like conscious mediocrity, someone who was desperately afraid of taking up a position and was unable to say anything original. I read now that he published 160 books. This sounds like the biography of a hack. If you have such difficulty developing new ideas, then signing away your soul to the Party is attractive because you can just go on writing up unoriginality for ever and a day.
He was responsible for the series of Key Poets pamphlets around 1950. Andy Croft writes about this in his excellent cultural history of the Communist Party. They were really good. It wasn't a good time for British poetry but he had come up with a whole row of fascinating poets. As Croft records, the Party leadership ended the series because they didn’t want to be associated with something middle class like poetry. This is, I think, one of the reasons why poetry in the 1950s ended up in such bad shape. I have to emphasise how good Lindsay was at doing this. Good editors are rare.
If you summed up Lindsay’s message, it would be “art has something or other to do with society”. And maybe “just give in to the Party and study the thought of the First Secretary and you will be free”.
His original project was Australian nationalism, with an emphasis on culture. Without having many details, I think that what he did was unsuccessful but that that brand of nationalism had a long way to go, from its start, and that anything dating to around 1920 seems shallow from a modern perspective. All the same it was a fertile idea around 1920 and he deserves credit for having this interest. Smith doesn't say what he contributed to Australian nationalist thought. Obviously I am reading Smith’s book because I want to know what is specifically Australian and how a cultural programme developed in the 20th century. This was Bernard Smith’s life project, I suppose. He records Lindsay converting to Marxism around 1937 and that seems to have been the end of his Australian nationalism. He records Lindsay buying a cottage from which the previous owner’s library of books on the history of religion had not been cleared. He spent a year in 1933-4 reading these in a consistent way and thought about the long-term history of human symbolism or spirituality. The outcome was A Short history of culture (1939). Lindsay certainly had that deep perspective:
Can we draw conclusions from this shamanistic stage, which will bear validly on the later developments of the creative function? I believe we can. Though specialisation breaks up the shamanistic experience, and though the simple yet intense unity of personal and collective experience cannot be maintained, the basic element survives.
(Perspective on Poetry)
The interest in shamanism is very early in 1945, and the perspective which links something as old as shamanistic rites with 20th C poetry is dizzying. But these sentences are saying nothing at all. I believe he is getting the “Tatars as shamans” material from a 1936 article by Nora Chadwick in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which has those words in its title. (Most Tatars are Moslems and do not practice shamanism.) It may have been the write-up in The growth of literature (by Chadwick and Chadwick), in fact. Chadwick (N.) says “Shamans are a class of professional religious and intellectual men and women in North and central Asia”. Can I record my doubts that Lindsay had actually read poetry from the Altai Tatars, even in English. And I am certain that Chadwick had not done any fieldwork – not among the Tatars in the Altai mountains, not anywhere. It is all a version learnt through prose, probably several stages of prose. This may be why what Lindsay says is so colourless. And, the Altai is an incredibly long way from north-west Europe. Why should societies in that plateau region of Central Asia be ancestral to societies of north-west Europe, or why should their artistic forms have any bearing on artistic forms in Wales, England, etc.?
If there is any connection between Central Asian shamanism and the shores of the North Sea, it would be amazingly interesting. But Lindsay does not identify any such connection.
I suspect the underlying idea is that ancient societies (in some millennium or other!) had collective art, and we have had individualistic art since about 1580, which is part of Alienation. And if we advance to Communism, we will again have Collective Art, and we will stop being alienated. And we will all vote for the same Party, there won’t be another. Lindsay isn’t quite this stupid. But he doesn't explain why individualistic art, since the advent of reflexivity in the Renaissance, has been so good. Or why Soviet art is so bad. (George Thomson's Marxism and Poetry, also 1945, also published for the Communist Party, follows this line of argument. It is more interesting than Lindsay but even more at odds with the known facts. Thomson dismisses all English poetry since the 16th century for not being collectively created.)
Chadwick says that Siberian and central Asian shamanism (together) are “among the most influential and interesting” of creative illiterates. OK, that is certainly interesting. Had she read all the others? If we jump ahead a bit, Ted Hughes read vast amounts of ethnographical literature (in translation) and recycled its motifs in a modern English style. The area is fascinating. Smith at pages 289-302 of his book talks about links between “White Australian” artists and “Black Australian” artists, an area of equally great fascination which is quite outside my visual experience. The essay is called “Cultural convergence”.
Chadwick says that her revision of the story is because “we have been dependent for our impressions on the reports of travellers” but she does not say what information she has except the reports of travellers, of Tsarist date. She specifies that she has never seen the performances nor learnt the languages their texts are composed in. Her main source is the ten volumes of VV Radloff’s collection (in Russian and German translation). It is certainly inspiring to learn that there is a whole range of literature outside the “European” models, and the possible connections with early artistic creation in north-west Europe are tantalising, but the writings of the Chadwicks are not illuminating. It is like reading a history of the symphony by someone who had never heard one. I have just read the 1936 paper and to be honest it has nothing to do with Eliade’s romantic version of shamanism. So Lindsay is thinking of Chadwick’s high/religious concept and not the image we have today.
Lindsay issued in 1927 an anthology of Bedlamite poetry from the 16th and 17th centuries. I like to connect this with Logue’s Bedlam poems and Sean Bonney’s poem about Tom O’Bedlam (in Blade Pitch Control Unit). I like the continuity over 70 years. The link has to do with the idea of the world turned upside down, radical critique being like someone whose perceptual framework is truly mutated and illegal. It has to do with altered perceptions. I see that the chorus of the primary Tom O’Bedlam poem has “Bedlam boys are bonny”, which is probably what attracted Bonney to it. Lindsay’s book had musical settings by Peter Warlock (who was the father of poet Nigel Heseltine).
I am reading Lindsay's Selected Poems 1935-81 (a copy turned up at a sale locally) but it is not very good. I have been thinking recently about poems by Jack Beeching and EP Thompson – who were also in that British Communist milieu around 1945 and 1950. I think Beeching was a friend of Lindsay. But I don’t think Lindsay got involved with Thompson's “opposition” magazine, the New Reasoner. He stayed in the Party. Anyway, Beeching and Thompson need to be taken very seriously as poets. There was a Left poetry in the 1950s. It doesn't need rehabilitating, you just have to read it.
Thursday 13 July 2023
beautiful feelings (count of)
(Continuing series of posts on a book, not quite finished, on poetry in the 2st century)
I trawled poetry titles from the British Library catalogue to get a count of books published by an individual author in a given year. I did this for three sample years: 2000, 2010, and 2019. The result was a list of 3181 poets who published a book in one of those three years. The overlap of names for 2000 and 2010 was 8% and the overlap for 2010 and 2020 was 5.8%.
I was interested in the complete count of poets over 20 years. If we decide that 1000 authors were added in each year the total would be 20,000 for 20 years. But evidently as you add more and more years you find the same names coming up and the yield of “new” authors falling off steeply. So that figure must be far too high. But then we have 3000 actual names for the three years we sampled. It sounds as if 8000 (the figure I developed in an earlier project for the period 1960-97) is too low. That holds, also, because the count of titles in each year has risen steeply since 1990.
I wish I had the energy to trawl up more years. But I don’t. It is tiring work and the checks are tiring.
So it looks like 8000 is too low and 20,000 is far too high. I am suggesting 10,000 as a possible total for the authors who published one or more books of poetry in this 20-year period.
This number may have its uses. It does not allow us to measure the frustration of people who were stuck outside the door and didn’t manage to become one of the 10,000. It does suggest that the business is eager to produce books and that the doors are open, or rather the walls have been knocked down and you don’t need a door.
I had another list of books published in 2019 and a cross-check showed that 40% of that list were not recovered in the BL trawl I had done. This is interesting. Maybe there are deep problems with the completeness of any recovery I have access to. The gap is probably partly to do with publishers forgetting to send copies of books to the BL and partly with the BL cataloguer not adding a label to show that they are poetry. A third problem is possible but I have no idea what it would be.
It is apparent that most of these 10,000 poets (if that is the true figure!) don’t get much attention. But it is also apparent that there are quite a few people who don’t get published and who show up as readers at Open Mike events. Stannard and I have been discussing this phenomenon recently. They may not have enough poems for a book, in fact, but it is safe to say that they experience a certain frustration and that they might write more if they got more attention and kudos.
A guess might say that most of the people who read modern poetry regularly want to be poets themselves. This is democratic and suggests a scene open to talent. But there is also a certain admixture of frustration to admiration in the process of being a successful competitor. Poetry has a magnetic attraction which quite a few thousand people feel; not all those people reach the position on stage, the role in the cast, which they would ideally like to have. I am not saying this is unstable, or that the people who compose the scene want to subvert it.
I became interested in these themes while reviewing Fiona Sampson’s book Beyond the Lyric, which must have been in around 2009. Sampson says that about 200 books of poetry were being published each year. If we take that to mean books by individual authors, the true figure was around 7 times that much. Sampson had a vision of a small intimate community, where a few figures had Expertise and were able to nurture the talented (and confused?). This is a powerful vision but what emerges from looking at the true figures is a large scene without intimacy, where most people are invisible and feel excluded, and the possibility of “expertise” is greatly in question. This is a more depressing vision. Raising the curtain on larger numbers of Outsiders may be honest but it also brings a problem to our attention. Sampson as editor of Poetry Review was probably reading more poetry submissions than any other editor, at the time, and I am sure that she wanted to nurture people – this is what shows up in the book. But as the reader for PR she must have seen that there were thousands of poets hoping to get in and that the door was not open for all of them.
This is a point where we can talk about "gatekeepers". It is literally true that one person can prevent you from publishing in Poetry Review and from reaching the audience which you think is your right. But there are 200 poetry magazines and you can try any of them. If you don't like the magazines, you can publish on the internet. So the idea of one single gate is vacuous. Actually, if 200 people turn your poem down, it may be a bad poem. Result - a gatekeeper is actually someone who spends much of their time reading bad poems. This is not a privileged and enviable condition.
It sounds perverse if you have thousands of people who want to be on the inside of a group and they are all left on the outside. I think rather that those people constitute the thing which has an inside and also that they are all on the inside. The intimacy is created by poems and it is empathy which places you on the inside of it. If you can’t deliver that then you are going to be stuck.
This is getting to be personal opinion here, but my guess is that if you don’t enjoy the whole process it is your fault. The more empathetic you are, the more you enjoy other people's feelings, including those of success, the happier you will be inside the poems. If you define it as a contest which you want to win, it will not be enjoyable and you will not understand the real point. Furthermore, another guess is that deep empathy with the rest of the scene is the basis for writing effective poems, and that if you are competitive and frustrated then you will be unable to write poems that other people like. My impression is that the aggression is all concentrated in the outsiders and unsuccessful. They (or some of them) see it as a struggle for territory whereas the people engaged in editing see the space as collective, belonging to everybody. Just that empathy is the central value and the aggressive interfere with that.
This may be the moment to expose my wish for ten different writers to produce a book on modern poetry from ten different standpoints. This would certainly relieve the invisible pressure on me to be universal in my coverage, which I cannot bring about. Sampson’s book baffled me because it hardly ever overlapped with my own feelings. I finally concluded that the reason for this is that what happens to her inside a volume of poems is quite different from what happens to me, in the same book, with the same sequence of words. That answer is satisfying but it just leaves us with the suspicion that what I write does not expose, or predict, to people what they will feel in the poem. So the goal of criticism cannot be attained. All the same if you take Sampson's book and mine that leaves only another eight mutually incompatible (and reinforcing?) works to go.
I trawled poetry titles from the British Library catalogue to get a count of books published by an individual author in a given year. I did this for three sample years: 2000, 2010, and 2019. The result was a list of 3181 poets who published a book in one of those three years. The overlap of names for 2000 and 2010 was 8% and the overlap for 2010 and 2020 was 5.8%.
I was interested in the complete count of poets over 20 years. If we decide that 1000 authors were added in each year the total would be 20,000 for 20 years. But evidently as you add more and more years you find the same names coming up and the yield of “new” authors falling off steeply. So that figure must be far too high. But then we have 3000 actual names for the three years we sampled. It sounds as if 8000 (the figure I developed in an earlier project for the period 1960-97) is too low. That holds, also, because the count of titles in each year has risen steeply since 1990.
I wish I had the energy to trawl up more years. But I don’t. It is tiring work and the checks are tiring.
So it looks like 8000 is too low and 20,000 is far too high. I am suggesting 10,000 as a possible total for the authors who published one or more books of poetry in this 20-year period.
This number may have its uses. It does not allow us to measure the frustration of people who were stuck outside the door and didn’t manage to become one of the 10,000. It does suggest that the business is eager to produce books and that the doors are open, or rather the walls have been knocked down and you don’t need a door.
I had another list of books published in 2019 and a cross-check showed that 40% of that list were not recovered in the BL trawl I had done. This is interesting. Maybe there are deep problems with the completeness of any recovery I have access to. The gap is probably partly to do with publishers forgetting to send copies of books to the BL and partly with the BL cataloguer not adding a label to show that they are poetry. A third problem is possible but I have no idea what it would be.
It is apparent that most of these 10,000 poets (if that is the true figure!) don’t get much attention. But it is also apparent that there are quite a few people who don’t get published and who show up as readers at Open Mike events. Stannard and I have been discussing this phenomenon recently. They may not have enough poems for a book, in fact, but it is safe to say that they experience a certain frustration and that they might write more if they got more attention and kudos.
A guess might say that most of the people who read modern poetry regularly want to be poets themselves. This is democratic and suggests a scene open to talent. But there is also a certain admixture of frustration to admiration in the process of being a successful competitor. Poetry has a magnetic attraction which quite a few thousand people feel; not all those people reach the position on stage, the role in the cast, which they would ideally like to have. I am not saying this is unstable, or that the people who compose the scene want to subvert it.
I became interested in these themes while reviewing Fiona Sampson’s book Beyond the Lyric, which must have been in around 2009. Sampson says that about 200 books of poetry were being published each year. If we take that to mean books by individual authors, the true figure was around 7 times that much. Sampson had a vision of a small intimate community, where a few figures had Expertise and were able to nurture the talented (and confused?). This is a powerful vision but what emerges from looking at the true figures is a large scene without intimacy, where most people are invisible and feel excluded, and the possibility of “expertise” is greatly in question. This is a more depressing vision. Raising the curtain on larger numbers of Outsiders may be honest but it also brings a problem to our attention. Sampson as editor of Poetry Review was probably reading more poetry submissions than any other editor, at the time, and I am sure that she wanted to nurture people – this is what shows up in the book. But as the reader for PR she must have seen that there were thousands of poets hoping to get in and that the door was not open for all of them.
This is a point where we can talk about "gatekeepers". It is literally true that one person can prevent you from publishing in Poetry Review and from reaching the audience which you think is your right. But there are 200 poetry magazines and you can try any of them. If you don't like the magazines, you can publish on the internet. So the idea of one single gate is vacuous. Actually, if 200 people turn your poem down, it may be a bad poem. Result - a gatekeeper is actually someone who spends much of their time reading bad poems. This is not a privileged and enviable condition.
It sounds perverse if you have thousands of people who want to be on the inside of a group and they are all left on the outside. I think rather that those people constitute the thing which has an inside and also that they are all on the inside. The intimacy is created by poems and it is empathy which places you on the inside of it. If you can’t deliver that then you are going to be stuck.
This is getting to be personal opinion here, but my guess is that if you don’t enjoy the whole process it is your fault. The more empathetic you are, the more you enjoy other people's feelings, including those of success, the happier you will be inside the poems. If you define it as a contest which you want to win, it will not be enjoyable and you will not understand the real point. Furthermore, another guess is that deep empathy with the rest of the scene is the basis for writing effective poems, and that if you are competitive and frustrated then you will be unable to write poems that other people like. My impression is that the aggression is all concentrated in the outsiders and unsuccessful. They (or some of them) see it as a struggle for territory whereas the people engaged in editing see the space as collective, belonging to everybody. Just that empathy is the central value and the aggressive interfere with that.
This may be the moment to expose my wish for ten different writers to produce a book on modern poetry from ten different standpoints. This would certainly relieve the invisible pressure on me to be universal in my coverage, which I cannot bring about. Sampson’s book baffled me because it hardly ever overlapped with my own feelings. I finally concluded that the reason for this is that what happens to her inside a volume of poems is quite different from what happens to me, in the same book, with the same sequence of words. That answer is satisfying but it just leaves us with the suspicion that what I write does not expose, or predict, to people what they will feel in the poem. So the goal of criticism cannot be attained. All the same if you take Sampson's book and mine that leaves only another eight mutually incompatible (and reinforcing?) works to go.
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